"Oh! Military merit land grants—full of hope..."
The sparse drizzle gradually stopped, and the flames in Stone Carving City died down as well. However, these great fires, lit by the defenders in their despair, had even been mixed with some of the temple's Black Oil. Such raging flames had not been extinguished by the fine rain, but smothered by the laborers' sack after sack of earth. Looking around the city, the damaged axe-spears, snapped longbows, broken feathered arrows, fallen corpses, and the trails of blood were all half-buried beneath the soil too, silently moving toward rot...
War was bound up with life and death, and both sides in a war would constantly learn from each other, concentrating every resource and all their wisdom first into the arts of war. In these two years of slaughter, the Totonac Eastern Alliance had learned the longbow from the Mexica Alliance and the kingdom. The legions of the Eastern Expedition had also figured out how to use Black Oil.
The Dog-kin warriors in the legion quickly learned to wrap grass rope soaked in Black Oil around feathered arrows and set them alight, making the cheapest kind of Fire Arrows! And to put out this oil fire that did not fear water, the simplest method was to bury it with earth.
Black Wolf Toltec carried a Longbow on his back, sniffing the pungent scent of Black Oil in the air. As he watched the thick black smoke rising in the rain, he could not help but think of the demon flames in myth.
The sulfur of the Stone of the Dead, the saltpeter from the Earth Mother's frost, the gunpowder of volcanic power, and the Black Oil of the endless Abyss... This series of "demon" flames had almost become the most striking mark of the