The wind blowing in from the south of Boulder Heights carried the smell of gunpowder and blood, stirring Chris's hair.
It was around two in the afternoon. He stood atop a hastily built wooden observation tower on the heights, steadily sweeping his Brass Telescope over the battlefield below, which seethed like a boiling furnace.
Below him, the battle raged.
On the southern front, the Retalians used the First Line of Defense they had captured as a foothold, launching savage charge after charge like wounded beasts made all the more ferocious by being cornered.
Before the breastworks of Hegrande's Second Line of Defense, smoke billowed and flames flashed. Flintlock volleys, the roars of field guns, soldiers' shouts, and dying screams mingled into a heart-stopping symphony of death.
Whenever the Retalian knights charged with their squires and auxiliary troops, that stretch of battlefield churned and boiled like a lake struck by a massive boulder.
To the west, smoke and dust rose into the sky. Through the telescope, the fighting in Captain Lennart's sector had entered its most brutal phase of close-quarter slaughter.
A torrent of steel crashed violently into a forest of steel, every collision seeming to carry the dull crunch of breaking bones.
The barbed-wire defenses had been torn apart, and corpses filled the trenches. Under the heavy cavalry's impact, the halberdiers' formations buckled and caved like iron kneaded by some enormous force, yet never broke entirely.
Soldiers could be seen desperately thrusting their halberds, hooking horses to the ground, and trading their lives in bloody struggles with fallen knights. The ground there seemed stained a deep, dark red.
Boom...
Another deep report rolled across the field like the beating of the earth's heart. It was Raitelia's Stone-Throwing Cannons.
Huge stone shot ripped through the sky with destructive howls, crashing far