"Alexander..."
Tears flying, the girl finally reached the battlements and saw the scene from afar.
Alexander's final glance, those eyes beneath his helmet's faceplate shining like stars at midnight, were etched deep into her heart at that moment. His broad, majestic back as he turned and left would remain unforgettable to her for the rest of her life.
"Alexander... you must come back... you'll become a brave king, the pride of Chambord City, and... a legend of... the Azeroth Continent... I'll be waiting for you!"
Angela leaned against the battlements, distraught.
She watched the figure who had slid down the wall, joined the soldiers and resolutely formed ranks to attack the enemy coiled like a giant black serpent. Her jewel-like eyes remained fixed on him without blinking.
"You have to come back alive!"
The south bank of Chambord City.
The autumn wind carried faintly yellow leaves through the air at a leisurely pace. A fluffy little squirrel rose on its hind legs and looked warily around, then relaxed, picked up a pine nut in its forepaws and happily began to gnaw. In the distant blue sky, birds flew freely.
It was a beautiful autumn tableau of movement and stillness, captivating to behold.
But suddenly-
Clatter, clatter, clatter, clatter!
A sudden rush of hoofbeats rang out, shaking the ground and bringing a fierce killing aura. Leaves swirled in disarray, the little squirrel squealed, dropped its half-eaten pine nut and darted into the branches of a distant tree, and the birds vanished over the horizon.
A warhorse's piercing whinny rang out.
The hoofbeats gradually ceased as the Silver-Masked Man and his personal black knight guards reined in their horses beside the Zuli River.
The Silver-Masked Man looked up at the sky, then took out an eagle-eye scope and observed the state of the enemy across the river in Chambord City. The scope was an ingenious magical device: a mage had enchanted its two thin crystal lenses with the Eagle Eye Spell, allowing it to show even an ant's antennae clearly from a thousand meters away.
Through the eagle-eye scope, he saw the faces on the walls distorted by exhaustion and fear, the lax defenses, the soldiers resting with their armor off, and the disorderly defensive positions... Everything was as he had expected. A savage smile appeared on the half of his face beneath the mask.
"Pass on my orders. The whole army is to prepare to atta-"
The Silver-Masked Man suddenly paused, stopping before he could finish the word "attack." In the scope's oval field of vision, he had suddenly spotted more than twenty large men clad head to toe in metal armor sliding down ropes thrown from a distant section of the wall.
"What is this...?" The Silver-Masked Man was momentarily taken aback.
But when he saw the men, protected from head to toe in armor, quickly assemble into a standard wedge-shaped assault formation as soon as they landed, he immediately understood his opponent's intention. After a brief moment of surprise, a smile full of disdain and mockery appeared at the corner of his mouth. The Silver-Masked Man hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. "Ha, king of Chambord City, it seems I still overestimated you. What a fool. It's not a bad idea, but you actually expect twenty-odd men to throw my formation into disarray?"
"Heh heh, in that case, let's have an appetizer before the real siege." The Silver-Masked Man sneered and whipped his riding crop through the air. "Order [two] and [three] to shift the tower-shield formations into a defensive position. Let those cumbersome, foolish pigs dressed like statues come closer, then bring me their heads within ten breaths."
Bwooo-!
The resounding war horn immediately filled the sky, finally breaking the oppressive tension hanging over the land.
At the horn's command, the formations of black-clad armored soldiers immediately began to shift like a finely tuned machine.
Clatter, clatter, clatter, clatter-!
Amid the unnervingly synchronized footsteps, the formations changed. The tower-shield formation closest to Chambord City began to move slowly, its center drawing slightly inward as its flanks advanced, forming a concave defensive line.
Clang, clang, clang-!
The grinding of heavy metal came from within the formation. Lances more than five meters long suddenly thrust out from behind the black tower shields, each about three meters high. Their shafts were forged of pure iron and polished to a shine. Beneath the blazing sun, the dense, chilling forest of lances looked like death's savage grin. Their points aimed forward, the black-clad soldiers behind the tower shields remained silent. In an instant, the entire formation became like a giant steel hedgehog gone mad, without the slightest gap. Even a giant elephant charging into it would be skewered like a kebab.
Across from them, more than twenty fully armored soldiers were charging fearlessly toward death.
It was a contest utterly unequal in scale.
Seen from the sky, it was like a dozen or so ants foolishly challenging an elephant. The elephant needed only to stamp its foot to crush them into pulp.
The cold gleam of the lances made even the blazing sun overhead seem icy.
No one doubted that those fearsome lances, as thick as the mouths of bowls, would easily pierce any armor. Even steel plates three or four centimeters thick would be torn apart like flimsy paper before their sharp points.
Yet the charging "ants" in their V-shaped wedge formation did not slow in the slightest. They pressed forward and accelerated, seemingly intent on smashing the chilling lances with their own flesh and blood.
No one on the battlefield made a sound.
The air froze in an instant.
Everyone seemed able to hear their own heartbeat.
On Chambord City's walls, everyone leaned over the battlements, unable to resist stretching out as far as possible for a clear view of everything below. Angela's beautiful large eyes were filled with worry, and her fair, jade-like hands clutched her skirt so tightly that it had twisted out of shape. The little blonde loli Jima also covered the still-undeveloped "little yurts" on her chest with both hands and held her breath.
Across the Zuli River, the Silver-Masked Man had already put away his eagle-eye scope. A cold smile on his lips, he watched the foolish pigs beneath the city walls with an unwavering gaze.
Did a mongrel dare challenge a dragon's dignity?
Behind the Silver-Masked Man, cruel excitement appeared on the faces of the dozen or so black knights. Like ravenous wolves spotting a sweet meal of flesh and blood in the dark, they licked their lips and grinned savagely.
The stone bridge.
The distance between the "ants" and the "metal hedgehog" continued to shrink.
Twenty meters...
Sixteen meters...
Thirteen meters...
Ten meters...
The Silver-Masked Man rose slightly in his saddle, the smile on his lips growing wider, as though he could already see the blood spraying and hear his opponents' screams.
In his eyes, the outcome was that simple: the concave tower-shield formation needed only to close around the enemy like filling wrapped in a pastry, and a few simple thrusts of the lances would skewer the fools who thought metal armor made them impervious to blades and spears.
He was not worried that the ants could throw the tower-shield formation into disorder.
The enormous, three-meter-high tower shields were encased inside and out in three layers of black refined iron, and each weighed more than a hundred jin. Behind them, elite soldiers and countless steel braces planted against the ground held them firmly in place. Such a defensive formation could hold for more than ten minutes even against a head-on charge by a heavy cavalry corps.
The Silver-Masked Man made no attempt to hide the mockery in his eyes.
But in the next moment, the Silver-Masked Man suddenly froze, as though struck by an invisible bolt of lightning from the sky. His body went rigid, and his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
Behind him came the sound of the black knights drawing sharp breaths.
Even their battle-hardened warhorses, capable of maintaining a steady pace despite serious wounds, began to stir uneasily. They lowered their heads, whinnied softly and backed away...
For two or three seconds earlier, a thunderous shout had come from the distant end of the stone bridge-
"By the god of war!"
Then, in the charging wedge of more than twenty men occupying the tragic position of "ants," the man running at the very front as the "wedge's tip" suddenly hurled the giant black axe in his hands with all his might amid that thunderous shout.
Whoosh-!
The giant axe became a streak of black light, spinning wildly with an ear-piercing shriek. It tore through the air, even tearing through space, making heaven and earth tremble.
Boom!
Screams rang out instantly as blood sprayed like rain.
The enormous black axe slammed into the three-meter-tall refined-iron tower shields like a bolt of black lightning.
In the next moment, like a sharp dinner knife slicing effortlessly through a blackened steak, or the arm of a god or demon descending from the heavens to rip apart a fragile sheet of paper, the giant axe struck the tower shields that could withstand a heavy cavalry charge. They began to buckle amid the groaning of metal. After a brief pause, the terrifying force erupted, blasting them away. More than a dozen refined-iron tower shields over three meters tall flew off as lightly as helpless dead leaves in a gale...
They could not stop it!
There was simply no stopping it!
The giant axe did not feel like an axe at all, but a punishment sent down by the god of war in his fury. With its thunderous momentum and terrifying power, it would have shattered even the Tangulaya Mountain Range, the most majestic range on the Azeroth Continent, if it had been placed in its path.
After the thunderous crash, the axe had smashed a shocking, blood-soaked gap more than a meter wide through the tower-shield formation, which had been as solid as a wall of steel. Severed limbs flew through the air, and the tremendous force threw the entire formation into chaos.
The black-clad soldiers behind the shields had never dreamed that anyone in this world could break through their ironclad defenses in such a way. The cruel reality left them completely stunned, so much so that they forgot their iron discipline and the instinctive reactions expected of soldiers, allowing the enemy to advance through the blood-soaked gap.
A second earlier, they had been inwardly mocking and scorning the twenty foolish pigs charging toward them, ignorant of death. Now, in the blink of an eye, those twenty-odd pigs grinned savagely and tore off their weak masks, stepping into the formation like demon gods. Their weapons were like the coldly gleaming scythes of death. They were death's representatives in the mortal world, and wherever they passed, waves of blood rolled and screams shook the sky. The black-clad soldiers in the front ranks, deprived of their refined-iron tower shields, fell like wheat before a farmer's sickle. No one could resist for a single second.
The confrontation between ants and an elephant became a massacre of the elephant by the ants.
In that single second, the two sides' roles had suddenly and unbelievably reversed.
The first chapter of a new week.
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