Chapter 1143: Seventh Iron Order
The castle of the Seventh Iron Order was an imposing thing that loomed over the landscape around it. It was an enormous construction made primarily of dull black stone, its largest tower reaching up into the lowest cloud layer. Long bands of blackened steel ran lengthwise up the towers like buttresses, and surrounding the castle was a triple-layered curtain wall, each layer more than twenty feet thick and sporting no less than a hundred Lance-capped towers.
Around the castle’s hill were open plains, with many rain-fed rivers cutting the region into long, narrow strips. These rivers emptied into the Serpent’s Neck Bay, which the castle oversaw from tall cliffs of black stone. Down upon the bay was a sizable port and town, cut into halves by the river, and numerous farming villages could be seen in the castle’s hinterland, growing the food that supported the castle and its local city.
By Leon’s estimation, at least ten million people were living in the shadow of the castle, though mostly out in the countryside. The castle itself was large enough to house tens of thousands of people, while the town that lay just below it on the coast appeared to have a population of around fifty thousand or so.
Hardly a huge number by the standards he was used to, but the Seventh Iron Order dwarfed his currently available manpower.
Leon took all of this in as he led his people closer to the castle with every passing second. Much of the castle he couldn’t inspect given its heavy warding, but he was more than a little interested in the large number of empty arkpads located outside of its walls. From the air, he could see that there were plenty of open baileys in the castle, hinting at the possibility of additional arkpads behind the curtain walls.
Despite this relatively large number of arkpads, the city below the castle appeared to lack any true arkyards, however. There was at least a fairly large shipyard, however, and from what Leon could see, they were producing some fairly heavily armed warships within from both steel and timber.
Out in the Serpent’s Neck Bay, he could see several fleets of these ships plying the waters, keeping tight patrols and protecting the fishing vessels closer to the castle. These fleets, however, were much smaller than the fleets the Bull Kingdom had access to, even if the average ship was much more heavily armed and armored.
On a more personal note, he found the area’s climate to be gorgeous. The sky was largely overcast, wind constantly blew from the land out to sea, and though it wasn’t raining as his party came into their final approach, lightning constantly flashed not only in the distance, but frequently struck the castle itself—contributing, and perhaps even causing, the black coloring of its stone and steel.
As his party approached, Leon not only made no attempt to mask their presence, but he let his aura spill forth, causing lightning to follow them closely, heralding their arrival with bright flashes and rumbling thunder that rolled across the flat plains. It didn’t at all surprise him that as they drew to within ten miles of the castle, three arks—appearing about equal in size at least to two of his frigates and one of his destroyers—took off from one of the castle’s more open areas and moved to intercept him. These arks bristled with as many weapons as seemed possible to cram into them and appeared to be made of the same black steel that buttressed the castle.