Chapter 39 : Chapter 39
Chapter 39. A Bloody Aria
A murderous atmosphere filled Lucerne City.
On the crude training ground, six hundred rebel elites had already formed up in ranks.
Grumm stood atop a hastily built wooden platform, sweeping his gaze across the mass of heads below.
He did not waste time on fiery speeches. His voice was flat, yet it carried a chill and temptation that seemed to seep into the marrow.
“The target is Black Territory. A population of nearly a thousand, granaries half full, tools still new, and women... plenty of them.”
He enunciated every word with perfect clarity.
“Break it! The grain will be yours! The ironware will be yours!
The slaves will be yours! The women... will be yours as well!
Take as much as you want!
Use your blades to tell those ignorant upstart pioneers who the true masters of this wasteland are!
Tell me, what do you want?!”
“Grain!!”
“Ironware!!”
“Women!!!”
“Kill! Kill! Kill!!!”
After a brief silence, a frenzied roar erupted across the training ground like a crashing sea.
Watching the army below boil over completely, the cold curve at Grumm’s lips seemed to deepen ever so slightly.
This was exactly the madness he wanted, the kind of crushing frenzy that could trample everything in its path.
“Good.” He raised a hand and suppressed the uproar.
“Forced march! Move out! Wealth and women are waiting for you ahead!”
“ROAR——!!!”
Led by the eight Silver knights, this six-hundred-strong army, utterly ignited by the flames of greed, surged out of Lucerne City like a breached flood of filthy water.
Trailing clouds of dust, they rushed urgently toward the Windrest Plain.
......
Two days later, at noon.
Windrest Plain, the dried ancient riverbed, Old Ford.
Time crawled forward amid suffocating silence and scorching heat.
Sweat soaked the backs of every ambusher from Black Territory, and each heartbeat thundered clearly in their ears.
Then at last—
A murky yellow line of dust appeared on the far horizon, closing in at a visible speed.
The dull thunder of marching feet, galloping hooves, clashing metal, and the chaotic noise of hundreds of men gathered together rolled nearer and nearer like an incoming tide, shattering the silence of the ancient riverbed.
The prey had entered the net.
The six-hundred-man force plunged into the mouth of the dried riverbed like a bloated, rabid python.
The narrow river channel instantly became a cage that restricted their overwhelming numbers.
The formation, which had at least been orderly before, rapidly became confused and congested under the obstruction of jagged rocks and brush, and beneath the oppressive presence of the steep riverbanks.
“Damn it! Move it up front! What are you dawdling for?”
“Why are you shoving?! Can’t you see the road is hard to cross?”
A soldier who had been shoved drove an elbow backward in retaliation.
“Stop pressing from behind! The horses can’t get through!”
“Who pulled me? Are you looking to die?!”
“...”
Complaints, curses, shoving, and shouted reprimands rose one after another inside the narrow riverbed.
The eight Silver knights rode tall horses near the front-middle of the formation, surrounded by their personal guards.
They too were growing irritated by the cramped, chaotic surroundings. They kept barking orders at the soldiers around them to maintain order, but the effect was minimal.
Grumm rode a magnificent black warhorse at the core of the column.
His gray-green eyes swept warily over the tall earthen bluffs on both sides, silent in a way that felt terrifying...
A powerful sense of foreboding began to grow wildly in his heart.
“Veli! Otto!” Grumm’s voice carried a gravity it had never held before.
“Drive the front ranks onward and speed up the crossing!
We cannot linger here! Have Karl take men and check the cliff tops on both sides!”
He was practically roaring by the end.
But it was too late.
WHOOSH——!!!
A shriek so piercing it seemed to tear through the eardrums exploded without warning from the top of the highest bluff.
Traveling faster than the eye could follow, it sliced through the air less than three feet above Grumm’s head.
Thunk!
That armor-piercing arrow, glinting with a dark black sheen, buried itself viciously in the tattered triangular flagpole held aloft by a guard knight behind Grumm.
The ragged banner represented the temporary identity of the Falai Rebels.
Time seemed to freeze beneath that single arrow.
All the noise, the shouting, the cursing, the jostling... stopped dead.
Six hundred pairs of eyes, full of confusion and shock, turned as one toward the silent bluff from which the arrow had come.
Grumm’s heart felt as though an icy iron hand had clenched around it.
He jerked his head up, his gray-green pupils shrinking to pinpoints.
“Enemy attack!!!”
Attack!!!
Eli’s arrow became an invisible command, spreading through the entire prepared battlefield in an instant.
“Black Crow!!!”
“Kill——!!!”
Buck’s roar crashed over the riverbed like exploding thunder, instantly drowning out the dead silence.
RUMBLE——!!!
From behind the steep bluff on the upstream side, it was as if the gates of hell had been thrown open.
A black torrent of steel, fifty strong, smashed violently into the soft, undefended flank behind the rebel main force.
Their target was the eight Silver knights standing out like cranes among chickens at the core of the formation.
Too fast.
Too fierce.
Too ruthless.
The Black Crow Knights, the most elite killing machine of House Black.
Their might was something the rebels—caught off guard, their formation already in disorder, and most of their soldiers still frozen in shock—could never have imagined.
Slash! Crack! Aaaah—!
“No—!”
“Stop them! Stop them now!”
“It’s a Gold knight!”
“...”
Lances and fine steel swords wreathed in powerful battle aura tore through everything in their path.
Men, horses, crude shields—it made no difference.
Before such absolute strength and speed, all were pierced, ripped apart, and hurled aside in an instant.
Severed limbs and hot blood flew in every direction.
In only a few breaths, that black flood of iron had already punched clean through the densest part of the rebel center like a red-hot blade stabbing through tofu.
What it left behind was a path of death paved in flesh and strewn with wailing bodies, and it drove straight toward Grumm.
“Meet them head-on!!” Grumm’s eyes were splitting with fury as he drew the command saber at his waist and let out a bestial roar.
He knew they had fallen into a trap.
“Form up! Hold them back!” Otto bellowed madly, trying to organize the personal guards around him.
“Spread out! Don’t let them build momentum!”
Karl’s face was deathly pale as he screamed shrilly, trying to slip his body into the rocks and hide.
But before the Black Crow Knights’ unstoppable assault,
beneath the crushing pressure of Buck’s Gold Tier aura, like that of a demon god,
every attempt at resistance looked pale and laughable.
Buck charged at the forefront. The seemingly ordinary steel lance in his hand was now spitting out a pale golden lance-light nearly a zhang long.
Wherever he passed, men and horses were sent tumbling, and flesh flew in bloody fragments.
His cold gaze locked instantly onto Grumm, who was roaring and trying to steady the collapsing line.
“The first,” Buck said, spitting out only those icy words.
The powerful black horse beneath him surged forward like a stroke of black lightning, crossing the final distance in an instant.
Gold Tier battle aura poured into the lance without the slightest restraint.
“No!!!” Grumm had only enough time to let out a desperate, unwilling roar.
His eyes were filled with disbelief, terror, and a rage born of having been utterly toyed with.
So... they were the prey.
This carefully prepared trap... Black Territory! Eli Black! He hated it! He would not accept it!
Slash——!!!
The lance infused with destructive golden battle aura punched through him as easily as though piercing a sheet of paper.
It entered his left chest with perfect precision, burst out through his back in a spray of hot blood and shattered organs,
and pinned his entire body against a massive stone in the riverbed like a rag doll.
Grumm’s broad body jerked once.
Within his gray-green pupils, all his ambition, fury, and unwillingness froze in place, then rapidly dimmed away.
Blood poured down the shaft of the lance in steady streams, staining the stone beneath him red.
The tyrant of Lucerne City—the ambitions of the Baron of Falei—ended there.
“My lord!!!” The remaining eight Silver knights nearly lost their souls when they saw Grumm slain in an instant.
“Kill them all.” Buck wrenched his blood-soaked lance free and swept his icy gaze across the remaining eight targets.
What followed became a one-sided slaughter.
The thrust of lances, the cleaving of swords, the trampling collision of warhorses... every strike was precise and lethal.
Slash!
“Aaaah—!”
“Spare me...”
Crack!
The shrill screams and the sounds of breaking bones rose without cease.
In only a dozen or so breaths, the eight Silver knights and the elite personal guards around them fell one after another into pools of blood like stalks of wheat flattened by a gale.
Almost at the exact same moment the Black Crow Knights launched their killing strike,
while the rear ranks of the rebels descended into chaos from the upheaval at the front, and the ranged archers stood frozen in confusion—
Awoooo——!!!
A wolf’s howl, wild enough to pierce the clouds, suddenly rang out from the flank of the open Windrest Plain.
“Kill!!!” Wolfgang burst forth like a fiend emerging from the earth, his ice-blue wolf eyes flashing with savage light.
Leading his thirteen fiercest Wolf-kin warriors, he shot out from behind the mounds like thirteen gray bolts skimming low across the ground.
“Wolves! They’re wolf-men!!”
“Monsters!!”
“Run!!”
The rebel rear instantly exploded into panic.
Faced with this terrifying enemy that had burst from the flank along with a ferocious wolf pack, their morale—already shaken by the collapse at the front—completely broke apart.
The archers threw down their bows. The crossbowmen abandoned their weapons.
Crying for their fathers and mothers, they fled in all directions, cursing only that their parents had not given them two more legs.
“Now!!” From the top of the downstream bluff,
Clark saw the narrow ford crammed with panicked soldiers running about like headless flies, and a feverish battle-lust burst from his eyes.
“Archers! Loose!!”
“Javelin throwers! Smash them for me!!”
“Rolling logs! Push them down!!!”
With Clark’s series of hoarse, frantic commands, the downstream slaughter began.
Hum——! WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH——!
Fwoom—— RUMBLE!!!
Dense volleys of arrows and javelins screamed through the air like a black storm of death,
pouring down upon the rebel soldiers packed together at the ford and in the narrow riverbed below.
Enormous rolling logs and heavy stones were shoved from the steep bluffs by the soldiers with all their might.
Carrying a thunderous force, they crashed into the tightly packed crowd beneath.
“Aaaah—! My leg!”
“Help! Save m—”
Bang! Crack!
“Urghhh—!”
The dull thuds of arrows piercing flesh, the wet tearing sounds of javelins ripping through bodies, the horrifying cracks of rolling logs and stones smashing bones—
together with the heart-rending screams of countless dying soldiers—
instantly drowned the entire dried ancient riverbed.
They formed a bloody aria.
The narrow space became an amplifier for death.
There was nowhere to hide.
Nowhere to run.
The packed rebel soldiers below fell in swathes like grain before the sickle.
Blood ran among the rocks like little streams.
Severed limbs and mangled corpses lay everywhere.
The scene was so grisly it resembled the underworld.
Eli stood at the highest point, his white hair whipping wildly in the fierce wind stirred by the screaming arrows.
One armor-piercing arrow after another, each infused with Bronze battle aura, became the call of death itself.
With cold precision, he picked out every rebel below who tried to organize resistance or looked like some kind of officer.
Thud! One rebel leader, waving his saber and trying to gather the fleeing men, took an arrow through the throat.
Thud! An officer screaming curses as he struggled to steady the line was nailed to his saddle.
Eli was like the calmest of hunters,
efficient and mercilessly removing every possible threat to his own side from the chaos below.
Ella crouched beside him, her violet eyes not daring to look at the slaughter beneath.
But she swiftly handed arrows to Eli, her movements precise and perfectly in sync with his.
The slaughter continued for a full half hour.
When the last rebel trying to climb the steep bluff to escape was skewered by a spear and sent tumbling back down...
...the thunderous clamor filling the ancient riverbed finally began to fade.
Only what flowed out of it now was no longer water, but blood.
Broken corpses were piled like hills, and the dried riverbed had been dyed a dark crimson by the blood.
Shattered weapons, splintered shields, dead warhorses... they covered the narrow ford and the riverbed from end to end.
Six hundred elite rebels, together with the eight Silver knights and their leader, Baron Grumm,
had been utterly crushed inside this carefully chosen river of death, annihilated to the last man.
The wind of the Windrest Plain was still hot.
It lifted dust thick with blood and swept across this hunting ground, now drenched in slaughter, with a low, mournful howl.
The hunters stood on high ground, their lord’s white hair gleaming like snow as he looked down upon their spoils—
a crimson hell that symbolized both victory and destruction.