Lord of Winter: Beginning with Daily Intelligence Chapter 710 - 399: Era-Crushing Overwhelming Force
Previously on Lord of Winter: Beginning with Daily Intelligence...
Disheveled and coated in mire from their escape, the Seventeenth Legion nevertheless projected a fearsome momentum as three thousand Black Steel Knights charged onward.
The very earth groaned under the assault, and the warhorses, exhaling plumes of white mist, seemed poised to uproot the entirety of the Icefield.
Frost Halberd City was now a mere kilometer away.
Ackman's grin was a vicious contortion, his face hideously sculpted by the biting wind.
Gazing upon the seemingly fragile front line of the Red Tide Knights arrayed before them, his arrogance knew no bounds.
These soldiers would soon be pulverized into dust by the relentless wave of his Black Steel Knights!
It was in the moments just before the Seventeenth Legion was to crash into their foe...
The Red Tide Knights parted like a receding ocean, their movements unnervingly unified.
Ackman's pupils narrowed. "Hmph, attempting to lure us in? How naive!"
But before his scornful words could fully escape, the mist-shrouded expanse beyond his line of sight flickered with nascent light.
As the white haze dissipated, Ackman finally perceived the secondary wall, concealed before the city's main gate.
It was not a formation of shields, but rather a formidable rank of steam-powered war machines, as imposing as colossal abyssal entities.
Arranged in a horizontal line, they formed an unyielding bulwark. Each machine stood as tall as two warhorses, their wedge-shaped hulls adorned with rivets, resembling dense scars of cold iron upon their armor. At their forefront, alloy ramming angles jutted out like the fangs of predators.
Their tracks rotated languidly, heavy metal chains biting into the permafrost, while copper steam pipes throbbed with tension; high-pressure steam from their boilers billowed out as black smoke.
"Boom... boom... boom..."
The low-frequency rumble of pistons and power furnaces resonated with the gravity of giants pounding the deep earth.
It was a vibration that propagated fear from the very marrow of one's bones.
The air itself seemed to warp, layers of frost detached from the ground, and snow accumulated near the city gate slid away with the tremor of the machines, as if the entire world was bowing to these metallic titans.
Ackman froze for a fleeting half-second, then erupted into laughter, a sound steeped in disdain and arrogance.
"Hahaha! Is this your ultimate strategy, Louis? A few dozen... iron coffins?!"
He tilted his head back, laughing with such abandon that his nostrils flared. "You seek to impede me with these broken toys? What a preposterous notion!"
With a sudden motion, he raised his longsword high, his Fighting Energy erupting into a blinding white radiance upon the blade.
His roar reverberated across the battlefield. "Seventeenth Legion—Annihilate them!!! Plunder the city for three days!!!"
The dark torrent unleashed its final fury. Warhorses whinnied, armor plates clanged, and the remnants of the formation coalesced through sheer, collective killing intent.
Three thousand heavy cavalry thundered forth, a colossal spear of darkness ignited by righteous rage, plunging fiercely toward the wall of steel war machines.
The ground shuddered beneath their charge, the air grew warm from escaping steam, and snowflakes in the sky were violently dispersed, scattering in chaotic disarray.
The two opposing forces were mere moments from a cataclysmic collision.
......
Upon the Northern City Wall, Count Albert observed the hundred meticulously positioned steam war machines below, unable to contain his agitation, his gray beard quivering uncontrollably.
"Absurd... utterly absurd!" he exclaimed in a low voice. "No chevaux de frise, no infantry phalanx, no dense spear formations... relying on these metal behemoths to halt cavalry? Louis, you are gambling with the very destiny of the entire Northern Territory!"
His words had barely faded when the other nobles turned ashen-faced.
Count Albert was poised to speak further, but Louis had already raised his hand, giving a gentle downward wave.
......
"Boom——!!!"
A full hundred main cannons discharged their payload simultaneously.
The resulting vibration was so profound that even the stone bricks of the city wall subtly trembled, and a cup on a nearby table sloshed tiny droplets of water.
The atmosphere itself seemed to tear asunder, white snow blasted violently into the air, transforming into a pervasive, dense mist.
In the very next instant, a seamless, concentrated barrage of shrapnel erupted from the muzzles of the war machines.
This was no rain of arrows, nor a beam of magical light.
It was a grinding net of steel, capable of bisecting the ranks of knightly orders, shattering heavy armor, and pulverizing the very skeletons of horses.
The vanguard of the Seventeenth Legion did not even have the chance to utter a single cry of defiance before they were eviscerated in a torrent of shrapnel.
They did not fall; they simply ceased to exist.
Black steel armor deformed and shattered, and the necks of warhorses snapped like brittle twigs under the sheer kinetic impact.
The knights themselves were reduced to mist and gore within the storm of shrapnel.
In merely a moment, hundreds of heavy knights were utterly erased from the tapestry of the battlefield.
A profound silence descended upon the entire city wall.
Ackman, his face a mask of utter shock, forced himself to bellow, "Press onward! To breach the defenses is to achieve victory! Retreat means certain death!"
True to their renown as the Northern Empire's finest, the Seventeenth Legion grit their teeth against the terror consuming them and charged onward.
However, at that precise moment, from behind the formidable war machine formation, a contingent of Red Tide Grenadier Knights simultaneously activated their fuses.
More than a hundred soul-shock grenades, etched with intricate blue demon patterns and designed to consume frost, were launched into the sky.
As these deadly projectiles descended, they produced a subtle yet unsettling "buzz," akin to the soft exhalation of some ancient, desiccated deity from the abyss.
The grenades landed amidst the knights, releasing no flames, but instead manifesting as ever-expanding rings of ghostly blue energy that struck the very soul, like frigid surges.
In the instant the cerulean luminescence washed over them, the fear that the Seventeenth Legion knights had managed to suppress with their discipline and reason was brutally amplified, magnified a hundredfold by the soul-shock grenades.
An intense, stark coldness, typically experienced only in the final moments of life, was forcefully plunged back into their minds.
Their perception of the world began to warp, colors leached away, leaving behind only a profound sense of gloom and disorientation.
Within their distorted vision, the steam-powered war machines transformed from mere instruments of battle into colossal figures with metallic spines and gaping maws.
Each plume of expelled steam appeared as a grotesque demon whispering into their ears.
Their comrades' forms became unnaturally elongated and twisted, the gleam on their armor flashed like predatory fangs, and they were no longer perceived as allies but as monstrous specters lunging forward, their mouths wide in silent screams.