Chapter 273 — Explosions and Flame

They had come.

Wreathed in corrupted magic, smoke, and dust, brimming with hatred for the living and for magic itself, bearing the ruin and madness of the Gondo Wasteland, they set foot upon Cecil Territory's pits and minefields.

Their assault was truly earth-shaking.

The instant the alarm sounded, tension gripped the walls. New recruits, equipped with thermal ray guns and force-field shields, took their positions atop the ramparts under the command of officers and veterans, forming a defensive line. In their sight, the monsters howled madly, trampling across the mine-strewn plain as though they felt no pain at all—a scene savage, awe-inspiring, and yet chilling to the bone.

The Cecil Territorial Combat Corps had a proportion of new recruits that would give any commander a headache. Of the thousand-odd soldiers in the corps, more than eight hundred had been recruited after the first defensive battle. Though they had the finest equipment and thorough training, a recruit was still a recruit no matter how well trained; without having faced the pressure of the battlefield, an insurmountable gulf would always remain between them and the veterans. To mitigate this disadvantage, Gao Yang had increased the proportion of live-combat training as much as possible—sending them into the deep forest to protect exploration teams and fight magic beasts, sending them into the mountains for training, even dispatching them to the northern wasteland and the borders of Kant Territory to wipe out bandits and the desperate mercenaries who had gathered in the chaos of Kant Territory. Only through such means had he barely ensured that every soldier in the Cecil Combat Corps had fired a gun and seen blood, allowing the recruits to grow. Yet only by passing today's trial could they truly be considered past their recruit phase.

After today, even if they still could not be called seasoned veterans, they would at least have shed the label of recruit once and for all.

The blood-red smoke pouring from the mountain gap was growing ever denser, gradually forming a blood-colored cloud mass of astonishing momentum. The aberrations surging out from that cloud threw themselves wave after wave at Cecil Territory's southern wall. To these monsters, the breath of the living and the omnipresent magical reactions of the city were like a beacon in the night. The moment they burst from the mountains, they charged with unmistakable purpose—even if the minefield ahead of them kept exploding, they never hesitated.

Landmines were a wonderful thing—Gao Yang had always believed this, especially when dealing with mindless monsters. No matter how many mines were buried on the battlefield, these single-minded creatures would charge without hesitation, then tread a straight line across the entire minefield. But the facts proved that even effective landmines could not fully resolve the threat of the aberrations, because those monsters' physical constitutions were simply too formidable, and their "physiological structure" was simply too bizarre.

A crystal mine could blow a monster's lower body to shreds, but with such wounds they would neither die nor retreat in fear. Instead, they would drag themselves forward with their remaining upper bodies, crawling until they triggered a second or even third mine before finally being killed. So while these monsters triggered mines with astonishing speed, their efficiency at "clearing mines" with their own bodies was equally remarkable.

Amid the ceaseless thunder of explosions, the blood-colored cloud front was rapidly closing on the walls. Soldiers in the watchtowers could already see through their binoculars the horrifying sight of the foremost monsters spiraling upward through the air and scattering as they fell. When a special wooden stake planted in the center of the minefield, marked with a flag, was also shrouded in the foul tide of corrupted magic, the second alarm rang out. Knight Byron's voice, full of vigor, resounded along the entire wall: "Enemy in position—catapults, prepare to fire!"

With a series of twanging sounds as the winches were released, the specially made small catapults sprang into action. One after another, head-sized crystal bombs traced long arcs through the air, falling into the distant battlefield shrouded in ominous black-red smoke. The next second, continuous and even more astonishing explosions erupted across the battlefield. Vast flashes and thunderous flames seemed about to tear that cloud of smoke and dust apart, whipping up storms of shrapnel and heat among the horde of monsters.

"Rewind the winches, continue firing!"

"Keep firing, Balto—rewind the winches, keep firing!!"

The shout of his comrade jolted Balto from his daze. This knight of the Typhon Empire felt his heart pounding, blood surging in his chest. He stared blankly at the distant plain now covered in explosions and flame, a single thought filling his mind: this was the battlefield they faced?

Balto mechanically carried out his motions. Operating a catapult was not difficult, and for a knight of astonishing strength, cranking a winch was no challenge at all. Yet as he reflexively tightened the winch and reloaded the crystal bombs, he felt his mind slipping beyond his control, a numbness slowly creeping into his thoughts.

This was not the battlefield he had imagined! Nor the battlefield he had experienced!

He was Typhon's elite, a knight who had been through a hundred battles. He was no green recruit, no country militiaman who had never seen the world. On the border between Ansu and Typhon, he and the soldiers he led had weathered all manner of crises. Though the two nations had not formally gone to war, their private skirmishes had escalated to the point of bloodshed. On those small battlefields unacknowledged by either side, he had faced blades and shed blood with his own hands—but no battlefield had ever been like this.

The two sides were hundreds of meters apart, yet the fighting had already begun. Blood and fire, thunder and explosions engulfed the entire field. Those nameless monsters charged fearlessly through the blasts, while the defending soldiers kept pouring more thunder and explosions upon the enemy.

And it was not even time to draw swords yet.

Of course, this world had battle mages, and mages in combat could conjure lightning, flame, arcane missiles, and the like to strike enemies at range. But how many battle mages could a battlefield hold? And how many times could a single battle mage cast spells of such magnitude?

Here, spells on the level of an Inferno Blast could blanket the entire battlefield!

Balto had once imagined himself being pushed onto the walls by the Ansu to take part in a defensive battle: with enforcers at his back, he and his Typhon comrades would hold swords and blades at the front as a shield wall, and only by desperately swinging their weapons could they avoid having their heads cut off by the enforcers and carve out a chance at survival. He had never imagined he would be operating a catapult here—much less that the "stones" these catapults hurled were such terrifying things!

Balto suddenly recalled that afternoon, when he had been carrying those crystal bombs and his hand had slipped, dropping several "iron balls" onto the brickwork. A cold sweat of belated fear broke out all over him.

He did not know that those iron balls actually had quite reliable safety mechanisms, and that they were controlled by runic triggers, springs, and locking mechanisms rather than simply "exploding on contact." Only after the copper pins on the iron balls were pulled before loading them into the catapult basket would they gain the ability to explode, and only upon enduring the powerful impact of being launched from the catapult to the ground would the internal trigger be released and the explosion set off...