Badge in Azure

After retrieving the bone needles, Gurney was only left with the burning pain in his lungs as he mobilized his sword aura. The injury that he made earlier was real, otherwise, he would not have been able to cheat the mage. He took two steps back and the two pirates on his left and right sides were blocking the bows with wooden shields. Gurney took out a small bottle and drank a mouthful of magic liquid.

When he left the city this time, Saleen gave Gurney three portion of magic liquid and told him that it could only be stored for three months or it would lose its function.

Gurney of course would not save the magic liquid as there were hundreds of soldiers dashing forward from afar. As a commander, he had to fight the battle himself. Gurney hardened his heart and catalyzed another portion of magic liquid with his sword aura to turn it into mist. He breathed it in to heal his injury.

These little tricks were taught to him by Jola, Gurney was cruel not only to the others, but to himself too. This kind of healing method was extremely fast, but it required one to withstand more pain.

Gurney then spat out a mouthful of purple blood and his face grew pale.

Pfft!

Gurney spat another sputum with blood in it, onto the dead body of the mage that was on the ground.

“You are a mage, so what? I killed you anyway.” Then, Gurney’s eyes grew ferocious as he drew the short sword and dashed towards the city gate.

The most narrow place at the city gate was only six meters wide. There were six iron shields that were standing to obstruct the constant attack of the enemy. Gurney ran forward from behind with the two loyal pirates that blocked the feather arrows for him.

An iron crossbow shot into one of the pirate’s shoulders. It glided above the bone and shot through. The pirate was hurt and his face was wrenched in pain. He was really courageous, he changed the long swords into another hand as though his injured right hand was not his anymore.

Gurney did not turn around. He ran to the city gate and the iron shield dispersed naturally to let the three of them pass. Gurney then was shot by a few arrows too.

The hole at the city door was starting to stop growing. The Barbarians used the taken iron axes to continue breaking the city door so that the magic chariots could pass through. The Barbarian agreed upon one thing, if magic chariots could enter the city, they considered themselves to have won in the war.

The situation on the battlefield was extremely tragic. The party that was guarding the city saw that the enemy was damaging the city door and knew that there would be more danger behind. They attacked the few rows of iron shields that were outside of the city gate vigorously. The Barbarians knew that if the city gate was taken back, the hundred of them would be killed by the other party.

There were a thousand heavy cavalrymen at the west of the city. If they were to be transferred over, with only a hundred Barbarians, they would not be able to withstand them.

At that moment, Gurney knew that he had miscalculated. From what he saw, the sudden attack would have made the other party panic, it would not be a problem for them to hold back for six minutes. When he was a pirate, he was fighting against nobles’ soldiers or mercenaries, but the one he was fighting against then was the empire’s regular army.

The regular army quickly charged against them when they were under attack all of a sudden, there was no hesitation. Although those low level officers from the empire looked savage, their command was organized. Looking at the row of Barbarians that were being killed, the other row from the back came forward.

The biggest problem with the Barbarians was that they lost their favorable weapons. If they had battle axes on hand, they would not let their enemy break the line of defence so soon. The empire’s army had already started transferring the long spear soldiers over. They had seven meter long iron spears and when they formed a human wall to charge forward, no formation would be strong enough to withstand them.

Tat tat, tat tat…

They could hear horses hoof’s clatter clearly from outside of the city. The Barbarians cheered and exerted all their strength to chop the city door. The pirates under Gurney did not follow the magic chariots, but arrived one step earlier. The Barbarians’ battle axes were hung on their skeleton warhorses. The soldiers on the city wall immediately shot arrows down.

The pirates raised their shields, they wore the armor that Saleen designed. Unless the crossbows were intermediate size or above, they would not be able to kill them directly.

The speed of the skeleton warhorses was extremely fast. They were at the city wall in the blink of an eye and the soldiers could not transfer heavy archery men to shoot them to death.

The typography of Fort Strand was strange, it was a city built in between two tall mountain peaks. The city wall was built extremely high and it would be difficult to climb. Fort Strand did not build any enclosure outside of city gate, but only a city wall. The pirates at the front pulled their horses’ heads up and leapt through the huge hole in the city door into the city. They took down the heavy battle axes and threw them on the floor, then turned around and dashed out again.

Suddenly, there were dozens of battle axes passed to the Barbarians. The battle axes were extremely sharp and heavy. The Barbarians gathered together and started to damage the city door entirely with their battle axes. Within the time frame of one minute, the city door fell outside.

The pirates braved the arrow shower from the top of the city wall and threw out ropes to pull away the city door debris. Very quickly, they cleared the path in front of the city gate.

A few pirates that were good at shooting picked up the small alchemy crossbows and wanted to counter attack at the top of the city. Due to the inconvenient landforms, they could not even suppress their enemy.

In the city, they had gathered big troops of long spear soldiers and they looked like they were going to launch an attack. The Barbarians that got their weapon past the line of defence formed by iron shield and charged towards their enemy that was ten times their forces and mounted a charge.

The arrows were shooting down like rain and the Barbarians that did not have the suited armor were suddenly down by more than twenty of them. There were still over thirty of them that dashed through the formation of long spear soldiers. They did not dash into the formation but jumped into it.

The front row of long spear soldiers raised their long spears vertically, even big sized magic beasts would find it difficult to break through such a formation. The Barbarians jumped a few meters high and there were two of them that were torn through by long spears from further back, even mages would not be able to save them if they rushed there.

Most of the Barbarians avoided sharp spears and got into the empire army’s camp. The long spear soldiers brought short swords too but the troops of long spear soldiers were an extremely close formation. They threw away their long spears and it was chaotic. How could short swords fight against battle axes? the Barbarians were definitely fighting with no plan.

They were surrounded by the enemy anyway. Swinging the battle axes everywhere, they would eventually hit a target with their eyes closed.

The long spear soldiers were wiped out and they could not uphold their high morale. They had never seen an enemy that could use battle axes like that. Every Barbarian that was chosen by Saleen was a man of unusual strength. Such talent, with a little training at the empire army and they could become a low level non commissioned officer. A low level non commissioned officer could lead forty to fifty soldiers as a crack troop that were in charge of attacking a fortification.

“Mage, where are the mages?” Some low level military officer started shouting. The city gate was broken open and if the mages did not come forth to block, everyone knew what was going to happen next. Although there were only a hundred pirates outside the city gate, which was a small number, everyone of them was on a skeleton warhorse. These empire officers knew that it meant there was a death mage among them and he was a grand mage.

If one was unlucky, it was not a grand mage, but a sorcerer. Letting this death sorcerer into the city would release a huge death army. Fort Strand would be a lost cause.

When mages were flying in the sky, they could still have their safety threatened by having arrows shoot in cluster towards them. It was the city defence after all. The top of the city wall and the high spots within the city had a lot of crossbows set up in them. If the mage were to enter from the ground, they could not pull off that kind of attack.

At west of the city, there were two infantry regiments that were approaching Fort Strand’s city wall. The mages in the two regiments had cast the Windspeed spell for the soldiers to avoid being shot by the magic stone bullets. The speed of a magic stone bullet was not fast, many mages could dodge all of them with a Windspeed spell. The weapon relied on throwing them in a cluster to cause damage and it was very effective when there was a large number of targets.

The trebuchet on the top of the city wall could kill targets accurately within two miles. The two infantry regiments stopped at the distance of two and a half miles away and started setting up their own trebuchet.

The two large troops of soldiers set up heavy archery defence around the trebuchet while the mage stood by the side cooly. At such distance, the trebuchet would need some luck to hit its target. The mages were expanding their magic chords to protect their trebuchet.

That was the most stable strategy. Only when their trebuchet was successfully set up, they could suppress the top of the city wall, to let their infantry dash forward. Half of the soldiers would be injured by the stone bullets before getting to the border of the city otherwise.

A trebuchet was something that if you had one and your enemy did not, it would be very useful. If both sides had them, it would be a tight match. To fight against each other, they would need soldiers to determine the battle.

Setting up a dozen meter tall trebuchet, the mages guarding next to the trebuchet were thrilled. Back then, the Qin Empire relied on mages and trebuchets to fight for sovereignty over rivers and mountains.

That era, sorcerers would set up a huge defence magic before the trebuchets then use the attack like a meteor shower to damage the enemy’s city.

Such attack methods were very efficient, way more efficient than mages exploding everywhere. Even a sorcerer would have limited magic chords after all, but trebuchets only needed magic stone bullets to shoot continuously.

Back when the Grukos family was strong, even Holy See had to make concessions for the sake of overall interest. They compromised with other forces just to keep the last holy ground, Tanggulasi.

It had been more than a thousand years since the last time one had seen such a scene.

Lex actually did not look to the two thousand cavalry regiment to win against Fort Strand. She attacked in order to loosen Daniel’s pressure on the East Gate.

Fortunately, when it happened, the soldiers of the Bitter Water army were almost ready. The war puppets were already activated to follow the two regiments of cavalrymen to outside of the city. These war puppets were in charge of moving magic stone bullets. As long as there were magic nuclei, these war puppets would not know what exhaustion was. Such an easy task would not required too much mental power by the mages that commanded the puppets.

The two regiments were just vanguards. Soon, there were another two regiments of cavalrymen that arrived at the position. They arrived almost one after another. The infantrymen were not heavy infantrymen. If they were arrayed and the enemy sent heavy cavalry to attack, these soldiers that relied on magic machinery would find it difficult to withstand.

To leave the city and an attack was a dangerous strategy, but if properly carried out, it would cause huge damage to the enemy.

People at the top of the city wall saw the Bitter Water Prefecture’s movement using an alchemy telescope and already summoned their mages to adjust the aim of the trebuchet at the top of the city wall. At that moment, the first who attacked would not be guaranteed an advantage. All of the trebuchets needed to be adjusted in order to ensure the range of placement. The invaders had to at least wait until the defending party started the attack to know the exact location of their trebuchet.

The magic trebuchet that Lex brought along might not be able to ruin the city wall, but it could shatter the enemy’s trebuchet.