Chapter 65: Black Dragon’s Wing
BOOM—BOOM—BOOM—
For the first time, the dull sound of war drums exploded above this newborn city.
This was not the joyful music of a celebration, but the prelude to an expedition.
Outside the city gates, an army with a violently mismatched style had already assembled.
At the very front stood Roland and his five hundred Black Dragon Guards.
They wore the fine chainmail Caesar had paid a “heavy price” to forge for them. In one hand they held heavy tower shields, and in the other, tempered long spears, forming a silent square of steel.
They were like a black reef, radiating only two words from head to toe—professional.
Behind them, however, the style changed so abruptly it was almost painful to look at.
There were one hundred and fifty beasts that looked as though they had just been released from cages.
They were the newly founded unit under Caesar—Black Dragon’s Wing.
Three days ago, they had been three hundred desperadoes lying in the mud waiting to die.
Three days later, they were monsters that had crawled out of mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
They wore no uniform armor. Instead, they were dressed in a mishmash of tattered leather, and some of them were simply bare-chested, exposing twisted muscles and savage scars.
The weapons in their hands were equally chaotic—battle axes, spiked clubs, two-handed greatswords… the only thing they had in common was the stench of blood that hit one in the face.
In three days, of the original three hundred, fewer than half had survived.
And of the one hundred and fifty who remained, only thirteen lucky men had truly condensed Battle Energy and barely touched the threshold of Squire Knight.
The rest were nothing more than enhanced madmen, their bodies forcibly stimulated by that vicious technique until they became stronger, bloodthirstier, and more insane.
Yet at this moment, whether they were those thirteen newly advanced Squire Knights or the enhanced lunatics, their eyes were all exactly the same.
It was a vicious gleam that mixed greed with savagery, as though they were ready to tear people apart at any moment.
Threads of newly formed, still unstable Battle Energy coiled around them like black wildfire, radiating chaos and ill omen.
They were a pack of mad dogs with their chains removed, and the other end of those chains was held by the young man standing atop the platform.
Caesar stood there in black combat attire, hands clasped behind his back.
Those deep violet eyes swept calmly across the crowd below, over every face thirsty for slaughter and wealth.
He did not say a single word.
There was no hot-blooded speech before battle, no hypocritical promises of glory. Those empty things were useless to this group.
He merely lifted a hand slightly.
The one-eyed Barrett behind him instantly understood. With an ugly grin splitting his face, he waved a hand and had two heavy chests carried forward.
Click—
The lids were yanked open with force.
The golden light that shone out, brilliant as frozen sunlight, stabbed into every eye at once!
Gold coins!
Two chests filled to the brim with gold!
A hoarse, suppressed panting rose from the crowd. Every eye turned bloodshot in an instant, and every breath grew hot.
“By the lord’s command!”
Barrett used Battle Energy to amplify his voice, and it boomed beside every ear like thunder.
“Today, we go south to Grayrock Town! And today, you kill!”
“For every skeleton soldier you kill, you get one silver coin!”
“For every ghoul you kill, you get five silver coins!”
He kicked one of the chests hard, and gold coins spilled across the ground in a glittering shower. To this pack of gamblers, that sound was sweeter than the moans of the palest beauty in the city.
“Whoever is the first to make it onto the wall gets this whole chest of gold!”
ROAR—!!!
All one hundred and fifty beasts boiled over completely!
They let out roars that hardly sounded human. The fire of greed burned away the last shred of reason in them!
Money! Women! Status!
Caesar had used the most primitive, most direct desires to paint them the grandest possible dream.
And the only way to eat that dream was to pave a road to the sky with the enemy’s bones!
“Move out.”
Caesar spat out those two cold words, giving them no time at all for hesitation or fantasy.
“AOOOO—!”
Barrett charged first, carrying his massive battle axe like a maddened bull. Leading the pack of mad dogs, he rushed straight to the front, even overtaking Roland’s formation.
They had no formation to speak of. They knew only how to howl and charge forward like lunatics, as though the gold would sprout legs and run away if they were one second too late.
Roland watched this rabble, less disciplined than common bandits, and his brow twisted into a knot.
But he said nothing.
He simply raised a hand in silence.
“The entire army will advance at a measured pace.”
The steel fortress formed by the five hundred Black Dragon Guards moved forward in steady steps, following at an unhurried pace like a calm undertaker arriving to collect the dead.
The army set out, kicking up rolling clouds of dust as it marched straight toward the town occupied by the undead in the south.
From the platform, Caesar watched them go, the corner of his mouth curving in a chill no one noticed.
“A pack of wild dogs that has not yet been properly hammered into shape still cannot count as true ‘wings.’”
“Let the bones of the undead sharpen you.”
He understood perfectly well that this was a military action, but it was also an internal refining process.
Using a siege bloody enough, he would drain away the excess energy of these mad dogs and, as a bonus, eliminate the weak and the stupid among them.
Only those who survived would qualify to become Caesar’s blades.
As for those who died…
The value of cannon fodder lay in being spent.
This wave was no loss.
…
At the same time, ten miles east of the City of Miracles, inside the Temple Knight Order’s main encampment.
Within the blood-red command tent, Cardinal Inquisitor Augustus stood before a massive crystal mirror.
The mirror had been polished from a single piece of natural crystal, its surface rippling with light as it clearly reflected the full panorama of Caesar’s army heading to war.
The Church’s second-tier holy relic, A Thousand Miles Away.
Though it could not transmit sound, nor reveal fine detail, it was sufficient for him to grasp the broad movement of the battlefield.
His adjutant, Kellan, stood respectfully at one side.
Looking at Black Dragon’s Wing in the mirror—a force that looked more like bandits sweeping through the land than any proper army—Kellan’s eyes were full of unconcealed disdain.
“My lord, they’re a laughingstock. Just a mob driven by gold.”
“That Caesar actually sent such troops as the vanguard. He’s foolish to the extreme.”
“It seems even the title of noble cannot hide the short-sightedness in his bones.”
“Foolish?”
The corner of Augustus’s mouth lifted in a smile that suggested complete confidence and total control.
“No, Kellan, my friend. That is not foolishness. That is… intelligence.”
His ice-blue eyes seemed to look through the crystal and see the young lord standing atop that platform, as though peering straight into all the calculations in his mind.
“He knows that the desperadoes under his command are a double-edged sword.”
“If used well, they can tear open the enemy’s defensive line.”
“If used poorly, they will cut him instead.”
“So he has used the most direct profit imaginable to point the edge of that sword firmly at his enemies.”
“It is crude, but effective.”
Augustus extended a slender finger and traced it lightly across the cold surface of the crystal mirror, as though caressing an interesting work of art.
“And beyond that, he means to use a bloody siege to expend the excess energy of those mad dogs, and in the process… eliminate the weak among them.”
There was admiration in his voice now, the admiration one chess player held for another.
“This is a military operation, but also an internal purge.”
“He is using my mission to sharpen his own knife.”
“This young man calculates every step with perfect clarity. His perspective is far from small.”
Kellan listened, more and more dazed.
He had seen only disorder and stupidity.
Yet the Lord Inquisitor had seen the order and purpose hidden behind the disorder.
So this was the perspective of those who stood above.
He had learned something today.
“Then… my lord, do you think he’ll succeed?”
Kellan asked cautiously.
“Of course he will.”
Augustus spoke as though stating a fact that had already happened.
“He will pay a ‘terrible’ price, then struggle his way onto the wall and claim a ‘hard-won’ victory.”
“Because this is a performance he must win, and must also make sure to lose in an ugly enough way.”
In Augustus’s eyes shone the gleam of a hunter watching prey step neatly into a trap.
“And I am the only audience for that performance, and the most important one.”
He looked forward to it. He looked forward to seeing that young man forced to stake everything for victory, only to end in ruin and come crawling to him for aid.
…
Grayrock Town.
This former frontier town had now become a paradise for the undead.
Black corrosive vines crawled over the crumbling walls, and behind the battlements, pairs of ghostly blue flames flickered in the darkness.
The walls were crowded with skeleton archers, their empty eye sockets fixed on the distant horizon.
The city gates had long since vanished. In their place stood a bone wall cast from corpses and obsidian, covered with blasphemous runes that radiated an ominous aura.
The moment Caesar’s army entered their field of vision, a shrill, grating horn sounded from the top of the highest mage tower in the town’s center.
The war horn of the undead!
ROAR—!
KRAAA—!
Countless ghouls and zombies poured out from every corner of the town like a tide, gathering behind the walls and letting out scalp-numbing shrieks.
When Black Dragon’s Wing saw the city of death, not one of them showed the slightest trace of fear.
On the contrary, every one of them lit up with excitement, running their tongues across cracked lips.
In their eyes, that was no city of undead.
It was a paradise built from gold coins and women.
“Boys!”
Barrett raised his battle axe high. The blade reflected a grim light beneath the sun as he roared at the top of his lungs.
“What the hell are you waiting for? I’ll personally add another ten gold coins for the first man through the breach!”
“Kill—!!!”
The one hundred and fifty beasts could no longer hold back.
They surged forward like a flood through a broken dam, launching a suicidal charge at Grayrock Town.
They had no siege engines. No tactical coordination.
Their only weapons were the blades in their hands and the suicidal madness in their bones.
“Loose arrows!”
From atop the wall, a necromancer in a black robe issued a hoarse command.
WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH—!
A rain of bone arrows blotted out the sky, crashing down over the charging men like a storm of black death.
PUFF! PUFF! PUFF!
The first unlucky dozen at the front were instantly turned into pincushions. They did not even have time to scream before toppling over, their bodies twitching once or twice before going still.
But such a bloody sight could not stop this pack of mad dogs.
They could not even be bothered to block.
By instinct alone, they used their newly condensed Battle Energy to protect their hearts and heads, allowing bone arrows to thud into the rest of their bodies as they rushed the wall with even greater speed.
They were using flesh and blood to force their way through the arrow storm.
BOOM!
A huge man more than two meters tall kicked off the ground while still more than ten meters from the wall, launching himself into the air like a cannonball!
The spiked club in his hands screamed through the air with wind and thunder and came crashing down onto the wall!
CRACK!
The already damaged section of wall was smashed open into a visible breach!
“Well done!”
“Do the same! Smash it open!”
More members of Black Dragon’s Wing followed suit. Like a troop of mad apes, they began scaling and destroying the wall in the most savage, primitive way possible.
The moment they reached the top, the battle entered its fiercest stage.
Black Dragon’s Wing swung their weapons and crashed violently into the skeleton guards who knew nothing of fear.
Battle axes split skulls. Longswords chopped through spines. The crack of shattered bone mixed with the clang of metal into a single chaotic roar.
One member of Black Dragon’s Wing had his stomach pierced clean through by three skeleton spears at once, his entrails spilling out.
Yet at the moment of death, he let out a savage grin, hugged one of the skeletons tight, and bit down with his teeth, crushing its neckbone between his jaws!
Another member was knocked to the ground by a ghoul. Half his face was torn away, exposing white bone beneath.
And yet he laughed wildly as he drove the dagger in his hand straight into the ghoul’s eye socket, dying together with it.
Savage. Bloody. Mad.
This was not war.
It was the most primitive kind of beastly mauling, a feast of flesh and blood inside a giant grinder.
And Barrett, after his initial roar to raise morale, did not personally join the breakthrough. Instead he stayed hidden in a safer corner, all the while cursing inwardly about what kind of technique the Church had handed them.
Did it really do this much damage to a man’s brain?
Roland’s formation halted outside the range of the arrows and quietly watched everything unfold.
Behind him, the Black Dragon Guards looked at the hellish battle on the wall, and more than one face had gone pale. A few even could not help retching.
Were these people still human?
Roland’s face, however, remained expressionless.
He was only waiting.
Waiting for the only lord he acknowledged to issue the next command.
Caesar, too, stood in the rear, coldly observing the entire battlefield.
His God’s Eye had already taken in everything.
He “saw” that on a certain spot along the southwestern corner of the wall, the undead defenses were clearly sparser.
The skeleton archers there always seemed to shoot arrows that “just happened” to miss their targets, or else lacked force.
Caesar sneered inwardly.
He knew that was the “stage” Elizabeth had left for him—a carefully opened entrance inviting him in.
“Barrett.”
Caesar’s voice came clearly through a small voice-transmission stone and into Barrett’s ears as he observed the wall from concealment.
“The southwestern corner. The third arrow tower. Break through there with your men.”
“Received, my lord!”
Barrett let out a helpless sigh, then suddenly leaped out from the shadows!
With one swing of his axe, he split a zombie in two. Green ichor splashed over his face, but he wiped it away without caring and let out a roar that shook the heavens.
“Black Dragon’s Wing! Any man with balls comes with me!!”
With the remaining dozens of Black Dragon’s Wing members, he carved a path of blood toward the position Caesar had named.
The defenses there truly were “pitifully weak.”
The skeleton soldiers looked as though they all suffered from brittle bones. One blow and they shattered.
After only a few charges, the arrow tower built of stone and dry bones had been half demolished by them.
RUMBLE—!
With a deafening crash, the arrow tower collapsed, smashing a great breach in the wall.
“Get in there! The gold is ours!”
Barrett was the first to leap through the gap and into the town.
Then he froze.
What greeted him was not mountains of gold and soft women.
Instead, there stood two full rows—twenty in all—of Abominations over three meters tall, each holding a monstrous butcher’s hook.
These creatures, sewn together from countless corpses, reeked of nauseating rot and powerful death energy.
On their stitched-together faces spread a grotesque, silent grin, as though asking him, Surprised?
“Fuck me…”
Barrett only had time to spit out those two words before one of the Abominations swung its iron hook like a bat and sent him flying.
BANG!
Fortunately, the details had already been arranged in advance. Other than the impact being a bit too strong, he was not seriously hurt.
But the members of Black Dragon’s Wing who had followed him inside in fevered excitement were, in the very next second, torn into pieces by those twenty monstrous war machines.
Blood and flesh sprayed everywhere. Screams rose to the heavens.
One newly advanced Squire Knight could not believe what was happening. The Battle Energy shield he had been so proud of was as fragile as paper before the butcher’s hook. He was split clean through at the waist, his upper body flying more than ten meters.
The momentum that had seemed unstoppable only moments before was crushed completely by absolute force.
The surviving members of Black Dragon’s Wing were terrified out of their minds by that scene from hell. Screaming and crawling in panic, they fled back out through the breach like men pissing themselves.
“Not a bad performance.”
From afar, Caesar gave his cold evaluation.
That woman Elizabeth had not disappointed him.
First lure the enemy by showing weakness and letting his mad dogs taste success.
Then answer with absolute force and smash them head-on.
This made the “brutality” of the battle look perfectly real.
For the benefit of that particular “audience,” it was exactly right.
“Roland.”
Caesar’s voice rang out once more through the voice-transmission stone.
“Your subordinate is here!”
“Send your unit forward to extract them.”
“Remember—do not get drawn into a prolonged fight. Pull the survivors out, then withdraw.”
“Yes, my lord!”
Roland drew his two-handed greatsword and let out a low, savage roar.
“For the lord!”
“ROAR!”
At last, the steel torrent of five hundred Black Dragon Guards moved.
Marching in lockstep like a moving wall, they advanced straight toward that bloody breach.
…
Before the crystal mirror A Thousand Miles Away, Augustus quietly watched the bloody scene unfold.
His face held no expression, but in the depths of his eyes there was a trace of pleasure.
“Naive.”
He spoke those two words lightly.
“That Caesar thought he could use a pack of mad dogs to bite through the undead’s defenses.”
“And now he is paying the price for that naïveté.”
At the side, Kellan watched with his heart pounding and hurried to agree.
“Yes, my lord! He has lost at least half of his ‘elite’ force!”
“And the undead at Grayrock Town are far stronger than we imagined!”
“Those twenty Abominations alone would cost even our own knight order dearly to deal with!”
“Cost?”
Augustus let out a soft laugh, his eyes flashing with cold ridicule.
“Kellan, remember this.”
“When cannon fodder dies, it is never called a cost.”
“It is called… expendables.”
His gaze fell upon the heavy infantry square beginning its advance in the mirror.
“Now the real show begins.”
“Let me see, then, how you intend to end this, Caesar Valerius.”
He eagerly awaited the sight of Caesar, driven by desperation to reverse the defeat, finally being forced to enter the battlefield himself, only to be swallowed whole by the vast sea of undead.
That was the ending he most wanted to see.
A reckless young man paying for his stupidity with his life.