"As expected of weapons left behind from the Fadlan Empire—they can easily destroy our tanks. But... since that is the case, there is no need for us to hold back anymore."
The hobgoblin sneered as he watched the overhead reconnaissance projection transmitted from the wyverns.
"Just as His Majesty Cassius once said, to 'kill the chicken to scare the monkey,' Saint Theo is that chicken waiting to be slaughtered. I will make all the Aethelans see... what comes of defying the Empire."
His voice was resonant and forceful. A glint of ferocity flickered in his cloudy yellow eyes, and ruthless determination hardened across his crimson, scale-covered face.
This hobgoblin officer was the commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army Group in this blitzkrieg campaign, the besieging commander of Saint Theo, and the illustrious Dragonblood Marquis—Arturo Redridge.
As a trusted confidant of Duke Duoluo, a key figure in the imperial military, and one of the quintessential ultra-hawks, Arturo would never let an opportunity like this slip by.
Arturo cleanly unsheathed the saber at his waist, hoisted it high, and roared with booming vigor, "Hear my command—all forces, launch a full-scale assault! Reduce this city to scorched earth!"
The hobgoblin bared his fangs, spittle flying as the solid-gold general's stars upon his shoulders gleamed under the light.
His roar was transmitted instantly via the electromagnetic waves of the magical communicator to every single tank and combat vehicle across the battlefield.
Before his voice had even faded, the entire battlefield erupted in a furious roar. The ground shook violently, even swaying, as endless fire and thick smoke surged toward the heavens.
The battlefield was boiling over!
*Boom—*
Over a hundred tanks fired in unison. Even the earth heaved and buckled under the immense recoil, and the black smoke belched from the muzzles veiled half the sky.
A blinding line of fire linked together across the plains as smoke-trailing shells tore through the air, weaving a dense web of firepower before raining down upon Saint Theo's towering, fortified walls.
*Boom!*
In an instant, the violent blast made the entire city tremble continuously. Billowing flames threatened to swallow the ramparts whole, and rolling clouds of smoke choked the sky above Saint Theo.
"Amaunator above! Is today truly the end of days?!"
"How do we stop this?! I don't want any part in this war!"
"D-Damn it all..."
The people stared up at the smoke blanketing the heavens, witnessing an apocalyptic nightmare, and let out panicked, terrified shrieks.
Confronted by this cataclysmic spectacle, the residents of Saint Theo had completely lost their senses, fleeing aimlessly in every direction as order collapsed into total chaos.
Under the concussive force of the bombardment, the protective curtain of light enveloping Saint Theo flickered erratically, riddled with spiderweb fractures. The ramparts trembled violently, sending several soldiers slipping over the edge to plunge to their deaths, dashed into meat paste on the paving stones below.
Cullen stood atop the gate tower, brandishing his longsword as he pointed toward the horizon through gritted teeth. "Soldiers! Do not falter! Drive them back!"
Beside the solar ballistae, the soldiers strained with all their might to wind the winches and frantically load the giant bolts. Yet beneath the shroud of thick smoke, they could not even pick out their targets.
One after another, bolts of radiant light streaked through the sky, only to plunge uselessly into the smoke and dust. Compared to the Cinder Empire's overwhelming storm of artillery fire, their response was negligible.
Watching the barrier dim and crack, Cullen turned his head and called out urgently to the assembly of wizards, "Master Zalan, can you and your colleagues repair our defensive array?"
Zalan shook his head solemnly, sighing. "With our strength, we can barely keep the Glittering Web aloft over the city. We have no power left to sustain such an intricate warding array.
"Lord Cullen, the Cinder Empire's assault is simply too ferocious, far exceeding anyone's expectations. I fear... we will not be able to hold out much longer."
Cullen's brow furrowed deep. "Are you saying... I should abandon this city?
"You want me to surrender Saint Theo, an ancient possession of the Fadlan Empire, to the Cinder Empire without a fight? To scurry away like a rat fleeing the light?"
His expression flushed with indignant rage, his tone turning sharp as golden fire blazed in his pupils.
"Lord Cullen, now is not the time for stubborn pride. Please wake from the illusions of the past and look plainly at what is before you..."
Zalan looked up, pointing his staff toward the sky choked with smoke and fire, his voice weighed down with sorrow.
"The fall of Saint Theo is already inevitable. We possess no means to avert it.
"Lord Cullen, preserve your strength. Do not throw yourself away on a reckless impulse. Right now... the only chance we have to turn the tide is the decisive battle at Corinth."
Cullen knew that Zalan was not wrong. Under such a furious shelling by the Cinder Empire, even a proud scion of godblood like himself was powerless to change the outcome.
The solar ballistae on the walls of Saint Theo were sufficient to bring down true dragons, but they were utterly incapable of holding back an organized armored corps of steel behemoths.
Yet he could not swallow his indignation. In his heart, Fadlan was the eternal emblem of conquest, victory, and glory. They were meant to conquer the world; how could they be reduced to the conquered, forfeiting their own ancestral soil?
After a long silence, Cullen muttered in a low voice, "Master Zalan, I cannot abandon the lands of Fadlan..."
*Boom!*
Another ear-splitting blast shook the ramparts. The Cinder Empire's specialized armor-piercing antimagic shells finally penetrated the barrier of light.
Immediately after, several more identical shells arrived in succession, triggering a cascade of secondary detonations.
In a breath, ring-shaped breaches appeared across the translucent canopy. The fractures rapidly splintered and spread, multiplying until they completely covered the barrier.
*Crack!*
Finally, with a crisp, brittle snap, the defensive array that dozens of archmages had built together—and that had shielded the city for decades—reached its breaking point and shattered into shimmering shards.
"Look out! Fall back!"
Zalan's expression twisted into alarm as he shouted a frantic warning. Even he had never anticipated the Empire could break the defenses so swiftly.
The very next moment, the Cinder Empire's mortars chimed in with their own thunderous roars. High, soaring arcs traced across the sky as shells descended upon the soldiers stationed atop the walls as if guided by sight.
*Boom!*
Fire surged across the ramparts, spraying shattered masonry and choking dust in all directions. Engulfed by the explosions, the soldiers screamed in terror before they could even scramble to flee.
Cullen unfurled his wings and vaulted into the air. Brandishing his divine energy longsword, he swung it again and again, cleaving through more than a dozen shells and causing them to detonate harmlessly in midair.
Yet against the Empire's saturating barrage, the godblood marquis's efforts were nothing more than a drop in the ocean.
Though he managed to shield the dozen soldiers beneath him and preserve a section of wall tens of meters wide, the Empire's artillery struck almost every defensive structure in Saint Theo with pinpoint ruthlessness.
The grand, towering walls were battered beyond recognition, gaping with horrific, jagged breaches.
Another swarm of wyverns swept across the sky from afar, their steel wings cutting through the air with a spine-chilling whistle.
Cullen beat his wings and shot steeply upward, raising his divine sword overhead as he shouted at the top of his lungs, "Fadlanese never retreat!"
Against the tidal charge of over a hundred wyverns, Cullen appeared remarkably tiny.
*Slash—*
Yet in the next heartbeat, a dazzling torrent of golden divine fire surged from the blade, cleaving through the middle of the wyvern formation. Several beasts shrieked as they plummeted, exploding violently in midair.
However, the remaining wyverns climbed and banked sharply, slipping past Cullen's slash. They swept over Saint Theo according to plan, dropping hundreds of deadly bombs.
*Boom! Boom!*
Dozens of bombs were intercepted by the wizards' Glittering Web and blew apart in the air, but the resulting rain of searing, jagged shrapnel poured indiscriminately into the streets below.
Building after building was ignited. Fleeing civilians were caught in the blast, and some had half their skulls shorn away by jagged metal.
Immediately after, the bombs that slipped through the web struck the city streets and exploded, swallowing both citizens and houses in rolling fire and black smoke.
Survivors knelt among the rubble, staring up at the heavens in utter despair. Yet the sun was nowhere to be seen—there was only the black smoke blotting out the sky, and the grim specter of death hovering within.
"O Lord, what have we done wrong to suffer such punishment?!"
"This is purgatory! A living purgatory!"
"We are all burdened with sin... His Majesty Amaunator has abandoned us, and this is His wrath!"
Amidst the burning, scorched earth, the people succumbed to madness. The order of yesterday had been utterly obliterated, leaving behind only the wails of despair and frantic, delirious screams...
*No, it shouldn't be like this.*
Looking down upon the once-prosperous, bustling city now reduced to utter ruin, listening to the shrill whistles of wyverns and the roar of artillery, and smelling the choking, blistering heat billowing upward, Cullen hovered in the air.
His wings beat slowly, and bewilderment crept onto his nearly flawless face.
*His Majesty Amaunator... have You truly cast us aside?*
*Lord Walter, what would you have done in my place? Am I truly to abandon this city and become the very deserter I despise most?*
The winged godblood warrior was far too conspicuous in the sky. He had already slain more than a dozen wyverns and intercepted over a hundred shells.
Naturally, the Cinder Empire's artillery targeted him as their primary objective. Countless armor-piercing and antimagic shells converged upon him, determined to bring down this angelic warrior.
Meanwhile, the Empire's player corps had advanced to within a hundred meters outside the walls. Some raised staves and chanted incantations; others drew magical bows taut; some leveled the newest magitech sniper rifles; and a few even hurled Forbidden Magic Bombs.
In their eyes, he was hardly a terrifying godblood warrior who sent chills down his enemies' spines—he was a walking treasure trove of experience and military merits!
"Shoot down that bird-man!"
"Hahaha, kill him! For the Empire!"
In an instant, radiant arrows, blazing spears, poison-tipped darts, magic-negating shells, and freezing ice lances converged in a dazzling array of attacks from every direction, crashing toward Cullen.
*Boom!*
With an earth-shattering blast, a violent detonation ripped open midair, fracturing the very fabric of space. Blinding fire and thick smoke engulfed the winged godblood in an instant.
"Is he dead?"
"Did anyone get the exp notification?"
Suddenly, two piercing beams of pure white light tore through the smoke, triggering an immense explosion that instantly vaporized several players.
"Ignorant mortals!"
The crowd looked up to see Cullen wielding his divine longsword. His eyes burned with radiant fire, like an angel descended to earth.
His immaculate white wings beat, blowing away the smokescreen and shedding the ash and dust clinging to his feathers, stirring up a localized gale that whipped across the ground.
"Who gave you the audacity to challenge a bloodline of the Sun God?!"
Cullen bellowed, hoisting his longsword high. The intricate, wondrous engravings along the blade flashed to life, erupting with searing divine brilliance.
A crimson-gold pillar of fire surged straight into the clouds, followed by a terrifying hail of falling meteors—a divine judgment raining from the heavens.
In the blink of an eye, dozens of players charging forward to claim the walls of Saint Theo were reduced to ash beneath the deluge of fire.
This was the angelic godblood of Holy Fadlan! The dreadful army that had once followed the Sun King, Aragorn I, to conquer the multiverse!
"Long live Fadlan!"
Cullen threw his arm up and shouted, but even his voice was drowned out by the deafening booms and the screaming artillery.
The death of a handful of players did not diminish the Cinder Empire's firepower in the least. If anything, the shells and bombs hurtling toward Saint Theo grew denser, detonating in an unending cadence.
*Boom—*
Suddenly, a dull rumble sounded from behind Cullen, followed by the panicked shrieks of the populace.
"It's coming down! The wall is collapsing! It's going to crush us!"
"Get out of the way!"
He whipped around to see thick clouds of dust billowing outward as the stone ramparts gave way. Under the relentless barrage of the imperial army, the walls of Saint Theo had finally collapsed!
The city gave an earth-shattering wail. Hundreds of meters of stone wall crashed down in a mountainous cascade of rubble, burying countless soldiers and citizens beneath the ruins under a towering cloud of dust.
"Lord Cullen, we must go! To Corinth! We cannot linger here any longer!" Zalan flew to the godblood's side with Fly, urging him frantically.
The other wizards who had accompanied him had already evacuated via Mass Teleportation before the wall crumbled. In Zalan's eyes, the fall of Saint Theo had long been inevitable.
Destroying a few more tanks and killing a few more soldiers would never defeat the Cinder Empire. Their only hope of victory lay in defeating that red dragon.
"Have we... truly lost?"
Cullen hovered in the sky, his wings beating sluggishly, the light in his eyes dimming.
He looked down upon Saint Theo reduced to ruins, then turned to face the charging steel behemoths and swooping wyverns. Uncertainty flickered through his golden eyes once more.
*Boom!*
Another explosion rocked the air beside him, stopped only by the invisible barrier of divine energy shielding the angelic scion.
Beneath the threat of continued artillery fire, Zalan cast his teleportation spell, his figure fading into a shimmer as he gave one last desperate plea. "Lord Cullen, we haven't lost yet!
"We will prevail, and Fadlan will ultimately triumph—but not here! Duke Walter needs you!"
Finally, Cullen clenched his teeth, a flicker of grim resolve hardening in his gaze. He uttered each word slowly: "We... will be victorious."
The angelic godblood raised his sword with one arm. Blinding brilliance ignited at the blade's tip, and his form began to blur and vanish.
A heartbeat later, a barrage of shells rained down from above, obliterating the space where Cullen had just been hovering. But the angelic godblood was already gone.
The steel behemoths charged across the earth unhindered. Billowing steam and exhaust trailing in their wake, they surged at high speed toward the scorched, ruined city, meeting not a single shred of resistance along the way.
They had seized Saint Theo—or rather, they had completely destroyed this city of storied history.
...
On July 15, 1789 of the New Calendar, the vital northern military stronghold of Saint Theo fell. That same afternoon, five other major cities—including the City of Calvin, the City of Falin, and the City of Asher—fell in rapid succession.
Three days later, seventeen more settlements, including Bertrand, Mitchell, and Ashwood Keep, were captured by the forces of the Cinder Empire.
By July 30, in a mere nineteen days, the Empire's thunderous offensive had brought down every city in North Aethel save for the City of Colin. Virtually all vital territory had fallen under the Cinder Empire's control.
The Cinder Empire's blitzkrieg shocked the entire world. Before the various factions across the Feanso Continent could even register what was happening, news of the fall of one city after another in North Aethel arrived in a relentless flood.
Meanwhile, the Grand Duke of North Aethel—the former 'Wings of Fadlan,' Walter Graham—remained stubbornly entrenched in Corinth with the remnants of his army, awaiting the final, decisive confrontation.
...
*"The Cinder Empire descended onto the stage of the Feanso Continent with the speed and fury of lightning, forcefully declaring its existence and tolling the death knell of the old Fadlan order."*
*—Annals of Feanso, by Todd Brown*
...
*"...His Majesty Wilhelm told me there is no need to worry, yet I am already preparing to continue fleeing south.*
*Damn it all. These arrogant Fadlanese are still wallowing in their dreams of former glory, utterly oblivious to the true terror of that red dragon. They will pay dearly for it."*
*—Notes of Luton*
Chapter 612