Chapter 441 — Fire

This was a war.

Sir Marchi knew perfectly well that it was a war—he had known it from the very start—but for the moment he could not grasp what Gaudy had meant by that remark. Was there something special about a war?

The nobles made their declarations, delivered their letters, writs, and challenges according to protocol, summoned knights and levied conscripts, agreed on a time and a place, drew up their formations, charged, fought, seized prisoners, and traded interests—and when necessary, settled everything by honorable duel and sworn oath. Was that not war?

Once again the Pioneer's Sword, as legendary as the Founding Duke himself, came cleaving down upon his knight's blade, the searing flames along its edge so fierce a man could scarcely draw breath; that black blade wreathed in fire could not help but call to mind the dark, corrupted wastes of Gondor, and the blaze upon it was like the lights that had illuminated those wastes seven hundred years ago—yet at this moment Sir Marchi had not a shred of spare mind to ponder or marvel at any of it.

They said that after his resurrection, this founding hero's strength had declined, and that he was in a period of temporary weakness.

They said that after seven hundred years of slumber, this longsword had lost all its magic, and was now merely an exceptionally sturdy ordinary blade forged from legendary materials.

They said that Duke Gaoyang Cecil, returned from the dead, almost never left his domain, because the hidden wounds he had suffered seven hundred years ago had still not healed, and he remained unable to set foot on a battlefield.

Nonsense.

The power carried by that black longsword was astonishingly great, and every cut and thrust of it landed exactly where it should; Gaoyang Cecil's techniques were hardly what one would call dazzling—they were as plain and simple as those of the most ordinary line soldier—and apart from a few basic knightly skills, this Founding Duke employed almost none of the so-called "legendary forbidden arts." Yet it was precisely this plain, simple way of fighting that kept breaking Sir Marchi out in cold sweat.

Unlike the noble knights shaped by strict training and rigid doctrine, all of Gaoyang Cecil's combat experience came from the battlefield, from fighting the aberrants. The aberrants had no knightly courtesy, no exquisite shifts of technique, nothing that could be called a pattern; combat with those inhuman things could usually be reduced to one simple sentence: strike the enemy before he strikes you, and make sure the blow is powerful enough that he never gets a second attack.

This pure form of "combat" left the knight deeply ill at ease.

He had been through battles—battles against all manner of formidable foes—and it was not the first time he had challenged an enemy stronger than himself in a war between nobles. In his youth he had wiped out the largest band of exiled knights on the Holy Spirit Plains with only eight family knights at his side—cutthroats and oath-breaking knights all, mercenaries cruel and faithless.

But plainly, none of that could compare with the demon tide of seven hundred years ago.

If a general from the eastern frontier were standing here, perhaps he would have done better...

Gaoyang found that he had almost completely merged with and absorbed the experience of Gaoyang Cecil; his control over this body had not yet reached its peak, but it was not far off.

In a little over a year he had finally recovered to the legendary rank—perhaps only the elementary level, but more than enough to defeat the high-ranked knight before him.

Only, whenever he faced this high-ranked knight named Marchi, he could not help but think of another enemy he had faced the year before:

that fallen druid of the Congregation of the End of All Things, the man named Bard Wendell, once the Wolf General of Typhon.

Though Bard Wendell had ultimately been defeated by Gaoyang because of the sheer gap in absolute power, the swordsmanship that sprang wholly from the battlefield—the kind honed only through countless battles—had left a deep impression on the latter. The high-ranked knight before him now surpassed the Bard Wendell of those days in raw power, since he still retained his complete transcendent abilities; unfortunately, his combat experience and instincts were plainly not on the same level.

And no wonder: one had been the strongest "Wolf General" the Typhon Empire had seen in a century, while the other was merely a commander holding a fortress in Ansau. This high-ranked knight named Marchi had already done very well.

A layer of mist gradually spread across the river; the clash of two transcendent powers had heated the nearby water into a thick fog, and because Gaosong deliberately restrained it, all the shock of the battle was confined beyond the safe distance of the two warships—even this fog had not spread outward.

In one brief instant, Sir Marchi and the Founding Duke who was his opponent passed close by each other; a vast force bore down on the hand that held his sword, nearly tearing the knight's blade from his grip, and when he had recovered his balance he found that Gaosong's figure had already vanished from before his eyes.

The next moment he noticed that the mist around him had suddenly gone still; the fog, which should have been formless and intangible, had at some point been mastered by the legendary duke's power and "cast" like iron into an enormous cage. Beneath the crushing weight of that iron mist the armor on his body cracked inch by inch, and the knight's sword in his hand slowly warped under the pressure.

He struggled with all his might once, then went still; the black Pioneer's Sword was already resting against his shoulder. The roaring flames along its edge were gone, but it gave off a suffocating pressure.

The thick fog dispersed, and with it the pressure that had seemed cast into iron. Sir Marchi raised his head and saw those two beams of world-destroying arcane torrent slowly sweeping across the sky—at the far end of the torrents, the shield of Boulder Fortress was dissolving into a sky full of scattered motes of light amid waves of thunder and shrieking, and the torrents, piercing the now-defunct shield, carved a great and appalling rift in that black wall which had stood for a century.

On Height Number Two, Sir Philip witnessed with his own eyes the collapse of Boulder Fortress's magical barrier, and without the slightest hesitation gave the order to fire: "The target's shield is down—all cannons, open fire!"

The massively powerful single-shot "Justice-I" accelerator cannon and the ferociously rapid-firing "Persuader-I" accelerator cannon roared out their deafening reports at the same time; a hundred pale-blue trails once more tore across the sky, and after crossing the broad plain of the battlefield they came crashing down upon the walls of that black fortress.

This time, at last, all of the Cecil's "Skyfire" had been brought to bear.

The walls of Boulder, built of massive stone and with their seams cast in metal, faced the might of Skyfire directly for the first time; the bricks long thought indestructible burst apart in an instant, exploding into a sky full of shattered rock and molten metal. The few soldiers still holding the walls had begun to withdraw the moment the shield collapsed, but some who could not withdraw in time were shaken from the battlements, or struck directly by the cannon fire and the flying shards, and died on the spot; the defensive counterattack that had been anticipated was gone the instant the shield fell.

The knights, officers, and southern nobles left in the city were thrown into chaos; even though some officers still struggled to maintain order, with the fortress breached they could not turn the tide. And what was more terrifying still was that those two dreadful beams of energy, after less than ten minutes of silence, had appeared once again.