The reason the female commander requested free fire was because the army had undergone special training.

If the women followed unified orders and all shot at the same direction, many bolts would inevitably hit empty space.

Free fire was different—it let these specially trained women fully bring out their shooting skills, so almost no bolts were wasted.

Seeing the beastkin army enter range, the female commander finally swung her hand and gave a low order:

“Fire!”

Whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh.

In an instant, arm-thick bolts poured down like a dense barrage, a storm of steel.

The shots looked completely random, yet every bolt struck true into the beastkin ranks.

The wolfkin legion at the very front took the hit first.

Each arm-thick bolt could pierce through three to five wolfkin in one go, then smash into the ones behind, sending them flying. The crossbows’ power was terrifying.

But compared to the last assault, the losses of this vanguard were almost nothing.

The rain of bolts these women unleashed was just as deadly as before. The targets they were locking onto in bulk, however, were on a whole different level now.

The wolfkin brought down by bolts made up only a tiny fraction of the vanguard.

Most of them, the moment a bolt came at them, swung their crude weapons and knocked the incoming shots aside.

It was hard to imagine that, even while sprinting at high speed, these wolfkin could still react this fast. What’s more—

batting away bolts in that split second took serious strength too.

If the wolf beastkin hadn’t cast enhancement magic beforehand, their wolfkin kin would’ve already been dying in droves.

“Roar!”

On another front, the bearkin army had launched their attack as well.

Their furious roars boomed like muffled thunder, rolling across the battlefield.

Compared to the agile wolfkin, the bearkin were naturally thick-skinned and tough.

Even without armor, ordinary weapons could hardly hurt them.

Let alone now.

With magical enhancements, their skin had become even harder than before.

Arrows were a joke; even sharp blades might not be able to deal a fatal wound.

To the entire beastkin host, the bearkin army was the toughest shield in front.

Tens of thousands of beastkin vanguard charged as one, shouting to kill.

The ground shook under their rolling advance. Giant stones and arrows rained down like a storm, hammering the beast tide.

Scarlet splashes burst up everywhere, mixed with endless screams and howls.

With that kind of desperate assault, caring nothing for casualties or sacrifice, the beastkin pushed forward step by step, until they pressed right up to the gates.

If the garrison didn’t stall this momentum, the whole fortress would be in danger.

“Cavalry charge!”

With a shout from their commander, over a thousand cavalry burst out through the gate.

They were the Empire’s elite heavy cavalry, clad in full plate. Every one of them possessed fearsome combat power—

in other words, every rider had reached the “Hundred Battles” level.

Cavalry warfare was all about speed and killing power.

The tactic of this thousand-strong unit was simple:

use their mounts’ mobility to rush out of the fortress, hack and slash for a brief wave, then immediately pull back inside and shut the gate.

When the scattered beastkin regrouped near the gate, they would open it again and launch another swift sweep.

After a few rounds of charges, beastkin casualties had already exceeded five thousand.

On the cavalry’s side, fewer than a hundred riders had even picked up light injuries.

That was the strength of Dibiles’s elite forces.

If it was about pure individual might, these elite soldiers were even stronger than those magically enhanced beastkin warriors.

But quality was quality, numbers were numbers.

As the attackers, the beastkin’s advantage lay in how many troops they could throw in.

Even after losing several thousand, they could still send out five times, ten times that number.

By comparison, the defenders were badly outnumbered.

Dibiles was a great empire; in peacetime, it could mobilize over a hundred thousand troops.

But its main forces had already been dispatched days ago to guard against the Inran Empire, leaving no spare soldiers to send to the fortress.

The troops manning the fortress right now even included a lot of reserve units from the capital. In other words—

Aside from the royal knights guarding the palace, the twenty-plus thousand women gathered here at the fortress were all the fighting strength they could spare.

There was almost a fivefold difference in numbers between attacker and defender, and they still had to deal with those terrifying giant beasts.

After the assault formation was scattered several times by cavalry, the White Bear simply sent out a group of behemoths, letting them form the core of the vanguard.

Each of those towering figures was over twenty meters tall, their bodies covered in silver-gray fur that gleamed under the sun.

Most shocking was the overwhelming aura they gave off. Even beastkin elites of other races didn’t dare get too close.

Every time their house-sized feet came down, the ground shook violently.

Every part of a behemoth’s body looked thick and powerful, especially those blood-red eyes filled with a lust for slaughter, glowing with a soul-chilling light.

The deltoids bulging on either side of their shoulders were like little hills. The muscles hidden under that fur could only be described as terrifying.

At the ends of their thick arms, their nails were like cavalry lances, sharp enough to tear open any creature’s skin.

As they drew closer to the fortress, each deep, heavy breath they let out made the very air seem to whimper.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!

The violent tremors knocked many women off balance on the walls, sending them tumbling backward.

The few who managed to stay standing and keep firing loosed a synchronized volley, then suddenly realized, shocked:

The dense rain of arrows bounced right off the behemoths’ bodies the instant they landed, sent flying by the thick keratin layer of their skin before they could even do any damage.

Countless bent bolts rolled across the ground, only to be crushed in the next second under those massive feet, driven deep into the mud.

“Archers fall back! Magic squads forward!”

The female commander issued orders in rapid succession, watching from the corner of her eye as fireball after fireball flew out, gauging how the behemoths responded.

Moments later, what she saw was—

The behemoths didn’t react at all.

The massive beasts just kept advancing, showing no fear of the relatively weak magic.

Fireballs exploded across their bodies, yet couldn’t even kindle a proper flame.

To them, that faint bit of fire couldn’t even singe the fur on their hides.

The women in the magic corps, along with the other troops, sank into despair.

The behemoths didn’t care about their tiny enemies’ feelings. In the next instant, they crowded up to the fortress, leveling their eyes—which were nearly even with the top of the wall—on the defenders nearby.

Then one behemoth raised a massive paw high and slammed down toward the wall.

“Get out of the way!”

The female commander shouted urgently, snapping her stunned subordinates out of it. They scrambled aside just as the paw came crashing down.

Rumble-rumble-rumble-rumble-rumble!

A second or two later, the spot where they’d been standing took the full force of that massive strike.

The metal plating of the wall floor caved in deeply.

“If we don’t take you out, this wall’s going down sooner or later…”

As the strongest fighter here, the female commander flicked her saber and sliced sideways, cutting several climbing beastkin in half in one smooth motion.

At the same time, she flickered forward, legs coiled, and leaped high.

Her blade came down in a falling-mountain chop toward the behemoth’s head.

Clang.

Her saber struck as if it had hit solid metal, sparks flying from the blade. Her face changed at once.

Even steel couldn’t come out untouched after a full-force blow from her.

Yet this behemoth below her stood as if nothing had happened, still hammering madly at the fortress gate.

Her expression tightened. She flipped the saber and slashed at the behemoth again, clean and precise.

Clang!

Another crisp ring.

This time, the rebound force was even greater. She almost lost her grip on the hilt—and the result was exactly the same.

There was only one reason her attacks weren’t working:

both of her strikes had failed to break the behemoth’s defense. She simply couldn’t penetrate it.

As a commander on the “quasi–Army Breaker” level, she’d known there was a gap between their strengths.

She just hadn’t thought it would be this wide. The difference left her in despair.

“We can’t win this battle…”

No one knew which defender on the wall said it, voice drained of hope.

Whoever spoke wasn’t alone. Soon after, similar cries rose up one after another.

The garrison’s morale was collapsing. If this kept up, the fortress would fall without a fight—the soldiers’ will to battle would shatter first.

The beastkin weren’t about to miss such a golden opportunity.

The behemoth closest to the fortress locked onto the gate right in front of it, ready to smash it apart within seconds.

In fact, it was already bringing its paw down.

The vertical strike of that giant paw came with a screaming rush of air and overwhelming power the defenders couldn’t hope to resist, slamming down toward the gate.

Just as many closed their eyes, prepared for the worst, a streak of black light flashed.

Bang!

The female commander, who hadn’t closed her eyes, saw a sight she would never forget:

The behemoth that had been sweeping aside their forces moments ago didn’t even get to complete its strike on the gate.

Its body took that black streak’s lightning-fast blow head-on.

In the next instant, the behemoth’s massive frame tilted back, then whooshed away, flung through the air.

Blood sprayed out, hanging in the air—that alone proved how badly it’d been hurt.

Seeing their companion wounded, the other behemoths nearby lunged forward by instinct, surrounding the black light floating in midair.

Bang, bang—bang bang bang bang bang!

The figure wrapped in black light finally came into view.

They snapped their long legs up and down, lashing out with blinding speed, and in the time it took to mow a field, they had already kicked several behemoths flying.

It still wasn’t over. Once that person had the flow of the battle in hand, they weren’t satisfied with what they’d done so far. They launched the offensive again.

The remaining seven or eight behemoths swung their claws to counterattack, but they couldn’t even track the figure’s movements.

In terms of speed, they were completely outclassed.

Right after speed, they lost just as miserably in the strength they were so proud of.

That person didn’t even use their hands—just loosened up their legs like a warm-up—and in an instant, sent all remaining targets crashing down.

Every behemoth that got launched, when it slammed back into the ground, had a clearly caved-in spot where it had taken the kick—bone and flesh alike crushed.

In that moment, the behemoth corps was completely annihilated.

At the same time, the defenders’ shock surpassed even what they’d felt before when they first saw the White Bear unleash its power.

They watched as that figure landed lightly on the wall.

They stared at that back, at that slightly tilted profile, and couldn’t help but shout at the top of their lungs.

It might have sounded over the top, but as they looked at that dignified, beautiful figure, the defenders just couldn’t hold themselves back from blurting out:

“S-So cool! Your Highness, you’re so hot!”