[West Gate Battlefield]

“Officer Milia! It’s just like you said. Not many of them, but most are assault heavy infantry. These spike barriers won’t hold long.” Sweat slicked Noel’s rugged face, like rain on weathered stone—fear or fatigue, even he couldn’t tell.

“Mm. If they won’t hold, they won’t,” Milia said, calm as a still pond at dusk. “Watch the flow. Lure as many as we can. Their plate might take flame, but not smoke. When the barriers and palisade crack, wait for my word.” Her voice was level as a drawn line; Noel’s shoulders loosened like a bow unstrung. He nodded and ran back into the fray.

Time pressed like a storm front. Outside the east, the other three lines had only crude palisade gates and high platforms. Luck favored them: many watchtowers stood nearby, like stone pines in a grove. Odd, though—the towers rose twenty meters high. The doors were iron, engraved with Impado’s mark. The stairs curled in spirals. The top platforms had doors too, all of it neatly encompassed within Lachesis’s reach, as if by design.

“Were these towers built for Lachesis from the start? No... how could the king have known its exact range?” The question bubbled up in Milia’s mind like a fish breaking water. She didn’t get to chase it. The spike barriers at the gate shattered; heavy infantry and Mountain Bandits hacked and hammered the wooden door, blades ringing like hail on a drum. In under a minute, it’d give.

They fell back from the gate and linked up with the city guards. The line held to Medith’s plan: shields in front, spears behind, archers on the high platforms pouring fire from the flanks.

Milia drew her longsword. She raised it skyward, the steel catching light like a shard of moon. Archers lurking atop the tower understood; they lit the prepared fire-arrows. Boom— The last wooden bolt on the gate snapped. The enemy roared in triumph, a tide of throats, and charged the hundred-meter stretch to the line.

Milia’s blade leveled, cold as a winter reed pointing at the stream. The fire-arrows hissed out and thudded into two haystacks. Flame spread like foxfire racing through stubble. Sage soldiers and Mountain Bandits faltered mid-stride. They sniffed, senses pricked; something was off. The paving slicked underfoot, soft and greasy, like skin hiding a wound.

“Damn it! Lamp oil—fall back—” Realization hit, but too late. Fire slithered along the oil like a red serpent, then dove beneath the tiles.

Whump—BOOM—whooosh— The ground geysered like a lava vent. A pillar of flame roared up and swallowed everything within dozens of meters. Fire climbed skyward, tens of meters tall, a red bamboo shooting up in an instant. Bandits inside burned through like paper charms. Even soldiers in Impado war-plate couldn’t last; the armor heated red in heartbeats. They tried to bolt through the wall of fire, but smoke and flame punched through their visors and into their skulls. Consciousness blew out like a candle.

In a single breath, hundreds died where they stood. Dozens more near the edge blistered into ruin. Worse, the fire-wall cut the advance like a river in flood. Unless they could fly, or skirt over four-meter roofs, they weren’t passing.

Milia watched the writhing figures in the pillar of flame, her face unreadable, as cold as iron. The iron-blood in her gaze made Noel swallow, the sound loud in his own ears.

…

[Southern Front]

“Captain Bel! Too many of them—over two thousand! We can’t hold!” A guard’s shout cracked like a brittle twig.

“Shut it!” Bel’s voice hit like a mallet. “At worst, it’s a lot of Mountain Bandits. Commander Medith and Lord Draela are facing a four-thousand-strong infantry regiment! Their cavalry and elites are with them!

“If we can’t stop this lot, how do we face our brothers? Hit the bandits! Bandits are brittle—morale will crumble fast! Then the Sage rabble cracks too. They’re here for coin; they won’t stand our push. Move!”

Bel had the veteran’s eye. He saw the bandits’ blows were only half-weight, their minds all on dodging the arrow rain.

His shout rolled off the tower stones like thunder. The tower heard it; the bandits heard it. Souls quailed like lamps in a gust.

“Don’t panic! Hold steady! We’re about to break this wooden gate!” the leading Sage officer bellowed. No one listened. The arrow rain from the tower only thickened, drumming like sleet on tin. Wind-Cleaving Arrows punched through flesh; bodies folded, and fear showed its teeth. They’d advanced on terror alone—collapse was always waiting just behind them.

“Bastards—!” the Sage officer roared. His blade slammed the gate. The palisade door—barely three meters high—finally splintered. Waiting inside stood the soldiers of Sia City, heavy shields in hand. Two hundred shields locked into a moving wall of iron, sealing the gap. Above, the tower kept pouring its rain of death.

“Damn it!” the Sage officer spat. If this were trained troops, they’d have been through already. Instead, they’d been sent with barely five hundred proper soldiers. The rest were Mountain Bandits with no discipline, no spine. He stared at that wall of despair and knew his own detachment wouldn’t be the ones to break it.

…

[Northern Line]

Oliver eyed the thousand-strong force before him without a flicker of fear. About eight hundred Mountain Bandits. Six hundred Sage soldiers. The real bite was in those six hundred. With the gate, the spike barriers, and arrow rain, they might not even need their last tricks.

The Sage commander couldn’t command. He fumbled at the assault like a man stirring porridge. The formation scattered like beans, bandits even scrambling their elites’ lines. Oliver snorted. “Guess they’re not all born war gods.”

“Yeah. Looks like we’re fine here,” a soldier said, joy bright as a fresh spark.

Oliver’s gaze went heavy. The West Gate’s sky-piercing column of fire painted the clouds; from the east came a clash that shook bone. The west held for now. The south looked steady. The only worry was…

…

“Report the field!” Manto called, as the scout came pounding in on a fast horse, dust smoking from the hooves.

“Reporting, Sergeant Major! On the southern line, Olido’s unit leads six hundred elites and eight hundred Mountain Bandits. They haven’t broken the gate.

“On the northern line, Carnegie’s unit leads five hundred elites and fifteen hundred Mountain Bandits. They broke the gate, but they’re bogged down at the defense line.

“On the western line, eight hundred elites and twenty-five hundred Mountain Bandits broke the gate and were about to punch through. Then they fell into Milia of the Elf Clan’s trap. Hundreds were swallowed by a flame pillar. They can’t break head-on and are trying roof assaults from the flanks.

“The bandits didn’t help; they dragged down our original combat power.

“Commander Erig and Commander Sinis with four thousand elites and seven hundred and seventy-seven iron riders are held outside the lines by Medith. They don’t dare force it. The Blackblood War Chariot seems to have a malfunction and can’t be brought to bear. The battle’s in stalemate.” The scout’s words spilled like pebbles down a slope.

Manto slammed his heavy shield. Iron fist hammered iron face; the clang cracked the air like lightning, and men flinched. “I left a thousand here! Just a thousand! And three hundred archers! And they turned it into this?! Where’s the Skaro man?! Where is he?!”

Rage boiled in him like a forge. Mountain Bandits were useless—that he could swallow. But dragging them down? He’d chased rumors that Eastern bandits were as fierce as a field army. Fool’s breath. It wasn’t bandits. It was Nessos’s bandits. Only the ones led by those two men fought like a field army.

The rest were just bandits—ditch scum with knife tricks. Good at raiding. War? A joke.

“Damn me for a fool! I let their bluster cow me, thought they had real chops! It’s enough to kill a man!” Manto kicked a Sage soldier. The man didn’t dare squeak, just scrambled up and stood stiff as a post.

“Where’s the Skaro man! And where’d all those Mountain Bandits go?! Nearly ten thousand! I’d take them as cannon fodder at least!” Manto’s rage roared like a wildfire wind, and cold sweat broke across the Sage soldiers’ backs.