Ten siege towers lumbered forward like ten steel behemoths, utterly impervious to the magic crystal cannon fire.
"Once those siege towers make contact with the wall, a flood of soldiers will pour through them and onto the battlements." Bark's face flickered with the multicolored glow of the magic crystal cannons, features shifting and indistinct. Boone, Black Shark, Gates, Anke, and the others wore grim expressions.
Lin Lei stood atop the wall, gazing down at the sea of soldiers clustered as thick as locusts below, and at the ten siege towers advancing toward them. The sight put him on edge.
"Now comes the worst of it."
Even someone with only a passing knowledge of warfare, like Lin Lei, could sense the frenzy about to descend.
"Charge!" Some soldiers bared their teeth and screamed themselves hoarse.
Thousands of scaling ladders were propped against the walls. Soldiers scrambled up them at breakneck speed, hoping to reach the top and engage the defenders. But ladders could be pushed over, or doused with fire oil and burned.
Each ladder could only bear one or two men at a time, and facing the wall of blades thrust at them by the defenders, they were cut down without mercy.
One soldier on a ladder leaped off, trying to vault onto the wall.
*Pfft!*
A half-dozen swords stabbed into him at once. He managed a single swing before his body was riddled with holes.
*Boom!* An entire ladder toppled backward, sending dozens of soldiers plummeting twenty or thirty meters. Those with stronger bodies survived, but the weaker ones were killed or crippled on impact. What made it truly horrific was the field of discarded weapons below—falling bodies landed squarely on blades.
*Pfft—* A body was punched clean through by a spear.
Meanwhile, the ranks below poured arrows up at the walls in a relentless storm. The dense volley landed not only on the battlements but also inside Kode County City itself. A number of defenders were struck down and killed outright by the falling shafts.
Every passing second claimed dozens of lives. The defenders took heavy casualties, but the attackers lost far more.
"Hurry, hurry!" In the rear of the army, the black-robed Grand Elder of the Church of Darkness, Vesport, growled under his breath. "Faster! Push the siege towers to the wall!" He could hardly bear to watch.
He desperately wanted the tide to turn.
The massive siege towers were the very tools capable of reshaping the battle.
Their terrifying height, their steel frames—they were mobile walls unto themselves. Fighting from atop a siege tower against the defenders below meant no disadvantage whatsoever. After all, hundreds of men could stand on the upper platform at once.
"Aim at the siege towers—fire!"
The commander roared his order, and several magic crystal cannons belched bolts of energy at the nearest tower. But the tower's outer armor plates were several meters thick. Even the devastating power of the magic crystal cannons could not punch through that much steel.
At most the tower shuddered, or the blast killed a few soldiers standing on it. But the men who fell were quickly replaced—after all, the other side of the siege tower was a sloped staircase.
"First company, over here! Get into position to hold this tower!" a commander barked. Dealing with a siege tower demanded elite troops.
Kode County City threw everything it had into stopping the behemoths.
But these steel monsters could not be stopped.
*BOOM!* At last, the first siege tower slammed into the wall. Then moments later—*BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!*—one after another, the remaining towers crashed against the battlements in quick succession.
"Pull the ramp open!"
An officer on top of one tower bellowed the command. Soldiers around him yanked the concealed mechanisms. With a grinding *click-clack*, the heavy steel plate on the tower's front swung downward.
*CRASH!* A slab of steel a hundred meters wide and several meters thick slammed down onto the wall of Kode County City.
Instantly, a hundred-meter-wide bridge connected the siege tower to the city wall. The tower already stood taller than the battlements, and now the soldiers of the Church of Light and the Church of Darkness could charge across, striking downward from a commanding height.
"Brothers, kill!"
"Avenge the captain—kill!!!"
Countless enraged soldiers howled and surged across the bridges, pouring onto the walls of Kode County City. They had been driven to the brink of madness—forced to fight from below, cut down by arrows and magic crystal cannons without ever getting a fair chance to face their enemies. That suffocating frustration had festered in their hearts.
Now it erupted.
Ten siege towers, ten bridges. Masses of soldiers funneled along them into the city. The defenders of Kode County City refused to yield—hurling boulders, splashing fire oil—anything to hold the narrow hundred-meter strips of ground where both sides were packed in as tight as sardines.
One soldier lopped off a man's head, only to feel a spear drive through his own chest.
The junction between siege tower and wall had become a meat grinder.
Attackers and defenders clashed at close quarters.
Piles of corpses rose higher than the wall itself, then toppled over the edge. Blood pooled on the battlements until the walkways ran like crimson rivers. And still countless soldiers raised their weapons and charged into the fray.
To stay alive.
To avenge their fallen comrades.
Everyone had fought themselves blind with rage.