A Flying Feather mercenary with a white goose feather stuck in the leather cap on his head appeared before
The Flying Feather mercenary turned his head and spotted Lorist approaching him with a grim expression. He stopped laughing, narrowed his eyes, and waited until Lorist was almost upon him before letting out a sudden roar and smashing the flail down with all his might.
With a thud, the flail struck the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust and leaving a small crater in the earth.
The Flying Feather mercenary froze. Where was the person? How had the young man who was just in front of him vanished? Before he could recover, a flicker of movement caught the corner of his eye. Before he could even turn his head for a clearer look, an indescribable wave of agony made his entire body shudder involuntarily. He looked down, only to find that his chest and belly had been sliced open from the inside out, and his organs were spilling out.
"Guh…" The Flying Feather mercenary felt the world rapidly darkening before his eyes, and every last shred of strength drained from him. By the time he toppled to the ground, he was nothing more than a corpse.
Was that the tenth or the eleventh Flying Feather mercenary? Lorist could no longer keep count. When he charged into the swirling melee, he found the battle far more brutal than he had imagined — those lying on the ground were mostly guards in double-layered iron armor and garrison soldiers in chain mail. At a single hurried glance, Lorist counted no fewer than twenty or thirty armored guards and soldiers sprawled across the ground.
Lorist's figure dissolved into a gust of wild wind, sweeping past a knot of fierce combat. Four Flying Feather mercenaries, fighting in perfect formation and pressing seven or eight guards and soldiers to the point of drenched brows and imminent collapse, suddenly clutched their spurting throats, spun in circles, and crashed face-first into the dirt. The seven or eight guards and soldiers stood stunned for a moment before recognizing Lorist's retreating back. The joy of being saved from certain doom and reinforced by a powerful ally sent their morale skyrocketing. Shouting "
Wherever Lorist appeared, the guards and soldiers there surged with renewed vigor as though injected with lifeblood. The scales of the chaotic battle quickly tipped toward Lorist's side.
It was not that the Flying Feather mercenaries lacked ferocity — in fact, even Lorist had to admit they possessed more courage than the guards and soldiers who had risen from banditry. Their martial skills were more refined and masterful, and most importantly, every one of them had awakened their combat force. Even a Flying Feather mercenary with only Bronze-tier combat force could handle three or four garrison soldiers with ease. If not for the guards — who had likewise awakened combat force — shouldering the brunt of the attack pressure, the garrison soldiers' casualties would have been far worse.
Lorist struck with ruthless brutality, showing absolutely no mercy — not a single Flying Feather mercenary he encountered managed to survive. In his heart, Lorist was filled with bitter regret. He and the others had anticipated so many possible scenarios beforehand, yet nobody had expected that cornered like trapped beasts, the Flying Feather mercenaries would still dare to resist under the threat of over twenty city-defense carriage crossbows. They had sacrificed only a dozen or so lives to neutralize the carriage crossbows entirely. And the guard squad and garrison soldiers who were supposed to surround them — thinking a mere show of force would be enough to compel the Flying Feather Mercenary Company to surrender — were instead met with a savage, brutal battle beyond anything they had imagined.
This is all my fault… Lorist sidestepped, his figure flickering as he reversed his grip and drove his sword through the back of a Flying Feather mercenary whose momentum from his own missed slash had carried him forward uncontrollably. The long blade pierced clean through the chest…
I was too careless. I shouldn't have assumed everything would go so smoothly, thinking these Flying Feather mercenaries would meekly lay down their arms under the threat of the carriage crossbows… Lorist charged forward and cut down a Flying Feather mercenary who was about to plunge a greatsword into a fallen guard's body. Blood erupted from the severed neck in a gushing spray, drenching Lorist until he looked like a man made of blood.
Lorist couldn't be bothered to dodge, letting the blood pour over him. This is all my fault — I was too arrogant. My previous victories made me complacent and negligent, thinking everything would unfold as I had planned, forgetting that the battlefield is where unexpected things happen most easily. He had never anticipated that the Flying Feather Mercenary Company would suddenly produce two Gold-tier Shield Defenders who physically pinned him down.
Even after that Si Luoba Master had shouted out Lorist's scheme, Lorist still hadn't been concerned at the time, believing everything remained firmly under his control. Jostock would deal with the Flying Feather mercenaries outside the city,
What he hadn't expected was that Captain Adams would have two Gold-tier Shield Defenders at his side, tying Lorist up for nearly twenty minutes — plenty of time for all manner of things to go wrong. Jostock, Patt, Ovekis, Sederkamp, and even Reddy had all executed their assigned parts according to plan, yet it was precisely here, at Lorist's position, that things had gone awry, leaving Captain Adams completely unguarded. The result was that Adams had rallied his men and launched a countercharge into the garrison soldiers' ranks, rendering all the planning futile. An entirely unexpected bloody battle had erupted just like that.
The four great families had yet to be dealt with, they were still in the process of building the city, they faced the threat of the Cames family, and mountain barbarian tribes were causing unrest within the territory. True, when the caravan arrived Jostock had put on a dazzling display of archery, driving off the mountain barbarian cavalry with his divine shots, but nobody could say for certain whether the mountain barbarians wouldn't seek widespread retaliation and send forces to cause trouble for Lorist.
Lorist felt that allocating manpower was stretching them painfully thin — it wasn't that there were no people, but that most of them were simply unusable. Just like back at Maplewood Manor: out of nearly two thousand inhabitants, only about one hundred and thirty had awakened their combat force, and of those, over forty were thirty-eight years of age or older — former family soldiers who had retired over the years for various reasons. They were either physically disabled or still carrying old wounds. When Lorist wanted to assemble a guard squad in which every member had awakened combat force, he could only drag them in to fill the numbers, and even then he barely reached one hundred and twenty.
The reason Lorist had insisted on teaching combat force awakening to every willing young adult at Maplewood Manor — even going against the objections of old Steward Kreis — was precisely because he sensed the crisis bearing down on them, with the family's very survival hanging by a thread. The greatest reason Lorist wanted to move the main keep to the castle construction site that wasn't even finished yet was to escape the threat of Northfield Town. This was a secret Lorist had confided to no one — only he and Sederkamp knew about it.
Sederkamp's two-day stay in Northfield Town had not been, as officially claimed, to assist
Over the past century, the commoner families of Northfield Town had placed particular emphasis on cultivating their younger generations. Although they practiced the military combat force of the former Krisen Empire's forces — far more complex and difficult to master than the basic combat force Lorist taught — their relatively comfortable living conditions meant they didn't need to worry about food and shelter. As a result, more and more physically robust youths had awakened their combat force. The reason the four great families could dominate Northfield Town was precisely that they had the most awakeners among their clansmen, making them the victors in several clan brawls over the years.
What Lorist could take solace in was that the smuggling caravans secretly organized by these four great families only operated within Northland. They had no way of crossing the Mitoboro River, the natural barrier that severed Northland's connection with the outside world. If those smuggling caravans had managed to reach
When that happened, the four great families could destroy the teetering Norton Family, arrange a marriage between one of their youths and the Norton Family's orphaned girl, and within twenty or thirty years, the Northland's Bear Rage clan would be legitimately replaced by one of the four families. Fortunately, the four families lacked such far-sighted vision. In the end, they were just a group of provincial rich men who had never seen the wider world, their eyes fixed squarely on the acre and a half of land right in front of them, haggling over every last copper coin's worth of profit. Now that Lorist had returned to the family, the four great families' days were numbered.
If Northfield Town truly had only a dozen or so combat force awakeners in the garrison, as the family had previously believed, Lorist wouldn't have hesitated to lead the squad of battle-awakened guards straight into Northfield Town for a bloody purge, eliminating every source of instability. But after receiving the intelligence Sederkamp had forwarded, Lorist had no choice but to think carefully. Sometimes he even wished that all those combat force awakeners in Northfield Town could be placed under his command — then the Norton Family wouldn't even need to bother with that damn Grand Duke of Northland's tax increase orders.
But that was merely wishful thinking. Northfield Town nominally remained under the Norton Family's rule, but in reality, Lorist considered it a greater threat than the mountain barbarian tribes. With such a vast disparity in strength, Lorist could only pursue a strategy of appeasement and division while waiting for the Northbound Caravan to arrive. The recent population registration in Northfield Town had infuriated him — the four great families had shoved their own clan members into the expanded garrison while blocking the families of dismissed garrison soldiers from registering, covertly stirring up their resentment toward the Norton Family so that those combat force awakeners couldn't be put to use by Lorist.
Among the nearly fifteen hundred people Lorist had previously brought back — former family soldiers' surviving dependents and displaced residents — fewer than ten had awakened their combat force. Lorist could only bide his time, waiting for his plan to divide and fracture Northfield Town to take effect. The moment those dismissed garrison soldiers who had lost their farmland came into conflict with the four great families and were sent to Poplar Shoal for the new town's construction, that would be Lorist's moment to strike.
Lorist fought on the battlefield, yet his mind churned with a torrent of thoughts. Every time he saw a guard or soldier fall in a pool of blood, the guilt in his heart deepened. These were all precious manpower the family could ill afford to lose, sacrificed because of his own poor planning. It made Lorist hate both himself and that Flying Feather mercenary band's commander Adams even more. What baffled Lorist was why Adams would still choose to resist when trapped in such a desperate situation. Even if they managed to eliminate the guards and soldiers surrounding the tent district, they would still face retaliatory fire from the city siege crossbows. Did they really think they could recapture this castle construction site?
The battle cries grew louder and louder. The space before him cleared — not a single standing Flying Feather mercenary remained in sight.
Lorist shook his head, pulling himself out of his gloomy mood. Not far away, two more groups had gathered, seemingly watching something.
Lorist walked over, and the crowd automatically parted to make way. Stepping inside, he saw that in the open space at the center, Reddy was dueling a Silver-tier Flying Feather mercenary. Reddy had taken cuts across his thigh, left ribs, and chest, the bloodstains still visible. But he was handling the fight with relative ease. His opponent, the Silver-tier mercenary, on the other hand, was panting heavily, his face streaked with panic. Even the white sword glow flickering along his longsword was erratic and unsteady — he had reached the end of his rope. Reddy's victory was assured.
Lorist left the crowd and headed toward another gathering. He had barely taken three or four steps before a scream rang out from behind him, followed immediately by cheers and shouts of approval from the crowd.