Chapter 157: Swineherd Return
On the eastern side of the city, the Swineherd Demons were formulating a plan.
The residents of Marimgar had put obstacles in their way, mountains of bodies and massive craters that would slow down any attempt at charging the walls to damage them. But that didn’t mean that there was no way for them to get over.
The plan was a simple one.
First, they would get as many boars close to the wall as they could, and then they would use the wall itself as a launching pad to have more leap into the city to cause chaos.
Then, while the defenders were occupied, they would charge the walls with ladders and run up behind the armoured boars to take the town.
It was a technique that they had used hundreds of times before, and it had always worked, no matter what enemy they faced.
Only, they had never faced a concrete wall fortified to the top with earthworks so it couldn’t b knocked down, and they had never faced the might of high powered rifles. That lack of knowledge would prove to be their undoing.
The boars surged forward, driven by the Swineherds, and lasers answered back. Dozens fell, then hundreds.
The first wave of boars reached the wall, only to find that their hard hooves could find no purchase against the concrete, and they couldn’t launch themselves up it as they always had wooden palisades.
So, they scrabbled about at the bottom, while more boars charged behind them, clambering over moving bodies in an attempt to get over the wall.
The defenders attacks rained down on them, and hundreds dead turned to thousands.
But the bodies were accumulating and the boars finally had the height that they needed to leap onto the wall, where they were met with the shields and swords of the warriors.
The quest required them to hold the wall for the full twelve hours, and they were not about to fail by letting a boar run down the hill into the city. Fortunately, there were more than enough defenders along the wall for the number of boars who had managed the breach, and the turrets were prioritizing the ones that got too close, so most of the boars landed with heavy injuries from laser blasts.
When they had a gaping wound in their side, the boars were not all that scary, and with the influx of Rare Grade boxes, many of the warriors had brand new weapons to test out.
A rare grade sword did fifty percent more damage than a common one, and that extra bit of damage was enough that most skills were turning into clean kills on the enraged monsters.
Unfortunately for the defenders, they were only the distraction.
The demons charged behind them with ladders, which the mages burned to ash with fire and lightning, sending the demons back down the wall.
Kalli watched it all on the turrets’ sensor feed, and prepared to send out more supplies to the front lines.
They were going to need more bandages soon, with the warriors in close combat.
The healers were well spaced, but they couldn’t afford to lose anyone, so their healing output would be high enough to ensure that the warriors were as safe as possible. And that was going to be exceedingly brutal on their mana.
Worse, because they almost all lacked offensive abilities, none of the quests that Kalli had created would reward the healers with boxes.
The system had made every one of them individual instead of group quests, and she had only now noticed.
It was too late to change them, the system wouldn’t let her issue quests that were too similar, as she belatedly realized.
It also didn’t want to accept her various phrasings of quests for points of healing done.
So, they were going to miss out on the kill quests, unless they took turns in one of the air defence guns. But that simply wasn’t practical when they were needed on the front lines.
The hall of heroes had become the hall of supplies, as Kalli burned through points sending out cases of ammunition to keep the front lines at maximum output. Then, bandages, the occasional replacement weapon, and requests for the occasional miscellaneous item that the heroes thought would help began to flow in.
The walls were holding, but the western front was closing in on the river, and soon they would be working on a way across.
The boars could likely manage it on their own, though the river was fast moving.
But the Swineherd Demons clearly hadn’t expected this obstacle that hadn’t been in the same place when they left before the volcanic eruptions.
Now, they had to traverse a river they hadn’t expected, that no longer had any runoff into the fields and water table upstream. The ash had hardened to stone through much of the region, and turned large portions of what should have been river basin into aqueducts.
So, they began to work. Trees were cut, lashed together, and dragged to the river, where they were assembled into a long floating bridge.
Sergeant Sanchez watched with great interest as the work was nearly completed, then fired two precision shots into the ropes anchoring the bridge to the shore. The Swineherd Demons scrambled to catch their bridge before it was washed downstream, but precious time was lost, and they were stationary targets for the snipers of Marimgar.
There was only one way they could think of to get across the river, and that was to get the bridge sections anchored as fast as possible. So, they threw manpower at the problem, sending a dozen sections at a time into the water, already linked together, and let the river’s flow drag them across as they anchored one end.
It was honestly rather ingenious, Sanchez decided. But they had forgotten one minor fact.
The river was three hundred metres across, and the blast from an Air Defence Battery was only a hundred metres wide.
The first shot took the centre out of the bridge, and the two sections separated, leaving the Swineherd Demons holding the ropes and swearing loudly enough that the heroes could hear them over the battle in the east.
That should slow them enough to cycle out the heroes, bringing fresh warriors from the other side of town to replace the ones who had fought to exhaustion.