Chapter 244: Maelstrom of the Royal Army
The freezing mist over the Crocodile River was beginning to clear when Little Green descended with a beat of her wings, landing upon a boulder in the center of the riverbed. Kellar leapt from the reptile’s back and took a few steps forward toward the enemy’s main vanguard.
Before him, the three-thousand-strong wave of armored soldiers from the Golden Rose Realm’s legion maintained tight battle formation. On the front line, Prince Caelen stared at the scene, his face twisted in a mixture of rage and disbelief.
Kellar locked eyes with him and let out a laugh.
"Well, well... If it isn’t the prince," said Kellar, smirking as he adjusted his tunic. "We could have traded in peace and done business together. But you chose to march out here just to seek your own deaths. Did you believe this walk through the mountain would be easy?"
𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢
Caelen ground his teeth, on the verge of ordering a charge. However, General Valerius extended his armored arm to hold the prince back, maintaining composure as he evaluated the Shaman.
"So you are the leader of this territory..." declared Valerius in a grave voice echoing over the riverbed. "By the authority of the King of the Golden Rose Realm, I command you to lay down your arms and surrender! You are one person, yet you dare face the Golden Rose Realm!"
Kellar burst into a laugh at the general’s proclamation.
"Surrender?" laughed Kellar, his smile vanishing as his eyes turned cold as ice. "Kill them!"
Upon his command, the bursts of the Overlord tribe’s rifles echoed from the cliffs and the shoreline. Dozens of bronze projectiles, propelled by the powder mix and the power of the Windstone, sliced through the air directly toward the realm’s officer line.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
To the marksmen’s surprise, the projectiles failed to pierce flesh or shatter the armor. The bullets slammed against the main army’s front line, bouncing off and leaving nothing but sparks upon the heavy tower shields and enchanted breastplates.
Unlike the vanguard’s scout patrol, this was the elite army of the Golden Rose Realm: soldiers outfitted with magic-alloy plating and defensive enchantments engineered to withstand heavy impact.
General Valerius flashed a smirk as he watched the shallow dents on the heavy shields and the bronze bullets falling onto the snow.
"Those wretches you killed were mere slaves we use to clear the ground," proclaimed Valerius in a thundering voice, raising his steel broadsword toward the sky. "Now you shall taste the true power of the realm! Fire!"
At the general’s command, the engineer line triggered the legion’s heavy torsion ballistas. Enchanted steel bolts shot forth at high velocity, zipping through the air with the acceleration of the tribe’s bullets.
The Overlord soldiers reacted on instinct, scrambling for cover. Several managed to dodge the volley by diving behind boulders, but the power of the barrage was catastrophic: six white tigers and several dozen soldiers were impaled in a single strike, dropping dead upon the snow.
Seeing his men and mounts fall beneath the enemy artillery’s strength, Kellar ground his teeth in fury.
"Little Green, hold them off!" roared Kellar, wheeling around on the boulder as rage burned in his chest. "Retreat! Everyone fall back to the village!"
Little Green let out a roar and beat her wings, unleashing sweeping blades of compressed wind toward the legion’s ranks to cover the tribe’s retreat.
However, General Valerius didn’t take a step back. Flexing his legs, he launched himself skyward, smashing head-on into one of the wind blades and shattering it to pieces with a single punch imbued with defensive mana.
"Nobody escapes the King’s justice!" bellowed Valerius as he landed upon the bedrock, while the legion pressed forward behind him.
The roar of the wind blended with the echo of armored boots along the narrow mountain pass. General Valerius advanced at the head of the Golden Rose Realm’s legion with a relentless stride, determined to crush the tribe before it could reorganize after the clash at the river.
However, the gorge was treacherous ground, and the Overlord tribe still had one card left to play.
From high atop the snow-covered rocky ledges, albino shadows moved in silence. Under the direct command of the White Tiger King, the feline cavalry positioned itself in the gloom. The tribe’s riders, their faces tight with the loss of their comrades but their eyes burning with rage, secured their grips on the saddles designed by Lennis.
Now! rumbled the Tiger King’s mental command through the pack bond.
Fourteen white tigers leaped simultaneously from the heights, crashing down like meteors of fur and claws onto the flanks of the enemy column. The impact was brutal. The beasts’ muscular mass crushed the lead infantrymen before they could raise their heavy tower shields.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Taking advantage of the stability provided by the articulated saddles, the tribe’s marksmen discharged their repeating rifles point-blank at the unarmored joints of the heavy armor. While the enchanted breastplates deflected long-range shots, at less than half a meter, the combined force of gunpowder and Windstone managed to punch through helmet seals and gorgets.
"Phalanx formation on the flanks! Hold the line!" roared a realm captain before the Tiger King’s jaws crushed his throat in a single bite.
"Don’t stop! Lightning strike!" ordered Brak, firing from the back of his feline as it bounded through the crags.
The tigers did not linger for a static brawl. True to the strategy laid out by Kellar during the war council, they dug their claws into the terrain, wheeled around in the snow, and retreated at full speed into the mist of the cliffs before the enemy torsion ballistas could turn their heavy mounts.
"Damned slippery beasts!" bellowed Prince Caelen, drawing his sword in frustration as the column ground to a halt to tend to the dozens of casualties in the vanguard.
General Valerius ground his teeth beneath his steel helm. The feline cavalry’s hit-and-run attacks were not meant to destroy the main army, but to fray their nerves and slow their marching pace. Every hundred meters, another albino shadow dropped from the fog, claiming lives before vanishing into thin air.
"Keep shields raised toward the heights and maintain the pace," commanded Valerius in a tone that dispelled the panic among his ranks. "Let them play their final tricks. At the end of the gorge there will be no rocks to hide behind—only their village, which we will reduce to ashes."
Several kilometers away, Kellar listened to the distant gunfire echoing in the mountains as the last work crews finished positioning the Garnis cannon atop the main tower of the paved village.