509 The Siege

Despite her cute appearance and penchant to resolve her problems by acting cute, Mia was outfitted with enough equipment to turn the tides of battle. She was a veteran with experience in large-scale battles; this was all the assurance that Baiyi needed.

The girl in question, Mia, was unaware of the events unfolding outside the city, as the officers tasked to evacuate civilians had yet to reach the bazaar, which was being held in one of the more secluded areas of the city. Oblivious to the horde of demons marching towards Highland City, Mia and Lulu were having the time of their lives as they watched foreign tribal warriors perform a local dance routine.

The enormous, black wave of demons outside Highland City had slowly begun to arrange themselves into battle formations, albeit disorderly. Afterward, they resumed their march, heading towards the city. Ancient Golems — which were gigantic demons — were at the forefront of the horde. They moved slowly, but with every step that they took, the ground trembled. Some smaller demons could be seen standing atop the Ancient Golems, squealing in anticipation.

This was a siege technique favored by demons. Ancient Golems were so huge, people atop the city wall had to raise their heads to look at it. The smaller demons could use the golems as ladders to scale the city's rampart and attack the soldiers positioned on the battlement. The golems would then their strength to take care of city walls, smashing open a path for other demons to rush through. Ancient Golems were a force to be reckoned with. Their rock-hard skin was resilient to weapon and magic attacks!

Behind the golems were gigantic Cyclops. The arms of these Cyclops were so long that without being raised, they carved paths on the ground behind the demons. The arms possessed immense strength, and the Cyclops used them as catapults. Their aim was much better than the average ballista. Thus, Cyclops were specialists in sieges.

Some Cyclops had their arms behind them, with huge boulders in their hands, like ballistae ready to fire; others had nets, which were woven from Abyss Ivy, in their hands. Inside these nets were demons eagerly waiting to be thrown over the city wall. If the demons manage to get into the city, they would make food out of every citizen they come across, and this would cause more casualties than a pile of boulders could.

Despite the alarming number of demons headed towards the city, the soldiers did not seem troubled, but their commanders had grave expressions on their faces. The army was only anxious about a demon that had yet to show itself.

Finn asked, "Do you need our help handling those?"

"No, we're fine," Commander Lorenz replied, shaking his head. "We can handle these canon fodder. I want your men to focus on the unknown Abyss Lord, who's still lingering in the shadows."

Lorenz then turned to his soldiers and announced, "Let's get rid of the larger eyesores!"

The military attendant beside him raised two huge battle flags and began to wave them. Having received their signal, the archers attached satchels of kerosene to the heads of their arrows and pulled their bows but did not fire. They were waiting for the golems to enter their range.

On a clearing just a few feet away from the city wall, a dozen soldiers began to load the city's large catapults. After attaching ropes from the rollers to the crocks of the catapults, they placed boulders — which were even larger than those held by the Cyclops — into the nets of the catapults. Taking command from highly-trained observers, the soldiers adjusted the catapults to face the sea of demons. The sun soon set, and dusk arrived.

When the soldiers below were ready, the Commander, who had been silent for a while, suddenly bellowed, "Fire!"

The battle flags were immediately waved more ferociously than before. The archers' arrowheads had already been lit, and the boulders placed on the catapults had been doused with kerosene and subsequently torched.

The moment the battle flags were waved, flaming arrows were fired into the sky, closely followed by enormous burning rocks. The flaming arrows poured down like rain on the advancing golems, and the fiery rocks crashed into the Cyclops behind. The scene was reminiscent of a meteor shower, albeit a deadly one.

The plains were filled with mourning cries from the Cyclops. When they were attacked, they dropped their payload and began to run amok — the exact opposite of what they had been ordered to do.

However, the flaming arrows did nothing to the golems, and the soldiers seemed to have expected this. As the arrows bounced off the rock-hard bodies of the enormous golems, the sachets of kerosene attached to them ruptured, soaking the golems. The next wave of flaming arrows instantly set the golems alight. The golems began bright, burning torches, but unlike the Cyclops, they did not seem to find and continued their march. As Ancient Golems had no receptors, they felt no pain.

The real targets, however, bore the full force of the flames. The demons that had atop the rock giants shrieked as the flames burned them to a crisp. Those that did not die instantly fell to the ground and writhed in pain. With that, the demons atop the golems had been cleared out.

The flames had almost fizzled out by the time the Ancient Golems neared the city wall. Their red-hot rocky body was a chilling sight, though. The army needed more than a fiery shower to take down these juggernauts, so the soldiers began to fire large sacks of freezing water at them. When the sacks of cold water struck the overheated golems, they burst and gave rise to hissing clouds of steam.

As the golems rapidly cool down, the catapults were used to fire boulders at their shins. Although it was a smaller area to target, the golem's enormous size made them easy to hit.

What ensued afterward was incredible. The Ancient Golems, which were naturally resistant to fire and water attacks, began to stumble as their shins were struck with multiple boulders. The crisp sound of cracks permeated the air as the knees of the rock giants softened before snapping. The marching giants trembled before crashing to the ground, stirring up clouds of dist, and the soldiers cheered.

How did that small trick manage to do what other attacks had failed to do?

It all came down to human ingenuity. The Ancient Golems and the cyclops were not new enemies. When they first appeared in the clashes between men and monsters, they were, indeed, lethal foes. Yet, the longer humans fought them, the better they understood them. With a relatively rudimentary understanding of physics, humans had discovered quite a myriad of ways to enfeeble their enemies easily. The army's tactic was only one of the many examples — much like a human, the knees were a standing golem's weakest points. Once one took that out, the weight of the golem's body would automatically respond to the call of gravity and crash onto the ground. In other words, they were instantly crippled.

The only factor that could botch this particular method was if the number of the enemy's golems exceeded the maximum number the Highland City Army could handle, but fortunately, that was not the case for today's attack. As a matter of fact, Ancient Golems were rare even in the Abyss, so they almost never appeared in large numbers.

Notably, as men progressed, their methods in dispatching the demons improved and diversified. Some may employ Earth-style magic to create large craters below the golems' feet and immobilize them; some may prefer casting a cocoon of ice around the golems' knees, therefore weakening their joints before a debilitating follow-up stroke. There were even fighters who preferred smashing the golems' shins into rubbles through sheer brute force, with its most famous example being the Paladin Walker's epic performance in one of the Church's wars against the demons. Then, the Holy Paladin, Hantai, charged right into the ranks of the enemy, nimbly evading their attacks as he busted every single golems' legs with his hammer imbued with immense Divine Energy. His valiant feat had critically crippled the enemy's best defense and sealed the Church's victory; thus, it was forever immortalized in history as the first of Hantai's many achievements.

The golems were down, but that was not enough cause for a celebration. The cyclops had recovered from their frenzy and had begun to retaliate. The enraged golems picked up boulders and nets, which were still filled with smaller demons, and hurled them towards the city. Some even managed to send the nets over the wall and landing right on the outer city where the civilians lived.

That was not all — the demons' spellcasters had also joined the battle after emerging from the realm crack. These were conglomerations of inhumane creatures endowed with a natural affinity for magic, and now they quickly took over the fallen golems' roles as the demons' frontline troopers.

The sight of these demonic spellcasters managed to cause Commander Lorenz's eyebrows to bunch together even more. Unlike the golems, which only seemed impressive but were actually just dumb muscles, taking down these demonic spellcasters without mobilizing the equally magically-adept human sorcerers was the commander's real challenge.

Clever schemes and tactics could only carry an army that much in a real battle, because most of the times, victory boiled down to the numbers of men each warring factions possessed. Right now, Highland City Army was the one in clear disadvantage; not only was the size of their army smaller, but they also lacked ace fighters and game-breakers who could swiftly and effortless dispatch the enemies. The strongest option they had would be the Sorcerers Corp, but what if the Abyss Lord suddenly appeared after the sorcerers had long been deployed to the battle?

Since this was the time before knowledge of alchemy was properly developed, humans had to fight without the aid of supplements such as mana-recovering potions and help from recovery-boosting equipment. In other words, a sorcerer's mana supply was directly tied to the speed of their natural recovery. Thus, it was crucial for a commander to consider the sorcerers' combined mana limitation — if the mages' mana was wasted on less critical foes, then the army would have nothing against the enemy's leader, and thus sealed the fate of their defeat.

The demons knew this weakness very well. In fact, they attempted to capitalize on it by deploying the Ancient Golems to the frontlines so soon. Since magic was the most effective attack against golems, the demons were trying to bait Highland City Army to use their sorcerers as early as possible. Now that their ploy had failed, they quickly moved on to their next plan by sending out their own spellcasters into the fray.

Their first wave of magical assault had begun, reaping the lives of the human soldiers despite the latter's best effort at evasions. Even a simple attack, such as a green orb of Sinister Mana which would then explode among the soldiers, could kill a dozen and injure several more. The number of casualties was climbing so steeply that the commander's eye twitched.

It was regrettable that Commander Lorenz was unaware that the next lawful emperor of the Ancient Rohlserlian Empire was in proximity, watching over the army and willing to back them up should the occasion called for it. Neither did he know that even if he fought these spellcasters back with every ounce of power he had, including ordering the sorcerers to throw themselves into the battle without reservation, he was still far from dooming the city.

As yelps and wails of agony and despair steadily filled the darkened sky, as more and more soldiers were wounded and felled, jolts of anxiety began to chip away Chiliarch Finn's stoic façade. "Commander? Sir, I…"

"No!" The Commander snarled, his tone and expression so cold it was as if he did not care about his subordinates at all. "Not now. Not now."

He swung his head to the direction of his attendant and commanded, "I want our backups deployed into the city. I want those demon scums terminated with extreme prejudice!"

Unfortunately, the backup was civilians and low-quality militia, who had been haphazardly armed and given very superficial military training. Against those sadistic demons and their thirst for carnage, these people were no more than cannon-fodders

One could already imagine the cruel fate that awaited them.