CH 151

The cloud of dust from the explosion finally settled down, and Siegfried could finally see the casualties with his own eyes, and it was a horrible scene to behold.

Twenty had died on the spot. Bleeding from the shrapnel could be considered a light wound, considering the severity of the injuries that the others had sustained from the sudden shelling.

“M-My leg…!”

Someone lost their leg, while someone else literally exploded into pieces upon being struck.

“H-Help me! Argh…!”

Someone’s entire lower body was buried under the rubble. The only solace was the fact that the mortal shell didn’t land where most people of them had gathered. However, Siegfried still couldn’t help but feel regret.

If he had only told them to stop working a few minutes earlier…!

“…”

He didn’t reveal any particular reaction. Instead, he turned toward Seung-Gu and Hamchi.

“Hyung-nim…”

“Speak, owner punk.”

At Seung-Gu and Hamchi’s urging, he finally spoke, “Let’s save them first.”

Siegfried then ran toward the injured and dragged them one by one to safety.

***

The large-scale landing invasion by the Adunyadet Kingdom was truly a large-scale invasion. It started with the shelling and was quickly followed by beach landings. They successfully landed more than ten thousand marines, and they capitalized on their momentum by attempting to rapidly conquer Stone Island’s Turnlock Fort.

“Is this how it’s going to end for us?” Lord Angele muttered with a downcast look while staring at the invaders. She couldn’t smile at all.

The knights and the soldiers of Stone Island could fend off the invaders if the invaders were only made up of poorly equipped marines, but the problem was the navy of the Adunyadet Kingdom.

Boom! Boom!

The Adunyadet Battleships fired their canons incessantly, and they soon managed to neutralize the Turnlock Fort’s canons.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The dozens of battleships turned their canons toward the fort gates and focused it down.

Crack…!

The fort that withstood numerous battles was finally showing signs of falling.

“The gates are open!”

“Let’s go!”

“Let’s put an end to these stubborn bastards!”

The Adunyadet Kingdom’s marines flooded into the Turnlock Fort. In addition to the marines, the Adventurers hired by the kingdom were in the fray as well, which made the situation even grimmer for the Stone Islanders.

“Ah…!” Lord Angele gasped in horror. “So this is the end of Turnlock Fort. It had been holding the line pretty well for us until now.”

“Lord Angele…”

“What about the declaration of surrender?”

“No! You cannot do that! Please have hope!” General Uriage protested the moment surrender was mentioned. She went even further and said, “The war isn’t over just yet! Even if Turnlock Fort falls today, we will still be able to hold on for two more months!”

“What good will that do? The war will simply turn into a siege,” Lord Angele said while shaking her head.

“But…”

“Resistance will be futile once Turnlock Fort falls, and we will simply be sending our soldiers to their deaths if we were to force them to fight afterward. Let me ask you this—do we have any trump cards that will help us turn the tables?”

“We still have twelve ships in our sea caverns…”

“The enemy’s blockade is still there. Our ships will be sunk as soon as they emerge from the sea caverns.”

Lord Angele wasn’t simply giving up. She was making an objective and rational analysis of their current situation, and she eventually reached a single, grim conclusion—there was no way they could turn this around.

There was no hope.

They had no chance of winning this war—unless and unless—the blockade of the Adunyadet Kingdom was broken.

“The Congress has already mentioned surrendering two months ago. We have endured long enough, and any more than this will only produce meaningless sacrifices. Let us surrender…” Lord Angele said and shed a tear.

“Lord Angele…” General Uriage muttered. She shed a tear as well.

While they were crying to themselves, a change suddenly occurred on the battlefield.

“What… is that…?” Lord Angele muttered. She was waiting for a pen and parchment to write the declaration of surrender, and while staring at the battlefield, Lord Angele noticed something strange.

There was a thick green fog coupled with sparks of flame burning at the gates of the Turnlock Fort, and the ground around the fort turned pitch black as shadows from the ground rose up and attacked the Adunyadet Marines.

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The tides of the hopeless war were slowly starting to shift in their favor…

***

Siegfried closed his eyes after burying the dead and tending to the wounded at the Stellarlumen Mine.

Grit…!

He gritted his teeth so hard that it looked like they would shatter at any moment now.

“Let’s go. I will repay them a thousand-fold,” Siegfried said furiously. He headed toward the place where most of the Adunyadet Forces were gathered to vent out his anger.

Sseeuuu…!

He then activated Irradiate as soon as he arrived at the Turnlock Fort, which was currently being besieged by the invaders.

“Keuh…!”

“Argh…!”

The Adunyadet Marines could not withstand the power of Irradiate, and they started falling one by one. Their equipment was so bad that their current Poison Resistance was a flat zero, which made the poison all the more effective against them.

Of course, it wasn’t as if there would be any difference even if they were equipped with Poison Resistant items because only advanced artifacts could withstand Siegfried’s Irradiate.

Thirty seconds later, Siegfried had already slaughtered more than a hundred Adunyadet Marines before he finally deactivated his skill.

‘The mana consumption is getting worse…’ he inwardly remarked. he felt that the skill’s mana consumption would up by ten percent for every level increase in its skill level. The realization made Siegfried decide that he would use it more sparingly from now on.

Why?

It was all because he didn’t really need to depend on Irradiate. After all, the Debuff Master’s raison d’etre was to debuff their enemies and beat them to death!

Siegfried deactivated Irradiate and cast the two skills that represented the Debuff Master the best.

Wooong!

He simultaneously activated Blaze Field and Shadow Swamp.

Fwaaa! Fwaaa!

The Adunyadet Marines’ defense would be significantly reduced whenever the flames touched their equipment, and the flames would also jump from one marine to another, wreaking havoc across the battlefield.

Even worse, the flames were slowly gnawing away at their equipment.

The Adunyadet Marines had no choice but to fight naked while under the Movement Speed reduction effect of Shadow Swamp.

“Kill them all,” Siegfried commanded the shadows.

The Adunyadet Marines had become akin to sheep waiting to be slaughtered as the shadows mercilessly killed them at Siegfried’s command.

And that wasn’t the end of it…

“Beat them to a pulp! You better regret getting on our hyung-nim’s bad side, you bastards!” Seung-Gu, who was equally as pissed as Siegfried, was shouting in fury as numerous magic circles on the ground started shining.

Boom! Boom! 

Various golems appeared from the magic circle and turned the Adunyadet Marines into pancakes.

“Are they Adventurers?” Vice Admiral Mahidon asked while in the safe confines of his battleship. He accurately judged that the strange turn of events at the fort gates was caused by an Adventurer. “Those Adventurers have always been tricky to deal with because they come back to life no matter how many times you kill them.”

For the NPCs, the Adventurers were extremely annoying to fight.

Immortal beings?

That was a one-dimensional way of looking at the problem. An Adventurer possessed all sorts of different skills and abilities as opposed to NPCs who would only be either knights or mages.

This meant that an Adventurer would almost always be more powerful than an NPC, provided they had the same level and prowess.

In short, the Adventurers had far more advantages compared to NPCs.

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We need a strong Adventurer if we want to fight against a strong Adventurer,” Mahidon muttered to no one in particular before he turned toward his adjutant and said, “Send them in.”

“Do you mean… those guys?”

“A blitz had always been an effective tactic. That Adventurer is probably the trump card those Stone Islanders had prepared, so we should acknowledge their efforts and show our own trump cards, don’t you think so?”

”Besides, the only thing that’s going to accumulate the longer we delay will be our casualties. Deploy them at once without any further delay. We have to capture Turnlock Fort today and end this war once and for all.”

Vice Admiral Mahidon was well aware that his head would go flying if the operation this time ended up in failure. Moreover, his motherland, the Adunyadet Kingdom, would suffer huge losses as well.

He knew better than anyone else that it was about time for him to throw caution into the wind and fight for victory at all costs.

“Roger that! We will send them in at once!” replied the adjutant with a salute.

Soon, a single speedboat was deployed from the battleship, and the speedboat quickly made its way toward the island.

***

The Commander of the Turnlock Fort was a shrewd individual.

“Now’s our chance! Sally out and kill them all!” he shouted.

They had been patiently defending, and the opportunity they had been waiting for finally presented itself. It didn’t matter where or how this opportunity came to be, as the only thing that mattered to him right now was to make full use of the situation—even if the decision could bite him in the ass later on.

“Let’s go!”

“Let’s kill them all!”

“Avenge our comrades!”

The Stone Island knights and soldiers defending the Turnlock Fort all sallied out at the commander’s command and launched a fierce counteroffensive against the Adunyadet Marines.

The tides of war then completely shifted in the favor of the Stone Islanders.

The Stone Island Forces numbered only around three thousand people, but Stone Island lived up to its reputation as one of the most affluent nations as all of its troops were extremely well-trained and well-equipped.

The shift in momentum wasn’t that strange if one took into consideration these overgeared troops and Siegfried’s debuff fields.

In addition, most of the Adunyadet Marines were recruited in a hurry and haphazardly for this campaign. Therefore, most of them were actually inexperienced new recruits.

Even worse, these inexperienced greenhorns weren’t even properly equipped because most of the Adunyadet Kingdom’s war funds had been invested in their navy. In short, a significant portion of these marines was nothing but meat shields.

Meanwhile, the culprit behind the sudden shift in momentum did not seem to be satisfied with what he had achieved.

“Hmm… I still feel angry…” Siegfried grumbled to no one in particular before continuing. “I’m venting my anger in the wrong place. I should go straight to the culprit first…”

In the end, he decided that it would be better for him to look for the culprit who caused the incident than mercilessly slaughter hundreds of enemy troops.

“Hamchi.”

“Yes, owner punk?”

“Let’s go find the guy who shot the canon and teach him a lesson.”

“Great idea! Kyu!”

Siegfried and Hamchi then went to the beach to look for the culprit behind the bombardment. There was a popular saying about how one should enter a tiger’s den to have any luck in hunting a tiger, and the exact saying was applicable to him right now.

Siegfried ran into the next batch of troops from the battleship, but he ran into the Adventurers that the Adunyadet Kingdom had hired to exterminate the Stone Island NPCs.

“Wow…” the Adventurer standing at the forefront muttered in amazement. He then clicked his tongue and said, “They got wiped out by a Level 180? Isn’t this a bit overboard…?”

The Adventurer was twenty-five levels above Siegfried.