Chapter 1157: The Battle of Taquila (III)
The flares changed everything.
Ursrook understood it in the moment they ignited — not slowly, not after analysis, but immediately. The humans had launched detection balloons and stopped their artillery fire at five miles. He had read it as hesitation. He had been wrong.
The balloons were the signal. The artillery pause was loading. The darkness he had depended on for three hours — the darkness that had blinded their observers and forced their shells into approximate trajectories — dissolved in the time it took for the first flare to reach its apex and ignite.
Multiple points of white light, hanging under tiny parachutes, drifting down over the battlefield. Each one burning with the intensity of a close sun. The shadows they cast were sharp and precise. The demon formation — the cylinders, the Spider Demons, the Mad Demons he’d spent the night maneuvering into position — was suddenly as visible as a painting.
He had seen human beings learn. He had watched it for six months. He had factored it into his planning.
He had not, apparently, factored in fast enough.
The flares meant there was no darkness anymore. The Artillery Battalion had correct targeting. The space between the God’s Stone shields and the main body of his force — which the shells had been probing blindly — was suddenly a corridor of light and falling iron.
He looked at his force.
He looked at the rate at which they were dying.
Then he made the second decision of the night.
He dropped into the encampment at maximum velocity.
The anti-aircraft squads tracked him across the sky. He counted the tracking arcs and moved through the gaps the way he always moved — not by speed alone but by the specific geometry of their reaction times. He reached the nearest observation balloon, took the basket in both hands, and killed the observer. He dropped the body and threw back his head.
The command went out through the Red Mist.
General assault. Now.
And the Fertile Plains erupted.
The junior demons came out of every position simultaneously — from the flanks, from the spaces between the cylinders, from the hidden approach routes he’d dug for exactly this moment. Thousands of them, moving toward the encampment’s perimeter at the full speed their bodies allowed. Mad Demons hurling stone spears at the bunker slots while other Mad Demons collapsed from the return fire and were replaced by the ones behind them. Spider Demons extending their range across the lit battlefield, taking losses, not stopping.
The First Army’s machine guns found their rhythm within seconds.
Iron Axe heard the encampment change.
For three hours it had been artillery — controlled, directional, the sound of the First Army shaping the battlefield. Now it became something different: the sustained overlapping roar of close-range engagement, machine guns and mortars firing at targets they could see, the sharp staccato of individual rifles between the heavier sounds.
He picked up the command telephone and gave the orders he’d prepared months ago.
Above the underground headquarters, the First Army fought in the light of falling flares.
The battle ran from midnight to dawn.
Sylvie watched it through the Eye of Magic from the observation room — or watched as much of it as the Eye could reach, still blocked in sectors by the God’s Stone cylinders. She relayed targeting data to the artillery and position reports to the command. She tracked the Magic Slayer as he moved through the encampment perimeter, too fast and too agile for any single gun position to hold, repulsed each time by concentrated fire when he lingered too long.
She saw the moment, close to three in the morning, when the Mad Demon assault lost its coherence. Not broke — didn’t route, didn’t flee — but the coordinated pressure became individual demons fighting independently, and individual demons could be isolated and killed.
She saw the Devilbeasts arrive at dawn.
They came in the grey light of early morning — dozens of them, more than had appeared in any single engagement over the previous six months. She understood what it meant. These were not harassment forces or intelligence scouts. The demons were spending what they had left.
The anti-aircraft squads repositioned. The Seagull came down from altitude. Tilly held the aircraft steady while the God’s Punishment Witches engaged from above, and Wendy shaped the wind around the wings to keep the machine in the narrow corridor of air that let the witches work.
The Magic Slayer drove into the encampment twice more. Both times the gun positions answered in mass and drove him back.
By noon, the guns had stopped.
Agatha and Iron Axe walked out of the underground headquarters into the midday light.
The air was heavy with gunpowder — the particular smell that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant anymore, just the smell of things that had been done at high speed. She breathed it in and felt, for the first time in hours, the difference between the underground and the surface.
The Fertile Plains meadow — which had been green when she’d last stood above ground — was not green anymore. The ground between the encampment perimeter and the edge of the demon formation was rutted and torn, the grass beaten down or burned away. Demon bodies were everywhere. The distance between the furthest advance and the perimeter wall was marked in blue.
Blue blood. Mad Demon blood. It had soaked into the soil in long irregular patches, catching the noon light with a faint iridescent sheen.
She looked at it for a moment.
She thought about all the blood that had soaked into the ground at Taquila four hundred years ago, and about all the ground between here and there, and about the silicon tablet men whose bodies had become the desert before any of this happened.
The land absorbed everything, eventually.
“We won.”
She didn’t know who said it. It came from somewhere along the perimeter — a soldier, a witch, one of the workers who’d emerged from the bunkers. The voice was not particularly loud. It didn’t need to be.
The encampment erupted.
Not shouting, exactly — something more complicated than shouting. It built from the near perimeter outward, from the people who had seen the field to the people who were hearing the news secondhand, a wave of sound that was noise and release and the specific relief of a thing you have dreaded for a very long time finally being behind you rather than in front.
Agatha stood in the middle of it and did not join it.
She looked south, toward the ruins.
The Giant Skeletons were still standing. Taquila was still there. But the demon force that had held it for four centuries had spent itself against the First Army’s line and left its dead on the Fertile Plains, and when the railway reached the edge of the ruin — a matter of days, now, a matter of days — there would be nothing left to stop them.
We’re coming, she thought, at no one she could name, at something that was less a thought than an orientation. We’re almost there.
Iron Axe stood beside her and looked south as well. He said nothing for a long time.
Then: “The God’s Punishment Witches should fire first.”
She looked at him.
“You asked,” he said. “The order stands.”
She turned back to the ruins.
The cheering continued around her, and the noon light fell on the blue-stained grass, and the Fertile Plains breathed in the quiet after the guns.
Chapter 1157: The Battle of Taquila (III) Translator: Transn Editor: Transn
When the two stone pillars crossed the median and were five miles from the encampment, the First Army launched the Detection Balloons and stopped firing.
The Magic Slayer also noticed the change but he could not figure out the intention behind this movement. He knew that the balloons must be used for scouting purposes, but he did not understand how that was supposed to work when it was pitch dark on the battlefield.
When the fiery rain finally stopped, the Magic Slayer instructed his army to accelerate.
After the stone pillars were within four kilometers of the encampment, the Artillery Battalion loaded the cannons and prepared the flare projectiles.
After the first night raid, Roland had instructed the workers in Neverwinter to produce some rudimentary illumination devices. These illumination devices were essentially the same as mortars, except that there was a miniscule parachute attached to the tail of the shell and the gunpowder at the front end was replaced with a mixture of powdered magnesium and aluminium that could burn for a long time. Roland had intended to use the same projectile used to eject mortars to project flares. However, during the test, he had noticed that small-caliber bullets were neither bright enough nor had a great lasting power. Therefore, he had decided to use large-caliber shells instead. Although those shells were still not as bright as sunlight, they were sufficient enough to illuminate the battlefield.
It was actually the First Army’s first time using flares in a real battle, which was obviously another suggestion from the General Staff.
When the demons were only three kilometers away from the encampment, Iron Axe ordered the soldiers to fire.
“Yes!” Van’er hung up the phone and shouted, “Shoot flares at the largest firing angle. Ready, go!”
A few explosions filled the air, and soon dazzling orange light dispelled the darkness that had weighed heavily upon the battlefield.
Then more flares rose into the air, ignited, and plunged downward.
Like numerous tiny suns, these flares spilled light across the area within a radius of three kilometers and outshone the moon and stars strewn across the sky.
Now, the soldiers saw the giant stone pillars, the Spider Demons, and the Mad Demons that were once hidden in the darkness!
Even though the flares only illuminated a small area, it was enough for the soldiers to find their targets.
Shells streaked toward the demons behind the stone pillars. It was like the shells knew where they were going! For a split second, the demons were rooted to the ground in shock.
Within the blink of an eye, the demons’ encampment erupted in deafening explosions.
…
Ursrook gazed at the “light balls” drifting down from the sky. His expression finally changed.
Now he understood why the humans launched the balloons.
They were no longer flustered and defenseless like they had been six months ago during that night raid as they had learned how to cope with a night battle. The fact that they waited for this moment to implement their new tactic told Ursrook that human beings were no longer the low lives that they used to treat with contempt.
Ursrook, for the first time, realized that human beings can rival them.
He must inform the king of this new development!
This was the decision he made at that moment.
At the same time, Ursrook further confirmed his belief that he must exterminate this army at once and leave it no chance to disrupt their development plan.
He rested his eyes back on the battlefield. Through the fiery rain, he saw a huge gap between his army and the stone pillars that were supposed to be within their shooting range. The junior demons, which were supposed to close in from either side of the encampment, had fallen far behind and failed to provide quick assistance to those pillar-shaped symbiosis.
Apparently, the junior demons were thwarted by the fiery rain. Instead of shielding them from shells, the lit blind zones had become a narrow death zone for the demons.
Was he supposed to destroy those light balls? No… human beings could produce as many of these light balls as they wanted. Plus, he was being watched.
Ursrook accelerated abruptly and tore toward the human encampment!
He dodged a series of fire bolts darting toward him, skidded to a halt in front of a balloon suspending in midair, and grabbed the lookout in the basket by the neck before the latter could escape.
Ursrook’s face split into a nasty, contorted smile as he stared down at the horror-struck man. Then he ripped the man apart.
He dropped the body and uttered a sharp, piercing wail.
That was the order to launch the general attack.
Encouraged by Ursrook’s power, the junior demons below growled as they came out of hiding and swarmed toward the human encampment.
The entire battlefield was stirred!
…
The First Army had totally controlled the pace of the battle.
The flares in the air lit the area within a radius of three kilometers. As the demons emerged from behind the blind zones, both the mortars and heavy machine guns produced earth-shattering roars.
Since both parties understood that this was the final settlement between the two races, the battle became the fiercest and bitterest they had ever experienced. The Fertile Plains was thus turned into a sort of butcher house as the two powers clashed.
The Mad Demons continuously sent out spears until their arms gave away. Many of them crawled across the battlefield and left a long trail of blue blood as they were indifferent about their broken legs and penetrated torsos.
The same applied to the First Army.
Bullets rained down. Wounded soldiers were soon replaced by new ones. It appeared that nobody cared about the pelting stone needles from the Spider Demons anymore. The only time they ceased to fight was when they reloaded their guns.
This ferocious battle lasted from midnight to dawn.
When the first faint hint of sunlight was visible in the east, dozens of Devilbeasts joined the battle.
This was evidently the demons’ last struggle.
The machine gun squads raised their guns and collaborated with the antiaircraft squads to defend against the demons.
The Magic Slayer rushed into the encampment and attempted to stop the soldiers from firing, but was repulsed by a rain of shells.
It appeared that human beings were now very close to their victory.
By noon, the roars of the guns had stopped.
Agatha and Iron Axe stepped out of the underground headquarters and strolled to the frontier.
The air was impregnated with the pungent smell of gunpowder, but Agatha, for some reason, liked it.
The demons’ bodies littered the ravaged meadow that had been, at one point, green and thick.
Their blood trickled down to the ground and soaked the earth. A sheen of ghostly blue light glazed off the bushes and grass the demons had once trodden on.
The Giant Skeletons in Taquila were still standing erect in the distance, but Agatha knew after this battle, the demons could no longer impede the progress of human beings. Men would soon recapture the Holy City.
“We won!” Somebody broke the silence. Agatha did not know whether it was a soldier, a witch, or one of the Taquila survivors. However, this did not matter anymore, because, in the next moment, the encampment erupted into a loud wave of cheers.
This was a victory that belonged to the entire human race!