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Chapter 888: Heavenly Divine Retribution

A click. The bolt released.

Two bombs — each the weight of Nightingale — slid free of the carrier and fell toward the crowd below, carried forward by momentum. The instant they left The East Wind, they snapped back to their true mass and kept all their speed, and that combination gave them a force that bent the air. As they arrowed downward, they produced a strange, keening friction — half whistle, half the howl of wind forced through a narrow cave. Every face on the ground tilted upward.

The nobles of the Kingdom of Dawn, in that moment, felt relieved.

Two things falling from the sky. Small, compared to the flying monster. Even dropping from that height, they would crush whatever they hit on landing — but crush what? Three men, perhaps four. A handful of the unlucky. For an army ten thousand strong, that was nothing.

There was real wealth to be had here. The church had been accumulating it for centuries. Appen Moya’s call to march west had drawn every grade of noble — dukes who sent cavalry, new knights who recruited servants from their villages, ambitious men of every stripe who smelled an opportunity and wanted their share before the collapsing church could deny them. They had come in numbers. A few dead soldiers would not move them.

The great flying monster remained their genuine concern. If it dove into the packed column — biting, trampling, throwing men in every direction — the casualties could crest a hundred before the panicked serfs scattered and made the losses worse. The thing hovering overhead was the real threat. As long as it didn’t land, they had nothing to fear from it.

The creatures in the sky, almost certainly witches, clearly lacked the nerve to fight the Kingdom of Dawn directly. Everyone here wore God’s Stones of Retaliation; the army’s supply wagons carried weapons made specifically for use against witches. Let them circle and drop their little stones. Brave men waited below.

Many knights, already lowering their longbows, began to lay bets on which soldiers would be struck.

No one stepped out of position. No one threw himself flat. They watched the two bombs trace their trajectory like a pair of thrown arrows and kept advancing.

Then two scarlet flowers opened in the middle of the column.

Everyone inside the blast radius ceased to exist. The air around the detonation heated, expanded, and became a wall — and everything that met that wall came apart. Broken limbs and viscera scattered across a wide circle before the blast front faded.

At a hundred steps from the center of impact, the pressure wave lost its lethal edge. But the bombs had not come alone.

The terrain offered no shelter — this was the broad plain between the Kingdom of Dawn and the old Holy City, as flat and bare as a threshing floor. Every man in the open was exposed to the blast, the debris, and the iron balls packed into the shells, which tore through the air at speeds several times faster than sound. Each ball pierced through a dozen men before slowing. The steel shell fragments were worse.

From above, the witches watched black smoke slam upward in an instant curtain, blocking off the stream of people below as though a wall had been raised across the road.

Before the nobles had recovered from their shock, Lightning had already climbed back to her maximum altitude and was lining up the approach.

“The East Wind — second attack!”

Maggie folded her wings and fell, howling behind the little girl.

“Ow ow ow—!”

They had loaded four bombs to each side of the carrier, giving them the option of four separate runs or one sustained release. For maximum effect, Lightning intended to dive four times, placing the explosions into the middle and rear sections of the column.

The third run ended the battle.

For the survivors, these detonations were not weapons. They were divine retribution — thunder and fire arriving from the sky without warning, leaving scorched earth and bodies behind. Neither the serfs in rough cloth nor the armored knights had escaped the flames. The explosions came and kept coming. The detonation noise battered them. The screams of the wounded battered them. And the worst of it — the thing that broke them — was the knowledge that they could do nothing except pray the next one didn’t land near them. The monster still flew well above arrow range. They had no way to reach it and no way to fight back.

This was not a battle they had prepared for. It was not a battle they had words for.

The nobles had come for wealth, not to die. Whatever they could strip from this city was worthless to a corpse. And with enough servants dead, they couldn’t carry anything home regardless.

The decision was swift and unanimous. They turned their horses and fled.

One horse became ten. Ten became a hundred. The nobles who had flogged serfs for breaking formation now spurred through those same serfs to reach the road first. The ordered column that had been streaming toward the city shuddered, reversed, and became something else entirely — a torrent pouring back the way it had come, all discipline gone, the herd instinct running at full.

The nightmare found them on the main road.

Eagle Face’s five squads had been lying in the wheat fields before sunrise, the stalks waist-high, Sylvie’s detection ensuring that not one scout had come close enough to notice them. They had simply waited.

The gap in information between the two sides was not a small gap.

The first shot cracked through the morning air. The nobles who had assumed the danger was above them discovered, with horror, that it was also beside them — hidden in the ordinary grain, so close the riflemen didn’t bother with aim. They just fired and reloaded and fired again, the revolving rifles and heavy machine guns working through their magazines against targets within three hundred meters.

If the Kingdom of Dawn’s army had been intact, coordinated, still thinking like soldiers, they would have concentrated their remaining force and charged the flank. But they were not intact. They were not coordinated. They were terrified men who wanted legs faster than the ones they had, and the nobles’ horses rampaged through the crowd as the owners fled, scattering the serfs in every direction.

The wide road became an avenue of death.

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