Chapter 1617: The Seed of a Siege
[Oh, boo! How come you guys get to be in the center of an incoming battle?] Razorstella complained. [This Ferroxa guy hasn’t done anything interesting past that time we saw him severely maim a guy.]
[I wouldn’t be so sure about this being fun this time around,] Hurricroak assured Razorstella.[There are a lot of mercenaries this time around, and I can already sense that the power level of the invaders is...huh. That’s weird. I’m not sensing anything from them.]
[Like they’re hiding their power levels?] Springerdermain asked.
[No, it’s more like...they don’t have any... you know what? It’ll probably be easier for us to show than to tell.] Nepherage answered.
[Good...thing...we’re going...to...be...fighting...then.]
...
"Huh...well...that’s fucking ballsy," Zhen Liu thought to himself as he heard the alarm of attack echoing throughout Mercenary Town.
From what he and his friends had seen, Mercenary Town had at least twenty or so Aether Grandmasters present, and that was even excluding the ones that Mysticlassic saw get decapitated.
As such, a military unit being sent to attack a town full of warriors was foolish to say the—
"Run, dammit, run!"
"Make a break for it!"
"Every man for themselves!"
"Ah, right."
Zhen Liu had forgotten that most mercenaries were actually cowardly fuckers who prioritized profit and their lives over much else.
As the mercenaries and civilians ran away from the possible source of danger, though, Zhen Liu and his friends decided it was smarter to run towards it.
Well, Zhen Liu did.
"Eh? Where are you going?" Antonio asked. "This isn’t our fight."
"It’s going to be soon enough," Zhen Liu shouted back as he kept running. "Might as well get a jump start on it."
"...fuck it, he’s right."
Once they realized that Zhen Liu was more or less correct that they were probably going to get roped into fighting this war anyways, the rest of his group decided to run after him.
...
"Incoming!"
BANG!
"AGH!"
"Get in formation! Formation, I say!"
"Don’t let them escape without bloodying them first!"
The attacking soldier of the Erupting Dawn Empire wasted no time when it came to unleashing hell upon the people of Mercenary Town.
Since they were a proper, unified army, the soldiers of the Erupting Dawn Empire made ample use of various battle formations that allowed them to coordinate and amplify their fighting abilities.
These sort of formation is what allowed warriors of lower standing to be able to punch above their weight class by several magnitudes if needed. Or in the cases where there are clear champion fighters present, it would allow the rank-and-file to enhance them and have them hit even harder.
However, this was only a small portion of the hell that was being unleashed upon the shanty town.
"Raidsmen, attack!"
GOAA!
Aside from the warriors maintaining the battle formation arrays, several other units of warriors were being released en masse like wolves amongst sheep.
These warriors, at a glance, looked like every other soldier present, but there was something...off about them.
Their movements seemed oddly jerky, as if their muscles had been stiff for years and had only just finally became loose enough to allow even the most basic of movements.
Their armor and weapons looked old, not out of misuse or lack of care; they were just simply falling apart due to the ravages of time sparing no one.
And top of these subtle details, if one were to lock eyes with one of these forward charging warriors, they would immediately notice two things.
First was the smell.
These weird warriors had a smell to them that wasn’t anything a normal mortal warrior would smell like...but they didn’t smell like a rotting corpse either. Anyone who was even remotely familiar with the work of funeral parlors would immediately recognize the smell of the chemical they used to preserve the bodies from decomposition.
These warriors, for whatever reason, stank of the stuff.
The second thing most people would notice would be the eyes.
The eyes of these warriors weren’t dull like a regular corpse, nor were they bright with the light of life.
Instead, they were yellow...mostly.
The part of their eyes that should’ve been white, the sclera, had a dark, unusual yellow tint to them, while the part of their eyes that should’ve had some form of color, their corneas, were as black as their pupils. Hell, if one didn’t know how to break down an eye into its base components, they would just assume that the entire black part of the eye was just an overexpanded pupil.
Of course, no one currently facing these weird warriors were appreciating such strange details. They were too busy fighting for their lives.
"What the fuck is wrong with these guys?!" a warrior shouted as she jammed a longsword into the gut of one of these Raidsmen, only to find that that attack served the same purpose as using a stick to push away a weirdo. "Why aren’t they fucking dying?!"
"I think they’re already dead?!" another warrior shouted as a guess as they punched away an enemy soldier. "Whatever the case, we have to retreat!"
"Right!"
...
"General! We have managed to wipe out the defending Temple Guards, and our forces are now wiping up the cowardly mercenaries as we speak. We should be able to establish a siege base in the next two hours or so."
"Hmm."
Overseeing this conflict was a bearded warrior dressed in the traditional crimson armor of the Erupting Dawn Empire with a severe look on his face.
This warrior was known as General Legante of the 31st Sons of Bronze, and he was also an Aether Lord of some repute in the Empire.
During the entirety of this war between the Erupting Dawn Empire and the Sacred Flame Theocracy, he and his forces had managed to make a name for themselves for participating and winning in twenty different skirmishes.
For all intents and purposes, he was a war hero.
And now, this hero had decided to take it upon himself to finally siege Emberona and put an end to this war once and for all. Or at the very least, establish a foothold for the rest of the army to use as a springboard.
"What cowards," Legante growled as he used an aether treasure to get a bird’s-eye view of the battle he was waging. Right now he was using it to see how the mercenaries were holding up against the new weapon that he had been given to facilitate this siege. "They can’t even handle a bunch of corpses? How in the world the theocrats manage to whip them into a proper fighting force, I will never know."
"In fairness to our enemy, milord, not many people have ever seen a Raidsman before," the attending soldier assured his liege. "It would honestly be surprising if someone could effectively fight them."
"That may be the case, but any warrior worth their salt should at least be able to...oh? Well, isn’t that interesting..."
Just as General Legante was about to chide about the quality of warriors in this day and age, lamenting how they weren’t able to adapt to their situations as well as they used to, a development on the battlefield occurred that actually caught his interest.
A young warrior, who was clearly of foreign descent, had charged into the fray and had chosen to actively engage with one of the Raidsmen.
The young warrior seemed to notice that something was off about the human-shaped weapon and began to act in a manner as if was trying to decipher its secrets before finishing the fight. It didn’t take him too long, though. With a quick one-two punch, the young man had somehow disabled the Raidman without that much effort before moving on to the next target.
A cry of shock from his attending officer confirmed that this was actually the case.
"What the—milord! One of our Raidsmen had just been fully deactivated. We can’t even begin recovery protocols."
"Interesting..."Legante muttered as he continued to watch the young man fight, eventually leading to the fellow to impale one of the Raidsmen with his fist. "It appears there is someone clever enough amongst the unwashed masses."
...
=Well, isn’t that convenient, = Logos commented as he stared at the screen showing Zhen Liu’s POV. =and here I figured that you and I were going to have to wait until much later to finally study one of these things in person. =
<Are we talking about corpse puppets or the force that is currently riding inside the heads of these damn things, like how the kaijin can jump into people’s brains? > Pathos asked as she began to process the data flowing through Zhen Liu’s fist.
=Ideally both, but this is very dependent on our Lord not accidentally killing or breaking our prizes in the process,= Logos pointed out to his companion as he switched displays to show their lord’s emotional state.
<Right...our lord’s fist is really up in those guts...>
