Chapter 847: Chapter 457: That Devil Named Louis (Part 3)
The man was sent flying on impact, the sound of shattering bones sharp and clear, and once he hit the ground, he never got up again.
The Knight did not look back.
The column kept moving, hooves trampling through blood as if over a puddle of water.
Hans had once served in the Border Defense Army and had seen real elite Cavalry, but compared to these terrifying Knights, they were nothing.
This kind of unit was not meant to suppress riots; it was meant to empty out a city.
The townsfolk stood along the road, every head bowed, as if afraid that thorn-like gaze would sweep over them.
The priest quickly gave the order: tear down the houses.
The houses beside the mill were marked, roof beams hacked through, walls shoved over; stones were pried out one by one and piled by the roadside as materials to build a cheval-de-frise wall...
Hans stood at the mill door, watching the familiar street have its bones peeled out bit by bit.
The Blacksmith’s son was hauling stone too.
The boy was only sixteen, thickset, and before the Church came he always laughed loudly.
Now he was barefoot, shouldering a block of cut stone nearly half a man’s height, shuffling forward step by step.
Suddenly his foot slipped, the stone tipped, and crashed down.
Hans clapped a hand over his mouth almost on instinct.
But the boy just lowered his head and glanced at his own foot, smashed to pulp.
The bone was a blinding white, flesh stuck to the flagstones.
There was no expression on his face at all; he didn’t even frown.
Then another Thorn Knight walked over and, without hesitation, drove the Longsword in from the side, cleanly and neatly piercing the boy’s heart.
The boy fell with his eyes still staring, empty, as if even in death he hadn’t realized what had happened.
The Knight waved his hand.
A few townsfolk with the same ashen eyes came over, dragged the corpse away, and threw it into that writhing pit of bramble roots outside the town.
Dark red tendrils surged up from deep in the soil like an Insect Swarm that had scented blood, coiling around the corpse’s limbs and torso.
The skin collapsed the instant it touched them, blood and flesh drawn out with a fine, sticky sound.
That body shriveled at a speed visible to the naked eye; in less than a moment, all that remained was a white skeletal outline wrapped in thorns.
Hans saw those brambles, once they had drunk their fill of flesh and blood, turn a deeper, heavier shade, strange patterns crawling across them.
A few thick roots rapidly extended outward, weaving into a barbed mesh along the pit wall, like a naturally grown cheval-de-frise.
Others curled and twisted together, finally hardening into sharp thorn stakes, which the Thorn Knights pulled up and planted between the road and the trench as new defensive obstacles.
That corpse, along with the life he’d lived, took less than a quarter of an hour to be completely converted into part of the fortifications.
The brambles in the pit slowly contracted, writhing in what looked like satisfaction, as if waiting for the next offering.
Through the whole process, no one screamed; it was quiet as the grave.
In the last few days, the bell in the square was rung.
Its rhythm was strange, neither fast nor slow, yet it made hearts clench.
At the sound of the bell, people came out of their houses one after another, their movements so uniform it was as if unseen strings were pulling them.
Hans blended into the crowd and saw the priest handing things out.
Not swords, not spears, but bundles of alchemy explosives.
The muddy ground north of town was dug up, opening a row upon row of shallow pits, only waist-deep on a grown man.
The priest ordered those numbed parents to put their own children into the pits.
Black explosive boxes were stuffed into the children’s hands, their fuses tied to thorn-lines and buried in the earth.
Hans saw Amy.
The little girl who had always been the quickest to cry now had half her body buried in the cold soil, clutching explosives in her arms.
She wasn’t crying, and she didn’t move; her gray-gold eyes were wide open, staring straight toward the north.
The red-robed priest walked back and forth among the children like he was inspecting crops.
The priest told them these were holy fireworks, and that if they ran toward the Red Tide’s iron wagons holding them, they would get to see angels.
On the last morning, Hans was still alive.
Not because he was lucky, but because he was too old; he was assigned to haul the so-called holy candles—those heavy Alchemy Explosive Packages.
He watched batch after batch of neighbors, drenched in holy water, driven into the trenches at the northern edge of town.
Hans knelt in the mud, hands trembling, and lifted his head to look north.
On the horizon, a black line was pushing closer.
That was the army of the Red Tide.
In that moment, he suddenly realized he was no longer afraid of the Lord of the North who had been painted as a monster.
Tears ran down his face as he uttered, in his heart, the most venomous yet most sincere prayer of his life: "That devil called Louis... I beg you, even if you kill me too.
Please, kill every last one of these animals."
