Lord of Winter: Beginning with Daily Intelligence - Chapter 755 - 421: Grand Finale
The wind on the hillside was cold.
Thomas knelt on one knee amidst the rubble, raised his hand as a signal, and the White Night Squad scattered and lay low behind the slope line.
Several searchlight beams pierced into Grey Rock Castle from the hillside, like shadowless lamps on an operating table, peeling away layers of darkness from the castle gate hole.
As the beams swept across, dust and the not-yet-dissipated blood mist surged simultaneously, and the air in the distance presented a murky dark red color.
Then Thomas heard a sound of chewing.
“Chomp… chomp…”
The sound of sharp teeth crushing bones and tearing flesh echoed across the empty castle square, amplified and reflected by the walls, sounding like countless mouths feasting simultaneously.
“Shit.” Someone in the White Night Squad cursed softly.
That sound was light, yet it couldn’t suppress the discomfort welling up from their throats.
Even these extraordinary knights, long used to fighting amid piles of corpses, couldn’t remain indifferent to such a sound.
The searchlights continued to sweep, illuminating the mountain of corpses piled up in the center of the square.
Broken armor, blood-stained silk, and trampled bodies mixed together, like a repeatedly trodden grave mound.
And on top of that, things crouched there.
Hundreds of them.
Thomas squinted, Fighting Energy slightly vibrating at the edges of his retinas, allowing him to see more clearly than most.
Those figures could hardly be called “human” anymore.
Their limbs were disproportionate, joints bent backward, and their bodies were covered with gray-black scales, twisted forcibly into illogical shapes.
They were monsters generally taller than two meters, with unusually large skeletons, yet moving with extraordinary stability.
Their vertical pupils showed no emotional fluctuation under the strong light, merely mechanically bowing their heads, biting, and swallowing.
And around them were hundreds of incomplete ones.
The mutation in these individuals was obviously not yet complete.
Their bones formed strange contours beneath their skin, and their muscles occasionally twitched unnaturally.
Some would suddenly freeze while eating, as if enduring some continuous painful stimulus, but in the next moment, they would tear at the flesh before them even more frenziedly.
“…Still evolving,” Thomas judged in a low voice.
What unsettled him more was that they were not without power.
Dark red Fighting Energy intermittently surged between the gaps of their scales.
When a few were torn and trampled by their peers, their visibly damaged bodies began writhing and bonding on their own in a short time, as though forcibly mended by some power.
Someone in the White Night Squad instinctively gripped their weapon tighter, an instinctual repulsion.
“Captain.” The deputy whispered, “These are no longer human.”
Thomas did not respond immediately.
He just stared at the scene in the castle gate, watching those things move slowly, eat, and stack atop the pile of corpses.
They were utterly unresponsive to the bright searchlights and oblivious to the distant watchers.
Thomas exhaled slowly, as if suppressing a disturbance in his stomach.
“Record the numbers and characteristics, do not approach, and immediately alert if any leave the gate area.”
Thomas knew well that even if the entire White Night Squad comprised extraordinary knights, this was not a place they should venture into.
He averted his gaze from the chaos in the gate, instinctively turning backward to look at the scene behind the hill.
The view there starkly contrasted with the chaos inside the gate.
Outside the gate, there was a death-like order.
A cluster of black Steam Tanks was spread out in a fan shape along the slope, their treads deeply embedded in the muddy ground, completely blocking all exits leading to Grey Rock Castle.
The steel armor was scoured bright by the rain, resembling a solid block of cooled Obsidian.
The gun barrels retained residual heat, where falling rain evaporated into wisps of white steam.
Behind the tank formation were thousands of Red Tide Knights.
They stood quietly in the rain, their cloaks hanging down, with the red insignias on their armor appearing particularly cold and hard amid the rain.
There was no conversation, no restlessness, everyone was waiting for Louis’s command.
On one side was a biological disaster spreading like a plague.
On the other was industrial civilization, precisely assembled to unleash the most efficient slaughter at any time.
Thomas stood between the two, this was not traditional warfare.
He looked again at the illuminated castle gate, his stomach still uneasy but no longer wavering.
Not because he underestimated those monsters.
Quite the opposite, because he saw clearly enough to be certain, this was not a battlefield meant to be filled with knights’ lives.
Thomas trusted Lord Louis.
This trust stemmed neither from blind obedience nor titles or nobility, but from consistently proven outcomes.
Over the years, in the face of choices that seemed unwinnable, even mistaken in everyone’s eyes, Louis consistently picked the most effective path from countless options.
Even if no one understood at the time, post-event analyses would reveal that Lord Louis always chose the optimal solution.
Therefore, he wasn’t worried.
Even if the scene inside the gate was a hellish tableau, even if those things kept evolving.
As long as Louis stood here, it was all part of a bigger plan, with the optimal solution identified.
Thomas believed this time would be no exception.
……
Rain drummed dully and rhythmically on the steel hulls of the war machines.
Louis sat at a folding table, his fingers resting on the edge of a map, quietly watching the sketch images transmitted from the front.
Inside the castle gate of Grey Rock Castle, those distorted figures crawled slowly under the searchlights.
