Chapter 590 - 361: The Demise of the Traditional Knight Order

Chapter 590: Chapter 361: The Demise of the Traditional Knight Order

This was a very unconventional battle.

For most of the Northern Legion soldiers defending Deepwater City, they never even saw the enemy.

The anti-aircraft gunners simply repeated their daily training exercises over and over.

Long bursts of suppressive fire.

Long-term, repetitive training had turned their tactical maneuvers into pure muscle memory, ensuring that all Warriors could engage in combat in any emergency situation without thinking, relying solely on instinct.

But the current situation was not only far from an emergency, it was even simpler than training. In training, they had to aim.

This time, they didn’t. They just had to sweep their fire back and forth into the thick fog.

It was enough to make one wonder if this was even a war at all.

Only the soldiers positioned at the very front of the defensive line had to pick off the occasional Alliance Army Knight who stumbled out of the fog, and that could hardly be considered combat.

The Knights who emerged from the fog had already completely lost their will to fight and were severely wounded. They had been trying to flee, but had charged in the wrong direction.

Their own smoke screen had become an obstacle to their retreat.

The extremely low visibility, immense panic, ever-present death, and incomprehensible attacks caused even Warriors with considerable combat experience to lose their sanity.

When they burst out of the seemingly endless fog, clinging to a final shred of hope and enduring the intense pain of their wounds, what they saw was the Northern Legion’s defensive line right in front of them.

According to the original plan, this was their tactical objective.

To enter close-combat range—the domain where traditional Knights and Transcendents held the advantage.

But when they actually arrived, their last shred of hope shattered completely. They fell into absolute despair, losing even the courage to raise their weapons and becoming little more than living targets waiting to be picked off.

To be fair, the magical resistance Defenses cast on the Knights by the Mage Corps were indeed effective. Against Magic Firearms, they could withstand three to five hits from the Northern Legion’s standard-issue rifles.

However, the fire they faced was a saturation barrage.

In the design of the standard-issue rifles, firing speed was prioritized over accuracy.

Compared to the relatively easy and pleasant battle on Deepwater City’s side, the Alliance Army’s experience was a pure nightmare.

Driven by their lust for victory and wealth, they charged into the fog, only to become lost souls under the fire of the anti-aircraft guns, dying without ever knowing how.

The crimson, high-temperature Elemental Stream pierced through their finest armor and continued on to the next unlucky soul without stopping.

At the same time, because the attacks were so quiet, the roars of the charge drowned out the cries of the wounded. Those charging in the rear had already reached the center of the battlefield before they realized the severity of the situation.

As far as the eye could see, there were only the severed limbs of their allies. They didn’t realize what had happened, not even certain if the attack was from the Northern Legion, but instinct told them they had to flee immediately.

The high temperature of the Elemental Stream heated the smoke screen laid by the Alchemists into a veritable smoker. Even those lucky enough not to be hit had to endure the scorching heat.

What was worse, the warhorses were completely spooked.

As horses are very timid animals, training them into warhorses requires long-term desensitization.

The Alliance Army’s warhorses had indeed been desensitized to traditional battlefields; fierce fighting and common Magic wouldn’t startle them.

But the high-temperature smoke, shimmering with red light, was something they had never seen before.

Panicked warhorses, carrying their masters whose fates were unknown, charged about in the fog like headless chickens. A few nobles who still had their wits about them shouted loudly, trying to organize the remaining forces for a planned retreat, but their cries were utterly powerless in the midst of such chaos.

One shouted himself hoarse, but no one listened to his commands. Instead, his terrified warhorse threw him to the ground. He wasn’t killed by a Northern Army gun; he was trampled to death, his organs crushed by hooves.

The reaping of lives was not limited to the area within the fog. The Alliance Army’s main position was over a thousand meters from the Northern Legion’s defensive line—a distance they believed was unreachable by firearms.

However, the effective range of the anti-aircraft guns was over two thousand meters, with a maximum lethal range of up to three thousand meters.

The Elemental Stream shot out of the fog, striking soldiers who had not yet joined the charge, passing through body after body until it reached the Mage Corps and Priest Corps at the rear of the formation.

Even the most experienced Mages in the Mage Corps had never seen such an attack.

’It seems to be an Element, but why is there no magical fluctuation? How can it attack from so far away? Even if some High Tier Magic could achieve this effect, how could the frequency be so high! Are Legendary Mages a dime a dozen in the Northern Domain?!’

Since they couldn’t understand what it was, they naturally couldn’t mount an effective defense.

The Priests tried to heal the wounded, but wounds that had been pierced through and cauterized were far beyond what an ordinary Healing Technique could mend.

The disaster that befell the vanguard finally triggered a full-scale rout of the entire line.

Flee south!

This was their only thought now.

When members of the disciplinary squad tried to stop the rout, they were immediately swallowed by the human tide. Countless fists and feet from all directions beat them into unconsciousness.

The rigid members of the disciplinary squad were still trying to carry out their duties; the smart ones had already blended into the routing crowd and started running with them.

’A reward of a few dozen Silver Coins for one battle? It’s not worth dying for.’

When the entire battle line began to run, a new problem arose.