Chapter 202: Ironhold Fails
Chapter 202: Ironhold Fails
"It has been a lot of months since our mercenaries last attacked them and burned them down." Isolde continued as she smiled cruelly. "And this time, we will just bring all of their precious rebuilding progress right back down to zero."
She laughed. "After all, there are reports that he has been aggressively rebuilding the entire place. Imagine exactly how he is going to feel when he wakes up and finds out that all of his efforts have been burned down to ash again."
Valerian just laughed loudly as she imagined it. The mages walking nearby heard her and they also started laughing to please the royals.
The knights marching in the front heard the laughter and they just smirked.
’We will easily destroy this prosperous place without actually going to a real war.’ the knights thought to themselves. ’We will just bite them exactly where it hurts the most. And we will just make them repeat a miserable cycle of developing the whole place from scratch again and again and again.’
A few of these specific veteran knights were actually involved in the original mercenary attack on Oresfall a few months ago. So they knew exactly how easy it was to burn a wooden town down to the ground.
And even now, they were not worried. Even though they knew there were way too many defending soldiers on the opponent’s side, they felt totally secure. As long as they just held their defensive shield wall for a few minutes, the royal mages would have already done all of the damage they needed to do. And then the army could just safely retreat back into the forest.
With this cowardly, hit-and-run plan in mind, the Ironhold army just walked forward feeling incredibly confident.
But as they walked further into the forest, a sharp crack ripped through the air.
And then another. Dozens of loud, overlapping snaps echoed right through the forest in an instant. It sounded exactly like dozens of whips violently cracking.
The frontline knights immediately turned around in a panic to see if the mages in the back were fine.
But forget the regular mages. They just desperately wanted to make sure that the Prince and the Princess were unharmed.
But to their horror, every single mage was already down on the ground.
Some of the regular soldiers in the back were also down in the dirt. And a large chunk of the rearguard knights had completely collapsed too.
The surviving soldiers who had not been hit yet just stood there and watched in pure confusion as their fallen comrades started screaming in pain.
Every single one of the fallen men had been hit cleanly in either their arms or their legs. They were not hit in vital places like the chest or the head where they would just die quickly.
But to the survivors’ total surprise, something incredibly weird was happening to the wounded.
Even though the bloody holes where the projectiles hit them were pretty apparent and bleeding heavily, the victims were acting incredibly strange. It looked like the guys writhing in the ground had suddenly lost all of their energy.
It was like they were extremely sleepy for some reason.
It was more like a severe paralysis. The healthy soldiers could see their friends screaming and thrashing. But in just one or two seconds, the screaming men almost completely froze up. They turned into something of a slow-moving, groaning puppets.
At first, the stiffening effect only hit the specific limb where they had been shot.
For example, the soldiers just watched in horror as one of the elite knights who had been hit right in the calf desperately tried to stand up. He was completely unable to move that bleeding leg even one tiny bit.
And then the knight used his hands to grab his wounded leg. And his hands slowly started to stiffen up too. He could barely twitch his own fingers. The healthy soldiers just stood there watching the paralysis crawl right up the guy’s limbs. His hands moved at a ridiculously slow pace like his joints had turned to solid rust.
And before the panicked army could even observe the strange poison anymore, they heard more loud cracks tearing through the air.
Another massive group of people fell to the ground. And this time, the invisible strikes only targeted the heavily armored knights.
And this time the cracking noise did not stop. It just kept going. A relentless wave of sharp snaps tore through the air.
And the Ironhold knights just kept falling into the dirt like cut wheat.
By the time the deafening sounds of air cracking finally stopped echoing through the trees, almost all of the three hundred knights were completely down and paralyzed on the ground.
And right at that exact moment, someone just dashed straight out from behind the trees.
Even though the hidden attackers were almost two hundred to three hundred meters away from the main force, every single soldier could clearly see them sprinting toward them.
It was basically just five people.
Hugo took the front of the formation and charged straight into the surviving vanguard of knights. There were only about seven terrified knights left standing.
And while Hugo was rushing toward the armoured men, he just shot a quick glance back at Octavia and Vance, who were sprinting right beside him.
"I want to fight them alone." Hugo yelled over the noise.
The two of them slowed their sprinting pace almost immediately. Octavia raised her hand into the air, and the rest of the squad completely stopped running.
Hugo continued charging forward alone.
He never even bothered drawing a weapon. He just jumped and drove his knee directly into the knight’s face.
The steel visor caved inward. The guy just dropped backward into the ground and stopped moving completely.
There were only six capable knights left in that cluster. Two of them, who were standing right beside the guy who just got his face caved in, frantically drew their longswords.