“Nero!” he shouted and jumped off the ‘wall’ directly onto a horse.
He cut the rider's throat and then threw him off the horse, after which the rider was quickly slaughtered by the infantry’s hooks. Each of the front rank soldiers had been given a hook—the soldiers would slam these hooks into the cavalrymen's hips and pull them down from their horses, turning the enemy into helpless, easy prey.
Nero was fighting five savages at the same time. Their light sabers caused sparks as they struck his heavy blade, but after each of these sparks, someone's severed leg or hand would quickly follow.
“Forward!” Hadjar hit the horse's sides and it neighed and rushed into the thick of battle.
Horses, people, blood, steel—everything was mixing into one boiling brew of fear and pain. And only because of that same pain and fear, the people, despite the hail of arrows coming down repeatedly and the whistling of cannonballs overhead, fought as if they’d been born only yesterday and never intended to die.
Hadjar slammed into the enemy ranks from behind. Holding the reins with his left hand, he delivered swift and brutal sword slashes with his right. A rider fell to the ground after each strike.
Hadjar's sword easily cut through even the strongest armor, not to mention pliable flesh and bones. Part of the savages died immediately, and those who’d gotten away with only a wound were trampled to death either by the enemy or their own allies.
“Hadj!” Nero, after decapitating one more opponent, stretched out his blood covered hand.
Hadjar, bending down, grabbed his comrade's forearm and pulled hard. Nero jumped up onto the back of the horse at once.
“You came just in time,” he patted Hadjar on the shoulder, and a moment later, ran an approaching enemy horseman through with his blade.
Pushing the dying savage off the horse, Nero climbed onto it.
Emergency message!
If the enemy’s artillery threat is not neutralized, then the host’s probability of survival will decrease to a critical value: <5%
“Cannons!” Hadjar shouted, cutting off someone's hand, and then stabbing them through the throat. “We need to destroy the cannons! They'll crush our entire flank if we don’t!”
And then another volley rumbled overhead as if to confirm Hadjar's words. A cannonball swept through the crowd of nomads with a whistle, killing them on the spot. The savages did not spare their own soldiers if they saw an opportunity to weaken the enemy.
Human bodies and shattered shields soared into the sky along with the dead horses.
“Infantry!” Nero shouted, raising his sword into the air. “Attack!”
Hadjar and Nero, urging their horses forward, rushed into the battle, pushing the enemy away from the ever-increasing gap in the wall, and the infantrymen raced after them, shouting wildly. They struck the enemy with spears and swords, leaving the ground covered in blood, and the dying groaning in agony under their feet.
Hadjar swung his sword tirelessly on either side of him. He wasn't a cavalryman, and therefore his strikes were much weaker than usual. But they were still strong enough to end a life every time he struck.
They were going through the enemy’s flank like a thin nail through a heavy board. It was difficult and slow-going, but with each new hammer strike, it went in just a bit deeper and deeper.
A savage infantryman tried to stab Hadjar's side with a spear. The Prince released the reins and, clutching the metal weapon under the deadly tip, pulled hard. The man flew up into the sky, and then his body, which had been split in half, splattered on the riders hurrying to organize a counter-attack.
Nero once again swung his sword, cutting off the head of an enemy's horse with one strike. It fell, burying the screaming savage beneath it. The infantry coming up behind them finished him off right then and there.
Thanking his friend with a nod, Hadjar put the spear on his shoulder and threw it with all the force he could muster. It pierced through a galloping horseman, then crashed into a second one behind him, knocked him off his horse, and stopped only after ending a third soldier. All three died together, killed by the same spear.
Losing themselves in cutting their way through the enemy riders, Nero and Hadjar didn't know how long they'd been wading through the hordes of enemies to get to their nearest cannons. But, judging by the number of volleys they’d heard, they hadn’t taken long to get there. The nomads were numerous, but they were poorly organized and not very well trained. They had been hardened by endless raids, but nothing more.
Most of them couldn't do anything to stop two practitioners of the Formation level. And therefore, they’d probably channeled their energy and hatred toward the infantry following after the two cultivators. When Nero and Hadjar saw the cannons in front of them, which the gunners were dousing in water carefully so that they'd cool down, but not crack, then...
“Damn it!” Nero swore when, after turning around, he saw nothing but a bloody battle in the distance.
They were alone in the midst of enemy troops.
A moment later, Hadjar's horse whinnied and began to roll over onto its side. The Prince managed to pull his leg out of the stirrup and jump down. As he did so, he noticed numerous wounds on the body of the animal.
“Get up!” Nero extended his hand to Hadjar, but as he did so, an enemy spear slammed into his horse.
He barely managed to jump out of the saddle and avoid being buried under the carcass of the dying animal.
They stood back to back. A bloodthirsty grin danced on Nero's face, which was covered in his own and other people's blood. Hadjar was calm and concentrated. His clothes had turned from red to purple.
Dozens of opponents surrounded them. They were wearing light armor, armed with short sabers, axes, or maces. With their painted faces, they resembled fiends from the abyss, hungry for the flesh and blood of outsiders. They were going to tear apart the two brave souls that had dared to try and seize their cannons.
“Whoever gets to a hundred first,” Nero growled. “Is buying the wine.”
“Ok,” Hadjar nodded.
They didn't move except to circle in place, keeping their backs to each other. The nomads didn't wait long. They saw only two opponents in front of them, while there were dozens of them.
A young man couldn't wait any longer and attacked first. Armed with a saber and a small shield, he rushed at the enemies. He managed to lift his saber, but in the next instant, his body had already been reduced to bloody chunks. A fountain of blood shot into the sky and its scarlet drops hadn't even fallen to the ground yet when Hadjar sent a second savage to a better world as well.
Due to standing back to back with him, he could feel Nero was wielding his blade, and thanks to that comforting feeling, his heart grew stronger, and a sense of confidence arose from the depths of his soul.
And so they stood, unyielding. Two warriors against hundreds of savages. They kept fighting. They blocked attacks, chopped limbs off and impaled foes. Scarlet blood soared into the sky. The severed arms and legs fell to the ground.
Someone tried to stab Hadjar with a spear - but the officer cut it off with a flick of his sword, and then sent the severed tip forward with a sweep of his hand. It pierced through the larynx of one nomad and got stuck in the eye of a second. Two cries of agony merged into one. The savages fell to the ground, but their comrades walked over their bodies, overcome with bloodlust.
A mace whistled on his left and Hadjar grabbed it at the base and, pulling on it to force the enemy forward, rammed his sword through the savage’s gut. Pushing the body aside and into the path of other foes charging at him, he struck down with the mace, toward his right, striking the head of another enemy. It broke like a rotten watermelon. Scarlet liquid and gray matter painted Hadjar's chest, and he immediately threw the mace. It knocked down at least four of the savages, and they choked on blood, feeling the fragments of their ribs piercing their insides.
“Break through!” Nero shouted and they abandoned their previous position.
Nero managed to carve a hole in the ring their opponents had made around them, and they rushed through together. Shoulder to shoulder, they were sending the enemy fighters to meet their forefathers. Their swords, the cries of the dying, and splashes of blood—that was their entire world in those moments.
They covered every inch of the ground separating them from the cannons with the bodies of dead and dying enemies. Hadjar didn’t even immediately notice that someone’s severed hand was slowing his pace. It was gripping his ankle tightly.
He swung his blade, sending the stump into the air. It crashed into the face of another savage, obscuring her view for a moment. Actually, that stump was the last thing that the savage saw in her life. Soon, her head fell to the ground, and Hadjar threw her body at the opponents chasing them. They fell to the ground after another attack, and remained there forever – Nero had used his ‘Giant’ technique.
A giant palm made of energy, with swords instead of fingers, had nailed at least a dozen savages to the ground at once.
“Save your energy!” Hadjar ordered while dismembering a foe.
“I know, I know,” Nero growled.
They couldn't constantly use their Techniques and were therefore forced to save energy so they could strengthen their own bodies.
Finally, they reached the cannons. The savages, upon seeing the two demons of the underworld burst through the ranks of the cannons' defenders with ease, abandoned their posts and fled in terror.
Fifteen cannons had been left without any protection or gunners.
“Blow them up!” Nero cried out, holding back the enemy’s onslaught alone.
The cannons had been positioned on a small hill that had only one path leading up to it. The only other approaches were covered in grass made slick with blood, rendering it impassable, and so Nero was holding almost a couple of hundred opponents back quite successfully. They were forced to line up and could not attack him in groups of more than two or three people at a time.
Hadjar looked to the west. The high siege towers were already moving forward, threatening the walls of the fort.
The hill for which the bloodiest battle was being fought had been ruined. One of the traps the engineers had set up had worked as it should have, sending several thousand savages to the plain. Alas, hundreds of defenders had joined them in death.
The ‘Fire water’ was burning, forcing the enemy riders to separate into smaller groups. Helion's cavalry was fighting them with all their might.
The cannons thundered from atop the walls of the Fort, their flashes blooming like crimson flowers in the night. Because of the flames, soot, and constant cannon fire, the sky was covered with black clouds. The part of the valley where the sunlight might have come through had already been enveloped by nightfall.
It was only the second hour of the battle.
“Keep them back!” Hadjar cried out.
He sheathed his sword and, gasping for air, turned each of the cannons toward the west. As he loaded the cannonballs, he watched Nero, who didn't seem to be encountering much resistance from the enemy. Practitioners at the Bodily Nodes level, and especially at the initial stages, posed as much of a threat to them as mosquitoes did. They were annoying, they could bite them, but they weren’t actually dangerous.
Ten minutes later, fifteen cannons fired. Fifteen cannonballs flew across the sky and struck the other gunnery hill. It was torn apart, chunks of earth flying into the air, and the metallic debris of the blown up cannons rained down on the fleeing crews.
Filling ‘his’ cannons with gunpowder, Hadjar ignited the wicks on the demolition charges.
He joined Nero and they rushed into the enemy ranks. Two minutes later, after exchanging tired glances, they collapsed to the ground, hiding underneath the corpses of their enemies and the bodies of those who were already bleeding to death.
Protected by this improvised shield, they waited for the explosion. The cries of the wounded and those who had been burned alive filled the air around them.
Getting out from under the bodies, they looked around. The battle had moved farther west, to where the siege towers had already been deployed.
General Leen's army had diminished noticeably, but the horde of nomads was still spread out over almost the entire visible space.
“Damn it…”
Nero pulled off his helmet, which was a clear sign of how disturbed he was.
Winged, humanoid creatures were flying up from the hills. They were clutching spears and flammable barrels in their hands and paws, their slave collars plainly visible. Some savages flew by them, riding some winged raptors.
“That's why they needed those creatures,” Hadjar exhaled, wiping his own and other people's blood off his face.
“Damn Lasсanian,” Nero took hold of his sword with his other hand and turned to Hadjar. “Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”
There, in the east, monsters had joined the savages’ ranks. The monsters that were in the sky attacked the army with ‘bombs’ and killed the gunners and archers at the walls of the Fort with spears. But there were other monsters - huge creatures, crawling on the ground. Something like small catapults had been hoisted on their backs. Encased in armor, they were easily trampling General Leen's army. And giants with faces akin to sea creatures followed after them.
They were also wearing armor, their giant fangs bared. They could send several soldiers to the other world with just one sweep of their paws. Streams of water burst from their mouths with a roar and cut through people as if they were sharp blades.
“As always, buddy,” Hadjar nodded. “As always.”
They ran, and, pushing off the pile of bodies, soared into the air. Clinging to the paws of the monster flying over them, they jumped on its back.
Both Nero and Hadjar raised their swords over the nomad who was guiding the beast. They beheaded him so swiftly it seemed like he hadn’t noticed a thing.
“How do we control this creature?” Nero yelled while grabbing the reins of the flying raptor.
Chapter 68
In the end, directing the monster was a process similar to ‘steering a horse’. Nero commanded the creature, and Hadjar operated some kind of a huge, automatic crossbow. It had about a hundred short bolts in its ‘cassette’. By turning the wooden handle, Hadjar launched one dart after another.
Together, they flew over the battlefield, soaring through the sky. Every one of Hadjar's shots found its target. He was not a prodigy marksman, and indeed - he looked more like a drunken jester than a warrior with a bow in his hands. But with the help of the neural network, which told him when and how to shoot, he was a real sniper of the skies.
Each dart would send the other winged creatures crashing down.
“Great shot, Hadj!” Nero tried to shout out, despite the roaring wind.
The winged humanoid hadn’t had time to drop the barrel full of the combustible mixture. Rather, the creature and the barrel both fell right into the midst of the savages' horse archers. Hadjar and Nero cheered triumphantly, but their reign over the heavens couldn’t last for long.
After a couple of minutes, two reptiles were on their tail. Darts whistled past their heads. And even if Hadjar wasn't a natural born marksman, Nero seemed like he’d been a pilot in his past life in Hadjar's old world.
“Hold on,” he shouted to his friend and began to perform a sharp turn.
They weaved through the sky, dodging the projectiles fired by their pursuers. Explosive barrels hit the ground repeatedly. Too many creatures with bombs were still in the sky.
As they made a sharp turn, Hadjar managed to spot Lian, the head of the archers. She was bloodied and barely standing on the wall. Actually, she’d braced two short spears on the parapet floor and was leaning on their handles to stay upright.
She gave an order and a cloud of arrows flew into the sky. They mostly struck warriors. The savages or the Lidish – that distinction wasn't very important right now. The archers fired indiscriminately. But some o
f them also managed to bring down the winged creatures in the sky.
“We won’t last much longer!” Nero shouted when two more nomads on winged reptiles joined their pursuers.
“Fly down!”
“Down where? Only the devil knows what's going on around here!”
Hadjar crawled over to his friend and pointed at one of the monsters. It was swinging its scaly paws. The claws, which were covered in thick, sturdy membranes, gutted horses and people alike. The streams of water escaping from its mouth left deep grooves in the ground as they sliced through everything.
“Over there,” Hadjar said.
“You're crazy,” Nero said, but still slapped the reptile's head with the reins.
He went into a steep dive. Their pursuers sped up behind them. They probably thought that the reptile they were pursuing would come out of its vertical fall at the last moment. That’s what they believed would happen and so they waited for it. But the reptile crashed into the monster's back head on, and two silhouettes jumped off at the very last moment.
The savages failed to react quickly enough and all the four-winged monsters slammed into the nomadic cavalry.
“It’s so nice to be back on the ground,” Nero exhaled, holding his sword casually as he relished the feeling.
“There's the second one!” Hadjar shouted.
And so they rushed toward the nearest monster. It was about ten yards away. They once again cut their way through the enemy. But this time, they were on foot, fighting through the ranks of the cavalry, which was engaged in battle. The hooves of horses struck out like hammers, passing mere inches in front of their faces, and the spears and long broadswords fell like guillotine blades all around them.
Hadjar pulled someone off their horse, but instead of climbing on it, he only chopped off its legs and then pushed it with all his strength. And he was a lot stronger than he looked. With a wild neigh, the horse flew forward and collapsed on top of several horsemen. They stumbled and fell, buried under a pile of bodies.
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