Chapter 409 — Nightfall

The fireball's explosion lit the surroundings, and the villagers around Wright fled in panic. Cries of terror rose, and in an instant the situation dissolved into chaos. Then, amid the sudden pandemonium, the Cecil soldiers' shouts rang out: "Civilians into the cellar! Everyone else find cover and face the enemy!"

One after another the attackers emerged from hiding. They kept loosing crossbow bolts at the Cecil soldiers holding up their shields and at the unarmed, panicking civilians; because aiming in the dark was difficult, many bolts went wide. Then they drew all manner of weapons and came charging out from every direction, shouting as they came.

By the flash of the earlier fireball's explosion, Wright glimpsed the attackers in an instant—a pack of desperadoes who looked as wretched as refugees yet wore armor and carried weapons. Some of them even had knights' surcoats and mages' short robes thrown over their bodies. Their faces were caked with mud, their clothes torn and ragged, their bloodshot eyes wholly red. They came charging out shrieking like madmen, and no one could possibly have imagined what glorious and exalted figures they had once been.

They were the routed remnants of the noble coalition—men who had been broken at Gravel Ridge, who had fallen away from their units during the pursuit, who had become outlaws in the wilderness.

Among those howling desperadoes Wright even saw two Church knights in Church surcoats with longswords in hand, and a Holy Light pastor in a tattered priest's robe!

Without hesitation he activated the force shield of his arcane terminal, then drew the melt-split sword that had been issued to him not long ago, and went to meet those bandits turned brigands.

At the same time, intelligence he had heard in recent days surfaced in his mind—

After the noble coalition's defeat, the Church knights and Holy Light pastors mixed in with the coalition had fled alongside it. Many of them had been taken captive by the Cecil forces in the cruel pursuit that followed, while others had become separated from the main body during the flight and luckily escaped the chase. Some of these fled northwest along the byways of the wilderness and hid trembling in the great cathedral of the Radiant Church's southern diocese—for the Cecil army, having only just conquered the Southern Frontier, had not yet found time to trouble that cathedral. Those who failed to cross the wilderness and remained stranded in the war zone along with the other noble soldiers had become brigands.

The Cecil army was still active throughout the Southern Frontier, hunting down the fleeing noble remnants everywhere, and word that "the Duke of Cecil will take the Southern Frontier in hand again" had already spread across the whole southern land. So these noble remnants wandering the wilderness did not dare return to their own domains. The serf soldiers and peasant conscripts among them were all right—common folk to begin with, they need only throw down their weapons and change into ragged clothes to slip easily back to their homes or hide in the countryside. But the extraordinaries—especially extraordinaries of rank and standing... they were still roaming the wilderness even now, and... they were starving.