Chapter 434 — Closing In

"You should understand—though I go to the battlefield, I would prefer that my presence be merely symbolic," Gao Yang explained. "The Cecil Combat Legions should be capable of taking a fortress on their own. If the assault on a single Boulder Fortress required me to take personal command, then the army's commander ought to apologize to the people of Cecil. And compared with the fighting on Philip's side, I am more interested in the new weapons and new technologies."

Byron could not help turning back to look at the "Calibrator" rainbow cannon mounted on the warship's deck. Beneath the deep night, this devastating new weapon crouched on the deck like a beast of steel, with only a few runes displaying its energy status glowing faintly on its base—like the eyes of a wild animal.

"New weapons, eh... this thing really is something else."

"It's more than just 'something else,'" Gao Yun said with a slight shake of his head, his gaze resting on the rainbow cannon, though his focus seemed fixed somewhere farther still. "Magic-crystal rail cannons and rainbow cannons... they can shatter a noble's castle and tear open a mage's barrier. The value of these two things is far beyond what one or two wars could ever demonstrate."

...

The squads sent to raid the Cecil camp and destroy the magical devices had all failed.

The bad news was delivered to Boulder Fortress, yet the Cecil army kept advancing, and Sir Ma Qi's hair began to thin at a rate visible to the naked eye.

He had a faint sense that his earlier confidence... might have been somewhat excessive.

From the mouths of those southern nobles he had indeed come to recognize the immense threat of the Cecils, and on the basis of available intelligence he had devised a plan capable of weakening the Cecil army—a plan that even ran counter to knightly spirit.

He knew the Cecils' "skyfire explosions" were delivered by some kind of magical device, and that the Cecils needed to establish positions before those devices could unleash their full power. So he sent men to try to destroy the devices before they could be brought into operation.

But those men had run into a unit of exceptional combat strength that seemed purpose-built to counter transcendents, and they were all but annihilated.

Small-unit raids were useless; Sir Ma Qi could only begin sending troops to harass the enemy—his second plan in violation of knightly spirit.

As everyone knew, an army on the march was at its most vulnerable and disordered. A vast host in motion was difficult to command effectively; common soldiers tended to lose their nerve in the face of chaos, while officers could not organize an effective counterattack amid panicking men. Thus a surprise strike against an enemy on the march often produced wondrous results—and precisely because an army thrown into disorder might well bring about the accidental death or injury of nobles, "harassing an army on the march" had always been a forbidden act in traditional noble warfare.

But having already launched a night raid on the enemy camp, Sir Ma Qi no longer cared about breaking one more tenet of knightly spirit.

Yet on the 56th day of the Fire Month, Year 736 of the Ansu calendar, the Cecils still stepped on schedule onto the long, narrow plain south of Boulder Fortress, and of the harassing force Sir Ma Qi had sent out, fewer than half came back alive.

Facing the dumbstruck fortress general, the wounded knight who had led the force described his nightmare of an encounter—

When he led his soldiers in a grand charge at the Cecils, the latter seemed to have seen them coming all along and were already prepared, showing not the slightest panic. Those Cecil soldiers counterattacked with the precision and reflex of machines—first some kind of man-portable "skyfire explosion," then thrown explosives and magical beams fired from arm-cannons, and finally enchanted blades that could cleave through an ordinary soldier's armor with ease. Every one of them was devastatingly powerful.

What was called a surprise assault had, once battle was joined, looked rather like marching willingly to one's own death.

Facts had proven that leaving the fortress to take the offensive—whatever form that offensive might take—was never a good idea.

Sir Ma Qi could only let his heart sink to its lowest depths and quietly wait for the Cecils to arrive.

On the 57th day of the Fire Month, Year 736 of the Anzu calendar, the banners of the Cecils appeared at the far end of the plain opposite Boulder Fortress.

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