Chapter 493 — The White Knights' Way of Fighting
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The great gate of the cathedral district came crashing down.
No one knew who had loosed the first roar, but everyone knew that this gate had been forced open by the strength of ordinary people.
Without supernatural power to sustain it, even the gate leading into the cathedral district was nothing more than that.
"Destroy the church!" "Kill the bishop!" "For those children!!"
In that moment the furious crowd seemed to have forgotten the terror of the superhuman, seemed to have forgotten the oppressive weight the Great Cathedral had accumulated over centuries. The White Knights charged at the head of the crowd; behind them the free mercenaries and adventurers gathered from around Karol and Luan formed a second tide; and behind them came farmers and merchants swinging sickles, hoes, walking sticks and pitchforks. The vast crowd poured through that gate like a tide of mud, and the Church knights and soldiers guarding the entrance, few in number, were swallowed by the flood in the very first instant.
This was the first uprising of ordinary people against the superhuman powers. Yet this was, after all, a world in which supernatural force stood utterly above mortals; to send commoners straight against a line held by Church knights would have turned the whole undertaking into a meaningless sacrifice. So the ones charging at the very front were, apart from a few dozen White Knights, the mercenaries and adventurers who had gathered from every region.
These people at least had relatively good equipment, or some measure of supernatural power; by sheer numbers they could now hold their own against the Church knights. Yet they too were a people long controlled and oppressed by the Church, and they too were part of the "common folk."
The newspapers distributed and the broadcasts aired in every region had enraged not only the peasants in the fields but also these people who lived by the blade. They had volunteered to become the first spearhead hurled at the Great Cathedral, and now that spearhead had already crossed the first line of defense in the cathedral district and was pressing on toward the Great Cathedral itself.
Amber and her squad were mixed in among the crowd. As they crossed the plaza of the Lesser Cathedral District, her keen eyes caught the shifting figures at the plaza's edge.
Those were the clergy of the Lesser Cathedral District—they had stripped off their conspicuous priestly vestments and changed into clothes indistinguishable from those of common folk, and they wore strips of white cloth bound around their arms. Running along the plaza, they pointed the crowd toward the roads, faithfully carrying out their duty.
Amber let out a breath. The priests had not only remembered to bring the white strips as markers, but had changed their clothes in advance—a genuinely wise move.
This tide of wrath was bound to sweep the whole cathedral district in a half-uncontrolled state; a furious crowd could scarcely be restrained by reason. Though before the action word had been repeated again and again among the people—'those with white cloth on their arms are allies'—once the fire of rage took hold, gorgeous priestly robes would inevitably stand out far more than a strip of cloth on an arm.
Within a mere ten minutes the crowd had crossed the Lesser Cathedral District, which offered no resistance to speak of, and closed on the circular plaza before the Great Cathedral with almost no destruction or bloodshed.
Roars like mountains and seas, the thunderous din of every kind of weapon and spell, echoed above the city. The Great Cathedral's solemn doors and gorgeous stained-glass windows creaked and groaned with unsettling sounds under wave after wave of noise. A priest in a white robe edged with gold came sprinting into the great cloister; the holy light around him was very dim, and a burn-like scar covered his face—the mark left after a shock hand-cannon had shattered his shield.