Chapter 99: The Valley Rescue Battle

I don’t know how to describe the soldiers stubbornly defending the fortress wall. Beautiful words like “brave” and “tenacious” were no longer enough to describe the deeds they had accomplished. They had pushed what a soldier could do to the absolute limit, stopping the Cretans’ waves of attack at their feet again and again despite lacking the necessary defensive tools. Although some of them could barely stand, stumbling even when they walked, as long as they were still alive, as long as they still had weapons in their hands, they were opponents not to be underestimated. It seemed that what flowed through their veins was no longer human blood, but a pure passion for battle.

Just as they shouted with their mouths: they were right there, not retreating half a step. Who said Delanmaya had fallen? As long as they were still there, the land beneath their feet was still that loyal land bearing the name of Delanmaya.

In the chaos of battle, a Cretan officer broke through the wall and lunged at Colonel Pekra, swinging his war blade.

Colonel Pekra didn’t even glance at him. He still stood there, leaning on his sword, like a lifeless statue.

A flash of blade light sliced through the air, and a fountain of blood sprayed from Colonel Pekra’s left arm. The Cretan officer who had attacked him paid for that strike with his life—four or five spears pierced his chest at the same time, stopping his breath.

Several officers tried to move the Colonel away from the fighting, but the stubborn, weakened middle-aged man shouted them back:

“Where would you have me go? Behind me lies the last land of Delanmaya. I am staying right here, and I’m not going anywhere…”

“I am staying right here!” The elderly Colonel struggled to his feet, his face pale from blood loss and pain. He raised his gleaming sword high. This sword, which could only serve a decorative purpose, now looked dazzlingly brilliant, not dimming the reputation of a truly brave soldier in the slightest. Seeing this, who could still say the Colonel didn’t know how to use a weapon? He was using his sword in the most correct way possible: not by thrusting it into the bodies of enemies, but by thrusting it into the hearts of his soldiers, carving out their sense of honor, carving out their patriotic passion. Those struck by this blade wouldn’t feel cowardice—they would only become braver.

Because they were right there, on that last patch of their homeland!

For these soldiers, this battle was unimaginably hard. They were using their own willpower to resist an endless tide of steel, and they couldn’t see the slightest shadow of victory. No one knew we were coming. For these soldiers, they were fighting a battle they were destined to lose. All they could do was make this land remain under the name of their homeland for a little longer, a little bit longer.

These people were truly fighting with the determination to die. So they faithfully kept their promise—they would rather die than retreat half a step.

Equally hard were we, on the hillside. Watching friends suffer right before our eyes was not a comforting thing. When I witnessed the Colonel getting wounded, I bit my lip hard enough to break the skin. The salty, sweet, bitter taste spread down my throat, forcefully suppressing the flames churning in my heart. I knew that resting here was our only correct choice, but my heart also told me that if I allowed the Colonel to meet misfortune while we did nothing when we could have helped him, I would never forgive myself.

“Fred…” Red Flame strode forward, attempting to persuade Fred to join the battle for the fourth time. What greeted him were Fred’s eyes, which seemed ready to bleed from glaring so hard.

“Can’t hold it in again, Red Flame?” Fred’s voice remained calm and collected. In front of him, Red Flame’s impulsiveness and fervor dissolved layer by layer. His proudly raised head gradually drooped lower and lower, until finally he shook it:

“No, you’re right. We… should wait a little longer…”

“What a pity, my friend. I thought you were ready. Since you still need to rest, it seems I’ll have to lead the attack alone…” Fred smiled with more than a little mockery, but the hand gripping his sword was clenched tight—there was no hint of joking about it.

“…It’s not just you, brave friend. I can’t stand it any longer either!”

Hearing this, Red Flame’s eyes lit up. Then he spun around joyfully and shouted: “Mount up! Everyone mount up! Charge formation! Prepare to attack…”

When the three thousand Magic Knights, shining with a mysterious light, thundered down the hillside with battle cries, time seemed to stop. The previously chaotic battlefield fell into an eerie silence. The Cretans who were attacking stared in shock at us—these uninvited guests on the battlefield—unable even to react in defense in time, as if they couldn’t understand where this powerful enemy had come from.

They missed not just their one chance to react, but their lives as well.

I had never tried charging down a hillside at such speed. Of that moment, the only thing I still remembered was the bitter winter wind scraping across my face like blades, making me believe it was capable of slicing open my skin and leaving wounds behind. The numbing cold air rushed past my eyes, as if it were a solidified substance—visible and touchable. It washed over my armor, over my skin, over my muscles, and seeped straight into my bones. I had almost lost all feeling—my sword hand was completely numb and stiff, unable to feel the weight of the longsword in it at all.

At that moment, I almost felt like I had dissolved and melted away, becoming part of this biting wind. Yes, I was the wind—a fierce metallic tempest, mercilessly swirling toward the enemies ahead of me.

A tall Cretan rider tried to stop me. He swung a massive sword almost as wide as two palms to face me, hoping to use his strength to overpower my speed.

He was brave, he was powerful. Perhaps he could stop any opponent in front of him—but he could not stop us.

Who can stop the wind?

I drifted past him lightly, whipping up a crimson storm around his neck. Perhaps the air rushing past my ears was interfering with my eardrums, but I seemed to hear a sharp whistling from beneath his spurting blood—as if his life was desperately squeezing out of that torn wound, squeezing and squeezing without stop…

His fresh, wet blood sprayed onto my body, seeping through the gaps in my armor onto my skin—especially my hands, which felt the dampness almost instantly. The heat carried in the blood warmed my fingers that had gone stiff from the cold. They tingled—it felt good. This warmth was so strange to me, wrapped as I was in the icy wind, that I instantly came to love it.

Almost out of an instinctive pursuit of warmth, I found one new source of blood spray after another before the last one could turn cold again. Great quantities of blood splashed over my body, helping me drive away the chill of deep winter. Joints, muscles, skin… I gradually warmed up, my body that had been stiff with cold becoming soft and supple again. But my reason made me loathe this feeling—loathe this bloody warmth bought with the lives of my own kind.

“Kill!” At this moment, I seemed capable of shouting only that one word. The voice didn’t come from my throat—it came from my heart, from the bloodthirsty, bestial part of my instinct.

Beside me, my comrades were doing the same thing I was—or rather, they were doing it even more excessively. Red Flame charged at the front, his twin sharp blades delivering death’s invitations ahead of schedule. His mount mercilessly trampled the remains of enemies who had died by his hand, as if treading on soft fresh mud after an early spring rain, splashing up streaks of flesh and gore. Kelsey and Eliot followed closely behind. In the eyes of these two beautiful women, you couldn’t see anything other than a thirst for slaughter.

I couldn’t describe how brutal this battle was. All I knew was that the entire battlefield had become steaming hot, like a pot of burning-hot mashed potatoes just set on the dinner table.

I wish it really had been a pot of red, steaming-hot fresh mashed potatoes.

“Destroy the catapults!” If there was one person who could keep a clear head during this frenzied slaughter, it was Fred. He calmly made the decision, shouted the order, and charged toward the formation of these gigantic machines without a pause. With a crisp “crack!” sound, the ropes on one catapult were severed in two by Fred’s sharp war blade “Ink Shadow.” The tray, already piled high with rocks, lost its securing mechanism and crashed down, smashing the huge wheeled base beneath it amid the shocked cries of the Cretan soldiers operating it. Then Fred’s blade pointed at the second one. In the blink of an eye, it met the same calamity as its unlucky companion. We followed behind Fred, copying his method, and destroyed the Cretans’ large-scale ranged siege weapons in the shortest possible time. These giants had earth-shaking power when far from their targets, but when enemies got close, they were so fragile—just cutting one rope was enough to completely paralyze them.

Our surprise attack achieved the intended effect. The Cretans who had already climbed onto the wall lost the powerful support of the catapults. Seeing their main camp under attack, they panicked and no longer had any heart to fight. Meanwhile, the defenders on the wall revived in spirit at our appearance. They shouted at the top of their lungs, driving their weapons into enemy chests again and again, then kicking them off the wall.

“Right here! For the last piece of our homeland, we will never retreat!” The Colonel’s voice was already hoarse and raspy, but through the noisy battlefield, I could still hear his impassioned shouts. He must have recognized who had come to rescue him at the critical moment, because he was so excited he seemed beside himself, uncontrollably waving his sword and shouting. I was even a little worried that he might, in his excitement, throw himself into the tangled melee to display his bravery—with his level of martial skill, that wouldn’t have been much different from walking to his death.

After feeble resistance, the Cretans on the wall were driven down from it. In truth, they had already touched the fruit of victory—they only needed a little more strength to pluck it from the branch. But the panic in their hearts made them miss that honor forever. The defenders on the wall let out excited shouts. What they expressed was the joy of narrowly escaping death.

The crisis on the wall had passed, but we, at this moment, had run into a huge predicament:

After completely destroying the Cretans’ catapults, we found ourselves surrounded. After recovering from the shock of the surprise attack, the commander of the Cretan army displayed the quality expected of a general. He completely gave up on trying to save the catapult positions. Instead, he reorganized his own formations in the shortest time, sealing the breach we had carved into them, and then directed his army to gradually close in around us at a slow, oppressive pace, with us at the center.

I didn’t know who the enemy commander was. Although my experience wasn’t deep, I could still tell he was definitely not some obscure, nameless general. Amid the sudden changes on the battlefield, he quickly made the most correct trade-off, making the elimination of our strange and powerful cavalry his top priority and decisively abandoning a large number of extremely valuable siege machines. This kind of decisiveness alone was far beyond what an ordinary general could achieve. He truly had found the most effective way to deal with us: trap us, minimize our room to move as much as possible, and after stripping away our most powerful weapon—speed—overwhelm us with the simplest and most effective tactic: a human wave.

Fortunately, in order to maintain their formation, the encirclement didn’t close in very quickly. This gave us our last chance…

“Target: the valley! Full charge!” Seeing that our path back was sealed off, Fred didn’t hesitate for a moment. He took the lead and charged toward the valley pass. His body leaned slightly forward, his originally fair complexion showing a ruddy glow. His war blade was raised high at an upward angle, like a black war banner guiding the direction of our advance.

That’s right—this was our only chance. The Cretan general had not underestimated our striking power at all, placing the vast majority of his forces behind us, afraid we might escape. In contrast, the enemies between us and the valley were far fewer, and they were all exhausted troops who had just been through fierce fighting. As long as we seized this last chance and charged into the valley, we could temporarily escape danger, use the tall fortress walls to organize our defense, and wait for Rodrick and the others to arrive.

Once our leader chose a direction, what followed was the Star Knights throwing themselves into a full-force charge without hesitation. We were like a gleaming chisel, plunging headfirst into the resilient formations of the Cretans, squeezing out streams of red liquid from them like a juice press, letting them freeze into glittering ice crystals in the cold wind. It seemed we were paving a road with our blades and hooves—a sinister road made of scarlet crystals, leading to the realm of the dead.

Our choice was correct. The enemy general truly hadn’t expected that, surrounded as we were, we wouldn’t consider fleeing the battlefield at all, but instead chose the besieged pass. Perhaps he had considered this possibility, but didn’t think that adding a few thousand cavalrymen to this pass in the middle of an encirclement would change its fate of falling.

On my right, a rider fiercely ran his opponent through with his spear. Then, unable to hold back his heroic pride, he let out a loud shout. At that moment, he was extremely imposing, like a truly great warrior blessed by the God of War. The light shining from his armor lit up his eyes—they were brave eyes, in which you couldn’t see defeat, couldn’t see discouragement, couldn’t see death. If someone had told me then what was about to happen, I would never have believed it…

Suddenly, a barbed spear hooked around his waist. Three or four Cretan soldiers pulled together, dragging this brave warrior off his horse.

The rider’s eyes widened in terror. His longsword fell to the ground, and his hands flailed in front of him, trying to keep his balance. But in the end, he couldn’t escape. He fell to the ground, his helmet covering his eyes. He screamed miserably, trying to pull the helmet off, and groped around searching for some weapon to defend himself. The majestic, brave knight from just moments ago vanished without a trace, leaving only a pitiful man destined to walk into death.

Of course, he died. At least ten sharp weapons pierced his body. He lay on the ground, his body curled up from the pain of his final moments, his face tightened with fear—not much different from the opponent he had killed.

Here, on the battlefield, there was no such thing as a “warrior blessed by the gods.” There were only people with bad luck, and people with the worst luck imaginable.

We seemed to be a group of people with the worst luck imaginable. The dense Cretan formations were like layered cloth, absorbing our charge layer by layer. We spurred our mounts without stopping, but couldn’t stop them from slowing down. Through one layer of spear formations, then another layer of shield bearers, breaking through a defensive line of longswords and shortswords—finally, we came to a halt.

Everyone knew that a cavalryman who couldn’t charge wasn’t a real cavalryman.

The Cretans’ formation wriggled forward and wrapped around us, completely blocking the way ahead. Not only that, there was no room to retreat behind us either. The Mages mixed in among our troops no longer cast buffs on the sword-wielding Knights; instead, they selectively used offensive magic at close range. They indeed caused considerable casualties, but it wasn’t enough to change our trapped situation.

We were like a nail hammered deep into a tough oak tree, unable to be pulled out again.

As the enemy formation wriggled, I could feel our own formation breaking apart. Tens of thousands of Cretans—whether deliberately, or simply because the frenzy of battle made it impossible for them to keep a good formation—tore and twisted our charge formation into a huge S-shape. The Mages inside the cavalry formation were exposed. Without any effective protection, they became the Cretans’ first-choice targets. We could only watch helplessly as these capable comrades died at the enemy’s hands, with no way to help them at all.

“Ah…” In the chaos, I heard a miserable scream. Following the sound, not far from me, a figure that seemed to be Poirot fell from his horse and was instantly torn into pieces of various sizes.

“Poirot!” I shouted in despair, mustering all my strength, trying to push my way to where that body had fallen. But the enemy’s encirclement made it almost impossible for me to move. If not for the many spells still enhancing me, I believed I would have fallen to the ground long ago.

“Poirot, is that you?” I was so anxious I was almost crying. I couldn’t believe that our Warlock friend had died so miserably here. He had been through so many hardships and finally found the love of his life—how could he just fall silently on this unfamiliar battlefield? He was such a cheerful, lively young man, and more importantly, he was so kind. Perhaps fate had forced him to choose to stay on the battlefield and face our enemies, but after battles, he never gave up a single chance to pray for peace for the dead—whether they were Delanmayans, Cretans, or Winstons.

“Poirot, answer me! Answer me! You can’t just die like this! How am I supposed to tell Eli, how am I supposed to tell her!” My consciousness seemed to be drifting away with my screams. The sword in my hand no longer seemed to be under my control, swaying in front of me so strangely. The combat instincts built over years of training still allowed me to struggle desperately amid the enemy’s pincer attacks, but I knew my life was leaving me. All it would take was one fatal moment of absent-mindedness…

Suddenly, a ferocious face became clear in front of me. The spear in his hand was already pressed against my throat. That ugly face wore a smug smile, as if what he was looking at wasn’t a dying enemy, but a military merit worth mentioning.

Was I going to die now, finally? In my daze, this thought jumped out from somewhere in my mind, occupying all my thinking.

In the next instant, that head burst apart. Red and white fluids mixed together splattered in all directions, carrying the smell of death. A familiar voice sounded in my ear, like a divine oracle from the sky, snapping me back to my senses instantly:

“Do you fucking want to die, Jeff?! Don’t wail my name like you’re at a funeral!”

Then, I saw the weapon that had helped me: a large flail almost dyed purple by blood. Its owner was swinging this mighty killing tool with extraordinary valor, slaughtering our enemies with the darkest disposition of the underground races.

“Eliot, Poirot?!” I shouted joyfully. Our Warlock friend was at that moment sitting right beside me, throwing one beguiling spell after another into the ranks of enemy soldiers, helping his lover of a different race fight.

“I thought you were… you…” A huge surge of happiness seized my chest, making me unable to fully express my feelings.

“Don’t disturb my spellcasting, you bastard!” Poirot shouted at me irritably. “Don’t underestimate me. I won’t die here! Don’t talk about tens of thousands—even hundreds of thousands, millions, I still won’t die here! I’m the greatest Warlock, Poirot Jonas, a man born for magic and love…” Perhaps because he had overused his spells, he coughed up a small mouthful of blood, but he still gripped his staff tightly and glared fiercely at the enemies surrounding his wife. “…If you little bartender want to die, go ahead and die! But I have to live!”

A strange force exploded in my right arm, making me feel restless if I didn’t swing it with all my might. Something—whether it was called self-respect or a sense of honor—goaded me, and I couldn’t help but let out a great shout.

“I won’t die here either…” I charged to the Dark Elf’s side, sharing the attacks coming from three directions with her.

“I’m the greatest bartender…” I blocked a sword.

“You’re definitely going to die before I do!” I swung back with a fierce slash, and another departed soul left this world. Eliot, on horseback beside me, shot me a glare during a brief lull in the fighting. Only then did I remember that cursing a husband in front of his wife was not a wise thing to do.

“Haha, whoever dies here is a coward!” Seeing that the spells on me were gradually wearing off, Poirot raised his hand and shot a beam of white light at me. I immediately felt my whole body become light again.

“You’re the one who’s going to lose, lousy mage!” Something grazed my body. I seemed to have been wounded. But…

Who cares? As long as I still had a breath left in me, this battle wasn’t over for me!