Free Web NovelChapter 744: The Battle of Nikomedia (12)
Then, a dismounted cavalryman noticed the few siege tunnels once dug to sabotage the Rumelian walls—long, narrow pits carved for demolition. Now abandoned and half-collapsed, they were just deep and wide enough to serve as makeshift shelter. Without delay, the Janissaries guided the Sultan down into one. The tunnel, once filled with slaves and peasants digging through earth and stone, was now crammed with nobles—Pashas, Beys, and the Sultan himself—pressed shoulder to shoulder, drenched in mud, sweat, and blood, their eyes hollow and unblinking.
The Sultan said nothing. He wished to ask, how many men have we lost? Yet the words withered on his lips, for he knew the answer no longer mattered.
Word spread quickly. One by one, soldiers realised their Sultan was within the tunnel. Like moths to a flame, they gathered, pressing into the narrow passage, desperate for refuge from the relentless rain.
The Janissaries tried to hold them back, scolding and shouting—but the Sultan raised his hand.
"I am your Sultan! It is my duty to care for you. Come inside, my brothers and sons."
The men obeyed, filing in. The Sultan sat by the entrance, nodding gently at each soldier who passed. Some bowed, others did not. The Sultan no longer cared.
The rain showed no sign of ceasing.
When no more came, he turned and found the nobles inside staring at him, tense and silent. Forcing a smile, he spread his arms wide.
"Do not worry, my friends. With your help, we will raise a new army, learn from our mistakes, and return stronger than ever!"
The nobles, hiding their true thoughts, answered in kind. One after another, they swore they still held tens of thousands in reserve. They promised Anatolia would not fall. They swore the Rumelians would never know peace until they were driven back across the sea. freewebnovel.cσ๓
Slowly, a faint spark of morale flickered in the darkness. ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com
But then, a Janissary near the Sultan felt something strike his cheek. He wiped it away—mud. Looking down, he saw a small puddle forming beneath his boots. Uneasy, he raised his torch.
Water seeped steadily from the tunnel walls. A soft cracking echoed above.
The Janissary frowned, dread stirring in his chest. Still uncertain, he turned to alert his commander.
But after only a few steps, the noises above grew sharper. Soil began to rain down on helmets, water dripping faster. Alarm surged through him. He spun and bellowed toward the Sultan, his voice booming through the tunnel:
"Your Majesty! Flee! Something is wrong in here!"
The Sultan, in mid-speech, turned with a frown—and what he saw would never leave his memory. Rainwater burst through the earth. The ceiling gave way in an instant, collapsing before the very Janissary who had shouted. The supports crumpled as though melted, crushing him flat.
At the same time, the collapse tore down more sections, as if the entire tunnel were being sliced apart, each fall sealing the exits tighter, leaving almost no escape.
The Sultan was struck numb, his soul torn apart, as he watched another few hundred men swallowed by the collapsing earth. Before he could move, his guards and nobles lunged forward, dragging their sovereign out of the crumbling tunnel with desperate strength. Behind them came the stampede—soldiers shoving, clawing, trampling one another in blind terror as the roar of the collapsing shafts grew louder than thunder. Men screamed, cursed, wept, their cries cut short as bodies were crushed underfoot or buried alive by falling debris. The chaos claimed more lives even before the soil could.
The Sultan stumbled free, but his mind was gone. He stared ahead, hollow-eyed, lips trembling, as if his soul had fled with the men buried beneath his feet. In the darkness of the tunnels, more and more segments caved in, the supports snapping like brittle twigs, sealing off hundreds inside. The Sultan could no longer see them, yet he knew they were there trapped, clawing desperately at the soil, voices breaking in agony as they begged for air. Hands scraped bloody against unyielding mud, but the earth only drank their efforts, pouring down with rainwater, burying them deeper, deeper, until their cries faded into muffled echoes, and finally into silence. He could not even tell if they had suffocated already or if the silence was only despair.
The storm raged on. The Sultan sank to his knees, water splashing around him, tears streaming down his face only to vanish into the rain. For the first time in his life, he felt utterly broken. He had not been defeated as a youth before the walls of Thessaloniki by Antonius De ’Ricci. He had not faltered when Rumelian lords encroached upon his power, nor when a bomb tore him apart before Nicomedia, nor when Giovanni Junior’s cavalry set fire to his camp. But now, here in the pitiless storm, with his sons of war entombed beneath the mud, he felt crushed defeated not by sword or fire, but by nature itself.
A trembling courtier approached, trying to soothe his shattered sovereign. Clearing his throat, he stammered, "Your Majesty, this is... this is a natural calamity. The ground was scorched for hours, burning hot beneath the fire. When the rains came, the sudden cold—together with the floodwater—it made the earth collapse, even against the strongest supports, it—"
"Just tell me what I must do next!" the Sultan roared, his voice ragged, half-choked with grief, trembling with fury. The courtier faltered, lips pressed tight, for he had no answer.
"Where is that traitor of our faith?" the Sultan demanded suddenly, his voice breaking through the storm like lightning. "Where is he? Bring me his corpse—I will have him torn apart, tortured, crushed until not even God himself will recognise his face!"
The soldiers exchanged uneasy glances. At last, one whispered, "Majesty... I saw the Rumelians seize him in the chaos. They pushed him onto a horse and rode him away..."
The Sultan staggered to his feet, drenched and trembling, his blade flashing out of its scabbard. He swung it wildly into the rain, a desperate roar tearing from his lungs as thunder cracked above. His voice was both command and lament, a howl against fate itself.
"Dig them out!" he bellowed. "All of you—commoner or noble, Janissary or Pasha—I care not! Dig! Dig until your hands bleed! Do not leave a single man beneath this cursed earth!"
The Sultan stumbled to the burial pit, his nails clawing through the sodden earth like a madman, as if sheer desperation might unearth his sons of war. Men rushed to his side, digging with hands, tools, broken blades, but the soil was merciless. The rain slowed, yet no miracle came. At last, the Sultan collapsed into the mud, not merely from weakness but from a spirit broken beyond repair. He lay there like one of the buried, eyes closed, as though his will to rule had been interred with his fallen host.
A few corpses were dragged out—faces pale, lips blue, ghastly masks of suffocation. The rest remained entombed, unseen, lost forever. The army that had once thundered with war cries was now nothing but silence and corpses.
Around the Sultan, the nobles gathered barely two thousand shaken men; the rest had scattered like frightened birds. All knew it was only a matter of time. Once the ground hardened, the Roman cavalry would sweep the field again, and the slaughter would be final.
"Your Majesty, we must go," pleaded the Pashas, voices hoarse with grief. But the Sultan did not stir. He seemed already a corpse. At last, the Janissaries lifted him onto a horse like a lifeless effigy. With hollow eyes and heavy silence, the remnant trudged away through the mire, stripped of hope, their souls as sunken as the bodies left beneath the earth. The Sultan’s proud host had ceased to exist.
In the Roman camp, no trumpets sounded. The soldiers prepared not for another charge, but for their emperor.
Leo dismounted the moment he arrived. He went among his weary soldiers, embracing them, grasping their calloused hands. His tears mingled with theirs. Finally, he seized the soot-streaked hands of Giovanni Junior, drawing him into a fierce embrace.
"I am sorry, my brother," Leo wept. "I came too late, leaving you to face these wolves alone. Yet I have heard of your great victory, how you bent fire itself to our cause. Look at you—scarred, burnt—God knows the torment you endured."
Giovanni bowed on one knee: his voice heavy with grief. "Your Majesty, I bring darker news. General Khalid—may God have mercy—has fallen. His wounds were beyond any cure. We could not save him."
The words struck like a blade to the heart. Leo staggered back, breath stolen, his chest heaving with grief. Of the three great captains who had raised him, taught him to ride, to fight, to lead men into war—two were now gone. Only the aged Helios remained.
The legacies of the old era are slowly fading away, and most of the times, the young Leo here wakes up in nightmares that his generation in their twenties are yet still too young to carry on the weight of the pioneers.
