Free Web NovelA one-second lull rippled through the refugees.
A white-haired old man raised a trembling hand and caught the food falling from the sky.
He stared blankly at his palm, then hesitantly pushed the scrap of meat into his mouth.
The next instant he jerked his head up.
Behind him the steel monsters stood motionless in the curtain of rain, their muzzles still smoking, yet not a single shell had landed among the crowd.
Ahead, the Supervising Officer who had been swinging his saber and forcing them back now lay in the mud—nothing left but a mangled corpse.
The old man's breathing turned sharp and ragged.
A simple, direct thought reassembled itself in his dulled mind.
The monsters behind them weren't killing the refugees.
They only killed the ones who kept them from eating.
The silence lasted no more than a heartbeat.
Then, with no warning, someone hoarsely shouted:
“That's our grain!”
“Grab it!!!”
The instant the cry exploded, reason was shredded.
Hunger, fear, the humiliation of being herded into a dead end—everything surged at once.
Survival became the only idea.
They no longer feared death; death was already within arm's reach.
So they began to fear something else: being a step too slow.
The roar spread like a lit fuse, detonating through the canyon. In the tower, every trace of color drained from Kyle Remont's face.
The wine cup slipped from his hand, hit the carpet, and spilled dark red across the fibers like a pool of spreading blood.
“Impossible... this can't be happening,” he croaked, voice dry as if scraped from his throat.
Kyle pointed at the distant chaos of firelight and surging bodies, his tone wild.
“It's a full four kilometers from the valley mouth! Through a rainstorm, through tens of thousands... how could he hit a granary hidden in a hollow?
And that shell power—enough to blast open fortifications and turn food into that kind of rain...'
His mind raced, but no experience could explain it.
In every rule of war he knew, catapults couldn't reach this far, and ordinary cannon couldn't achieve such precision. freewēbnoveℓ.com
This wasn't a question of firepower; it was a method of strike beyond range and comprehension, one he had never encountered.
A thought stabbed into his brain without warning.
No—this isn't just about the cannon!
Kyle's breath caught. “How could they know...'
His gaze bored into the burning hollow, voice so low it was almost inaudible.
“How could they know I hid the grain there?”
Pit Three had never appeared on any public supply list.
It was a temporary off-load point he had personally marked, used only for the Supervising Officer's rations.
Camouflage nets, false markers, patrol routes—all swapped at the last minute.
Outsiders couldn't know unless—Kyle's pupils contracted to pinpoints.
All the anomalies he'd forcibly suppressed over the past fortnight surged up at once.
Supply convoys had been intercepted with pinpoint accuracy.
Patrol gaps had been exploited to the second.
Every Northern move had looked as if they had read his deployment in advance.
“There's a traitor...”
The words had echoed in his skull for half a month, and now a chill shot up his spine.
He didn't even know whose shadow those eyes watched from.
Fear finally pierced his reason.
Kyle watched helplessly as everything he'd carefully built began to collapse.
The human wall he prided himself on had never even engaged; two shells had turned it into a fuse that burned straight back at him.
These commoners, who normally dared not look a knight in the eye, now hurled themselves like beasts at the end of their tether, clawing and biting at the Supervising Troops.
By every rule, this shouldn't be possible.
A Supervising Knight burned with battle aura; he was a trained Formal Knight who could drop thirty commoners in open combat, let alone starving wretches who hadn't eaten in three days and could barely stand.
But battle aura meant nothing now—because the charge wasn't a handful of men, it was a black tide of bodies.
One knight roared and speared a refugee through the chest, but in the next instant a dozen more dragged him from his horse.
His aura flared, then vanished beneath the swarm.
For a sodden sack of flour behind him, the armored body was trampled into the mud with no chance to struggle.
He wasn't the only one.
People ignored the blades. Some were run through, bodies still upright as the next rank stepped over them; others lost an arm yet kept clawing at a knight's greave with the remaining hand.
The entire Supervising Line collapsed in minutes.
Either a crossbow bolt from Red Tide's position found its mark before contact, or the black tide simply drowned them, rendering aura and armor meaningless.
“Mad... all of them mad...” Kyle's teeth chattered.
The Wall of Sighs he had built with his own hands had fallen—
—and fallen straight toward him.
Watching the flood surge toward the granaries—and toward Grey Rock Fortress's flank—
Kyle's terror cooled into cold, pure venom.
“If you want to eat...” he ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) rasped, voice low and shrill, “then eat in hell.”
He spun, snatching an alchemical flare gun from the weapon rack.
His hands shook with excitement on the edge of collapse, like a gambler fondling his last chip after losing everything.
He still had a card to play—five tons of blackfire demon explosive.
Blow the cliff, and millions of tons of rock would avalanche down, burying the rioting mob and Louis Calvin's vanguard together in the canyon.
Kyle rushed onto the terrace.
Rain slammed into his face; wind roared in his ears.
He jerked the trigger toward the pitch-black sky.
Bang—!!
A black signal flare shrieked upward and bloomed into a dense plume of smoke against the night rain.
It was the pre-arranged signal for annihilation.
“Blow it!” he screamed toward the left-hand cliff, voice tearing his throat. “Bury them all!”
He stared fixedly at Eagle Beak Rock.
In his mind the mountain should already be splitting, fire blazing skyward, boulders raining down to choke the entire canyon.
He held his breath.
One second.
Only the sound of rain.
Two seconds.
Thunder rolled in the distance.
Five seconds.
Nothing.
Ten seconds.
The cliff still loomed in the darkness, silent and indifferent, a giant watching from on high.
No fire, no blast,
not even a pebble fell.
Kyle's expression froze.
He snapped the signal-pistol like a madman, but the hammer only clicked on empty chambers.
"Why?!"
An icy chill shot from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.
"Impossible..."
He muttered to himself while his brain raced in frantic, useless circles.
"An alchemical misfire? No! I foresaw tonight's downpour; I had the alchemic fuse cut and replaced with the crudest, most reliable physical primer cord.
Human error? Even less likely! The men on watch are death-sworn I raised from childhood. Their families are in my grip—even at the point of death they'd yank that switch.
"Position exposed?" Kyle shook his head violently. "That's Eagle Beak Rock, a sheer cliff! There's no path up!"
Unless... his thoughts slammed to a halt.
"Besides..." Kyle's voice began to waver, "it was top secret. Apart from me and those few, nobody knows where the detonation point is.
How could Louis know? And how, amid tens of thousands of refugees, could he slip a blade precisely to my throat?
The signal-pistol slipped from Kyle's hand; clutching his head, he staggered back several steps.
At this instant he finally realized something more terrifying than defeat had appeared.
It was a gaze that seemed to be everywhere.
The opponent might be standing in this tower, behind him, watching every arrangement, every adjustment.
The double safeguard he deemed flawless was as fragile as a pane of glass before those eyes.
"Louis..." Kyle's voice quavered, "are you man or ghost?"
...At the summit of Eagle Beak Rock the downpour washed the stone and the five corpses lying upon it.
Thomas stood on the cliff's lip, his cloak snapping in the gale.
He glanced at the human tide surging the wrong way below, then toyed with the thick physical primer cord he had just severed.
Downslope, the granary burst open, sparking brief, wild hope—and at once drew disaster.
The canyon did not clear; on the contrary, tens of thousands of refugees, scrambling for the grain in the left-hand hollow, lost all control like a cauldron upended.
Trampling erupted in the chaos.
The strong clambered over the old and the women; those behind shoved those ahead; some slipped into the mud and were instantly silenced beneath countless feet.
Cries, curses and the dull crack of breaking bones mingled, then were swallowed by the rain.
The main road stayed blocked.
Those who could not squeeze through, the wounded on the ground, and the ones rooted by terror piled layer upon layer.
Louis's vanguard was still barred outside the canyon by this barrier of flesh and panic.
Inside the command vehicle, Reg was almost pressed to the observation slit. "My lord! At this rate they'll trample half of themselves to death—and the road still won't open!"
Louis did not answer at once.
Through the glass blurred by rain he watched the surging mass: snatching, screaming, falling, trampled—repeat.
"It's inevitable," he said quietly, yet clearly. "The chaos isn't from hunger; it's because no awe has been forged in this crowd."
Louis turned, his gaze settling on Reg. "Then help them forge it."
He raised his hand without hesitation. "Transmit the order: all headlights on, horns blaring, entire army advance at steady speed."
Commands were repeated down the line.
BWAAAM—!!!
Scores of steam-tanks sounded their horns in unison.
The note wasn't shrill; it was a dull roar that seemed squeezed from inside the mountain, rolling along the canyon.
Dazzling searchlights snapped on, thick beams cutting through the rain like cold hard blades slashing into the mob.
The crowd reacted by instinct.
When that low thunder approached from behind and the vibration of treads grinding mud came through the ground, the lust for food was crushed by a more primal fear.
They needed no understanding of orders—only to know that staying in the way meant being ground to paste.
The mass that had jammed the road began to press toward the cliff walls on either side.
Even where no space remained, they forced it with shoulders, ribs, bodies.
The tanks advanced slowly, but never stopped.
Some knelt in the mud, cramming handfuls of sodden grain into their mouths; others were flattened face-first against cold stone, gasping.
Louis opened the window; cold wind and rain poured in.
He saw a child knocked down by the crowd, body trampled again and again, yet still clutching a black crust of bread.
Louis gave no order to halt.
Those who could not be saved—he would save the ones still alive.
"The medical corps will follow at once," he commanded, voice carrying through wind and rain. "Set up pots near the granary. Tell them: looting is useless. Anyone wanting soup—kneel in lines along both sides of the road."
The order passed; soon a knight's voice overrode the rain.
"Kneel and queue!"
"The lord grants hot soup!"
"Run out of line—die!"
The words "hot soup" provoked a swifter reaction than steel.
Those still scrabbling in the mud for raw flour faltered.
For the sake of survival, for a mouthful of broth that would not choke them, the chaos began to subside.
The crowd no longer surged forward; trembling, it drew back to the sides.
One after another, they knelt.
Only kneeling showed enough submission to avoid the treads, to be marked down for soup.
The trampling ceased; shouts faded to stifled gasps.
The main road of Blackstone Canyon was finally open.
Down the centre rolled Louis's steel tide, advancing steadily beneath lights and horns.
Along both sides refugees knelt in countless rows, caked in mud, clutching half-swallowed raw flour, heads tilted to watch the army roll past.
Albert stood by the window, speechless; he had fought wars all his life and never seen such a sight.
Tens of thousands had parted like worshippers, kneeling to open the way.
"This..." Albert swallowed, unable to name the scene.
The Red Tide marched through that corridor of kneeling flesh and emerged from the canyon unscathed.
Behind them the logistics troops set up field-kettles.
White steam rose into the rain, mingling with the scent of meat.
That single plume of cooking-smoke gathered the last scrap of public goodwill left in Grey Rock Province.
"Don't stop! Full speed ahead!" Louis's gaze crossed the valley to the lone Grey Rock Fortress standing in the distance.
