Free Web NovelChapter 849: Chapter 458: An Infuriating Trap (Part 2)
A coarse fuse extended from the shell of the explosive, converging on the ground behind, forming a unified whole with thorns, blast-proof piles, and fog zones, like a meticulously woven trap waiting for them to enter.
Vance’s palms were sweaty; he saw not an enemy array, but an entire defense system built around children.
The bodies of those children were frail, their faces youthful yet gaunt.
Each of their eyes was open, gray-golden pupils appearing unusually murky in the mist.
Occasionally, one would blink, but it was mechanical, like broken gears idling.
In that moment, Vance’s teeth made a slight yet piercing sound as they clenched; he was furious to the extreme.
He had seen the most tragic piles of corpses in the snowy fields of the Northern Territory and had personally ordered artillery strikes on enemy formations, causing countless casualties.
But all that happened within the rules of war, while this scene before him wasn’t even worthy of being called war.
It was sacrilege, the most complete trampling on humanity.
Vance’s Adam’s apple rolled violently once.
"Sir... let’s find another way around." His voice trembled, not out of weakness, but suppressed to the extreme anger, "Seven hundred meters away. But if the tanks keep advancing..."
As he said this, his gaze never left the binoculars.
"Those are hundreds of children." Vance almost squeezed out the words through clenched teeth, "In the eyes of the heretics, they’re not even considered human, but to our knights..."
Before he finished his sentence, the air around the command car seemed to freeze.
The knights of the Red Tide stood between the armored vehicles and the tanks; no one spoke, but their thoughts were almost in unison.
The knights of the Red Tide could accept death, could accept sacrifice, could even accept failure.
But they could not accept children being used as weapons.
Vance finished the last sentence softly, his voice almost hoarse: "These lunatics... they don’t even see those children as people."
Beside the command car, Legion Commander Gray spoke calmly, "Lord Louis expected something like this to happen long ago."
Gray turned, looking at the artillery position, and gave the order, "Special Shell No. 3, Frost Leaf Bullet, airburst fuse, height fifteen meters."
Vance was stunned for a moment and then his eyes lit up, standing at attention, he responded, "Understood."
Gray raised his hand, "Execute."
"Puff—Puff—Puff—" The position emitted a dull and restrained roar.
The shells left the chamber, tracing a gentle arc.
They didn’t fall on the battlefield but exploded above the children’s heads.
Dark blue cold mist suddenly blossomed in the air, like a torn night curtain, cluster after cluster, quickly spreading across the entire front.
The mist was so dense it couldn’t dissolve, carrying the unique cold scent of the Northern Territory, the smell of mint and wormwood rapidly dispersing in the air.
"The effect is even faster than expected."
Vance lowered the binoculars, looking at the human bombs who had fallen into deep sleep, his expression complex.
This wasn’t a new weapon; as early as the pioneering days of the Red Tide Territory, this blue liquid extracted from the Frost Leaf Vine was merely used as a simple sedative to suppress the rage instinct of the Fire-Scaled Viper.
But Lord Louis keenly perceived its strategic potential to stabilize magic power and cut off spiritual resonance.
Over the past decade, Alchemy Master Hillco had frequently complained about this formula.
As he grumbled, "Great alchemy should not be reduced to a potent sleeping potion," he was nevertheless forced to undergo more than a dozen technical iterations under the lord’s strict orders.
From the initial prototype that could only daze a Furious Rabbit for a few seconds to later versions isolating the Nest’s spiritual pollution, and finally to today’s deep blue No. 5, which could instantly cool the neural centers of thousands through the respiratory system.
This isn’t just a potion; it’s the only antidote Lord Louis offered for this mad war.
Old Hans, hiding in the mill chimney, slowly opened his eyes.
He instinctively tensed his body, waiting for the anticipated explosion and screams.
But nothing happened.
After the cannonade, the world instead fell silent.
The blue mist, like a massive blanket, slowly descended, covering the entire contaminated land.
Hans saw the red-robed priest who had been holding the detonation rope abruptly stop moving.
His hand froze in the air, as if someone had removed all support.
The next second, the priest’s eyes rolled back, and he toppled backward heavily into the mud.
And the children in front fell even faster, piece by piece.
Those human posts, upon contact with the blue mist for a few seconds, seemed to have been switched off.
The once stiff and upright bodies instantly lost strength, heads drooped to chests, and slender shoulders collapsed forward.
The black explosives fell from their arms, rolling into the muddy water.
Hans stared intently at the battlefield, his fingers digging into the brickwork of the flue.
He saw the children’s backs gently heaving; they weren’t dead, just asleep.
The deep blue mist quietly flowed over the battlefield, swallowing all sound, nearly halting the wind. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
At that moment, the whole world seemed to have been put on pause.
Old Hans’s chest inflated and deflated rapidly, a sensation akin to surviving a catastrophe.
"The children made it out alive..." he repeated the words over and over in his heart, as if confirming reality to himself.
The blue mist, like a layer of calming snow, covered over madness, even giving birth to the momentary absurd notion that perhaps this would all really end.
But such a thought lived for less than a single breath. fгeewebnovёl.com
From deep within the mist, the ground suddenly began to tremble dully.
At first, it was a slight shake, akin to a massive creature turning underground.
But in just a few seconds, this tremor became endless thunder.
The echo of tens of thousands of iron boots simultaneously striking the earth.
Old Hans stared through the chimney cracks, pupils contracting sharply.
That heavy, deep blue cold mist was forcibly torn apart.
The Thorn Knights broke through the mist, surging in from all directions.
Their numbers were overwhelming, hundreds, perhaps thousands?
Forming dense phalanxes, they resembled a black tsunami advancing.
Every knight’s armor seemed to have been re-sewn with living thorns, with dark red tendrils emerging from the joints, crawling along shoulders and spines, piercing into the flesh of the warhorses.
Those warhorses lacked skin, only covered in bright red textures of vine thorns, nostrils exhaling not white vapor but yellow smoke laced with a putrid moisture.
This massive army maintained a deathly silence, only the "creaking" of metal friction and root tendrils squeezing.
They advanced from all sides, even including that hypnotically induced children’s minefield.
Those children still slept in the blue mist, heads resting in the muck, clutches of explosives scattered beside them.
Hans had thought the knights would bypass them or at least slow down.
But they didn’t; the front-rank Thorn Knights didn’t even lower their heads.
Their gaze fixated on the distant Red Tide tanks.
To them, the children beneath their feet weren’t lives, not even obstacles.
"Squish—"
It was a chilling, muffled sound.
Like a ripe watermelon smashed by a hammer.
Red and white matter splattered onto the knight’s greaves, quickly absorbed by the writhing roots, leaving not a trace.
Then the second, the third...
"Crunch, crunch, squish..."
Dense sounds of bones shattering, mixed with the rumble of marching, like an accompaniment from hell.
In just a few seconds, a blood-and-gore-filled red carpet had been created.
Hans’s stomach violently churned, a metallic sweetness rising in his throat.
He bit his lip hard, blood flowing into his mouth until his lip was torn.
The mist continued flowing, the Thorn Knights treading on that layer of flesh-and-blood mire, moving faster, like a wall of despair covered in thorns, pressing towards the Red Tide’s position from all directions.
Old Hans curled up in the chimney flue; he no longer wanted to pray, faced with such a spectacle, God was of no use.
He only wanted to see fire, the kind capable of burning all this sin to ashes, with the fiercest flames.
