Chapter 888: Heavenly Divine Retribution
Translator: TransN Editor: TransN
With a clicking sound, the bolt loosened. Two bombs, each as heavy as Nightingale, slid out of the bomb carrier and fell toward the crowd due to their inertia.
After leaving the East Wind, the bombs instantly regained their weight while maintaining their high speed. This change gave them great momentum. As they sailed through the air, they made a friction sound which was like a strange whistle or the howling sound made by a gust of wind blowing through a cave. People on the ground simultaneously looked up at this incredible scene.
At this moment, the nobles of the Kingdom of Dawn felt relieved.
They thought these two things falling from the sky were nothing compared to the big flying monster. In their view, though these things dropping from that height were able to crush anything they hit on the ground, they could, at most, kill three or four unlucky guys.
They believed this would not be a problem for such a large army. Hearing Appen's call for an expedition to the west, both great nobles such as dukes and lesser nobles like the new knights had been actively preparing their horses and eagerly recruited servants. Numerous people joined this expedition, hoping to get a share of the profits from the church that was already on the verge of collapsing.
Having an army of over 10,000 people, the nobles would not care at all if serval guys or even 30 to 40 people got killed by the things falling from the sky.
They still thought of the formidable Devilbeast as a genuine threat. Once it dived into the crowd to bite and stomp, it would easily slaughter over 100 people, let alone the casualties and loss that would occur when the panicked serfs began to run away. Given that, they firmly believed that as long as the monster did not land, they did not need to worry too much.
They also reckoned that the enemies in the sky, who were probably witches, did not have enough courage to openly fight against the army of the Kingdom of Dawn. Since they came here to rob the church of its treasures, all the nobles of the Kingdom of Dawn wore God's Stones of Retaliation and brought many weapons specially made to fight witches.
At this moment, many knights put down their longbows and Magic Stone arrows and bet with each other on whose soldiers would be hit by the black stones.
No one on the ground moved out of position. No one lied down to cover themselves from the coming explosion. They just watched the two bombs flying towards them like two arrows and kept advancing steadily.
A moment later, two scarlet flames broke out in the middle of the stream of people!
People within the bombs' landing zones were instantly turned to ash. The heated air rapidly expanded, forming hot, strong blast. Everyone that bumped into it felt as if they had hit a steel wall and quickly got blown to smithereens. Soon, broken limbs and internal organs were littered everywhere.
The blast quickly died down and could not tear apart people that were 100 steps away from the center of impact, but this explosion was not the only destructive thing.
The Kingdom of Dawn's troops could hardly find any shelter, since unlike the king's city, this area connecting the Kingdom of Dawn and the old Holy City was a vast and open plain. When the bombs exploded, the defenseless people became easy targets for the explosion waves, debris and numerous iron balls shot out of the shells. They traveled through the crowd at a speed several times faster than that of the sound. Each iron ball could pierce through a dozen of people before it stopped, and the steel shell fragments were even more destructive.
Due to the terrain advantage, the bombs caused damage over a wide area.
The witches in the sky saw the black smoke rise in a flash and form something like a high wall, which choked off the movement of the stream of people on the ground.
Before the nobles of the Kingdom of Dawn recovered from the shock, Lightning had already ascended to the highest point possible, ready for the second round of diving.
"The East Wind, launch the second attack!"
Maggie immediately closed her wings and followed closely behind the little girl, falling all the way from the sky with a loud howl.
"Ow ow ow—!"
They had loaded four bombs on each side of the bomb carrier, so they could choose to carry out four bombing raids or drop all eight bombs at once. In order to achieve the best effect, Lightning intended to dive four times to throw bombs into the middle and the rear parts of the stream of people.
Beyond her expectations, during the third round of attack, the army of the Kingdom of Dawn totally collapsed.
For those who were still alive, these explosions were more like divine retribution coming from heaven. Places struck by god's thunder were all scorched and littered with corpses. Neither the serfs without protective clothing nor the fully armored knights could escape from these hellish, raging flames. This seemingly endless catastrophe made them feel desperate, and the deafening explosion noises and screams of the seriously wounded crushed their spirit.
The biggest crisis for them was that in this inconceivable series of attacks, they could do nothing except praying that the black stones would not land near them. They had no chance of hurting the giant flying monster either since it kept hovering or swooping beyond the range of their arrows.
This kind of battle was totally beyond their understanding.
The nobles came for the wealth, but never wanted to risk their own lives in the process. No matter how much money they got from this city, they would not be able to enjoy it if they died here. They could not even carry the wealth back home if all their servants got killed in this attack.
With this thought in mind, they made a swift decision to escape.
Seeing the nobles, who had strictly prohibited the serfs from running away, turn their steeds to flee the battlefield one after another, the whole army quickly slid into chaos. As more and more people joined the fleeing knights, the stream of people started to move again, but this time, it was heading in the opposite direction. The people outside the city that had marched orderly in the beginning now stopped entering the city and started to escape in disorder.
The nightmare for the army of the Kingdom of Dawn began at this moment.
When they swarmed to the main road, the First Army's soldiers hiding in the fields on one side of the road calmly pulled their triggers
This was a typical flank attack.
The panicked nobles just wanted to leave this dangerous place as soon as possible and completely forgot about detecting enemies and protecting their flanks. Five squads of the Northern Region's garrison lined up along the road and shot the soldiers of the Kingdom of Dawn with revolving rifles and heavy machine guns. As their targets were within 300 meters, they did not even need to think about accuracy. They just kept firing, trying to shoot out all the bullets in their guns as quickly as possible.
Before sunrise, Eagle Face's troops had already hidden themselves away in the fields where the wheat-straws were waist high. With the help of Sylvie, they could hide here without being spotted by the enemy's scouts and remain informed about the enemies' movements.
Obviously, there was a huge gap in information gathering technology between the two factions.
'Crack!' The moment the first shot rang out, the nobles of the Kingdom of Dawn were astonished to find that they were ambushed by some enemy forces hiding in the fields. If this had happened when they had been marching toward the city, they would have concentrated their forces to fight back. However, now the situation was totally out of control. The soldiers of the Kingdom of Dawn were hurriedly running for their lives and wishing that they could grow extra legs to rapidly move as far away from the bullets as possible. The nobles sent their mounts rampaging through the crowd, squandering their subjects' lives.
The wide road turned into an avenue of death.