Chapter 267: The Bombardment

Chapter 267: Chapter 267: The Bombardment

Chapter 267: The Bombardment

The destruction of Bastion Nine did not begin with a deafening roar. It began with a single, highly calculated strike.

BOOM.

A heavy artillery shell arced through the freezing morning air and slammed into the dirt fifty yards short of the outer southern wall. It kicked up a massive geyser of frozen mud and shattered cobblestone, leaving a smoking crater in the trade road.

Then, the battlefield went dead silent.

Ten minutes passed. General Marek’s forces did not charge. They did not shout war cries or beat their weapons against their heavy gray shields. The Capital engineers simply stood their ground.

They consulted their measuring instruments, adjusted their firing angles, and compensated for the morning wind resistance. They calmly recalibrated their heavy runic ballistae.

The patience was the true horror. General Marek was not fighting a war of anger. He was performing a demolition.

CRASH.

The second salvo landed with terrifying perfection. Bastion Nine was a wealthy merchant city. Its outer walls had been built to project financial power and cultural supremacy, not to withstand a mechanized siege.

The massive blocks of polished granite, beautifully carved with golden wheat sheaves and grand trading ships, began to shatter under the kinetic impacts. Heavy slabs of ornamental stone that were never load-bearing peeled away in jagged sheets, raining lethal shrapnel down upon the defenders and exposing the brittle mortar underneath.

On the high parapets, the local Vanguard garrison scrambled in a blind panic to return fire. They hastily triggered their [Barrier Runes] and loaded their own defense batteries.

But their cannons had been forged for parade displays and pirate deterrence. When they fired, their runic payloads exploded harmlessly in the air, falling hundreds of yards short of the Capital lines.

The merchant guns were fundamentally uncalibrated for true warfare. The garrison was shooting at ghosts while Marek’s engineers dismantled their home brick by brick.

Lord Commander Vell did not retreat to a reinforced bunker. He stood on the highest parapet of the crumbling southern gate.

He wore a suit of pristine, heavily enchanted silver armor that had never once been dented in combat. The golden energy of his Valor class leaked violently from his skin, projecting a desperate, burning aura of courage over the terrified soldiers. He stood in the open, fully visible to his men and the enemy army alike, refusing to yield an inch of his pride.

It was a foolish, highly exposed position, but it was not worthless. The Vanguard garrison held the line much longer than they should have. They swallowed their terror and kept reloading their useless cannons because their Lord Commander was standing right where they could see him, anchoring their broken morale.

Standing two paces behind Vell, a tall Vanguard aide with dull brown eyes casually brushed a chip of shattered granite off his shoulder. The clone of Malakor recorded the structural degradation of the wall in total silence.

The disguised creature was perfectly content to let the Lord Commander play the martyr for a few more hours. If the foundation gave way, Vell’s personal guard would forcibly drag him away to the safety of the central spire. The script was already written.

Miles away, Draven Mordis remained in the eastern quarter.

He stood on the roof of a brick warehouse, his dark coat blowing in the wind as he watched the distant plumes of gray smoke rising over the southern gates. He did not move to reinforce the Vanguard. He did not send his Warlord or his Cryo-Berserker to the front lines.

’The primary defensive barrier is structurally compromised,’ Draven calculated, his gray eyes tracking the flawless ballistic arcs of the Capital artillery. ’Every hour spent defending a falling wall is an hour of lost logistics. The objective is no longer preservation. The objective is maximum civilian extraction.’

He had ordered Strike Team Zero to lock down the canal chokepoints. They had started funneling people toward their fortified lifeboat hours before the first ranging shot was even fired.

He trusted the efficiency of his preparations, knowing that surviving the day required ignoring the instinct to fight an unwinnable battle.

The bombardment lasted for just under eighteen hours.

The end did not come with a dramatic, explosive collapse of the southern gate. It came with a sickening groan from deep within the earth.

RUMBLE.

A massive, two-hundred-yard section of the southern wall simply subsided. It sank directly into the ground, pulling the pristine guard towers and the beautifully carved granite facades down into a deep, jagged trench.

The Capital artillery had never been the primary breaching tool. The bombardment was just a deafening distraction to mask the grinding of heavy machinery.

Marek’s sappers had been digging beneath the city foundations since the very first night. They systematically hollowed out the earth, rigged the underground supports with heavy explosives, and collapsed the tunnels in perfect unison.

General Marek did not want to blow the city to pieces. He wanted to own it intact.

The wall opened like a massive maw. The dust cleared, revealing a flat, paved ramp leading directly from the trade road into the affluent heart of Bastion Nine.

The local Vanguard garrison broke instantly.

The illusion of safety shattered the moment the cold wind from the Wildlands blew unimpeded through the massive breach. The Vanguard knights dropped their heavy halberds. They abandoned their parade cannons. They turned their backs on the incoming army and ran.

From the civilian side of the city, the true terror of the rout became visible.

Varn stood at the edge of the eastern quarter, leaning against a barricade of heavy iron shipping crates. The massive canal foreman watched hundreds of shining Vanguard knights sprint past the narrow alleys. The soldiers’ eyes were wide with blind panic as they fled north, abandoning the affluent districts they were sworn to protect.

Varn did not run. The dockworkers standing behind him tightened their grips on their heavy wrenches and rusted iron pry bars. They watched their designated protectors flee, yet the soot-stained laborers stayed exactly where Draven had told them to stand.

Through the clearing dust of the breached wall, the Capital infantry finally marched.

There was no chaotic pillaging. There were no feral roars or bloodthirsty war cries. The soldiers of Bastion One entered the merchant city in locked, flawless phalanxes. Their heavy gray shields overlapped seamlessly, forming an impenetrable wall of moving steel.

They did not break down the heavy oak doors of the merchant estates to loot gold or silver. They methodically secured the major intersections.

They established armored supply lines down the main avenues. They placed squads of runic snipers on the highest balconies to command the high ground.

They were not sacking Bastion Nine. They were occupying it.

It was a slower, colder, and terrifyingly unstoppable process. They were tightening a mechanical noose around the city, securing it block by block with suffocating precision.

Far to the north, the eastern quarter opened its iron gates.

The makeshift lifeboat took its first massive wave of refugees. It was a bizarre, desperate collision of classes. Thousands of wealthy merchants, terrified guild clerks, and affluent families flooded into a gritty industrial district they had never once set foot in.

Their expensive velvet coats were stained with soot and ash. They carried whatever silver and heirlooms they could fit into their pockets, their faces pale with shock.

They were received by soot-stained dockworkers they had never spoken to.

Draven stood at the primary intersection of the shipping district, directing the frantic flow of human traffic with sharp, commanding gestures.

Aegon and Reina flanked the main entry point, one ready to burn the approach and the other ready to freeze it, if the Capital vanguard pushed too close to the borders of the slums.

They were not engaging the main army yet. They were holding the edge of the board, conserving their mana for the true fight.

’The demographic shift creates extreme internal friction,’ Draven evaluated coldly, watching a weeping noblewoman accept a rusted canteen of water from a canal digger.

’But shared trauma is a highly effective unifier. Once Marek’s vanguard hits this specific district, the class divide will vanish. They will all become cornered animals, and they will fight with the ferocity of the doomed.’

The pristine streets of Bastion Nine belonged to the Capital.

The urban war for the eastern quarter was about to begin.