Chapter 21: Andrew
Day Three, Morning.
On the city walls of Iron Fortress Territory, the wind cut like a knife.
Viscount Andrew's luxurious clothes flapped loudly in the cold wind, bringing no warmth whatsoever.
He stood by the battlements, overlooking the city under his rule.
Twenty years.
When he first set foot here, Iron Fortress Territory was just a mud town with a slightly nicer name.
He spent twenty years of effort paving those muddy roads with stone bricks.
Replacing those crooked wooden shacks with sturdy stone buildings. Watching the population grow from a few hundred to tens of thousands.
He had welcomed the birth of his children here, and buried his father here.
Just last month, he was sitting in his warm study, calculating how to use the war between the Empire and the Theocracy to take Iron Fortress's wealth to the next level.
This month, he stood here, ready to be buried with this city.
His gaze crossed the empty streets, landing on the wriggling black line on the distant horizon.
That was the tide of fleeing refugees, like a disturbed colony of ants, slowly surging toward the east.
"My Lord, the wind is strong."
A knight who had followed him for over a decade held a heavy bearskin cloak, trying to drape it over him.
Andrew raised his hand, stopping him.
He turned around. The city walls were packed with people.
His guards, his knights, mercenaries from the Adventurer's Guild.
But even more were commoners holding pitchforks, hatchets, even kitchen knives.
Fear they couldn't hide was plastered on their faces, their bodies shivering in the wind.
In the crowd, one figure surprised him slightly.
Hamus, the Honorary Knight who betrayed his hometown and whom he despised, actually hadn't left.
Everyone's eyes converged on Andrew.
Without amplification magic, Andrew simply used every ounce of his strength.
To make his voice drown out the wind, drown out the faint crying coming from afar.
"My soldiers!"
His voice was somewhat hoarse.
"Fellow citizens... of Iron Fortress Territory!"
The noisy discussions and the sound of chattering teeth on the wall vanished instantly.
Only the whimpering wind scraped against everyone's eardrums.
Andrew abruptly raised his arm, not pointing at the enemy, but at the empty city behind them, pointing further away at the black line of refugees.
"Look behind us!"
"Our parents, our wives, our children... they are running! Running for their lives!"
"Because something is coming! Not beasts from the grassland, not bandits blocking the road! It's a group of... monsters we cannot even comprehend!"
He paused, letting this sentence smash into everyone's heart.
"We... might all die."
This sentence, like a cold boulder, pressed heavily on everyone's chest.
Uneasy commotion erupted in the crowd.
"Yes, we will all die!"
Andrew repeated it. His gaze swept over faces twisted by fear—young, old, men, women.
"Have our heads chopped off by those bone racks! Have our bones crushed by them!"
"Then, become one of them, and hunt down our own kin!"
"This isn't some heroic epic sung by bards! This is a massacre! A one-sided massacre!"
He took a step forward, his voice suddenly rising in pitch.
"We! Are Iron Fortress! We are... the bait to buy time for those fleeing people!"
Extreme honesty created a bizarre persuasiveness.
When the deepest fear was ripped open, bloody and raw, by the Lord himself, the trembling of some people actually stopped.
"I know you are afraid! I am afraid too!"
Andrew's voice began to tremble, but the volume grew louder and louder, carrying a hysterical interrogation.
"I am so scared my legs are weak, scared I can barely stand!"
"BUT—!"
He practically roared it out, veins bulging on his neck, his entire face flushing red.
"Just because we are afraid! Should we kneel on the ground, stretch out our necks, and beg them to kill us a little faster?!"
"Just because we are afraid! Should we watch helplessly as they trample flat the home we've lived in for decades?!"
"ABSOLUTELY NOT!"
He spun around and punched the battlement beside him viciously.
The cold stone bricks hurt his knuckles, blood seeping from the cracks, but he didn't care.
"Our ancestors! Used blood and life to carve this land out of the wilderness! Not so that today, we could line up to be slaughtered like livestock in a pigpen!"
"Every brick on this wall! Is soaked in our fathers' sweat! Every inch of soil on these streets! Buries our forefathers' bones!"
He pointed at the wall beneath his feet, at the city behind him, roaring at everyone.
"Tell me! When those ghost things with no life, no emotion, who don't even know what death is, come to take all this away!"
"When the cries of our children are drowned out by the click-clack of those bone racks walking!"
"What can we men, who still stand here, who still hold weapons in our hands! DO?!"
On the city wall, dead silence.
Only heavy breathing wove together in the cold wind.
Andrew gasped violently, his chest heaving.
His bloodshot eyes swept over everyone.
His voice wasn't loud, but it spread clearly to every corner of the wall.
"The only thing we can do... is... one last thing."
He paused for several long seconds.
Time seemed to freeze at this moment.
Despair and determination fermented and collided frantically in the dead silent air.
"That is..."
"To fight on this wall until our last breath!"
"Use our corpses to stack this wall a little higher! Use our blood to dye this land a little redder!"
"Make those monsters step on our scalding entrails for every step they advance!"
"Even if all our lives added together can only delay them for one more minute! Even if it lets just one more child run a hundred more steps!"
His voice lowered, every word carrying the weight of steel.
"This is the only... and the last... value... of us who are left here!"
Slowly, he drew the sword at his waist that symbolized his family's honor.
The blade reflected cold light under the gloomy sky.
"We are not fighting for victory..."
The sword tip pointed straight outside the wall, toward that dead silent, eerie horizon.
"We are fighting to tell them—"
"If you want to step over Iron Fortress, you have to step over... all of our corpses first!"
His voice fell.
No earth-shaking cheers, no passionate slogans.
What answered him was a heavy, suffocating silence.
Then, Schwing—the sound of an iron sword unsheathing.
Followed by a second, a third... scattered at first, then merging into a wave.
A gray-haired old farmer silently shifted his grip on the pitchfork to one that allowed more force.
A guard who had just come of age, face still childish, wiped the tears from his face messily with his sleeve and drew the iron sword at his waist.
Hamus gripped the longsword in his hand tightly. The cold touch reminded him of the Skeleton Cavalry and Lilia.
His hand shook once, but then gripped even tighter.
Viscount Andrew watched all this, slowly resting the sword hilt against his forehead.
The cold metal against his skin cleared his chaotic brain for a moment.
He closed his eyes, whispering to himself in a voice only he could hear, addressing the tide of people already far away.
"Run fast..."
"Survive."
"And..."
"...Remember today."
Just then.
A strange sound came from below the extremely distant horizon.
Clack, clack.
Everyone on the wall quieted down, listening intently.
The sound grew clearer, denser.
The stone bricks beneath their feet began to transmit extremely faint vibrations.
It was the sound of thousands upon thousands of bony feet striking the ground with perfectly synchronized frequency!
The earth was trembling.
On the distant horizon, a white line appeared.
That line was widening and thickening at a speed visible to the naked eye, surging toward Iron Fortress.
The war had begun.