Chapter 356: The Massacre
Kian's destination was Throne Mountain, and so was Luca's, which made traveling together a natural fit.
By the second day, Luca's column got underway.
Luca's forces amounted to one Knight suit, two squire-suits, a hundred Enginseers and support staff, a thousand personal retainers in full heavy armour mounted on horseback, and two thousand light infantry serving as baggage and support troops, armed with spears.
Over three thousand men under his command. Sure, most of it was cold-steel infantry, but this was supposedly a wandering noble traveling alone. In practice, it looked more like a full mercenary company on the march.
That was exactly what it was, functionally. As the column moved out, Luca settled into the command throne inside his Knight suit and advanced at a measured pace.
Kian rode alongside in a transport vehicle driven by one of the Enginseers, keeping pace with Luca.
They talked as they traveled. Luca explained that in an era this chaotic, opportunity was everywhere. To secure supplies from local nobles, he'd occasionally take on mercenary contracts. Complete the job, and the local lord would pay him in food, coin, or the precious reactor fuel his Knight suit needed to run.
"Not long ago, my men made contact with a Baron. His House has no Knight suits of its own, but it's a mortal bloodline over a thousand years old, holding a grand castle and governing half a million people. Recently, a Crimson Legion warband moved into his territory, harassing his people, and he sent word requesting my help. If I can break this warband, he's offered supplies in return. My route happens to pass right through his lands, so I've decided to take the contract."
Luca spoke through his Knight's vox-amplifier as the war engine strode forward.
Kian asked, "Does this warband have anything unusual? Chaos-corrupted Knight suits, that sort of thing?"
"Intelligence suggests no. Just a large mortal infantry force, cold steel only. With a Knight suit at my back, all I need to do is walk two squires straight through their formation and this fight ends before it starts."
Luca sounded confident. In a world where powered weapons no longer functioned, a walking tower of steel like his Knight suit was absolute military supremacy.
Kian, though, had a nagging feeling it wouldn't be quite that simple.
Sure enough, half a day later, Luca's column reached the edge of the Baron's territory.
The moment they crossed the border, the first thing they saw was a burned village, and thousands of headless bodies scattered across the ground.
Corpses covered the village, the dirt road, and the surrounding wheat fields, blood soaked deep into the soil, the stench thick and rotten in the air.
Everyone in the column grimaced at the sight. A massacre this indiscriminate, sparing neither the old nor the young, this warband had gone completely feral.
Luca gave the order to advance in combat formation. It seemed the Crimson Legion had already launched their assault on the Baron's territory sometime before they'd arrived, though there was no telling how far the fighting had progressed.
He wasn't willing to risk his column getting caught off guard by the warband along the march.
A thousand heavy cavalry and two thousand spear-infantry formed up into more than thirty separate blocks and advanced together.
Fortunately, the surrounding land was farmland, wheat fields they could simply march straight across. Nobody here worried about trampling crops. The farmers who'd once tended them had already lost their heads, and there was no one left to complain about it.
As the column advanced, they passed more and more burned villages, more headless corpses.
At one point they came across an entire battlefield, evidence of a clash on the scale of ten thousand or more, bodies strewn everywhere alongside broken standards.
Every body on the field was headless, stripped completely bare of armour and clothing, everything of use looted.
Given the head-taking style of the killing, the Crimson Legion had clearly won this fight.
The column pressed on with even greater caution now, wary of a possible ambush.
They marched from morning through the afternoon and finally reached the Baron's city.
The city was a genuine medieval settlement, home to a hundred and fifty thousand people.
Marble walls and archer towers ringed the residential districts layer by layer.
At a glance, the castle looked like any other medieval fortress, but a closer look revealed extensive anti-Knight defensive design. The walls were absurdly thick, twenty-five meters high and fifteen meters through.
Given that melta and plasma weapons no longer functioned on this world, a marble wall that thick would stop even a Knight suit cold.
The walls also bristled with round turrets, cast from single blocks of solid steel, each fitted with massive cannon barrels capable of firing shells over three hundred millimeters, the same class of naval guns you'd expect on a Terran-era warship.
Between the sheer thickness of the walls and the naval-grade guns mounted on them, this fortress should have been able to stop a Knight assault cold.
Except the guns were dead weight now, unable to fire at all.
Luca's column advanced slowly in formation toward the city, and before they'd gone far, his Knight's vox-amplifier crackled with a voice thick with fury.
"Halt, all of you! Form ranks, prepare for battle!!"
Kian caught the rage in that voice immediately. He found a large boulder, climbed atop it, and looked out toward the distant city. His expression darkened instantly.
The Baron's city had become a charnel house. Where the walls had once been decorated with colorful banners and heroic statues, they now hung thick with headless corpses, dangling row after row.
The walls, once pale grey marble, had been stained a deep red-black with blood.
Every few meters along the ramparts, a spear had been driven in, each one topped with a hunk of flayed body, a severed head, or a stretch of human skin.
This was a wall meant to protect a hundred and fifty thousand people. A wall that long, and it was packed end to end with human remains. How many had they slaughtered to fill it like this?
Kian pulled off his helmet and took a deep breath, and the stench of blood and rot hit him instantly.
He was still four kilometers out from the wall, and even at that distance, the smell came through with sickening clarity.
God damn it. Don't tell me these Khorne cultists actually wiped out all hundred and fifty thousand people.
Kian thought grimly to himself.
"Such a desecration!! Such an atrocity!! A hundred and fifty thousand souls!!! Curs of the Dark Gods, I will hunt down every last one of you and crush your skulls with my own hands!!! All units, prepare! Prepare to storm the city!!!"
Luca's furious roar tore out over the vox. As a Knight, raised from birth on chivalric ideals, there was no way he could stand by and let a desecration of this scale go unanswered before his own eyes.
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