"Hold the line! Hold the line!"
Vice Commander Friedrich was well past his prime, his wrinkled face a testament to the hardships of time. His bald head was exceptionally shiny. Rumor had it that he had served in the Imperial Infantry Corps in his youth. After retiring due to a serious injury, he only managed to awaken his Knight Power in middle age, advancing to the rank of Earth Knight at sixty.
Although he held the post of Vice Commander in the Steel Knight Order, he rarely showed his face, leaving all the Knight Order's internal affairs to be handled by Erich and Sedon.
The boys in the training camp had heard some rumors about power struggles within the Knight Order, but the Knights themselves were tight-lipped about such matters and rarely discussed them.
At this moment.
Holding the line was exceptionally difficult. However, with Earth Knight Friedrich taking command and killing the Bloodline Mages and Flame Demons that had charged into the fortress, the retreat into the fortress's interior gradually stabilized.
When Frostfire Fortress was first built, the northern wall was constructed without any entrances. To attack the fortress, one could only charge head-on against the twenty-meter-high, thick walls.
Just then, two boys appeared behind the defensive line, relentlessly pursued by Abyssal Hounds. A sharp-eyed Knight acted quickly, saving them both.
His brow furrowed as he asked angrily, "Who gave you permission to leave the underground fortifications on your own?!"
Pachy had a shy personality and was struck dumb by the reprimand. Carl, however, ignored all that. Gasping for breath, he seemed exceptionally anxious.
"Rein... Reinhardt is still back there! To cover our escape, he... by himself..."
"Reinhardt?"
Pachy, whose face was deathly pale after his narrow escape, became frantic and incoherent when he thought of Reinhardt still being back there.
"We... We came for help! Lord Knight, we have to go save him!"
The Knight motioned for him to stay put. He called over three soldiers and jogged quickly in the direction Carl was pointing.
Frostfire Fortress covered a huge area. Built into the Frostfire Mountain pass, it was like a small border town. The northernmost wall was twenty meters high and six meters wide. A hundred meters south of it was the barracks area for the Fortress Defenders.
Past the barracks was the fortress's second inner wall, built to the same specifications as the northern wall, but designed with a gate.
To the southeast of the second wall was the Knight Order's garrison. A clock tower soared into the sky, with a small cluster of buildings built around its base. This area was originally designed as an exclusive lounge and command post for officers and Knights, but the Steel Knight Order followed tradition, and everyone from the commander to the Official Knights lived in uniform tents.
Three hundred meters southwest of the wall was the location of the Knight Order's training camp.
Sir Holden was a one-eyed brute of a man with his hair in a war braid. His bulging muscles and powerful physique easily ranked him in the top ten of the Knight Order.
He didn't know many of the young followers from the training camp, but he had heard of Robbie Hiling, the son of a Sky Knight, and Reinhardt, who was highly favored by Vice Commander Erich.
Leading three soldiers, he crossed the second wall. The barracks area here was in chaos, littered with large craters from the rain of fire and ashes left by extinguished flames.
"Reinhardt! Can you hear me?! Reinhardt!"
Holden's brow was tightly furrowed. He searched along the way, cleaning up the stragglers that had slipped into the fortress, but no matter how much he shouted, he got no reply.
In a time of war, the fortress was chaotic. It was all too common for an insignificant training camp follower who had left the underground fortifications without permission to end up dead in the jaws of an Abyssal Hound.
According to those two boys, Reinhardt had held off at least three Abyssal Hounds by himself around here. If not for his duty as a Knight, Holden wouldn't have even come back to look for him.
The fighting strength of three Abyssal Hounds was such that even a ten-man squad of the Imperial Infantry Corps' finest would find it extremely difficult to survive.
The fortress's defensive line was under immense pressure. He couldn't waste too much time on a follower who had disobeyed orders. Waving to the soldiers still searching for Reinhardt, he said, "Stop looking. Let's go back."
Just as he had completely given up, assuming Reinhardt had long since died in some insignificant corner of the fortress, a completely unfamiliar aura of Power suddenly emerged from a small alley near the barracks' clock tower.
Although Knight Power had four major attributes, the aura of each Knight's Power was unique.
Holden had served in the Steel Knight Order for eight years, and he was familiar with the Power of every Knight here. But the aura emanating from the cluster of buildings not far away was one he had never encountered before.
Unsure if the source of this aura was friend or foe, Holden acted with caution. He ordered the three soldiers to return to the defensive line and inform Vice Commander Friedrich that a strange Knight had appeared in the barracks. He prepared to go investigate by himself.
Before setting out, a wild, inexplicable guess popped into Holden's mind. 'Could it be Reinhardt?'
Once the machine of war begins to turn, even in the most insignificant, forgotten corners, there are still people fighting against their damned fate.
Inside the cluster of buildings.
The alley was deep and dark, littered with the corpses of Abyssal Hounds. A squad of a dozen or so soldiers, all covered in wounds, supported one another as they desperately fought off the Abyssal Hounds' attacks while retreating into a building.
"Stay together! Stay together! Shields up, don't break formation!"
They were neither deserters nor cowards hiding here.
The moment the fortress wall fell, faced with a tide of Abyssal Hounds, too many soldiers were scattered. Along the four-hundred-meter defensive line inside the fortress, the Knight Order and the defenders could only continuously shrink their line back toward the second wall.
The Abyssal Hounds had astounding combat power, but they were not the least bit cunning. They were both the vanguard of the Abyss Legion and cannon fodder that relied on sheer numbers to win.
After breaking through the defensive line, lacking the command of Bloodline Mages and Flame Demons, large numbers of Abyssal Hounds ignored the defenders on the line. Not only did they fail to encircle them, but they instead charged into the fortress like headless chickens, wreaking havoc wantonly.
The soldiers in the alley had been cornered by these very Abyssal Hounds. Although these veterans, relying on their extensive experience, had killed no fewer than three of the beasts by trading life for life, these damned creatures seemed endless. If rescue didn't arrive, death was only a matter of time.
Nick was dragging a soldier whose right leg had been torn off by an Abyssal Hound, retreating into the building. His comrade's heart-rending screams, sharp and agonizing, grated on his nerves with every passing second!
He was just the son of a farmer from Hearn Territory. That spring, he had answered the Great Lord's summons and joined the Hearn Territory's Infantry Legion, to be stationed at Frostfire Fortress.
The laughter and cheers of his comrades from days past still echoed in his ears, and it had even led him to mistakenly believe that death was something distant and far removed from him.
But now, all that remained of that past laughter were the grimaces of fear and impending death!
As he stood there in a daze, his mind completely blank, a veteran's rough right hand slapped him hard across the face. At the same time, a shield was tossed into his arms.
"Don't just stand there! Go hold the door! A Lord Knight will come to save us soon!"
'Will someone really come to save us?'
'They're just third-rate infantry from Hearn Territory. No one really cares if they live or die.'
Nick knew it was a lie meant to boost morale, but he still mechanically raised the shield to block the doorway. The stench of the Abyssal Hounds and the immense force coming from the shield made it hard for him to breathe.
「Time passed.」
With every passing moment, another one of his former comrades would disappear from his side, leaving only a string of bloodcurdling screams that echoed through the alley, growing more distant until they vanished completely.
Nick hid behind his shield, his heart filled with nothing but numbness. He silently prayed that when his turn came, his death wouldn't be too painful.
In this desperate moment, as death crept ever closer.
A streak of dark purple light, like a phantom, suddenly appeared, flashing across his vision at high speed!