Chương 284: 59.Fort Louis 1

At first, I thought it was merely the wreckage of war burning. Looking down from high altitude, the ground along the eastern flank of Fort Louis was patched black and red. Pillars of smoke arched upward one after another, as if someone had treated the entire open plain as a rotting stove and simultaneously lit a dozen fires. It wasn't a sight I was unfamiliar with.

The aftermath of battle—burning supply wagons, incinerating siege ladders, clearing corpse piles—always left this kind of stomach-souring residual heat behind. But as we dropped lower, I realized I was wrong. It wasn't wreckage. It was people. People running. People falling. People thrashing inside the fire. The things that had looked like scattered embers from high above suddenly grew limbs as we drew closer. They grew screams.

They grew a kind of visceral, mind-numbing chaos that made my scalp tighten even through the roaring wind and distance. Some men were entirely engulfed in flame, yet still stumbling instinctively toward the fortress walls. Some had collapsed at the edge of the trenches, the fire on their bodies igniting the corpses and wooden shields beside them. Others had already fallen to their knees, only to be trampled flat by the surging tide of the army pushing up from behind. My stomach plummeted. Just as I'd feared.

The Yanxia Empire wasn't probing our defenses. They weren't feinting. They were assaulting the fortress. And compared to the tide of Yanxia soldiers surging forward like fire ants below, the situation atop the walls of Fort Louis was even less of a laughing matter. If I had to describe it, it wasn't simply low morale. It was hovering somewhere in the fatal gray zone between a total rout and outright desertion in the face of the enemy.

Some defenders were still standing behind the crenellations, but their eyes weren't pointed outward at the enemy. They were pointed inward, toward the fortress, scanning for the escape route least likely to run them straight into the military police. One man clutched a bundle of arrows with hands shaking so violently the fletching kept spilling out.

Another had pushed a defensive stone halfway to the edge and simply stopped, turning to scream at the men behind him—I couldn't make out the words over the wind and distance, but there was absolutely nothing of hold the line in that voice. Only the ragged, desperate don't push me up here to die.

Worse still, visible gaps had already opened along the eastern wall—not the kind of temporary vacancy left by casualties waiting to be filled, but the kind that appears when men themselves shrink back and the line simply tears open behind them. Watching that unfold, I felt my back teeth grind together. If defending a fortress was like watching a pot on the stove, this pot wasn't merely boiling dry.

The bottom had already cracked wide open, and there were still idiots banging on it with spoons, screaming for more fire. I raised a hand and made a sharp signal. Almost immediately, a Yinglong Guard rider banked her wyvern toward us, holding a careful, parallel altitude off our flank. She leaned sideways in her saddle, waiting for my order.

"I'm going down with the princess," I said directly.

"Your people keep their eyes locked on the enemy's Dragon Cursemasters. The moment anyone raises a staff to cast, starts drawing a fire array, or begins pulling a curse-chain skyward—report to Lei Lian immediately."

"Yes, sir!" Her response was crisp and razor-clean. She yanked her reins, banking her wyvern back and to the side, carrying the signal down the line. I lowered my head and patted the thickest patch of scale between Ignicia's shoulders. When I spoke, even my own voice sounded a little cold to me.

"They're yours." Ignicia turned her head slightly, fixing me with one glance from those molten-gold draconic eyes. Then she huffed through her snout. If I translated that into human speech, it would go something like: Understood. Shut up. Hold on. Don't fall off and cause me trouble. Good. The next instant, her entire body plunged. I didn't even have time to draw a full breath before my vision was yanked violently downward.

She didn't simply descend—she folded most of her wing surface inward, her whole body becoming a crimson spear hurled straight from the heavens, driving point-first into the Yanxia Empire's siege line outside Fort Louis. The wind, in that moment, stopped being wind. It became something closer to a mob of people who'd owed me money for years, finally seizing the chance to collectively take revenge on my face.

I flattened myself against her back, not even daring to fully open my eyes, watching through wind-blurred vision as the battlefield below exploded in size. The Yanxia Empire's siege line stretched long and deep. Shield infantry and ladder teams at the very front, followed by pushcarts, battering rams, throwers, and rear-pressure troops. Further out, rows of what looked like incendiary wagons sat beside stacked oil barrels and wrapped bundles—clearly staged to keep feeding fire onto the walls.

The entire formation was pushing forward with a ferocity that didn't feel like an army chewing on a city for half a day. It felt like a starving beast lunging for a piece of meat already touching its lips. A pity. There was a dragon on that piece of meat now. Ignicia didn't snap her wings open until we were at an altitude so dangerously low I wanted to scream obscenities. Boom. That wasn't simply the sound of wings spreading.

It was the sound of an entire wall of crimson wind being slammed violently into the battlefield. The shockwave tore through the shield formations and ladder teams below, detonating outward in a chaos of dust, sparks, splintered wood, and human screams. And in the next heartbeat, she opened her jaws. The fire wasn't breathed out. It was released. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

A near-blinding torrent of molten red-gold swept down at an angle, slicing first through the front-rank ladder teams before carving horizontally through the mid-line pushcarts and incendiary wagons. That wasn't a color ordinary fire produced. That wasn't a temperature that belonged to the mortal world. Where it touched wood, the wood detonated into brilliance. Where it touched iron, the iron flushed red and warped. Where it touched people— They didn't even finish their screams before the wave swallowed them whole.

The entire siege front looked as though someone had taken a white-hot blade and split it clean down the center. First the shield wall collapsed. Then the ladder teams exploded outward. Then the mid-line wagons loaded with oil and siege gear detonated almost simultaneously. The blasts chained together, one after another, ringing in my eardrums long after the sound had passed.

Fire chased itself along the toppled frames, the oil-soaked cloth, and the scattered siege equipment, tongues of flame hooking together until that entire stretch of the advance line became a living wall of fire. Hundreds—thousands—of Yanxia soldiers screamed, recoiled, collided, and fell inside the blaze. Some tried to break sideways, only to be shoved back by a rear guard that still hadn't understood what was happening.

Some dropped their weapons and ran, only to be crushed under a collapsing, burning ladder frame two steps later. Some were still holding their shields up, as though clutching the lids of ovens they themselves were being slowly baked inside. One breath of fire. Just one. Ignicia had severed, in a single instant, the rhythm of the Yanxia Empire's siege that had sunk its teeth into this fortress's throat. And she'd burned it so thoroughly, she didn't even leave the ashes any dignity.

Pressed against her back, staring down at the carnage, even I—a man who usually had a sarcastic remark ready for every occasion—was left with only one brutally honest thought.... Thank every god there is that this dragon is currently on my side. The Yanxia rear was already unraveling. Sharp horn calls pierced the chaos as officers desperately tried to recall, regroup, or at the very least drag the unburned remnants clear of the inferno.

Further back, several figures had already raised long staves and banners, faint red circles bleeding into existence on the ground beneath them. Dragon Cursemasters. My eyes sharpened. I snapped my gaze back up and behind us. Thankfully, the Yinglong Guard had already moved. Two teams of riders pressed in from the rear flank, holding an altitude a full tier above ours—making their intention unmistakable. They were locking down every single one of those bastards preparing to cast against an aerial target.

Lei Lian's mouth could cut glass on a normal day, but when speed mattered, her people moved faster than anyone. Ignicia didn't get greedy for a second breath. That, more than anything, reassured me. Because if she'd chased the rush of it and gone hunting for another pass, she could absolutely have cleared another layer of troops below—but she would also have handed those ground-based Cursemasters the steady rhythm they needed to lock onto her.

Instead, she simply beat her wings and climbed, sweeping diagonally above the sea of fire, pulling herself clear of the most dangerous low-altitude firing arc—like a fallen star that had just struck the earth and was now ascending calmly back into the sky. Below, on the walls of Fort Louis, voices finally erupted. Not a clean chant. Not a polished war cry.

The kind of sound that breaks out of a chest that's been crushed under despair for far too long, the moment it sees someone else willing to fight to snatch a life back from the edge.

"A dragon! It's a dragon!"

"Reinforcements! Reinforcements are here!"

"The Fire Dragon Princess—!" Some men didn't even manage full sentences—they just beat their fists against the parapets and screamed. The hollow, breaking eyes from moments ago looked as if someone had dumped a bucket of scalding water over them, forcing a little raw life back into place. This was exactly why Ignicia had to come. There are moments when reinforcements can't be measured in headcount or supply wagons.

There are moments when what you need is a presence unreasonable enough to fall out of the sky and tell everyone on the verge of breaking, without a single word: It is not your turn to die yet. As we swept over the outer wall, more details came into focus. Bodies no one had found time to move were stacked beneath the arrow towers. Oil barrels lay overturned along the walkways. Wounded men were being dragged toward the interior.

Scorch marks scarred the stone everywhere, and one whole section of parapet had been smashed black and cracked. From altitude, this had merely looked "bad." Up close, the fact that this place was still standing was a direct insult to common sense. Ignicia didn't land on the outer wall. She drove straight down toward the largest open space inside the fortress. It was a central courtyard, likely meant for mustering troops, transferring supplies, and temporarily stacking equipment. Right now it was chaos.

People hauled barrels, carried the wounded, led horses, sprinted with crates in their arms. A few men who were clearly scribes or adjutants stood rooted in place, shouting orders in four directions at once, looking very much like men trying to plug ten leaks with a single mouth. Then they looked up and saw us. More precisely, they saw Ignicia. The reaction was remarkably uniform. First, total paralysis. Then, detonation. The officers found their voices first: "Clear the yard! Clear it now! Open the center!

Everyone back! BACK!" The soldiers scattered on pure instinct, dragging each other sideways. The stretcher-bearers nearly flipped their patient entirely. A man leading a warhorse was spun in a full circle by his own panicked mount. Two unlucky souls carrying crates simply dove face-first into the mud, cargo and all. Several non-combatants nearby—kitchen staff, launderers, or conscripted porters, by the look of their clothes—dropped into crouches with their hands over their heads.

One man went fully to his knees, lips moving rapidly in something that might have been a prayer or a very hurried recitation of his family lineage. Excellent. Very atmospheric. If I weren't currently strapped to Ignicia's back and being hauled down alongside her, I might have had the leisure to observe that at least half the men in this fortress were going to dream about crimson wings for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, I had no room left for that kind of reflection. Because the landing impact was coming.

Ignicia's massive forelimbs slammed into the ground, and the whole courtyard shuddered. Gravel and dust blasted outward. Several planks that had already been barely holding together were launched into the air. The thermal wave off her folding wings swept out to both sides, tearing cloaks, flags, and several tactical maps clean off a wooden table. For one moment, the entire courtyard fell so silent it felt as if someone had cut the sound out of the world. I vaulted down from her back.

My legs were still half-numb, and I nearly stumbled in a thoroughly undignified manner. Fortunately, I caught myself. If the supreme commander's first act on arrival had been a dramatic face-plant off a dragon's back, that story would have been carved into Fort Louis's military folklore and retold at every campfire long after the war ended. Everyone around me was staring at me. Everyone was also staring at her. Ignicia didn't shift back to human form right away.

She simply held her draconic posture, raised her head, and exhaled a long breath threaded with embers. The nearest men stepped back half a pace, but the look in their eyes had already changed from moments before. It wasn't pure fear anymore. It was the specific, complicated expression of people watching a natural disaster stand on their side—the look of men whose fear had to shuffle sideways to make room for something else entirely. The next second, a soot-blackened figure shoved through the crowd.

He wore a fortress officer's short armor. A large section of his shoulder had been burned away, and his left arm was wrapped in a hastily tied bandage. He nearly tripped over a broken plank on the way over, but forced himself upright in front of me, snapping off a salute so crooked it was almost painful to watch.

"R-Report, sir!" His voice was hoarse as gravel. I frowned.

"Speak." He sucked in a breath, his forehead caked in ash and sweat. He didn't dare look at Ignicia at all, keeping his eyes locked on me instead, as if afraid that if he slowed by even half a sentence, the breath he'd just barely clawed back would disappear again.

"The third and fourth sections of the Eastern Wall have been under continuous main assault from the Yanxia Empire since dawn. A quarter-hour ago the line briefly fell—we've barely retaken it. But… but that isn't the worst of it." My stomach sank. Of course. I'd known from the moment I saw that smoke in the air that it was never just siege equipment burning out there.

"What's the worst of it?" He clenched his jaw, as if forcing the words out cost him something physical.

"The ordnance transfer depot and the material sheds on the inner side of the Eastern Wall have caught fire as well. It wasn't spread from outside—it started from within. The entire eastern supply line is severed. The garrison can't get arrows, oil, or replacement shield boards up to the wall at all…" His voice grew rougher with every word.

"And… the Eastern Wall just reported in. Sentries spotted a second wave of the Yanxia main force massing behind their current line." The air in the courtyard seemed to drop several degrees at once. The brief breath of relief Ignicia's fire had clawed back for this fortress hadn't even had time to settle before this report closed its hands around everyone's throat again. I raised my head, looking past the inner walls and arrow towers, toward the east. The sky there was still bleeding smoke.