Chương 109: Siege Deployment

Following Gobu Run's departure with the heavy logistics convoy back to the tribal center, the regular cavalry company was left under the operational command of its Vice Captain. Leading his mounted scouts across the outer perimeter to conduct screening operations, the Vice Captain quickly intercepted a vanguard column of human horsemen penetrating the rural sectors of Poloia.

Recognizing the immediate threat, he and his riders instantly wheeled about, racing back to the city gates to deliver a battlefield brief directly to Li Qinwu. At that exact hour, Li Qinwu was stationed within the courtyard of the Governor's Manor, rigorously drilling his newly organized infantry companies. Listening intently to the scout's breathless report, a grim thought flashed across his mind: So, they have finally arrived. Li Qinwu turned his gaze to the Vice Captain.

"What is the numerical strength of the enemy's mounted vanguard?"

"Boss, I mapped out roughly three hundred riders in total. The moment they crossed into our sovereign territory, they immediately fractured into small reconnaissance splinters to map our defenses." Li Qinwu nodded slowly, finding the small headcount entirely consistent with his strategic calculations.

Currently, the broader world outside their borders was completely engulfed in a brutal war of global proportions; the standard standing armies of Halyun Province had long been stripped of their premium assets, with every fully formed heavy cavalry regiment fully committed to distant frontlines. These 300 riders were, in all likelihood, merely a patchwork screening force thrown together from the personal message-runners of various regional lords.

Without a moment's delay, Li Qinwu delivered his executive directive to the cavalry officer:"Pass my command across the line: completely evacuate our garrisons from the ten outer castles and withdraw every available soldier back within the city walls." Previously, Li Qinwu had distributed his raw Goblin recruits across those ten conquered strongholds to maximize the passive training modifiers granted by the castles' training facilities.

With this full recall initiated, out of the 2, 000 fresh conscripts returning to the core, roughly 200 had successfully accelerated their biological growth, elevating themselves into towering Hobgoblins. Simultaneously, Li Qinwu ordered a complete halt to the exhausting physical military drills. With an immense host bearing down upon their gates, his soldiers desperately needed to conserve their physical stamina to endure the shock of the impending siege.

Li Qinwu knew with absolute certainty that traveling directly behind this mounted screening force was Count Fischer's primary host—a colossal hammer of nearly 70, 000 men. When factoring in their lumbering heavy baggage trains, the enemy's marching columns would easily stretch across the terrain for more than ten kilometers.

A bold instinct stirred within Li Qinwu's chest; he wanted to guide a contingent out beyond the walls to execute a sharp, kinetic strike, testing the human vanguard to see if he could violently disrupt the momentum of their advance. This time, however, he would not burden his deployment with slow-moving heavy infantry.

He intended to deploy exclusively with the original ten veteran companies of the Punisher Army—operating as a highly flexible skirmish element that would unleash devastating musket volleys before instantly vanishing into the terrain. It would be a pure war of attrition and guerrilla tactics. Yet, under the present circumstances, they possessed zero visibility on the internal formatting of the approaching human host. They desperately required intelligence support. Li Qinwu locked eyes with the cavalry Vice Captain.

"Scatter your riders across the entire northern approach. I want a comprehensive layout of the human host: map their vectors, determine how many separate marching columns they have fractured into, and above all else—see if your scouts can slip past their screens to locate the exact positioning of their primary logistics and baggage trains!" The Vice Captain snapped his heels together into a crisp military salute, spinning on his heel to guide his riders back out into the wilderness.

With his scouts deployed, Li Qinwu accessed his system storage, withdrawing the vast reserves of magical beast meat he had accumulated over his previous campaigns. He distributed the spoils evenly among the soldiers of the veteran Punisher companies. The shipment comprised premium Horned-Crocodile meat—a rare, nutrient-dense delicacy that was nothing short of an absolute treasure to a Goblin's physiology.

The veterans of the original ten companies had endured immense physical hardship; they had barely completed a grueling, light-speed northern expedition across Halyun Province before being forced to march back to Poloia on broken feet. They had secured less than forty-eight hours of rest in the barracks before being slated for another deployment.

By distributing this magical beast meat, Li Qinwu ensured his elite core could rapidly rebuild their physical reserves over the next few days while they waited for the cavalry to return with actionable intelligence. With the vanguard preparations set, Li Qinwu commenced a sweeping inspection of the city's internal infrastructure, focusing his primary attention on the massive defensive battlements.

The stone walls of Poloia were exceptionally towering, engineered with a sweeping breadth thick enough to allow multiple warhorses to gallop abreast. As the largest, most prosperous mercantile hub in Halyun Province, the city was an absolute goldmine; now that Li Qinwu held total administrative control over the town, the system's daily tax revenue generated a staggering 30, 000 Denars directly into his treasury.

Guiding his senior officer corps along the stone parapets, Li Qinwu methodically mapped out their defensive arcs. Reaching out with a massive, gauntleted hand, he pointed toward the dense, sweeping woodlands visible on the distant horizon.

"Dispatch a detachment into the timber immediately. Set the entire forest ablaze; burn it to the absolute ground." Gobu Bow blinked, a touch of confusion crossing his features.

"Boss, why are we torching the woodlands?" Li Qinwu explained coldly, "If the human host intends to breach a fortress of this magnitude, they will be forced to construct massive siege engines—catapults, siege towers, and heavy rams. To do so, they require an immense supply of fresh timber. By reducing the surrounding forests to absolute ash, we force the enemy to haul their raw construction materials from leagues away, drastically draining their operational timeline."

A look of sudden enlightenment flashed across Gobu Bow's face, and he lost no time in leading a detachment of Pyromancers out to ignite the mountainside. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Next, Li Qinwu arrived at the shattered segment of the curtain wall—the exact sector he had previously brought crashing down with heavy explosives during his own assault.

Although his engineering teams had managed to hastily choke the breach with rubble, it remained the absolute structural weak point of the city's perimeter. Turning his head, he addressed Knight Leo.

"Have the militia conscript a massive labor force of commoners from the lower districts. Accelerate the structural reinforcement of this wall sector at all costs. Furthermore, I want three successive lines of defensive trenches excavated directly outside this breach. Dig them as wide and as deep as the earth allows!" Knight Leo bowed his head in deep assent, immediately setting off to mobilize the workforce.

Standing atop the high wall, Li Qinwu turned his gaze back toward the sprawling city beneath him, watching the thousands of warm hearth-fires beginning to flicker to life as twilight descended. He turned to Miss Hana.

"Miss Hana, I want you to mobilize your diplomatic and oratorical teams immediately. Fan out across every residential district and spread a specific piece of intelligence: inform the populace that the moment Count Fischer's host breaches these gates, he intends to unleash his soldiers to execute a systematic, three-day sack of the city." A look of profound distress washed over Miss Hana's delicate features.

"Your Grace... is this rumor the absolute truth? A three-day unrestricted sack... that is far too horrific..." Having accompanied Li Qinwu on his sweeping northern campaign and witnessed the cold calculations of captured aristocratic lords, she knew intimately that such atrocities were standard practice for medieval hosts. Yet, her heart rebelled against the raw scale of the impending human suffering. Li Qinwu stared unblinkingly into her eyes.

"Whether it is true or not, your own mind understands the reality of warfare in this world. Go forth and spread the word with maximum urgency. Inform them that if they possess the means to flee the city, they should do so immediately while the roads remain open. If our lines fail to hold and Count Fischer's host pours through these streets, it will be far too late for any of them to run."

While Count Fischer had framed his operational directive as a standardized sack rather than an outright campaign of extermination, Li Qinwu knew the base reality of military psychology. Once an immense, frustrated host breached a fortified city and a systematic plunder commenced, the primal, animalistic savagery of the common soldiers would be fully ignited. Under those conditions, could the officer corps truly restrain their men? Or rather—would the aristocratic officers even care to try?

Left deeply shaken and burdened with worry, Miss Hana bowed and departed. Li Qinwu maintained his silent vigil on the parapet, his eyes tracking her silhouette until she descended the stone steps and vanished into the lower avenues. Naturally, Li Qinwu's psychological machinations were not driven by a sudden, benevolent concern for the common human citizens of Poloia; his sole objective was the absolute unification of ideological terror.

The inhabitants of this city were native Thasos humans, and Count Fischer's approaching host was the legitimate military arm of the Thasos Kingdom. Without a unifying counter-incentive, there was an exceptionally high statistical probability that the local populace would attempt to coordinate an internal uprising to open the gates from within the moment the human army laid siege.

By systematically weaponizing the terror of an unrestricted military sack, he would compel a massive portion of the volatile population to willingly evacuate the city, drastically reducing the number of potential domestic subversives and tightening the Punisher Army's administrative grip over the urban sectors.

As for those impoverished citizens who lacked the economic means to flee, the looming specter of an aristocratic slaughter would keep them entirely paralyzed with fear—ensuring that even if they harbored hatred for their Goblin rulers, they would not dare risk sabotaging the city's active defense. Over the course of the following days, a heavy, suffocating anxiety gripped the streets of Poloia.

In this dark, unforgiving era entirely devoid of humanitarian principles, the wholesale plunder and massacre of captured cities was an ordinary facet of geopolitical conflict. The most vivid precedent etched into the collective memory of the populace had occurred a mere three years prior, within a neighboring province of the Thasos Kingdom. Two prominent grand dukes had engaged in a localized private feud that quickly spiraled out of control.

Following the accidental death of one duke's primary heir during a skirmish, the conflict instantly mutated into a bloodthirsty, unrestricted war of extermination. When the victorious duke finally breached the rival lord's capital city, he unleashed his entire army to execute an unmitigated sack.

The resulting slaughter was so catastrophic that over half of the city's total civilian population was systematically put to the sword, leaving the urban center so utterly broken that even to this day, it had failed to recover its basic economic output. With such a stark, horrifying historical precedent looming over them, any citizen of Poloia who possessed the slightest wealth or mobility lost no time in packing their wagons, fleeing the urban core in a desperate bid to escape the impending crucible of war.

The total civilian population of Poloia plummeted sharply within a matter of days. Those left behind were almost exclusively the absolute lowest tier of the destitute—impoverished laborers who possessed zero financial savings and no external kinship ties, individuals who knew with absolute certainty that if they attempted to flee into the wilderness, they would simply perish of starvation along the open roads.

Recognizing that this remaining human underclass represented a massive pool of exploitable physical labor, Li Qinwu ordered Miss Hana to maintain a continuous, crushing propaganda campaign throughout the streets. Day after day, her criers filled the avenues with vivid, harrowing descriptions of the impending rapes, arsons, and massacres.

By the turn of the week, the narrative had naturally escalated from a standard three-day sack into a campaign of total civilian liquidation; in the minds of the terrified populace, Count Fischer had been completely transformed into a literal demon from the abyss, and his approaching knights were viewed as a horde of ravenous monsters. Seizing upon this perfect climate of existential terror, Li Qinwu directed Knight Leo to aggressively expand the ranks of the domestic militia.

Within a stunningly brief timeframe, the regular security forces swelled to a headcount of 2, 000 men. Naturally, these 2, 000 raw human conscripts possessed absolutely zero tactical combat efficacy on an open field; consequently, Li Qinwu bypassed standard military training entirely, organizing them into heavy labor details tasked exclusively with hauling massive logs, hoisting boulder payloads, and stacking defensive stones atop the high battlements.

To fully cement his administrative grip and secure the absolute compliance of the desperate underclass, Li Qinwu took the unprecedented step of throwing open the imperial granaries, initiating a sweeping distribution of free rations. Every remaining citizen was issued a full three-day supply of grain, delivered directly to their doorsteps by pairs of heavily armed militia guards.

This calculated display of state benevolence achieved a staggering political return, instantly driving the local civilian approval rating toward his administration up to a stable 50%. With their basic survival guaranteed by the state, the likelihood of the remaining human populace staging a treacherous backstab during the height of the siege was effectively neutralized.

For a brief, surreal moment in time, the ancient streets of Poloia bore a bizarre semblance of unified civic solidarity—a strange reality where Goblins stood ready to bleed for the state apparatus while domestic humans labored to fortify the gates. One could only wonder what manner of profound shock Count Fischer would experience if he were to witness this unholy unity.

Yet, precisely within this meticulously orchestrated atmosphere of civic harmony, an exceptionally severe breach of military discipline shattered the peace: a newly formed company of raw Goblin recruits had attempted to execute a coordinated, mass desertion under the cover of darkness. Although a vanguard of veteran sentries had managed to intercept the flight and capture a large portion of the defectors, a subsequent roll call revealed a catastrophic detail.

An entire ten-man squad had successfully slipped through the perimeter, vanishing into the labyrinthine alleys of the city. The moment the intelligence reached his desk, Li Qinwu personally guided a heavy detachment of heavy infantry to initiate a sweeping, block-by-block dragnet through the urban sectors. Yet, by the time his iron boots finally kicked open the door to their hidden sanctuary, an absolute tragedy had already unfolded.