Chương 117: The Siege

Over the following two days, Count Fischer's army completely ignored Li Qinwu's relentless ambush tactics, maintaining an aggressive, breaking pace to press directly for Poloia. Li Qinwu managed to find a tactical opening to engage one of the advancing columns, neutralizing several hundred enemy soldiers in a lightning-fast skirmish before executing a rapid withdrawal back toward the city.

He dared not linger in the field any longer; several enemy vanguard units had already bypassed his coordinates and were racing ahead of him. A single tactical miscalculation could leave his main infantry force completely locked outside the gates of Poloia. Furthermore, if one of the human generals were to initiate a wide, sweeping pincer movement to encircle his position, the Punisher Army would find itself in a catastrophic perimeter.

Therefore, after delivering one final, bloody sting to the human column, he abandoned the field and retreated behind the city defenses. As for Count Fischer, his unwavering operational focus paid massive dividends; within forty-eight hours, his massive vanguard had officially established a presence beneath the city walls.

Flanked by his high-ranking vassal lords, Count Fischer halted his command detail safely beyond the maximum effective range of the enemy's field artillery, peering up at Poloia—the grandest, most heavily fortified urban stronghold within the entire Haluin Province. The moment Count Fischer's eyes locked onto the massive, fractured section of the curtain wall—the exact vector Li Qinwu had violently breached with black powder during his initial assault on the city—his expression lit up.

Pointing a gauntleted finger at the scarred stonework, he turned to his lords and declared, "Look there! The masonry has collapsed. Though they have attempted a crude restoration and reinforced it with trenches, that coordinate remains the absolute weakest link in their defensive layout. If we concentrate our primary assault vectors directly against that breach, Poloia will fall into our hands within days!"

The assembled lords nodded in rapid succession, their eyes gleaming with an aggressive excitement as they evaluated the gaping structural flaw. Although Li Qinwu had deployed massive labor details to reconstruct the breach, the surrounding region had been entirely depleted of high-grade masonry and quality lime binding agents; consequently, the structural reconstruction had proceeded at a painfully slow pace.

While the intact curtain walls of Poloia towered at a majestic twenty-five meters, the stone masonry at the breach reached only ten meters high. The remaining fifteen-meter void above it had been crudely blocked off by a massive, interlocking framework of heavy wooden palisades and timber beams. Directly protecting the approaches to this structural weakness were three successive layers of circular trenches, each excavated to a uniform depth of two meters and a width of three meters.

Evaluating these rudimentary defensive measures, the aristocratic commanders felt a collective wave of confidence wash over them. As feudal warlords, they were seasoned masters of conventional siege craft. Confronted with an ad-hoc perimeter of that nature, they possessed a hundred distinct methodologies to violently dismantle it—literally a hundred distinct ways!

Count Fischer's foul mood improved significantly; it felt as though the paradigm of warfare had finally reverted to a familiar, traditional theater where his numbers and siege engines could dictate the terms. Turning to his inner circle, he bellowed his directives: "Lords! The moment your respective divisions complete their camp layouts, initiate a full encirclement of the city! Erect your defensive perimeters and prepare the siege works!"

The barons glanced around the surrounding hillsides, which had been thoroughly scorched bare by the raging forest fires, their brows furrowing deeply.

"My Lord Count... the demon host has systematically put the surrounding ridges to the torch. There isn't a single scrap of harvestable timber within ten li of our current coordinates. Where are we supposed to secure our construction materials?" Li Qinwu's scorched-earth policy had been executed with ruthless, unyielding efficiency. Every forested ridge within a five-kilometer radius of the city walls had been thoroughly reduced to ash and charcoal.

Whenever a localized blaze threatened to die down prematurely, he would immediately dispatch specialist detachments to reignite the timbers, inflicting a catastrophic, absolute devastation upon the local ecosystem. Had a modern environmental activist been present to witness the ecological ruin, they would have drowned him in unrefined crude oil. Count Fischer shifted his gaze toward the sprawling agricultural communes dotting the distant landscape.

A vast array of sturdy, timber-framed peasant dwellings stood within the fields, where terrified serfs were currently cowering inside their hovels, peering through the narrow cracks of their shuttered windows at the massive ocean of iron surrounding their lands. A cruel, mocking smile spread across the warlord's face as he extended his finger toward the settlements.

"Construction materials? There is an absolute bounty of timber sitting right before your eyes. Those wretched, subhuman serfs have willfully chosen to live as submissive subjects under the reign of a demon host. Soldiers! Go forth and deliver their righteous punishment!" The assembled nobles followed his gaze toward the defenseless hamlets, a collective, understanding smile breaking across their faces.

Throughout their grueling march across the province, their troops had accumulated an immense reservoir of volatile frustration and terror; it was indeed high time to unleash the common conscripts and allow them to vent their rage. Furthermore, they had learned from the frantic testimonies of fleeing wealthy landowners that these lowborn agricultural slaves had actually dared to defy their traditional masters under the goblin administration. Such unpardonable treason demanded absolute, bloody retribution.

Under the harsh commands of the minor lords, massive detachments of common infantry broke formation and swarmed into the agricultural communes like a ravenous horde of bandits. The sheer, horrific scale of the agony and violation that followed within those walls was a bitter torment known only to the victimized serfs. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

The wretched peasants had lived under the Chieftain's administrative jurisdiction for months without suffering a single instance of physical harm; instead, they had tasted the sweet, intoxicating reality of genuine personal autonomy. Yet, a mere few months later, the merciless steel of their traditional human masters had descended upon their necks once more. Amid the deafening wails of the dying peasants, Count Fischer secured an immense, non-stop supply of raw construction timber.

He immediately prepared to issue commands for the assembly of heavy ladders and battering rams, but Archmage Fortier stepped forward, offering a profoundly different strategic perspective.

"A moment, Lord Count. Pray, restrain your impatience. Poloia stands as a vital strategic bastion of the Haluin Province; its primary ramparts remain exceptionally formidable, and the demon garrison inside numbers over ten thousand combatants. This engagement will inevitably devolve into a grueling, bloody war of attrition—especially when one accounts for the enemy's supernatural projectile engines.

"In my professional estimation, launching a premature assault would be an act of profound folly. Our primary objective must be the systematic excavation of a fortified siege encampment, designed specifically to insulate our forces against the enemy's capacity to launch devastating black-powder raids under the cover of darkness." Count Fischer dropped his aristocratic pride, adopting a deeply respectful posture as he inquired, "Does the Grand Advisor possess a specific layout for our deployment?"

Archmage Fortier puffed a lazy smoke ring into the air, leaning comfortably against his staff as he gestured toward the open terrain.

"Advance your primary lines exactly one kilometer toward the city walls, and immediately initiate the excavation of an expansive network of continuous trench lines. Station your active garrison forces directly within the depths of those earthworks.

"By implementing this layout, even if the demon host utilizes their long-range thunder-engines to project destructive payloads across the field, our soldiers will remain entirely insulated from the kinetic shrapnel so long as they huddle within the trenches.

"Should the monsters attempt to mount an infantry charge across the open field to dislodge us, our troops simply need to surge out of the earthworks to engage them in close-quarters melee. Does this not instantly drag the theater back into a domain of combat where our superiority is absolute?" Hearing the methodology, the gathered vassal lords erupted into a flurry of animated praise, loudly extolling Archmage Fortier's immense, omniscient brilliance.

The old magus simply offered a quiet, knowing smile, maintaining a dignified silence. In truth, this specific defensive methodology had not been birthed by his own intellect; rather, it was a desperate tactical innovation conceived decades ago by the armies of the Donovan Kingdom after they had been thoroughly pulverized by the Mages' Guild's elite bombardment divisions.

The most common offensive spell utilized by conventional battle-mages—the standard Fireball —operated under an aerodynamic profile remarkably similar to modern black-powder artillery, though its effective range was significantly more restricted, typically maxing out around 150 to 200 meters, though a high-tier practitioner could expend surplus mana to project it up to 300 meters.

A single fireball detonating within a compact infantry formation possessed more than enough thermal force to instantly incinerate two to three standard soldiers. During the grand unification campaigns, the massed legions of the Donovan Kingdom had been systematically bombed into absolute structural paralysis by the Guild's continuous fireball barrages, teetering on the absolute brink of total annihilation.

Forced to adapt or face extinction, their military architects developed the classic "foxhole and trench" doctrine. By digging deep into the earth and forcing their infantry to operate out of subterranean lines, they effectively neutralized the mages' capacity to project area-of-effect elemental devastation across the open plain.

If the mages wished to inflict casualties, they were forced to physically close the distance to the edge of the trenches, at which point the hidden infantrymen would surge out of the earth, dragging the delicate spellcasters into the brutal, chaotic reality of hand-to-hand melee. This specific doctrine had introduced an immense, bloody frustration to the Mages' Guild's military campaigns, and it had been preserved within their archives as a textbook case study for generational analysis.

Meanwhile, standing atop the high stone battlements of Poloia, Li Qinwu trained his looking glass on the distant fields, letting out a slow, appreciative sigh as he watched the massive human host systematically hacking at the earth with shovels and pickaxes. There is a genuinely sharp military mind operating within that camp, he realized grimly.

Having absorbed a single night of asymmetric black-powder trauma, the human leadership had immediately pivoted to an expansive trench network to completely neutralize his field artillery and musket volleys. With the human infantry huddled below the surface of the earth, he could no longer use his long-range ordinance to execute thoughtless, mechanical slaughter across the plain.

Shifting his lens, his gaze drifted toward the smoking perimeters of the visible agricultural communes, where Count Fischer's conscripts were currently running rampant through the huts. Having endured an entire march of unmitigated psychological terror and high-casualty bombardments, the common human soldiers were venting their immense, accumulated trauma by subjecting the local serfs to absolute, unbridled sadism.

The muscles along Li Qinwu's jaw twitched violently as a succession of deeply disturbing, horrific violations flashed through his optics. The absolute depravity on display was so grotesque it forced a dark, cynical thought into his mind: Who are the true monsters in this world? Is my army supposed to be the goblins, or are those human soldiers the real beasts? At the same time, a wave of profound sorrow washed over his heart for the fate of the peasants.

When he had initially finalized the operational orders to put the surrounding ridges to the torch, he had explicitly dispatched massive detachments of his Security Forces to deliver a stern, urgent warning to every single agricultural commune. He had laid out the strategic reality plainly: the moment Count Fischer's host arrived, they would immediately strip the local villages to secure timber for their siege engines, and an occupying army entering a defenseless village never brought anything but ruin.

The Security Forces had aggressively pleaded with the serfs to abandon their holdings and flee into the safety of the interior, and Li Qinwu had gone so far as to authorize the allocation of official military grain reserves to serve as emergency rations for their displacement. Yet, despite their best efforts, a significant fraction of the population within every single hamlet had stubbornly chosen to remain behind.

On one hand, they were blinded by a naive, desperate hope that the incoming human lords would show mercy to fellow humans; on the other hand, they harbored a deep, paralyzing terror of the unknown world beyond their birthplaces. For an ordinary peasant of this feudal era, the psychological barrier of physical distance was an obstacle far more absolute than the boundary between life and death. A region located a mere thirty li beyond their local horizon was, for all intents and purposes, an alien universe.

Human nature was fundamentally terrified of navigating unmapped domains; consequently, countless serfs chose to chain themselves to their patches of dirt, placing their entire existential survival in the hands of the Goddess of Life. Regrettably, the Goddess of Life had entirely abandoned them to the wolves. Li Qinwu closed his looking glass, turning toward his senior company commanders with a cold, precise directive:"Open the primary sally ports.

Wheel the field pieces beyond the perimeter and initiate an active bombardment. Let's introduce a little structural frustration to their morning." The human trench networks were still in their infancy, and his internal city storehouses were packed to the brim with a massive surplus of artillery ammunition. It was only natural to deploy his ordnance to disrupt their labor details and severely bleed their excavation speed.