Chương 121: The War of Siege and Defense (Part 3) / Sniper's Vigil

As the human columns pulled back to marshal their captured serf details, leaving the Cloud Ladders abandoned in the no-man's-land, Li Qinwu sought to exploit the window by vaporizing the machinery. He summoned his Goblin Incinerators to launch a systematic bombardment, attempting to reduce the massive wooden chassis to ash with their viscous fireballs.

However, the absolute moment an elemental sphere plummeted from the ramparts and splashed across the timber framework, a succession of Water Orbs would instantly erupt from the deep human trench networks, neutralizing the flames before any real structural degradation could occur. The asymmetric arcane duel dragged on for the remainder of the day.

Through immense focus and exhausting coordination, the Incinerators successfully incinerated exactly three Cloud Ladders before Li Qinwu called an absolute halt to the operation, recognizing that the severe drain on his spellcasters' internal mana reserves was structurally unsustainable. In truth, whether the ladders were reduced to charcoal was of little consequence to his broader strategic calculus. His core operational objective was the systematic eradication of the enemy's active military personnel.

If the siege machinery never advanced, the human vanguard would remain permanently insulated within the depths of their subterranean trenches—a passive posture that directly conflicted with his desire to farm experience. Standing atop the high parapets, Li Qinwu scanned the distant horizon. He had no definitive reading on when the next human surge would manifest, but he knew with absolute certainty that the aristocratic commanders were incubating some foul, desperate contingency.

After executing a brief inspection of the frontline battlements to evaluate the psychological posture of his garrison, he stepped inside the stone gatehouse, collapsing onto a cot to harvest a few hours of mandatory rest. As the undisputed warlord of the collective forces, preserving his cognitive sharpness was a non-negotiable metric; if the operational theater collapsed into chaos, he might be forced to endure a continuous multi-day vigil without a single wink of sleep.

Reclining on his back, Li Qinwu accessed his system interface. Out of his core pool of 310 system-derived infantry units, over 200 had officially crossed the operational threshold for advancement. With a sequence of decisive mental commands, he triggered the upgrades, instantly infusing the veteran Ten-Company brigade of the Punisher Army with 200 newly evolved Level 3 Goblin Marksmen.

At this trajectory, another one or two pitched engagements would see the entirety of the storied Ten-Company transformed into maximum-tier Marksmen. Backed by their accrued, live-fire combat experience, they were rapidly cementing their status as an absolute elite force on this continent. With his army configurations updated, he turned his focus toward the verification of his personal attribute ledger.

His current statistical parameters read as follows: Vigor: 25 (One-Handed Weaponry: 12, Two-Handed Weaponry: 101, Polearms: 8) Control: 12 (Archery: 18, Crossbows: 78, Throwing: 68) Endurance: 11 (Riding: 0, Athletics: 67, Smithing: 80) Cunning: 7 (Scouting: 43, Tactics: 25, Roguery: 17) Social: 7 (Charm: 25, Leadership: 72, Trade: 0, Prayer: 0) Intelligence: 15 (Stewardship: 37, Medicine: 1, Engineering: 28, Magic: 28) Li Qinwu let out a soft, reflective sigh.

Nearly a single standard year had dissolved into the ether since his consciousness had materialized within this bizarre world. To evolve from a malnourished, grass-chewing tribal runt designated as emergency rations for a goblin brood into an autonomous military warlord capable of dictating his own destiny was an undeniable milestone.

As his gaze lingered across his Crossbow metric, which had surged to 78 due to his continuous live-fire training with smoothbore muskets, the system flashed a notification, unlocking a binary perk selection. Without a moment's hesitation, he selected the passive talent: Dynamic Vision.

The mechanics of this perk were profoundly straightforward yet lethal: so long as he focused his cognitive intent, his perception of the physical universe would experience a drastic decelerating shift, manifesting an effect practically identical to a localized "bullet time." Li Qinwu blinked his eyes, focusing his mental faculty upon the immediate surroundings. Instantly, the physical universe slowed to a crawl.

A thin ray of morning sunlight pierced through a narrow structural fracture in the wooden door, illuminating a cloud of drifting ambient dust particles. Under the influence of his heightened perception, Li Qinwu could trace the individual vectors of the floating debris with absolute clarity, mapping their exact descent trajectories seconds before they occurred. A massive grin split his face. This passive modifier was an absolute masterpiece, radically elevating his personal lethality.

Abandoning all intentions of sleep, he shoved the wooden door open and marched toward the towering stone watchtower—a massive defensive structure that scaled ten meters above the primary battlements. As he stepped onto the upper platform, the stationed Punisher Army detail instantly snapped to attention, their chests thrust forward as their eyes filled with absolute, reverent awe for their commander.

"Boss!"

"At ease. Return to your posts—and I need three individuals to manage my reload cycles." With a sweep of his hand, Li Qinwu retrieved four custom-crafted muskets from his system storage, each bearing a precision modifier of +10—premium firearms he had personally forged at the anvil. Lining the weapons against the stone embrasure in a neat sequence, he snatched up the first rifle and leveled the barrel over the valley.

Perched at a commanding elevation of thirty-five meters, the watchtower afforded an unrestricted, birds-eye view of the entire theater of war. Below, the terrain was a heavily scarred labyrinth of trenches and approach networks. Within 200 meters of the fortress walls, the human sappers had either driven their works entirely subterranean or insulated their routes with heavy overhead wooden mantlets.

So long as a human soldier kept their head low, it was mechanically impossible for the riflemen on the walls to establish a clean line of sight. Bracing his musket against the stone battlement, Li Qinwu began to systematically scan the maze for a viable target. His crosshairs eventually locked onto a newly driven approach trench roughly 150 meters out. Because it was a fresh excavation vector, the overhead structural protection was conspicuously incomplete.

Deep within the ditch, a human sapper was driving a heavy pickaxe into the earth with rhythmic motion, his helmeted head momentarily breaking the silhouette of the trench line with every upward swing. Li Qinwu tracked his movement with cold precision. The target's exposure window was fractions of a second at best—a fleeting glimpse that would render it mechanically impossible for a standard rifleman to achieve a hit.

Even if a common soldier attempted the shot, the physical delay between the trigger pull and the target's rhythmic bobbing would almost certainly result in a clean miss. But Li Qinwu was no ordinary marksman, and a +10 precision rifle was no ordinary firearm. Aligning his iron sights with the precise pocket of space where the helmet routinely materialized, he concentrated his mind, triggering Dynamic Vision. Instantly, the frantic, chaotic rhythm of the battlefield decelerated into a slow, measured dance.

The target's bobbing head lost its erratic quality, transforming into a predictable, slow-motion loop. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Li Qinwu held his breath for a count of five seconds—which, under the temporal dilation of his heightened perception, felt like an extensive twenty-second window of absolute stabilization. Calibrating his internal clock to the exact micro-second the target would re-enter the pocket, he compressed the trigger. BANG!

The musket roared, projecting its high-velocity lead ball across the distance. One hundred and fifty meters away, the human conscript hoisted his heavy pickaxe back over his shoulder, his head rising slightly above the dirt wall precisely in time to intersect the incoming projectile. Following a sickening CRACK of shattering bone, the soldier's skull exploded into a spray of grey brain matter and crimson mist, his lifeless body collapsing backward into the very ditch that had instantly transformed into his grave.

"Whoa! A clean hit!!" The goblin riflemen stationed on the watchtower, having tracked the trajectory through their own optics, erupted into a chorus of stunned gasps. To pluck such a microscopic, moving target from that extreme distance was a feat they considered completely impossible for their own skill sets. Their frantic cheers rippled across the platform. Li Qinwu cleanly passed the empty rifle to an assistant for reloading, immediately snatching the second primed musket to scan for a fresh target.

His gaze settled upon an enclosed subterranean exit point roughly 170 meters out, which had been reinforced with heavy vertical wooden mantlets. While the wooden boarding was intended to insulate the trench from the fortress's line of sight, a jagged structural fracture ran through the center of the wood, revealing a narrow vertical corridor through which human personnel were routinely moving back and forth.

Evaluating the fracture, Li Qinwu deduced that this specific junction served as a critical traffic artery for the frontline units; a human silhouette crossed the gap roughly once every second. Anchoring his barrel against the opening, he triggered Dynamic Vision, mapping the walking speed and rhythmic cadence of the personnel moving behind the gap. Timing the exact window, he squeezed the trigger.

The lead ball tore through the narrow fracture in the mantlet, striking a human runner precisely as he stepped into the gap, dropping him instantly with a mortal wound. For the next ten minutes, the high watchtower was defined by the continuous, rhythmic crack of Li Qinwu's custom rifles. With nearly every single report, a human asset was cleanly neutralized across the plain. With every pull of the trigger, his cognitive command over Dynamic Vision grew increasingly fluid and organic.

Along the lower battlements, the common goblin infantry quickly caught on to the situation: their Boss was using the entire human army as a private shooting gallery! Focusing their eyes through the stone crenellations, they would occasionally catch the distant, dramatic collapse of a human soldier through some impossible structural gap. As hereditary Goblin Marksmen, they understood precisely how much divine martial skill was required to execute shots of that caliber.

A collective realization washed over the ranks that their supreme commander possessed a terrifying level of lethality, and the entire detachment gathered at the embrasures simply to watch him hunt. With every thunderous report that barked from his position, the lower ranks would let out excited, guttural screeches, howling in feral delight. However, the shooting gallery came to a swift conclusion.

After roughly ten minutes of continuous fire, resulting in twelve confirmed fatalities, the human forces—no matter how dense or unconditioned—realized a high-tier sniper had locked down their positions. The surviving sappers pulled back into the absolute deepest recesses of their earthworks, refusing to afford him even a millimeter of exposed silhouette. Li Qinwu lowered his smoking barrel with a soft grunt of disappointment; he had barely begun to enjoy the exercise.

Just as he prepared to step down and resume his rest, a succession of deep, thunderous war horns suddenly blared from the heart of the human encampment. In the next instant, a massive, dense sea of individuals clad in tattered, threadbare rags began to pour out from the rear lines, flooding into the hundred-odd trench systems and driving toward the fortress walls. The sheer volume of these rag-clad individuals was staggering; within a few heartbeats, their numbers completely choked the approach lines.

Recognizing that the main human surge had finally manifested, Li Qinwu issued a roaring command that rippled across the defensive lines: "Brace for impact! Man your battle stations! The enemy is coming!!" Subordinate officers barked orders as military whistles shrilled across the perimeter. The goblin garrison mobilized instantly, flooding the stone battlements with a wall of weapons and anchoring their musket barrels against the masonry. As Li Qinwu focused his vision upon the oncoming mass, his brow furrowed.

The individuals flooding the approach lines were not professional soldiers; they were a hollow-cheeked, visibly terrified mass of agricultural serfs clad in absolute filth. Tracing their movement toward the seventeen active Cloud Ladders anchored a mere thirty meters from the walls, a sharp curse hissed from his teeth:"Son of a bitch..." The aristocratic command was using their own civilian populations as human shields to drive the machinery home! Li Qinwu felt a genuine wave of psychological shock.

These serfs were not foreign elements or alien species; they were ethnically pure citizens of the Kingdom of Thasos. To capture one's own civilian populace and drive them into the jaws of an industrial meat grinder as disposable fodder was an act of absolute desperation—a depraved metric seen only during the death throes of a collapsing dynasty. He felt a massive administrative headache brewing.

These serfs were not his subjects; liquidating them carried zero ethical weight or psychological burden for his conscience. The core issue was one of resource optimization: these unarmored targets possessed zero strategic value, yet their sheer volume would systematically deplete his precious ammunition reserves. His high-grade black-powder cartridges were a finite resource; every shot fired was one less round in his logistics ledger.

His total stockpiles hovered at roughly 40, 000 rounds—a volume that could not even liquidate Count Fischer's entire host if they stood in an open field and allowed themselves to be shot. Expending those precious lead balls on unarmored targets was a catastrophic waste of capital; those rounds needed to be reserved strictly for the annihilation of the heavy plate infantry!

Seeing the miserable serfs being driven out of the trench lips by the whips of the rear guards, Li Qinwu turned to his line officers and snapped a fresh directive: "Deploy the five hundred captured human crossbows to the battlements immediately! Instruct the men: any target lacking armor is to be neutralized strictly with archery and crossbow fire! Reserve the muskets entirely for the heavy plate targets!" The 500 captured human crossbows were rapidly distributed among the Punisher Army musketeers.

Because the vast majority of these units were Level 3 Goblin Marksmen who possessed high foundational proficiency in all missile weapons, they handled the mechanical crossbows with instant, fluid familiarity. As the defensive shift finalized, the desperate mass of serfs appeared to accept their grim destiny, screaming in absolute terror as they broke from the trench lips and charging toward the stalled machinery.

Every individual driven onto the field had been selected precisely because they possessed families back in the rural communes; if they refused to drive the ladders forward, their wives, parents, and children would be systematically slaughtered by Count Fischer's provost details. To preserve the lives of their loved ones, they were forced to conquer their instinctual terror, driving their bare hands into the heavy wooden chassis.

Thanks to the bloody sacrifices of the previous professional divisions, the seventeen active Cloud Ladders sat a mere thirty meters from the stone foundations. Over 3, 000 serfs converged upon the machinery simultaneously, their frantic, grief-stricken wails filling the air as they leveraged their collective muscle against the frames. Though the Cloud Ladders were colossally heavy, under the kinetic pressure of thousands of desperate souls, the massive wooden wheelbases began to roll forward at a visible pace!

"Release! Loose your volleys!" At Li Qinwu's roar, the goblin garrison unleashed hell. A dense, black cloud of bolts and arrows erupted from the stone parapets, plunging directly into the packed, unprotected mass of humanity below. The field dissolved into a chorus of agonizing shrieks as the high-velocity projectiles tore through flesh.

Those who sustained mortal wounds collapsed into the dirt, instantly trampled under the frantic boots of their peers; in this meat grinder, a down target was simply left to bleed out in the mud. The Goblin Marksmen maintained a cold, mechanical cadence with their crossbows and short bows.

The short bow, in particular, proved to be an exceptionally efficient tool in this specific environment; lacking the extensive reload cycle of a musket, a single archer could launch a continuous stream of arrows into the mass, achieving an incredible rate of liquidation against the unarmored targets. A relentless rain of iron-tipped bolts and shafts poured from the embrasures, answered by the continuous, agonizing wails of the dying peasantry.

Yet, these wretched souls drove the machinery forward with a frantic, desperate ferocity that completely eclipsed the performance of Count Fischer's professional troops. For the survival of their bloodlines, men who sustained multiple arrow wounds refused to fall, gritting their teeth as they screamed through the agony, throwing their weight against the wood until their hearts officially ceased to beat.

Watching their suicidal determination, Li Qinwu easily deduced that their domestic units were being held hostage by the Count's command. Though a flash of grim pity flickered in his mind, the absolute divergence of their strategic positions left zero room for hesitation. Snatching up a heavy composite war-bow, he began to systematically rain high-velocity shafts into the densest pockets of the crowd at maximum speed.

The serfs endured the apocalyptic slaughter with raw, animalistic desperation, their corpses piling up around the wheelbases in massive mounds as fresh waves of frantic laborers stepped over the dead to man the driving stakes. Twenty-five meters... twenty meters... fifteen meters... ten meters... The immediate approach vectors beneath the walls were completely choked with mountains of human meat, forming literal carpets of the dead that extended directly to the stone foundations.

Finally, utilizing the corpses of over two thousand of their kin as a physical roadbed, the survivors successfully drove the seventeen massive Cloud Ladders directly against the base of Poloia's fortifications. The internal winches screamed as the folding mechanical frameworks were violently thrown upward. The heavy iron structural hooks slammed over the stone lip of the parapets, anchoring themselves with an absolute, ominous lock.