The day before the House family clashed with Gramont's army, the five thousand Toristine elite troops who had arrived at La Rochelle, together with Gandalf and the fifty Academy magicians originally stationed there, boarded an airship and flew toward Albion's floating continent.
On the day the Houses met Gramont in battle, the Grunt family also moved. Twenty thousand troops stationed across the mines in their domain mobilized: ten thousand advanced on the nearest port city, while the other ten thousand slipped through the forest toward the House family's lumberyard and shipyard.
Albion's civil war had begun anew.
As a floating-continent port city, Edisi did not maintain a large garrison. Under siege by ten thousand Grunt troops, its lord simply ceded control.
Grunts secured the port of Edisi by morning. By afternoon, the ten thousand Toristine soldiers who had left La Rochelle the previous day arrived, took a brief rest, then — under Gandalf's command — five thousand Toristine troops marched out from the port toward the House logging camp.
The House family, a wealthy clan founded on shipbuilding, split its forces between two hubs: the royal capital where they now resided, and the forested logging ground feeding their shipyards. Ten thousand garrisoned each.
The capital enjoyed complete fortifications and ample stores; even triple its defenders would struggle to take it. The logging forest, by contrast, had only rough wooden defenses — a single blaze could end it.
Sora personally led ten thousand Grunt soldiers to the lumberyard.
"Bring combustibles — tie them to arrows. Light and loose!!"
Rear-line archers nocked; nearby soldiers bound grease-soaked rags to shafts and set them alight. A dozen torch-like volleys formed.
"Fire!" Sora shouted.
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh…
Thousands of flaming arrows arced skyward.
Some fell harmlessly on bare earth, burning out. Others struck stacks of timber, wooden huts, and half-built airships; one by one, small sparks swelled out of sight of the defenders, merging into fires that began to swallow buildings and hulls.
Driven by the blaze, House's lumberyard defenders stumbled from cover in panic.
Their commander spotted the enemy and roared, "Who are you? Do you know whose land this is?!"
"Shoot him," Sora said coldly. "Kill him."
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh…
Hundreds of burning arrows rained toward him. Terrified, the commander dove behind a burning airship. All around, flames crackled, charred beams collapsed, and soldiers sprinted with buckets, frantically dousing fires.
"Forget the flames — useless!" the commander yelled. "Grab your weapons — kill them! Kill that lot!"
Under his hard stare, defenders abandoned firefighting and snatched up swords and spears, charging out of the yard. With a ragged howl, five thousand surged at seven thousand Grunts.
"Front to rear, rear to front — withdraw!" Sora ordered.
He wheeled his horse and rode back along their approach.
The seven thousand Grunt soldiers, startled, pivoted and began a steady retreat.
House's defenders chased a thousand meters; Grunts had pulled five hundred farther by then.
Frustration boiling and unable to vent, House troops finally halted, then turned back to the yard.
Seeing this, Sora again ordered an about-face and advanced.
At two hundred meters from the lumberyard, archers loosed another flaming storm, undoing the defenders' earlier efforts. Fire blossomed anew around the yard, growing fiercer and licking into the surrounding forest.
If defenders sallied en masse, Sora would draw back, forcing them to break off pursuit. If only a thousand came, he met them with his own thousand swords and spears while the remaining eight thousand archers kept bombarding with rockets.
Sora reached the area at 1:30 p.m. By 7:00, the lumberyard and shipyard lay in charred ruins. Nearly ten thousand defenders, stripped of defenses, attacked in a red-eyed mass, chasing Sora's seven thousand across the open.
His swordsmen and spearmen formed the rear guard, archers loosing as they fell back. The line retired gradually.
The ten thousand pursuers stretched into a long serpent pouring from the ruined yard, jaws snapping at Sora's rearguard.
Then, from the ravine ahead, a hidden force struck.
Crack-crack-crack…
Hundreds of one-meter stone lances erupted from the center of the enemy column — a thousand in all — in a single instant. Four hundred were merely wounded, but six hundred were impaled outright. The charge faltered; the column devolved into chaos.
[Fireball], [Wind Blade], [Rock Spear], [Water Impact], [Great Wind Blade], [Great Fireball]…
Fifty robed Academy youths appeared on the hillside flank. Chanting loudly, they rained spell after spell onto tightly packed ranks, each blast claiming two or three lives — sometimes more than a dozen.
Overwhelmed by magic's destructive force, the defenders panicked.
Behind the mages, five thousand Toristine swordsmen and spearmen burst forth, charging with a roar into the disordered enemy. Toristine's reinforcements had arrived.
After an afternoon battling fire, the defenders' morale had already frayed. Two successive magical barrages broke what remained. Then enemy reinforcements crashed in.
The surviving eight to nine thousand finally shattered, dropping weapons and screaming: "I surrender! Don't kill me!" "I don't want to die!" "Ancestors, save us!"
Toristine's five thousand elites swept through them, cutting down nearly a thousand. The rest flung aside arms and squatted in terror.
Toristine halted, encircling the surrendered.
Sora rode forward to meet the allied commander.
It was Gandalf — former leader of Albion's advance army.
After exchanging greetings, Sora began organizing the next move.
He had the lumberyard's captured commander brought forth. "Write a plea for aid to the capital," Sora ordered, "and send it to all House offspring there."
"We have over fifty mages," he added softly. "You know what they can do to make a man beg for death."
The garrison commander lacked any great loyalty — proven by his surrender. Under Sora's "guidance," he penned a distress letter to the royal capital: The lumberyard shipyard is under attack by ten thousand Grunt troops; our ten thousand defenders are locked in fierce stalemate.
Under Sora's expectant gaze, the pigeon bearing this bait took wing toward the capital.
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