The First Dawn of the Rotinzel Offensive
The Rotinzel main force had arrived, and the second day dawned.
They launched their assault at first light.
“Shall we fire the cannons?”__
Jeanne shook her head at the knight’s question.
Even with reinforcements from La Rochelle, the supply of cannonballs at Peale Castle remained strictly limited.
It was far wiser to save them for moments when they could truly devastate the enemy.
First, the Rotinzel sharpshooters opened fire in unison before charging forward.
“Now.”__
Boom!__
The cannons roared in perfect sequence, striking the enemy vanguard with everything Jeanne had at her disposal.
Metal-shredding cannonballs tore through the air.
The soldiers clutching their guns were vaporized on impact, their bodies reduced to sprays of blood and gore.
“Continue the charge.”__
Yet Laurent ignored the order and urged his men onward.
The enemy cannons had limits, and every shot they wasted risked wasting precious ammunition on siege weapons rather than living flesh.
In truth, the sheer horror of bodies torn apart by cannonfire was already breaking the morale of the charging soldiers, but the casualties themselves were still only a fraction of the total force.
CRASH!__
A massive wooden ram, reinforced with iron at the front, began its relentless battering of the castle gate.
The defenders of Peale Castle aimed every possible shot at the men hauling the ram and the soldiers shielding them behind broad shields.
Some Rotinzel troops wore helmets shaped like upside-down umbrellas.
The Rotinzel army was now openly trying to breach the castle walls.
The iron-reinforced gate groaned and shuddered with each impact, and the soldiers of Peale Castle inside heard every thunderous blow, their skin crawling with cold sweat.
“Hold the gate at all costs!”__
The defenders braced themselves against the shockwaves, absorbing every blow with their bodies and refusing to yield an inch.
Rotinzel did possess cannons, but their performance was inferior to Bluisol’s own artillery.
That was why they had brought their older siege engines in the first place.
The assembled ballista and trebuchet continued to hurl massive arrows and boulders.
While arrows and rocks could pick off soldiers on the ramparts, cannonballs hammered directly into the stone walls.
The defenders had hastily reinforced the front with sandbags, yet Peale Castle was no great fortress like Ilion.
Some shots got through, and the walls began to shake, dust cascading down in choking clouds.
A siege tower, the weapon that could physically carry troops across the walls, now lumbered toward them.
“Prioritize the tower!”__
Laurent’s command rang out.
Cannonballs slammed into the base of the siege tower.
The wooden structure collapsed with a deafening crash, and the soldiers riding it plummeted to their deaths twenty meters below.
The brutal exchange of fire and steel lasted for hours.
By the time night finally fell, the Rotinzel army had halted its assault and retreated to regroup.
Aaron gave orders to his subordinates.
“Activate what we’ve prepared.”__
“Yes, sir!”__
They strung headless scarecrows around the castle walls, setting them spinning to create eerie, rattling sounds.
Some soldiers emitted ghastly noises that eerily mimicked the lament of the death god Vense.
“D- Durahahn!”__
Panic spread through the defenders of Peale Castle.
A headless knight figure was said to be the reaper who escorted the dead into the afterlife.
Aaron’s cunning ploy to sow terror and break enemy morale had succeeded.
At the same time, they drew the enemy’s attention with the fake Durahahn while another siege engine was quietly assembled behind the walls.
Divine noticed the soldiers waiting in ambush and gave the signal.
“You all know the song I taught you a few days ago, right?”__
The soldiers began to sing in unison, their voices trembling at first.
When my voice grows hoarse with exhaustion__
The Saint who descended from heaven__
Will she save us all?__
The sea that bathed in light__
Washes away the red stain__
The booming voices of Peale Castle soldiers cut through the dark night like thunder.
Even though the notes were slightly off and the rhythm irregular, it was more than enough.
The soldiers began to calm, their fear slowly receding.
“The Saint is with us! We will win!”__
“WAAHHHHHH!”__
Divine rallied his troops, cheering them on until their voices shook the heavens.
Jeanne’s face flushed with embarrassment, yet she said nothing.
Every bit of hope for victory was worth it.
The tense standoff between Bluisol and Rotinzel continued deep into the night.
It was still pre-dawn, the hour before true light, when Jeanne finally stepped out of her room after a fitful sleep.
“Wouldn’t it be better to get a little more rest?”__
“If Fabian says that, I’ll only feel even more guilty.”__
Fabian, her personal guard knight, had stood watch beside her every moment she was awake.
The earlier she rose, the less sleep he received himself.
“I am fine, Lady. I only worry about your health…”__
“That warms my heart, Fabian.
But I am perfectly fine as well.
Everyone else is suffering too.”__
Jeanne climbed the castle walls.
Even at this hour when soldiers should have been deep in slumber, the sentries remained alert, scanning the enemy lines for any suspicious movement.
As soon as they spotted something amiss, they would alert their comrades by pairing up and moving quickly.
Jeanne approached the soldiers to encourage them, but the sound of voices stopped her in her tracks.
“Will we actually win?”__
“Of course we will. The Saint is here.”__
“But is the princess really the Saint?”__
One soldier voiced his doubt, and another beside him chuckled softly.
“What difference does it make?”__
“Why?”__
“Whether she’s real or not, she’s fighting right beside us now.
That makes her the Saint, doesn’t it?”__
“That’s true…”__
Jeanne could no longer stand to listen.
She leaned against the wall and looked up at the sky.
‘The Saint… I never imagined Divine would invent something so absurd to bring me back.’__
If only the real Saint had descended from heaven, she might have had something to cling to.
Yet a heavy stone of responsibility settled over her heart.
“You don’t have to carry it all alone.”__
Fabian, who had watched over her for so long, already understood what she was thinking.
Jeanne lowered her gaze and looked around.
Her eyes drifted from the Rotinzel camp beyond the walls to the soldiers inside.
“When I was young, I thought I was unlucky.
I never got to see my mother’s face, and my father’s glare was terrifying.”__
The place her gaze landed on was a cluster of children huddled together, still asleep.
Even these small ones had been hauling firewood for the cauldrons and running errands while the battle raged around them.
“But since I was born into the royal family, I enjoyed many things paid for with the sweat of countless others.
Now it’s time to give it all back.
To build a country where those children can live happily.”__
She did not want to add one more regret to the list of things she would regret at the moment of her death.
Even if her body grew tired, she would simply run until she could go no further.
“I doubt I’m the only one thinking like this.”__
From a short distance away, she sensed a familiar presence and turned her head.
Fabian, who had noticed it almost at the same moment, also looked over.
Another figure had appeared on the castle wall.
The lively, rhythmic footsteps belonged to Laurent.
“He can’t sleep either, it seems.”__
Laurent was the type to feel such things deeply.
Beyond his duties as lord or knight, he simply worried about the soldiers who were his neighbors and family.
“I’ll take over the watch here, so you should get some rest.
The men will start rising soon.”__
“Understood.”__
If Laurent had soldiers at Peale Castle, Jeanne had the Second Knight Order.
She set out to check on the people she cared for the most.
***
Full daylight had finally broken.
Overnight, the Rotinzel army had completed assembling the trebuchet.
Among the siege engines they had shown so far, the trebuchet was the largest, and perhaps the most powerful, even among those that did not use gunpowder.
The Rotinzel forces launched boulders gathered from the banks of the Alun River.
The riverbank was abundant with rocks of suitable size.
A boulder the size of a man crashed down onto the ramparts.
“TAKE COVER!”__
Someone shouted urgently, but not everyone could react in time.
Several soldiers standing in the path of the falling rock were crushed instantly and died on the spot.
Chunks of flesh and blood splattered across the walls, staining the stone crimson.
“Ugh…”__
Some soldiers felt their stomachs turn at the sight.
One man, driven mad by fear, ran screaming while his hair turned white.
The boulder that had fallen was uneven and stopped where it landed.
“Fire! Break their siege engines!”__
Laurent ordered through gritted teeth.
Dodging the endless barrage of boulders was impossible.
The only way to reduce casualties was to destroy the trebuchet itself.
At the same moment, another trebuchet hurled a corpse into the air.
While scaring the enemy was the main purpose, Rotinzel also hoped the disease would spread through the decaying flesh.
A soldier unlucky enough to collide with the flying corpse died instantly.
The body thudded onto the wall with a wet crash, limbs twisted at unnatural angles.
The bones had shattered, and parts of the body had been flung in all directions by the impact.
Nearby soldiers were drenched in blood and flesh fragments.
“AHHHHHHHH!”__
Another boulder smashed into a section of the wall.
The soldier standing there had no chance of escape and fell from a height of nine meters.
While ladders were being raised and enemy soldiers began to swarm up them, arrows and cannonballs rained down from above.
The defenders had to fight both the attackers climbing the ladders and the projectiles overhead.
Their hands trembled as they fired, knowing their own safety was not guaranteed.
Fortunately, the knights protected their men by repelling the aerial attacks.
‘This is what war really is.’__
Jeanne’s expression twisted in disgust.
Of all the things humans created, war was the most horrific.
War was cruel to friend and foe alike.
If God truly existed, she wanted to ask why such horror still existed in the world.
The battle continued without a single moment to catch their breath all day long.
Soldiers with severed limbs fought on without medical care, merely staunching the bleeding before plunging back into combat.
Jeanne watched a soldier with his arm gone drive his spear into an enemy, her lips tightening.
Even if the war ended in victory, the wound would likely fester and kill him soon enough.
Arrows and bullets flew, and the heads of Rotinzel soldiers climbing the outer walls toward boiling oil on the ramparts.
On one side, filth was poured over the enemy.
They even coated their arrows with the disgusting substance, hoping it would cause infection and do even greater damage.
Screams echoed from every direction until her ears rang.
The soldiers moved their limbs mechanically, fear of death pushing everything else aside.
The attackers were no different, yet despite the massive number of casualties, more soldiers kept pushing forward from behind.
There was no end in sight, only an endless, endless war.