The Ross soldiers poured through the breached wall like a sudden tide. The city gate yawned open and once-hidden forces flooded into Halma, turning the streets into a living, roaring front. Where the great army of Emperor Longdangor had taken its strongest contingents, only a skeleton garrison remained—thin, exhausted, and ill-prepared for the thunder that had come in their place.
Inside the palace, Fox Adviser rapped his staff against the stone floor and barked orders. Reports had come in fast and terrible: the outer walls had collapsed. He gathered the last of the defenders—barely a thousand hardened men—and pinned his hopes to the one thing he must tell them at any cost: that the Emperor's five hundred thousand troops would return to relieve Halma.
"Hold the palace! Hold the castle!" he cried. He could see the truth in his own mind—the truth that it was the Emperor himself who had taken away the greatest portion of the realm's forces—but that truth could not be spoken. To speak it would shatter morale. It was better to bind the men by courage, however false.
"His Majesty leads five hundred thousand—he must be near! They are only a small band of humans; hold the palace and he will crush them." Fox Adviser shouted, sword raised. The lie tightened the men's faces and made their voices louder; the lie did its job and for the moment steadied fists and hearts.
Outside, the Ross forces advanced without mercy. Halma—long the proud capital of the beast orc empire—suddenly trebled in sound: gunfire, screams, breaking wood, the metallic clang of falling armor. Orc soldiers who had fought for decades watched in dismay as their brothers fell under strange, lightning-quick weapons. The weapons these humans bore—so small, so light—rained death with a speed the orcs had never seen.
"What are those weapons?" one veteran whispered as another rutting great-knight collapsed nearby, holes opening in his chest like a flayed blossom.
Panic rippled. Men and orcs who had not known fear in years found themselves racing back toward the inner fortress. A line of battered garrison troops slammed on the palace gate and pounded until their knuckles bled.
"Open—open the gates! Let us in!" they begged.
From the castle parapets, the defenders watched the rout soldiers slam against the gate. A cold calculation passed their faces: failed soldiers were worthless. Many simply let the beaten men die where they fell. Then, as the retreating soldiers were mowed down, the defenders' confidence wavered. If a handful of humans could kill so many, what hope had they of surviving a full assault?
The castle's magic wards had always been Halma's greatest protector. Once upon a time, three hundred orc wizards had sustained the great ring of power that kept entire armies from forcing the gates. Now, most of those wizards had been taken away with Longdangor's campaign. Less than a dozen were left to man the ancient rune-works. The formation still glowed—barely—but it was a fragile arrogance to believe it unbreakable.
Gavin Ward surveyed the towering castle as his lines readied their next move. The fortress rose well over fifty meters, its walls ringing with sigils, its inner stores filled with treasures and food enough for a siege. It made sense that the Tongsley Empire's million-strong host had failed to take this gate a century ago; stone and sorcery together can resist a great many things.
But Gavin did not command an army of spears and banners. He commanded an army of gunpowder, iron, and the new math of siegecraft. His war machines were not the crude tubes of older days—they were 120 mm mortars, the kind of weapons that turned walls into dust. For every fond legend about invincible wards, Gavin had engineers who loved the geometry of destruction.
"Bring forward every mortar," he ordered. "Line them on four angles. I want the circle hammered until it is a memory."
Within minutes the field hummed with preparation. Dozens—then hundreds—of 120 mm P-38 mortars were hauled into place. Men with quick, practiced motions rammed shell after shell into the muzzles. In a neat ballet of efficiency the mortars were aimed and the crews tucked themselves behind crude shields.
"Fire!"
The first volleys spoke like thunder. A hundred heavy booms shattered the still air; the ground shook under the rhythm of metal and flame. Above the castle, the ancient wards stuttered—like a giant eyelid that could not remain closed under the storm.
The defenders on the battlements watched, eyes widening. The wards had always been a static certainty. But now cracks spidered along the glowing rings, hairline fractures pouring out shards of raw magic that splintered into motes and fell like dying sparks. Orc soldiers who had laughed at human frailty suddenly toppled, ears ringing, knees buckling under the force of the shock waves.
"Another round," Gavin commanded. He did not flinch. He had brought the future to clash with their past, and he meant for it to be decisive.
The second bombardment was worse. The magic circle could sustain only so much. With a thunder of impact and a cascade of collapsing light, the ward shattered. The sky above the wall filled with falling runes and fragmented mana—tens of thousands of points of power cascading like a meteor shower. The dozen orc wizards who had held the formation straight were hit by the backlash all at once; many vomited blood, glowing sigils searing their flesh, and several collapsed and died where they stood.
Fox Adviser stared as an impossible scene unfolded: the great protective ring that had once withstood the armies of the Tongsley Empire now lay in ruin beneath the assault of a twenty-thousand-strong human vanguard.
"How is this even possible?" he wailed. He had heard of Gavin Ward's prowess—who had not?—but even rumor did not prepare him for this. A century ago, three hundred wizards, the combined weight of a nation's arcane might, had failed where now a handful could not hold.
He knew numbers; he knew that the old tales spoke of a million attackers halted by those stones and magics. Yet before his eyes, a host of twenty thousand humans—armed differently and thinking differently—brought down what had once required whole legions and centuries of sacrifice.
The defenders staggered but did not yet surrender their pride. "It cannot be," one royal knight growled. "The wards were not only stone—they were belief. We still have our swords. We will fight!"
But their courage was no match for a hammer of modern ordnance. The Ross army advanced through the gap the mortars had made: infantry with repeating rifles, engineers with explosive charges, and squads whose training taught them to exploit every crack. Towers that once bristled with archers and spellcasters were now caved in, doors blown clear from their hinges, parapets shattered into heaps of rubble.
Gavin's men moved with the quiet confidence of a force that had rehearsed this moment. They did not waste time. Small detachments leapt over the ruined stones, planted scaling ladders in broken niches, and poured through collapsed embrasures. In the narrow streets below, shock and chaos replaced the stately pomp of Halma.
Fox Adviser, coughing and clutching the ruin of his robes, paced like one who had watched the world tilt on its axis. "A handful of mortars—twenty thousand troops—and yet they overthrew a ward we believed eternal," he whispered, half to himself, half to the falling sky.
The fall of an age-old defense by what Halma had considered a mere band of humans was not merely military—it was symbolic. It told any who would listen that the old certainties were gone. That the law of power had a new grammar: steel and gunpowder married to sound tactics, and a willingness to use them without reverence for what the ancients called inviolable.
Gavin did not gloat. He watched, cold and efficient, as his engineers sealed the breach, as squads established footholds in the city, and as the battered defenders were either cut down or taken. He had broken the castle not to revel in the deed, but to open Halma and its riches to the next phase of his campaign. The palace still loomed—the heart of the beast orc empire—and he intended to take it.
As the Ross banners lifted over walls that had once been impregnable, the reality settled on every heart in the city: Halma was not the same place it had been that morning. Its gods had fallen silent, and a new order walked the streets with rifles in hand.
----------------------
Visit our Patreon for more:
Get membership in patreon to read more chapters
Extra chapters available in patreon
patreon.com/Dragonscribe31
----------------------------------------------------- .