However, this seemingly short distance of one hundred and fifty meters, turned into an uncrossable distance, the last round of firing of canister shells completely destroyed the last bit of their fighting will. In the range of one hundred meters, the solid iron balls were able to penetrate through as many as two to three people, turning the area in front of the cannon fire into a field of death. From the twenty knights riding at the forefront, almost none had been able to survive, the only difference between them lied in the amount of iron balls by which they had been hit.
The knight’s assault had completely collapsed.
Because the fear created by the collapse of the knight’s assault was so huge, the knights following attempted to turn around their horses wanting to flee the battlefield.
When they saw the knights scatter the mercenaries weren’t willing to take another step forward. They had always only been working for the money, but they immediately turned around when they saw how much they would have to pay. Now, at the moment of their retreat, they ran even much faster than they had during their attack.
When the wave of their crushing defeat swept over the dukedom’s allied forces, the situation soon became impossible to control. The crowd had only one thought left, they had to flee. There were people who fell and were trampled to death, no one took the time to care for others, they only hated themselves for not being able to grow another pair of legs.
At this moment the melody of the Guerrilla warfare song resounded through the battlefield, and the lines of the infantry began to march in step, sweeping across the battlefield.
It was Carter’s first time that he seeing a battle.
A lineup of more than three hundred knights was unable to even scratch the edge of their defensive line, instead, they had been totally crushed.
Until the end, they had failed to even enter into a range of fifty meters — it was the hunter team’s fire line, only when the enemy had come closer than fifty meters were they allowed to open fire.
The four cannons had brought the enemy’s assault to a complete halt at merely one hundred meters. Along the range of one hundred and fifty to one hundred meters, laid an orderly row of twenty bodies, it was as if they had run into a wall. And these men, like himself, belonged to the strongest category of fighters, Knights; otherwise, they would have never been able to control their horses under the sound of gunfire.
In the end, Carter was glad that he wasn’t one of them. He felt a faint hunch that the battles in the future would become very different, and it was only a matter of time, until Roland Wimbledon the master of such a powerful force would aspire to the throne and aim for kingship.
When the members of the First Army saw the bloody battlefield, they became dizzy and began vomiting or had other adverse reactions. But this wasn’t the reaction they would show if they had personally killed the enemy during close combat, the sense of deterrence brought on by killing someone over a long distance was much less when compared with killing someone with a knife, their reaction couldn’t be counted as critical. Carter picked a set of people from his own team to pick up the severed limbs and put them back with the dead bodies, while still searching for the living people.
The sun gradually fell behind the mountains, and when Carter looked at the blood-red sky, and the distant woods with its crying crows, he was suddenly hit by a dull and dreary feeling.
The era of the Knights was over.
…
Even until now Duke Ryan was still unable to recover.
He couldn’t understand how it was possible that he had lost, even more to a line of defense as thin as a slice of onion skin, normally it would have been enough to poke it with just a finger to run through it, but today, it was his knights who fled like they had come face to face with the Devil. In truth, he couldn’t even blame them because the assault was under the command of his elite knights.
His personal guards had even to chop down several people so that the blindly fleeing mercenary didn’t come close to the Duke’s position. But he was unable to do anything else, no matter how much he shouted, he couldn’t unite the defeated men once more. In desperation, even Duke Ryan had to retreat with the flow of fleeing people, and their mindless escape only stopped after they had crossed nearly ten miles.
When the night came, the Duke chose a place close to the river bank to camp. Even after setting up torches to lead the separated knights and mercenaries back to their camp, most of their people were still missing. To make matters worse, the freedman had without any hesitation left in the carts with the food, so tonight they had to slaughter a few horses to serve as rations.
