CHAPTER 124: FOG OF WAR

The eastern battering ram was the first to fall, as a cannonball detonated inside its cab, tearing apart the drive mechanisms and rupturing the pressure vessel.

The western front had better luck, as the driver had raised the plow-shaped ram to guard his windows. It had taken dozens of hits with minimal damage, but Dominic could see that the vehicle was spewing steam as it approached the gate.

A round must have bounced under the ram and hit the undercarriage.

Dominic couldn’t hear the impact over the sounds of battle, but he could see the backside of the western gate, and it didn’t buckle after the truck disappeared from sight.

Again, white smoke was beginning to block the view over the wall as the cannons continued to fire. At least the Natural Sons’ Regiment wasn’t making the issue worse.

Their rifles were all compressed air and magic powered, so they didn’t give off the signature white smoke of a black powder firearm.

But there were some upsides to the situation.

Neither side could see what was happening from a distance, so the remaining artillery couldn’t tell if they were hitting the city or mage barriers, and they were unable to target the emplacements on the walls.

Then, the airships began to rush back into the sky, leaving only two to continue harassing the army on the ground.

{Incoming Dagos Heavy Transport fleet. Thirty Airships, lightly armed, loaded with infantry for paratrooper insertion.} The Airship Commander announced over the radio.

That would let Dagos know that they had been spotted, but the Commander had deemed it more important that the forces on the ground knew what might be coming if they didn’t stop them before they got in drop range of the city.

Overhead, the battle began in the distance, but over the next half hour, Dominic could tell that they were getting closer, even if he wasn’t watching the steady stream of soldiers floating down from the sky.

They had started far off in the distance, but the closest ones now were in rifle range, and few were making it to the ground alive as the riflemen turned their attention upwards.

It was an absolute massacre, and the soldiers outside the walls were coated in blood before they even reached archer range.

Dominic shook his head. "What sort of insane strategy is this? I know that many Commanders don’t care much about conscripted forces, but this is inhuman."

Princess Alexis and the Marquis came to the window to see what he was talking about, just in time for the incoming troopers to get close enough that the mages along the walls could hit them with fireballs.

The magic exploded in the air and lingered, burning bodies and parachute strings alike. The unfortunate soldiers plummeted hundreds of metres to the ground, onto their charging allies.

And those were the lucky ones, as most who didn’t get hit by fireballs were landing critically injured from rifle shots.

Then, the cannons directly above their heads, on top of the keep, began to fire, sending flak into troopers from an airship that had gotten close enough to put troops into the city.

"Incoming aerial invasion. Barriers up. Prepare the militia archers." Princess Alexis ordered.

The response was predictably bloody and brutal, but the artillery of the Dagos army suddenly picked up its firing rate, and units that were previously thought destroyed began to set up, bombarding the north wall, closest to the paratroopers.

Many of the soldiers were forced to take cover, and others were lost as sections of the upper battlements were shattered. But the majority of the riflemen moved down the ramps, out of the direct line of fire, but still able to aim up.

It wasn’t enough.

Hundreds of troopers in a second wave were coming down as the first wave was eliminated, and the north wall couldn’t take them all out in time.

One after another, Dagos paratroopers landed in the city. Some landed in the streets, some slid down clay tiles and fell from roofs, and others were caught in trees only to be hacked apart by the citizens of Burton.

While most of the commoners didn’t have any weapons training, that didn’t mean that they would not attempt to defend the city during an invasion, or that the Guard hadn’t been passing out spears ever since the threat of war started.

Every household had at least a few, and whole bundles were stacked in the lobbies of most of the apartment buildings.

The Dagos army took the successful landing of even a few paratroopers as a victory, and they were working quickly to set fires and cause chaos within the city. The faster that the chaos spread, the sooner that Burton would fall, they assumed.

But the people of Burton were not going to let this insult go so lightly, and not long after the wave of troops landed in the city, they began hurling the mangled corpses of paratroopers back over the wall.

The invaders were predictably not impressed with that, or the failure of their first attempt to storm the city. There were fires in dozens of locations, but the only troopers who had made it into the city had all landed in the same area, and the tactic had proven highly ineffective after their loss of the air battle.

{Dagos armoured convoy located. No airship support spotted, we are moving to intercept.} The Cygnia Airship commander reported.

So, the invaders weren’t going to give up.

In the distance, the army was digging trenches and settling in for the siege, now that the blitz of the city had failed.

But what Dominic couldn’t help but notice was the distance. They had set the trenches fifteen hundred metres out from the walls, at the very edge of cannon range, where the riflemen couldn’t target them.

At least, not easily.

"What do you think their strategy here is? Are they setting a staging area for another imminent assault? Or do they plan to wait us out?" Dominic asked the two better trained Nobles in the room.

Princess Alexis shook her head. "I think that they’re planning to cut us off from reinforcements and see how long we can keep the army supplied. They don’t know that we’ve got the Magitech abilities to create more munitions, so they likely assume that we will be out within a few days or a week at the most.

But the airships have enough supplies to stay up longer than that, and they can continue to bombard the trenches as well.

As long as the cloud cover holds, they won’t be able to prove that it’s the same group every day."