Lord of Winter: Beginning with Daily Intelligence

Chapter 710: Chapter 399: Era-Crushing Overwhelming Force

The Seventeenth Legion, despite being disheveled and covered in mud from their escape from the quagmire, still maintained a terrifying momentum with three thousand Black Steel Knights charging forward.

The ground trembled, and the warhorses snorted white mist, as if intending to uproot the entire Icefield.

The distance between them and Frost Halberd City was now less than a kilometer.

Ackman grinned viciously, his face grotesquely twisted by the cold wind.

Seeing the seemingly flimsy front line of the Red Tide Knights ahead, his arrogance erupted completely.

These men would soon be crushed to powder by the wave of his Black Steel Knights!

Just at the moment before the Seventeenth Legion was about to collide...

The Red Tide Knights suddenly retreated to both sides like a tide, their movements eerily synchronized.

Ackman’s pupils contracted: "Hmph, trying to bait us? Naive!"

But before he could finish his words, the open field shrouded in mist behind his line of sight suddenly lit up.

As the white mist cleared, Ackman finally saw the second tier of wall hidden before the city gate.

It wasn’t a shield formation, but a row of steam war machines as oppressive as abyssal giants.

They were arranged horizontally, forming an iron wall, each as tall as two warhorses, with wedge-shaped bodies covered in rivets like dense cold iron scars on their armor, and alloy ramming angles in the front like predator’s fangs.

The tracks rolled slowly, heavy metal chains gripping the permafrost tightly, copper steam pipes swelling and trembling; high-pressure steam from the boilers spewing black smoke.

"Boom... boom... boom..."

The low-frequency rumble of pistons and power furnaces was as heavy as giants pounding deep underground.

It was the vibration, a fear spreading outward from the marrow.

The wind distorted, layers of frost peeled off the ground, and snow accumulated near the city gate slid off with the vehicle’s tremor, as if the whole world bowed to these steel monsters.

Ackman froze for half a second, then burst into laughter filled with disdain and arrogance.

"Hahaha! Is this your trump card, Louis? Dozens of... iron coffins?!"

He raised his head, laughing wildly till his nostrils flared: "Trying to block me with these broken toys? What a joke!"

He suddenly raised his longsword high, Fighting Energy bursting into a dazzling white glow on the blade.

His roar echoed across the battlefield: "Seventeenth Legion—Crush them!!! Slaughter the city for three days!!!"

The black torrent roared its final rage. Warhorses neighed, iron armor vibrated, and the remnants of the formation were reassembled by collective killing intent.

Three thousand heavy cavalry were like a black giant spear ignited by fury, fiercely stabbing toward the wall of steel war machines.

The ground trembled under the hooves, the air heating from the steam, and snowflakes in the sky were shaken apart, scattered in disarray.

The two torrents of war were about to collide head-on in the next second.

......

On the North City Wall, Count Albert looked at the neatly arrayed hundred steam war machines below the city, unable to hold back any longer, his gray beard trembling incessantly.

"Absurd... utterly absurd!" he shouted in a low voice, "No chevaux de frise, no infantry phalanx, no dense spears... relying on these iron lumps to stop cavalry? Louis, you’re gambling the fate of the entire Northern Territory!"

His voice had just fallen, and other nobles also turned pale.

Count Albert wanted to say more, but Louis had already raised his hand and gently waved it down.

......

"Boom——!!!"

A full hundred main cannons roared simultaneously.

The vibration was so intense that even the stone bricks on the city wall vibrated lightly, and a cup on the table splashed tiny droplets of water.

The air seemed to be torn apart, white snow blasting into the air, turning into a pervasive white mist.

In the next instant, a dense, seamless salvo of shrapnel shot from the war machine muzzles.

It wasn’t an arrow rain, nor a magic light beam.

It was a steel grinding net capable of cutting through the knight order’s formation, tearing apart heavy armor, and shaking horse skeletons.

The vanguard of the Seventeenth Legion didn’t even have time to let out a roar of rage before being shaved away in a torrent of shrapnel.

They didn’t fall, they just vanished.

Black steel armor was deformed and shattered, and warhorses’ necks snapped like broken branches under the kinetic impact.

The knights were torn into blood mist in the shrapnel storm.

In just a moment, hundreds of heavy knights were erased from the battlefield.

Silence engulfed the entire city wall.

Ackman, face twisted in shock, still forced himself to shout, "Keep going! Getting past means victory! Retreat is death!"

The Seventeenth Legion, true to their reputation as the Northern Empire’s elite, clenched their teeth against the terror in their hearts and charged forward.

But just then, behind the war machine array, a group of Red Tide Grenadier Knights simultaneously pulled their fuses.

Over a hundred frost-eating soul-shock grenades engraved with blue demon patterns were tossed high into the air.

As they fell, they emitted a faint yet eerie "buzz," like some ancient withered god breathing softly in the depths.

The bombs rolled among the knights, emitting no fire, only rings of outwardly expanding ghostly blue ripples hitting the soul like cold tides.

In the moment the blue light swept over, the fear smartly suppressed by reason within the Seventeenth Legion knights’ hearts, was brutally magnified a hundredfold by the soul-shock grenades.

The stark coldness that would only emerge in the last moments of life was forcibly shoved back into their minds.

Their vision began to distort, colors drained away, leaving only gloom and dislocation.

In their eyes, the steam war machines were no longer cold machines but giants with steel spines, abdomens gaping open.

Every jet of steam was like a demon licking the victims’ ears.

The figures of their comrades became elongated and twisted, the armor’s reflection flashed like fangs, and they were no longer allies but monstrous shadows lunging at them, mouths agape.