The next few hours were a blind whirlwind for me. I reveled in the pure violence I was experiencing. The bloodshed. The steel clashing. The bodies dropping. My blood-soaked gauntlets were no longer a pristine silver.
I know that I personally didn’t kill many; I probably could count my true kills on one hand. Still, even just giving assisted kills or just myself running around doing my best to survive felt exhilarating to me.
Still, through all this, I didn’t come out unharmed. In fact, my clothes were nearly nonexistent at this point. My linen shirt was barely more than rags that were held together by the bit around my shoulders. My pants had dozens of open holes and cuts that dyed the black cloth even darker with my blood.
Quite a few bloody cuts could be seen adorning my torso, as I even started to feel the blood loss that I was experiencing. Even my face didn’t remain untouched, as I had gotten my nose broken again from another headbutt!
The fighting was starting to die down, with it being overwhelmingly in our favor; however, there were even significant losses on our side, since the field behind us was littered with corpses in the tens of thousands, possibly reaching hundreds of thousands. The land itself was starting to show a deep red color instead of green.
I was currently bent at my waist, trying to catch my breath, with nothing but bodies all around me. The little bit of fighting that remained had moved further towards the enemy encampment. My body was covered head to toe in blood, caked in it, some of it mine, but most of its others’, whether friend or foe.
My body felt heavy, my vision hazy, and my legs refused to move. Honestly, I almost felt like I was dying again, yet my mind never felt better. I didn’t even care if I died again, since it felt like I had experienced the greatest fight of my life once more. No! Forget that! I don’t want to die again. No, I want to experience this again, and again!
I stood up straight with great agony as a muffled groan escaped my torn lips. I urged with every fiber of my being for my legs to carry me forward. One step. Two steps. Three steps!
My broken nose flared as I snarled, forcing my body to keep moving forward. Eventually, I was able to round the top of the small hill dotted with a few small patches of woodland. This is where I saw a sight that stole my breath away!
First was the continuous fighting as we approached the enemy encampment, where what looked like a couple hundred thousand of our Knights were pushing back the tens of thousands of enemy soldiers who remained. The battles between the black robes and the silver robes continued, although both sides had significantly fewer numbers than before.
I was even lucky enough to catch a glimpse of General Corvo Ataras slay the silver giant of a man, decapitating him, grabbing his head, and tossing it into the enemy encampment. "FORWARD! BURN THEIR CAMP TO THE GROUND!" He yelled out to his troops as he dropped from the sky, impacting the ground and forming a large crater as he joined the slaughter.
However, what truly stole my breath was what lay beyond the enemy encampment. A massive ravine spread out before me; from the eastern mountain to the western mountain was a bottomless abyss. There was no natural path across to the enemy fortress beyond.
No, instead, there was one large central bridge that was as massive as if built by giants. It went straight into the city walls that stood on the other side. What was even more incredible was the vast network of smaller, more fragile-looking bridges that emerged from the large central one. They were layered about like a giant spider web, with various platforms that held various-sized towers all across the ravine.
I had never seen anything like it before; it truly made me stand still, frozen as I took in that sight. It made me feel small, smaller than I had ever felt before in my two lives.
Waking up from my stupor, I started to stumble my way down toward the enemy camp that was now on fire. As I made my way down, a horn boomed across the valley, coming from the enemy encampment. It clearly indicated a full retreat as the remaining enemy forces took off at full speed toward the bridge to cross it, as if it were their safe haven.
By the time I had gotten halfway to the burning camp, the surviving enemy forces had made it to their bridge, numbering only a few odd ten thousand souls, with fewer than a hundred of their silver-robed cultivators making it across.
It seemed our forces were smart enough not to follow, as they seemed to be organizing around the burning camp, under the General’s orders. Alas, it seems one guy was too blood-crazed to think straight.
A single, black-robed Sentinel zoomed across the sky, wielding two swords, hand in hand, as he went directly toward one of the towers placed amongst the spider web of bridges.
"STOP, FOOL!" General Ataras yelled out, hoping to reorient the wayward warrior, but to no avail, as the man continued forth as if he heard nothing. The flying warrior managed to fire off what looked like a bolt of dazzling blue lightning that hit the tower, blasting the top half to pieces, and the lower half began to burn from the heat.
Yet, in the next moment, another tower, which held a ballista the size of an SUV, fired a steel bolt! It punctured and pierced almost all the way through but was stopped by what looked like claws at the back end that hooked into the man’s body, holding on. It flung the man straight into the cliff wall, pinning his body there like a warning.
In fact, when I looked close enough, I could see that most of the towers in that spiderweb of bridges had the same kind of ballista, easily numbering a few hundred.
After that, no one else tried to cross; they were just reorganizing at the enemy encampment, which was now burned to a crisp, leaving scorched earth behind. Eventually, I made my way down just in time to hear the General giving orders to a handful of black-robed Sentinels.
"Order the Medicae to scour the fields. Kill any surviving enemies and save who you can amongst our own. Also have the camp packed up and brought forth to here. You, get siege engines from Nevarrine; we are going to need them." He gave order after order to each Sentinel. After which, each one left to fulfill their orders.
That is when I finally collapsed from exhaustion and pain.