The monsters numbered more than two thousand. Of those, nearly two hundred could fly. There were also as many as one hundred and fifty ogres on the ground.
It was a really bad situation. But that wouldn’t change their tactics. First, they would firmly shut the castle gates and attack the monsters from up on the rampart. Then, if the castle gate or a part of the rampart broke, they would lure in fixed numbers of monsters and wipe them out in manageable chunks.
There were currently one hundred soldiers waiting on top of the rampart with bows at the ready. This group had been formed after gathering people with experience. Every one of their arrows had been laced with the poison Zara received from Narillia. It was lamia poison that Narillia herself had secreted.
Zara had all five of the treasures he’d borrowed from House Mercurius equipped. He had been told not to use them in places where he stood out, but this wasn’t the time to worry about his appearance.
He had not yet taken out Bora’s Sword. Zara’s father, Panzel, died from overuse of the sword’s blessings. His mom had always told him not to use it unless he absolutely needed to.
“Fire!”
Arrows were loosed at the commander’s order. Very few of the soldiers were able to handle their bows steadily in the face of the approaching monsters. As a result, most shot their arrows too quickly and were way off the mark, but a few of them did still find their target.
The effects of the poison were immediate, and just being grazed by the arrows caused the flying monsters to crash to the ground. Some of them collided into the rampart, and some fell within the palace grounds.
A great number of the archers forgot that they had been ordered to get down immediately after firing an arrow and fell victim to the flying monsters as a result.
Zara loosed three arrows in rapid succession with his Tirika Bow. He immediately drew three more arrows and fired.
The small size of the Tirika Bow made it look like a toy compared to the bows of the soldiers around him, but it was actually very strong. With his strength and skill, Zara could manage significantly greater distance than the other soldiers were capable of, and his arrows penetrated more deeply.
The flying monsters dove at them. Zara dodged nimbly, turned to face the ones that had made it inside the rampart, and fired three more arrows. He was using the bow technique he had been taught by the girl of the mountains.
Eight of the nine arrows he shot found their mark and felled the beasts. The one arrow that missed ended up traveling a long distance and hit an ogre directly. The ogre toppled over and brought down a decent number of monsters with it, so it was fair to say he got a decent return out of that arrow.
They had taken down less than forty of the flying monsters so far. Over one hundred and fifty of them remained, but thankfully, it seemed like all the ones that possessed the ability to breathe fire had been killed. Those could cause a lot of trouble if ignored, so they had been priority targets.
Next, all they could do was leave it to the mobile forces within the palace walls.
The army of monsters on the ground was approaching. They could not let them take the rampart with that level of force. Zara decided it was time to use a trump card.
“Summon Comet! Summon Comet! Summon Comet!”
Giant comets were summoned, falling to the ground where Zara pointed his sword and destroying and burning everything in their path.
Raika’s Ring ran out of magic power, and its light extinguished.
Each one of those spells was powerful enough to exhaust the magic of an elite sorcerer. And Zara had used three of them. He’d probably killed fifty monsters.
The surrounding soldiers looked at Zara in mute amazement. Even the commander.
“Prepare the bombs!”
On Zara’s order, a group that was on standby spread out atop the rampart.
The bombs were big and heavy but extremely effective at killing enemy forces. When Zara pulled out three hundred bombs that he had stored in his Treasury and offered them to the defense effort, Laura was shocked and asked him if he had been planning to go to war against this land. That was a perfectly understandable reaction. Just one of the bombs was worth more than all the equipment of an elite knight put together, so it was unimaginable that one person could be walking around with that amount of them.
Some of the soldiers started to rush to throw the bombs immediately, but Zara stopped them.
“Don’t throw them yet! Wait until they have drawn closer and are about to hit the rampart. Aim for specific monsters and make sure you hit your target! Don’t hit the rampart!”
He wanted to tell them to aim for only ogres, but that would have been expecting too much. There was no point in giving them an order they were incapable of following.
“Now! Throw the bombs! Archers, what are you doing? Fiiiiiire!”
A mass of bombs and arrows flew together on Zara’s order. This strategy wouldn’t last very long, but it would be effective if they bombarded the enemy with everything they had.
The explosives detonated, sending monsters flying in every direction. The arrows fell over the monsters by the rampart like a blanket.
They were doing as well as could possibly be expected. That said, they had taken down only around 20 percent of the enemy’s numbers. If they had been fighting an army of humans, the enemy probably would have temporarily withdrawn after suffering such losses, but monsters in a Mass Craze did not stop their assault until all had perished.
The real battle started now. The monsters began to attack the rampart. Judging by the quaking, it wouldn’t last long.
Zara advised the commander to have the soldiers evacuate to the right and left and leaped within the walls of the rampart. He kicked off an overhang on a tower, landed on a staircase, then jumped down to the ground in an instant.
Laura then called out to him. “Zara, good work up there.”
“We need to retreat. It’s about to collapse.”
“Got it. Everyone, fall back!”
They heard the constant booming sound of the rampart being hit. The wall finally gave in near the south gate. The large quantity of falling stones crushed about ten monsters.
The monsters instantly began to climb over the wreckage. They let in about fifty monsters and then blocked any more from getting through. Their five valuable sorcerer knights were given the role of blocking the monsters.
Laura, the archer Shariabro, and the support sorcerer Orien were also with them.
The defensive specialist Moura, the assassin Jamagar, eight knights, and fifty common soldiers were in charge of killing the monsters they’d allowed past the wall. Seven more knights and fifty more common soldiers were close by, awaiting orders to switch places with them. There were also fifty common soldiers stationed around the city to deal with flying monsters or anything that broke through the line of defense at the rampart.
Moura, who was using a tower shield, attracted three ogres his way. Normally it would take five soldiers to defeat a single ogre. An elite knight would be able to fight one on their own. He may have been a defensive specialist, but taking on three at once showed that Moura was no ordinary warrior.
Each clanging noise of the ogres striking his shield was dreadful enough to make even battle-hardened warriors cower in fear, but Moura’s face was perfectly calm.
Jamagar snuck behind an ogre and sliced through the tendons of its legs with his curved sword. The ogre then fell, and he cut its hands so that it wouldn’t be able to hold its weapon. From there, he left it to the common soldiers and turned toward the next monster. Jamagar and the soldiers made short work of three ogres using that method.
Eight knights were fighting two ogres a short distance away.
Fifty soldiers were fighting forty medium-size monsters.
Zara charged forward and severed the legs of the two ogres one by one. Then, without even looking back, he plunged into the pack of medium-size monsters and began to slay all within reach.
The commander of the knights issued an order, and those who were fighting switched with the group that was on standby. Laura then judged it was time to let in the next batch of monsters.
This time, they let in sixty monsters, ten more than last time. They then used offensive magic and explosive arrows to obstruct any more from getting through.
After using his Tirika Bow to help keep the group of monsters in check, Zara got to work on cleaning up the monsters they’d allowed in. Everyone watched in awe at the brilliance of his movements, all wondering who in the world this young man was.
Zara was thinking about the current situation.
It was going well. For the time being. But the sorcerer knights’ magic wouldn’t last very long. The arrows would eventually run out. The monsters were in the process of breaking through in a number of other locations across the rampart.
At this rate, they had no chance of holding back the remaining 1,500 monsters. Eventually their front line would collapse.
This was a battle without any hope of victory.