Chapter 250 Chapter 247 The Sword of Order
“Whooo!”
A low, mournful sound like a horn of crying echoed within the city.
It was the signal for retreat.
George stood atop a pile of corpses, wielding a massive two-handed sword. The lowly horned beasts, acting as cannon fodder, held their spears and also heard the horn, momentarily lowering their hooves, hoping that the paladin before them would leave soon.
George turned his head, signaling the more than ten knights behind him to retreat.
The knights nodded and turned to ascend the dirt slope littered with various corpses.
The invasion of the beastmen into Quinas City was already a foregone conclusion. The miracle George had prayed for did not occur.
He stepped over stones and burnt bodies, making his way toward the crumbling city wall.
As he climbed to the top and witnessed the scene inside the city, he took a deep breath and took his final step.
The situation was as dire as he had imagined.
The army had abandoned the city walls and retreated to defend the streets. The beastmen army surged into the city like a brown mudslide.
Though the humans had been foresighted enough to build barricades on the streets, barricades required people to defend them.
Now nearly half of the defending troops were militiamen who, just over a month ago, had been farmers and petty townsfolk, with only basic training. But now, they had to wield spears to fend off the rampaging two-meter-tall horned beasts and the terrifying minotaurs that formed the mudslide.
As the figures of the cyclopes collectively stepped through the gaps in the city wall, the already precarious morale of the human soldiers quickly wavered.
Several barricades fell.
Panic rapidly spread as the carnivorous beasts poured into the human settlements.
George watched as the panicked residents filled the streets, rushing toward Quinas Fortress.
But these moving sources of food drew the attention of the cyclopes, who hurled massive rocks to smash the barricades. The roaring, bloodthirsty horned beasts surged forward, breaching multiple barricades and chasing after the fleeing crowd.
The residents were thrown into a frenzy, pushing and shoving one another. Many fell, and among the rear of the crowd were mostly women, children, and the elderly. Mothers pulled along their knee-high children and carried infants, while the beastmen closed in, raising axes and knives to slash mercilessly.
At that moment, George hated that he could see so clearly. Neither distance nor the narrow vantage point limited his sight; he could see everything. Impatient beasts reached out to snatch infants from their elders’ arms, stripping clothes away and stuffing them directly into their mouths…
With a roar, he bent down to grab a beastman’s war axe, whirled around, and smashed it toward the nearby beastman army, caving in the head of a giant horned beast. Then, driven by rage, George gripped his two-handed sword and charged toward the beastman army below.
But coldly speaking, the beastman army’s indulgence in their appetite also gave the human army an opportunity. While they were busy devouring people, the priest in charge of communications stood atop a vantage point, signaling a retreat order with flashes of light.
The essence of the defending forces was preserved as they formed an orderly formation, continuously repelling the incoming beastmen and steadily falling back toward Quinas Fortress.
Cardinal Gregory stood high above, watching the cyclopes chase the fleeing crowd several blocks away. His murky eyes betrayed no anger, seeming indifferent, as if they had long been numbed.
“Children, be quiet, don’t make a sound, don’t make a sound.”
A mother, dressed in a patched-up long dress and pale in face, comforted three children on the verge of crying.
They were hiding deep within the innermost room of the house.
Outside, the air was filled with the roars of beastmen, the sounds of knives and axes cutting into flesh, and the agonized cries of those being devoured.
The mother stuffed a boy under the bed, saying, “Tom, hide well and don’t make a sound.”
Then she took a thin, short boy and crammed him into a narrow wardrobe, saying, “Jerry, curl up on the bottom shelf; you’re best at hide-and-seek.”
Suddenly, the door was kicked hard several times, the loud noise nearly making the children cry out. A high-pitched wail echoed from outside: “Oh goddess! Save me! They are eating me!”
“Mom, I’m scared,” the girl clutched tightly to her mother’s skirt, “I’m scared of being eaten.”
“Just hide well,” the mother comforted, “someone will come to save us; you hide well too.”
“Boom.”
A loud crash sounded outside, the roof shook, and dust fell.
The tear-streaked girl covered her mouth tightly with her hands.
“Quick, hide,” the mother urged the girl, but their family was poor, with little furniture, and ultimately, the girl had no choice but to crawl under the bed.
“Boom.”
Another loud crash, this one different, closer, and it sounded like footsteps, knocking the mother to the ground.
Outside, it quieted significantly, but only for less than five seconds.
The roof was ripped off, and several tiles, mixed with dust, fell onto the mother’s head. She hugged her head with both hands and crouched down.
A wave of hot wind blew against her neck, warm and damp, mixed with a strong stench of blood.
She trembled all over, looked up, and nearly fainted from fear.
Above her loomed a cyclops occupying most of the sky, its massive mouth opening wide, drool mixed with human blood dripping down.
The mother collapsed on the ground, screaming, “Ahhhhhh!”
“The box is opened nicely,” the cyclops said slowly, “there’s a female, there must be a child.”
Standing on its shoulder was a raven-like creature with wings that said, “Let’s eat them together; the little two-legged lambs must be hiding under the bed.”
The cyclops reached in, grabbed the wooden bed, and threw it out, revealing two tightly clinging children who remembered their mother’s words, covering their mouths and making no sound.
“I’ll eat.”
The cyclops reached in again.
The mother, not sure where her courage came from, surprisingly stood up, blocking the way of the two children, her legs trembling as she said, “Quick… get away! Beasts.”
The giant fingers clamped together, firmly grabbing the three of them.
The children cried out, “Mommy, mommy!”
They didn’t know what to do or what to say, instinctively calling for their mother.
The mother panicked, struggling with all her might, but it was of no use. She could only watch as the giant mouth opened before her.
“Don’t break in to rob and kill!”
A furious shout rang out, and enraged, George moved like a shadow, raising his massive sword and striking fiercely at the cyclops’s arm, “Death sentence!”
Clearly, the diameter of the cyclops’s arm was almost longer than the giant sword in his hand, and the blade did not penetrate the arm.
Yet, the cyclops’s arm was severed by an invisible blade. George inflicted greater damage upon those who disrupted the order he had established.
The cyclops’s forearm holding the mother and children fell away.
This six-winged paladin leaped toward the cyclops’s head like a grasshopper; the cyclops reached out to block, but George was too quick. With both hands, he struck down, his blade filled with rage against the transgressors of order, penetrating deep into the cyclops’s forehead.
The cyclops’s eye glazed over as its skull bulged and exploded, the body tipping to the right.
The raven, now panicking, flapped its wings and shouted, “It’s George!”
It was about to flee.
“Weren’t you just very happy?”
George released the sword hilt, grasped the raven’s neck with a firm hand, his fingers sinking deep into its throat.
The raven gaped; only then did it notice another cyclops lying at the other end of the street, while the beastmen below fled in disarray.
George dragged the raven down while asking, “Why aren’t you talking?”
The raven could hear the sound of its own cervical vertebrae crumbling; George tightened his grip on its neck, slamming it down onto the ground, eliciting a pained cry as it bounced back up.
George’s feet landed on its chest, and with ruthless fury, he shouted, stomping down on its forehead.
“Eating people?”
He lifted his iron boot, “Still eating people?”
He stomped down again, finishing it off. George took a few breaths, leaped onto the cyclops’s corpse, and drew his sword.
The mother and children trapped in the severed hand screamed for help.
But at that moment, George was filled with rage; his blue eyes turned red as he looked around for any cyclops that had strayed from the main force. He wanted to kill and stab more of these man-eating beasts.
A silver-white, agile figure leaped across the rooftops, landing next to George.
“Frostleaf, you came at just the right time.” George pointed at a nearby cyclops, “Quick, let’s kill it together.”
“George, there’s important news.”
Seeing the blood-soaked, unfamiliar George, Eve Frostleaf’s eyes flashed with concern, “Jima has already sent the extraordinary substance to the Lionheart King.”
“No wonder the beastmen are so eager to attack the city!” George clapped his wings and bounced on the rooftop, “Quick, come with me; as long as we eliminate a few more man-eating beasts, we can hold out!”
Frostleaf raised her hand and splashed a stream of icy water onto George, washing away the blood and dirt from his armor.
George’s head cooled somewhat as he asked, “Frostleaf, what are you doing?”
“There’s someone in the house that needs saving.”
George replied, “More people need me to save them; more enemies need to be eliminated.”
“George, calm down; you are providing bait for the Blood God.”
“What?”
Eve Frostleaf stood firm, her long legs together, shaking her head, “Poor humans.”
George opened his mouth to retort, but the coldness from Frostleaf’s icy water made him realize something was off.
With a greater understanding of theology, George grasped what “providing bait for the Blood God” meant. A renowned priest believed that the intense emotions generated by killing and war nourished the Blood God.
Therefore, to weaken the Blood God, one must remain calm during battle, viewing killing enemies as a tedious task.
Simultaneously, Frostleaf was reminding George not to go overboard.
George had undergone rigorous anti-demonic training, striving to suppress the impatience in his heart, saying, “Thank you for your specialized reminder.”
Frostleaf said, “The cries of so many humans make me feel distressed.”
George turned back to save the mother and children.
He realized that now he needed to calm down and think of a better plan. What good was being impatient? It would only allow the cyclops to live for another minute, which was utterly insignificant to the big picture.
After rescuing the mother and children from the hands of the beast, George’s heart almost completely settled.
“I’ve thought of a way,” George said, “I need to have a good talk with the beast king leading all of this.”
“What to talk about?”
“Tell him that the demon king’s extraordinary substance is already in the hands of the Lionheart King,” George said. “The Mother of All Beasts may have set a deadline for the beast king commanding the army to withdraw after that time limit, to retrieve the demon king’s extraordinary substance for her. So, during this time, the beastmen are attacking the city at all costs.”
