Chapter 166 Losing the War

Over the next four days, the sky turned into an open slaughterhouse.

The United States Air Force had established permanent, rotating combat air patrols over the entirety of the Dragonspine Mountains and the western valleys. High-altitude Global Hawks and MQ-9 Reapers orbited beyond the reach of any imperial arrow or wyvern rider, while flights of F-15E Strike Eagles, F-16s, and carrier-launched F-35s swept the skies clean.

Whenever the sky was clear, death followed without warning.

In the eastern province of Valoria, Duke Raymond had answered the Golden Decrees with grand imperial pride. He had assembled twelve thousand heavy infantry, three hundred noble knights in mirror-polished armor, and forty supply wagons laden with flour, cured meats, and spare arrows. They had marched out onto the wide stone highway, standard-bearers raising the golden sunburst flags high, drums rattling a proud marching cadence that echoed off the hills.

They made it six miles.

From twenty-five thousand feet up, the neat, packed marching column showed up on synthetic aperture radar like an illuminated line drawn across a blackboard. Two F-15Es, flying so high they were mere silvery glints in the sun, each released four CBU-105 sensor-fuzed cluster munitions.

The metal canisters opened mid-air with dull pops. Dozens of hockey-puck-shaped skeet warheads spun downward, scanning the road below with optical and infrared sensors. The moment the pucks detected the warm iron breastplates and wagon metal, they fired self-forging copper penetrators downward at Mach 6.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

In less than three seconds, the highway became an inferno of shredded steel and exploding wagons. The penetrators punched clean through bronze shields, steel chest plates, and warhorses alike. Knights who had trained their entire lives in the sacred sword arts were torn in half before they even heard the aircraft.

By the time the sound of jet engines rolled over the valley, the Duke’s twelve thousand men were shattered into panicked mobs, fleeing blindly into the forests, tossing away their pikes and banners.

Similar scenes repeated across all twelve provinces.

At the river crossing near Oakhaven, five thousand levied spearmen attempting to cross a stone bridge were caught in the open by a pair of B-1B Lancers dropping satellite-guided JDAMs. The ancient bridge was vaporized into gravel in two impacts, tumbling an entire regiment into the swirling rapids.

In the high northern plateaus, a cavalry column of imperial paladins was spotted by an RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft tracking their radio-free crystal transmissions. Twenty minutes later, precision-guided glide bombs turned their fortified waystation into a smoking crater, burying their horses and commanders beneath tons of collapsed stone.

The imperial decree had called for two hundred thousand men.

Not even forty thousand managed to get within fifty miles of the capital.

The moment any duke, baron, or prefect gathered more than two hundred men in one spot, the iron birds appeared from beyond the clouds, and high-explosive fire rained down. Supply lines were cut off entirely. Grain carts were burned, bridges were dropped, and mountain roads were cratered into impassable rubble. The empire’s feudal army, designed to march in massive, tightly packed squares, was completely useless against an enemy that fought through optics, radar grids, and GPS coordinates.

Inside the Ironwood Basin, the air was hot, wet, and choked with sulfur.

Viona stood at the mouth of a damp stone cavern, coughing into a silk rag. Her eyes were red and stinging from the constant ash.

Around her, within a four-mile radius beneath the dense canopy, nearly eight thousand soldiers huddled in the mud. They were the only ones who had made it through the passes before the air strikes sealed the routes.

Here, Leon’s countermeasure was working.

Viona constantly fed mana into the subterranean fissures, keeping the river boiling. Thick, scalding steam hissed from cracks in the ground day and night, mingling with the oily black smoke from smoldering ironwood trunks. Above them, the sky was a permanent, impenetrable ceiling of gray and black murk.

Twice a day, the faint, menacing rumble of American jet turbines could be heard high above the smoke, circling like vultures looking for a tear in the meat. But without clear lines of sight, their laser designators scattered uselessly in the water vapor, and their thermal sensors saw only a uniform sheet of blinding white heat. The jets dropped nothing, eventually turning back west toward their airfields and carriers.

The eight thousand men beneath the smoke were alive.

Yet, as Viona looked out over the crowded, miserable camp, she knew with sickening certainty that they were still losing.

"Look at them," Viona muttered, her voice trembling with bitter frustration.

The soldiers under her protection weren’t standing in proud formation. They were shivering in damp trenches, covered in mud from head to toe. Their fancy white tabards were stained black with soot. Men were coughing constantly from the ash-filled air. Horses stood with their heads hung low, their ribs showing because supply wagons from the outer provinces hadn’t arrived in four days.

"They’re starving," Viona said, turning her head toward Leon. "And they’re terrified. Every time thunder rumbles in the mountains, half the sentries dive into the dirt thinking the sky is falling."

Leon sat on an upturned wooden barrel, sharpening a newly forged, plain steel broadsword with a wet whetstone. The rhythmic shhk-shhk of stone against steel was the only steady sound in the camp. His chest was wrapped tight in stained linen bandages to support his cracked ribs, and his scarred face was dark with charcoal.

"They’re alive," Leon grunted, not looking up from the blade. "Alive is better than being blown into pieces on the open road."

"Alive to do what?!" Viona hissed, stepping closer and lowering her voice so the nearby guards wouldn’t hear. "I called for two hundred thousand men, Leon! Two hundred thousand! Do you know how many have arrived? Less than ten thousand! The couriers we sent out have barely returned, and the ones who did bring nothing but horror stories!"

She pulled out a crumpled, blood-stained dispatch parchment from her sleeve and shoved it toward him.

"Duke Raymond’s army was wiped out on the southern highway before they saw a single enemy face," she spat, her teeth clenching. "The Oakhaven garrison was destroyed at the river. The highland fortresses are isolated. The moment any provincial lord gathers troops in the open, those metal birds butcher them from leagues away! We cannot assemble an army!"

She clutched her head with both hands, her golden hair tangled and greasy with soot.

"We are trapped in our own country, Leon! We can hide under this boiling mist, yes. We can keep a few thousand men invisible. But how do we take back the capital like this? How do we march eight thousand half-starved soldiers through the mountains to face John Smith’s army when we can’t step ten feet out of this smoke without a flying monster tearing us apart?!"

Leon stopped running the stone along the edge of his blade. He wiped the steel clean with a thumb, checking the sharpness, then slid the weapon into the rough scabbard at his hip.

He looked up at Viona with his single amber eye, completely cold and unbothered by her panic.

"We don’t march to the capital," Leon said flatly.

Viona blinked, stunned. "What?"

"I told you before," Leon said, standing up slowly and resting a hand on his hilt. "You’re still thinking like an emperor who needs a grand army to fight a war. If you try to gather two hundred thousand men, they’ll just be target practice for those iron birds. Big armies need big roads and big camps. Big roads get bombed."

"We are going to unleash the beast."