Herald of Steel

Lapitus's sneak attack from atop the second wall quickly died down under the effort of Zanzan's crossbowmen, soon enabling those on the walls to come out of their cover and occupy it.

On paper, the man's plan had not been a bad one.

Lapitus seemingly devised a kind of elastic defense where under Alexander's attack, he would give up his position and retreat to his next stronghold, baiting Alexander to take the vacant place, and then, once Alexander had used up his energy getting there, Lapitus would launch a counterattack to push him back and try and retake it.

That was the theory anyway.

However it failed to materialize in practice mainly due to a lack of adequate mass.

Lapitus simply did not the number, for if he had wanted to make taking the wall as hard as possible for Alexander, he should have deployed infantry on the walls, along with those archers from the top.

That way if the attackers stayed on the walls they would be peppered by arrow fire from above.

But if they wanted to take cover, they would have had to do so while fighting in a brutal hand to hand melee with the defenders.

If Lapitus had done that, it would have certainly added a lot more punch to his attack.

Of course, even if Lapitus had managed to do so would not have meant they would have certainly won, but it would have meant that he would have been able to make Alexander bleed much more.

However given the current circumstances, due to the huge losses they had suffered just a few hours ago, as well as Alexander denying them any sort of time to shore up those deficiencies, the man was forced to choose one or the other type of unit- infantry or archers.

And sensibly he chose the latter since those could still effectively use the second set of fortifications to hound the enemy, whereas the infantry would be simply annihilated by the legionnaires.

But that also meant Lapitus's attacks lacked the proper punch behind them, hence after surviving the initial barrage, Alexander's men on the front walls quickly started to spread out, making them a much more difficult target.

Once they had done so, the men then began to work to secure the various points along the sprawling structure, gathering around key defensive points, and then signaling to their allies on the ground that it was safe to climb up through ladders.

In this way, they rapidly reinforced their hold on the walls as the numbers there began to swell from the initial hundreds to the thousands very quickly.

And the ones conducting all of this did everything on their own, without needing any command from Alexander or his officers.

Seeing which Alexander whispered in his heart, 

'As expected. Good mercenaries are really worth their gold. If I had used those recently trained peasants, I'm afraid they would have all panicked and ran headlessly in every direction the moment those arrows hit.'

'While these guys did the opposite and instead all ran towards the arrows, taking cover under the crenelations. And no one needed to tell them that.'

The quality of the training and more than that experience really showed itself in that one instance, and Alexander was reassured that his money had not been wasted.

It was also because of that he had made the mercenaries assault the walls, and kept his own men for the second wave.

The sellswords were very much expendable compared to the much more precious men in the first legion but equally as trained.

So Alexander thought if anything went wrong, which given it was night had much more likelihood of doing, and he was unable to respond to all of them on time, these trained men could make the decisions on the spit.

Which they seemed to have made.

The complete capture of the first walls took a few hours, which was not surprising given the sheer size of the whole thing.

The structure did encompass the entire city after all.

And as the summer sun slowly rose over the horizon, signaling the start of another day, the entire structure was indeed confirmed to be under Zanzan's control.

The bright sunlight also worked to reveal the true state of the carnage that resulted in trying to take this wall and frankly, it was even more ghastly than most would have imagined.

The huge field was littered with bodies in all sorts of mangled shapes and sizes and in various states of ruin.

Very few corpses were found intact, a favor bestowed only upon the lucky few who got to die from a single deadly wound to the vitals like the heart, the throat, or the head.

These bodies were rare gems, found mostly only around the site where Lord Ponticus fought, and the injuries were caused mainly by Alexander's lances during all those cavalry charges.

A far more common type of corpse was those with multiple lacerations on them, with some even having their limbs missing, done by cuts and slashes coming from all different angles.

Kind of like how Lord Ponticus had died.

This type of injury was the most common in any battlefield, caused when men tried to run but were chased and cut down.

But these types of injuries were not what had made the sight so gruesome.

All of them were common.

No, it was the corpses that had been trampled to death, either by the elephants or the stamped that the most eye catching, 

These bodies had black and blue marks all over, and many of the joints were bent in strange but painful ways.

Some even did not have a face to recognize them, it was all just a red mush like paste. 

This was in fact Alexander's first time seeing such huge swathes of men so badly deformed litter the field like sown seeds.

And when his eyes saw what happened when an elephant stepped on a human being, even his stomach churned a bit.

The civil way he would describe the sight would be like it was a bun that had been squeezed and all the red filling had come out.

Alexander had never seen a human being so…'flat'.

As for the culprits who wrought this destruction, well they were the most eye catching sight on the battlefield.

For there were seventeen such huge beasts lying scattered all around there. either dead or very nearly so, the latter letting out low, pained cries, as the beasts slowly but painfully bleed to death.

And this was not really surprising given the grievous wounds that could be seen etched into their bodies.

Every one of them had tens of painful spears, javelins, and other projectiles sticking into and out of each of them, as their once shiny, jet-black skin seemed to have become covered with a black crust of dried blood.

For these huge creatures had not only been attacked by Alexander's legionaries, but during their rampage, the Tibians too had not shown them any mercy, throwing and stabbing them with everything they had.

Thus the beasts were really put to death by a thousand cuts, a very painful way to go indeed.

And perhaps the dead ones were the lucky ones since their pain had already ended.

As for those that were still alive, they were too hurt to be rescued, but putting them out of their misery was also difficult.

Even if Alexander was to order such a thing, the soldiers would not really know how to go about doing it.

They could not slaughter it, as forget the bones, even their hide was too tough to cut cleanly with a single swing.

So they would likely end up poking the poor thing to death.

As Alexander gazed at those tragic beasts, he felt that would be too cruel to the animals and ultimately decided to leave them alone, letting nature take its course, even if it meant a slow painful death.

At the same time he felt a bit regretful that he was unable to get his hands on even one of these majestic animals, for he would have very much liked one as a pet.

'Oh, Alexandria would have loved seeing it!' Alexander hence sighed a bit bitterly.

And even if he could not keep it, he would have at least liked to show it off during his victory parade as his prize.

But since all the war elephants were already claimed by the grim reaper, Alexander had to give up on that and turned his head to look at something much cheerier.

And as he gazed toward Thesalie's formable walls, his heart filled up with glee seeing what was once manned by men in blood red armor had now switched to a bustling, vibrant color of blue, confirming the fact that it was indeed his men that patrolled the walls now.

Furthermore, along the entire length of the walkway, hundreds of huge pavises could be seen being set up, there to be used as makeshift cover.

Because it was not uncommon for the archers on the second wall to take sudden, sneaky potshots on the men below.

For although the crossbowmen remained ever vigilant, it was not hard to slip a few shots past them.

But such a thing was more a nuisance than a problem, and soon Alexander was given the official confirmation that the first walls were indeed fully his control.

And with that, the hardest part of the siege was over.

Tibias had no way of keeping Thesalie, not anymore!