Chapter 25: The Final Bell Tolls

After the Golems breached the city gates, the people of Kagard faced nothing but utter disaster.

When their villages fell overrun, barbarians would still grab any weapon they could find and fight the invaders to death.

But after Kagard’s walls fell, the people chose chaos and final indulgence.

Forced by circumstances, Kagard III had no choice but to concentrate all remaining troops at the church for defense. The armed civilians neither dared to advance towards the breached gates to use their bodies to stop the stone giants nor dared to open the other two gates to escape without knowing the situation outside.

Caught between advancing and retreating, the will to survive and despair turned into madness and violence before the end.

Some sought revenge before death, indulging in wanton acts of rape in desperation, or still holding a glimmer of hope, started looting in a bid to escape with their stolen wealth.

Naturally, some did attempt to resist.

However, against the Golems’ heavy stone fists and thick tree trunks, most militia resistance proved futile. The best outcome was becoming corpses stuck to the Golems’ bodies. At worst, not even pieces of their corpses remained.

The Golems couldn’t spread out in the narrow streets, so they continued marching, crushing the bodies on the streets into a thick paste.

The sewage in the gutters turned crimson, and the giants’ clubs dragged some people hiding on rooftops down. The Ling tribe’s goal was to rescue their children, and the people of Kagard, who had plundered their kin for gold and a good harvest, would pay the price.

However, only a fool would give up resistance. Kagard III was clearly not a fool.

In a very short time, he turned the church into a fortified stronghold, but even so, the stained glass windows and various corridors, which were meant to showcase the church’s grandeur, now became vulnerable points for enemy infiltration.

More people were needed to fill the defensive line. They had to hold out until reinforcements arrived.

Count Kagard desperately grabbed the collars of the mages and the remaining priest’s attendants, forcing them to aid in repelling the stone giants.

But this was not an easy task.

Setting aside the priest’s attendants, the mages’ tearful situation could not be resolved with words.

As the Roman Empire understood it, mages, being the only ones capable of competing with priests who wielded divine power, relied on mana to cast their spells.

With the teleportation portal destroyed, and the mana within Kagard’s territory nearly turned to residue by the portal’s destruction, the mages could not provide any help.

“If those antlers were still here, I might have been able to control the residual mana around,” the mage cried out, struggling, trying to get Count Kagard to release him.

“But the problem is those antlers were sold to the diocese. Not a single one is left! Even if I could recover my mana at the fastest speed, I wouldn’t be able to cast even a single fireball spell before dawn.”

“What about the priest’s attendants?! You there! Is your faith in the God of Light not strong enough at this moment?! Why can’t you wield divine power like the priests?!” yelled the count.

“Not everyone can become a priest!” 

The priest’s attendant also seemed desperate. 

“We attendants cannot wield destructive divine spells, and to put it bluntly, the congregation outside the church is being slaughtered. Our divine power is ebbing away.”

Priests were powerful. But their power was built on their followers.

Typically, the range of a priest’s spells was directly proportional to the number of believers around them. The more believers, the wider the range and the more potent the spells.

While a priest’s spellcasting only consumed their physical strength and the divine power of their deity, they might still need to rest eventually.

Unless they were in a sacred site of their deity, if the number of believers started to plummet, even the most powerful archbishop could not cast high-impact spells.

Mages relied on mana, priests on their followers. 

Now, the former lost their mana, and the latter’s followers lost their priest. Count Kagard was left with only flesh and blood, swords and shields, and a group of terrified guards, police, and militia armed with pitchforks to fight against the approaching giants.

How could they possibly fight? Who was attacking Kagard Town? Where was their commander?

If given the chance, Count Kagard would immediately surrender, even if it meant turning everyone in his county into slaves, just to save his own life.

But for the people of Count Kagard, whether he surrendered or not, the invaders would not halt their brutal rampage.

The stone giants were getting closer to the cellar where the sacrificial offerings were held.

Some people wanted to escape underground, thinking the stone giants wouldn’t be able to enter such narrow spaces.

Some fanatical believers stubbornly believed that if they dragged the offerings out and presented them to the God of Light, their great deity would descend and slaughter the stone giants.

But when they reached the cellar entrance and pushed the door open after unlocking it, they found… the door was barricaded from the inside?

“Open the door! Open the door! If you don’t open it, we’ll die out here!”

One believer pretended to be a woman in need of shelter. She was indeed a woman, but the sickle in her hand made her disguise laughably poor.

“Open the door! Open the door!”

Other believers kicked at the door, but their kicks didn’t open it. Instead, their actions drew the attention of a stone giant searching the streets nearby.

The approaching stone giant made them even more frantic. Desperate, they got a large wooden mallet from who-knows-where and began pounding on the wooden door to the cellar.

Just as they managed to make a small breach and were about to feel relieved, salt and broken dishes were hurled from inside, hitting the nearest people in the eyes and making them scream and retreat.

“To hell with you animals!” Dr. Joseph’s furious voice boomed from inside. “You ungrateful scoundrels! A bunch of ingrates repaying kindness with malice! Die out there! Don’t you dare think of coming in!”

“Please! The monsters are coming! If you don’t open the door, none of us will survive!”

A farmer turned around in despair, seeing the stone giant now less than fifty meters away. He knelt at the entrance of the cellar, banging his head on the ground. If the people inside didn’t open the door soon, they were done for.

“Please—please, I beg you!”

“You were planning to burn us alive tomorrow anyway. We were already on a dead-end road, so if I can take you down with us, I’d be more than happy to!”

Negotiations were impossible. These maniacs could only keep using the hammer to try and break down the door.

But it wasn’t that easy.

Even if the wooden door was broken down, the obstacles made of pots and pans inside would still only allow one person to crawl through.

Even if someone tried to crawl in, they were met with a barrage of farm tools and kitchen utensils.

Moreover, Joseph’s resourceful wife had found a ceramic plate in the cellar. She shattered it and combined the shards with a cooking spatula to form a short spear. She stood to the side of the cellar entrance.

If anyone tried to enter, she would use all her strength to stab the spearhead into their neck or armpit. If she had the chance, she would stab repeatedly to make sure they were dead before taking a breath and letting a healthier-looking demon folk take over.

Having practiced medicine with her husband for many years, she knew the human body’s fatal points even as a woman.

After several bodies piled up at the cost of many lives, a frenzied follower of the God of Light finally forced his way into the cellar entrance, only to fall, crushed into pulp by the force from outside.

Joseph couldn’t dodge in time and was splattered with the crimson paste. He didn’t understand what had happened, but when he turned to look at the cellar entrance in a daze, he saw not the ferocious believers, but a large stone hand.

The demon folk around him cried out in joy upon seeing this.

The large hand dug at the cellar entrance, quickly creating a passage wide enough for people to walk through.

A demon folk, similar in appearance to those beside. Joseph but with antlers on her head, jumped down from outside.

Upon seeing her kin, she initially looked delighted, but noticing the missing parts on their heads, her expression grew increasingly furious. It seemed she might take out her anger on the three humans in the cellar.

The victims in the cellar began chattering in a language Joseph couldn’t understand. As he and his wife and daughter huddled together, trembling, the demon kin from outside nodded at him and then spoke in broken common tongue.

“You, not, bad people. Come, come with us. Humans…”

“Who… who are you? Who commanded this attack?”

Joseph sighed in relief but remained wary. His faith had been shattered by those he once promised to protect. How could he unconditionally trust these beings while trying to safeguard his family?

“We are, Ling tribe. Leading, leading us. Chief, and human.”

“Human?”

The demon kin who claimed to be from the Ling tribe nodded. After pondering for a while, she uttered a name that left Joseph stunned.

“He, his name, Yang Hao. Is a, good person.”

“Yang, Yang Hao?!”

Upon hearing this name, Joseph was momentarily dumbfounded.

His voice suddenly rose three octaves, “His Majesty?! Regent King?!”

Throughout the entire Roman Empire, there was only one person named Yang Hao.

He truly had returned like a bolt of lightning!

Holding his wife and daughter, Joseph wept uncontrollably, but he quickly composed himself. He wiped the paste from his face with his clothes and tidied his appearance as much as possible.

“I understand. Let’s go.”

With his head held high, he led his wife and daughter out of the cellar that had confined them for so long, following the Ling tribe members.

***

After entering the city, Narujia behind Yang Hao paused, her antlers glowing with a yellow light.

“The children have been rescued. There are three humans with them.”

“Three humans?”

Yang Hao kept his gaze fixed on the church being used as the last bastion of resistance.

“Why are there humans?”

“The children said one of them was a doctor who tried to help them, and he was imprisoned with his family. Is this someone you know?”

“Maybe. But now isn’t the time for reunions.”

He smacked his lips, watching as the Golems threw massive foundation stones from the nearby ruins like projectiles.

The stone missile struck the church tower. With a deafening crash, the tower collapsed.

The church bell tower, plummeting under its own weight, destroyed the inner walls, smashed the uselessly firing high platform, and crushed the internal organ pipes, releasing a screeching noise. Finally, it brought down the already precarious dome, burying almost everyone inside alive before it hit the ground.

Amid the wreckage of the bell tower, the church bell, miraculously intact, tolled with a series of long, resonant chimes.

Kagard’s last stronghold had fallen.

And now…

It was 11:47 PM.