"Something is not right." Ana, Merah City's General said to one of her officers. "I am unable to contact Yaega at all." She tried tapping on her magical ball charm to check on his status but there was no reply at all. As compared to General Edgar, Ana could feel some feedback emanating back even though there was no answer.
But for Yaega, there was essentially no change in the colour of her magical ball charm and the only reason she could think of was an anti magic field even though it never happened before. This was mainly because the magical ball charm would blink of a different colour upon attempting to communicate through an anti magic field. But this time around, it seemed as if he entirely disappeared. Thus, she could only deduce that the charm was inadvertently be destroyed in a scuffle especially since there was no retreat flare indicating any defeat from Yaega's direction.
"Perhaps he is preoccupied fighting that he accidentally drop it or lose it? You know how those mounted cavalries usually lost things they carry when they charged like a mad man." Her officer suggested as he was more concerned with the current situation in front of him. The behemoth looking walls were bothering him to an extent that he felt paranoid with his general's line of questioning. The wrong information was given to them by Taris General and the Church was something new to him and it proved to him that all of this could potentially be a trap. But since General Ana was his higher up, he could only think of simple excuses to answer her while he was vexed with the current situation.
"Yaega is not that kind of person, he would at least send a transmission at least once and all the more if the situation is unfavourable," Ana remarked as Yaega and her had been battle pals for quite some time. From attacking each other till near destruction to cooperating against other cities, those two had gone way back.
And Ana did attempt to send another transmission out with a scroll containing a specialised form of magical telecommunications. However, she did not know that the enemy Gobs Infocomms team were able to intercept it and blocked her message from going in.
Kraft wanted to mess around with the message and relay the magical telegram that everything was proceeding all fine but he decided he was too lazy and let them be. (After all, he got way tired of messing up the messages during the Mafia fights.)
Although Ana eventually felt something was amissed, seeing that she was unable to get through Yaega nor receive any message, she decided to stop the army from going any further. "Everyone, halt! I need a suicide squad to volunteer!" Ana shouted and instantly, a bunchful of hands emerged from the crowd of soldiers.
"Alright, come out and assemble at this flag point! Officers, make sure those troops have their duties covered by the rest of their teams." Ana said and in less than a minute, those daredevil soldiers assembled right in front of her.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for covering this particular task. Report your names to Major Farou later so that you are duly compensated for the resurrection process. Now, to the task at hand, I am going to impart to you some of my powers and I would want you to charge to the wall and detonate my magical powers. Avoid any attacks and move forth when I give you the command." Ana explained and the suicide squad immediately acknowledged the glorious duty given by the War Angel of Fire.
And without further ado, Major Farou took the names of the soldiers when Ana spoke a long prose of magical words. A mystic circle emerged on the ground and expanded to encompass the entire squad. Slowly, her powers were passed to the squad and they could feel that her fire magic was overwhelming. It felt like it was burning them from the inside and wanted to overtake them, to consume their innards and explode outwards. But for now, the only thing that was holding them together was their human sanity.
Yes, what Ana did was not exactly transferring magic to the squad but instead, applying her magic and to make them into a deadly ticking human timebomb.
To add on, she even commandeered the suicide squad to carry actual fire bombs to charge to the wall. Simultaneously, Major Farou had cast mass support magic on to the suicide squad, allowing them to be more agile and run faster.
"At least with this, I should be able to recognise the trap if they were not dumb enough to place any." Ana thought to herself as she ordered the squad to move forth.
With the timebomb magic cast on the soldiers, the suicide squad felt like they knew no boundaries in terms of stamina and ran as if their heels are on fire. Their only goal was to keep their sanity intact until they reach the wall.
But the Demopolis Home Guards were not idle either. The System had managed to capture the commotion of making the suicide squad. And thus, the Home Guards were already zeroing into their squad through the sights of their sniper rifles.
"Fire whenever you feel they are moving." Qiu Yue said through the System Channel and the Demopolis Home Guards were ready to shoot as soon as their General gave the call.
"BOOM!"
As the suicide squad was about to be given the command to run, they suddenly exploded right in front of the army, giving Merah City's General a huge shock as she knew that they should not explode so haphazardly unless they die.
She knew that the timebomb magic was a volatile one but Ana had been using such a tactic for ages. So much so that her army even acknowledged such a powerful tool at their disposal and it was one of the reasons why they dubbed her the War Angel of Fire. The last time it backfired on her was aeons ago and there never had been such an incident as bad as this.
While she was lucky that she was able to shield herself from the damage, it was not the same for the rest of her army. Her entire frontline was either killed or heavily burnt. To make this worse, the fire bombs that they carried were extremely flammable, causing the entire forested area they were hiding from cannon fire to be caught on fire. Thus, they either retreat now or charge fully through the wall.
Ana thought it was her fault that the human time bombs had backfired but they had no idea that the Home Guards were the ones who shot them. At that point of time, they had lacked the understanding that the deaths of those firebombs would be such a setback against the Merah City Army.
The Home Guards merely performed their actions as per Qiu Yue's orders and even the System's tactician was unaware that the inferno that was happening could be realised and she even readied an alternative plan to blast them all bits and pieces once again.
Now with the inferno brewing right in front of them, Qiu Yue did not have to think of other ways to reduce the amount of wham and bam while still being efficient in her methods of killing.
Thus, the current change of winds had allowed Qiu Yue to keep Demopolis safe and withheld her trump cards for the next phase while ordered the Tyr Gauntlet to move out.
