“All hands on the wall!” Alissa heard Sir Marsten yell out. He was calling out to the people who were resting below to help with the defense. In the long run, they would likely continue the shifts as it was impossible to fight on for long without rest, but they needed everybody to help out with the first wave of attacks that were coming, at least.
Other than a few who happened to be close to the wall, most of the rest didn’t even reach the wall yet when the first wave of the renewed demon assault began.
The first attacks that arrived were a wave of siege engine projectiles, followed closely by a volley of arrows as the demons renewed their offensive with gusto. One of the stone balls hurled by the trebuchets went for the section of wall Alissa was on, so she jumped to meet the projectile with a blow from her shield, which shattered it into a rain of stone shrapnel.
As she used the recoil to fall back towards the wall, however, she noticed that the volley of arrows behind the projectile was still dense – even after the shrapnel caused by her blow took some out – and more than a couple dozen arrows were headed straight towards her. Alissa’s response was to twirl her spear like a propeller in front of her, relying on her by now superhuman physique to do it so fast that none of the arrows headed her way made it through, the shaft of her spear swatting them out of the air as they passed through the twirling spear.
She landed on the fort’s wall safely this time – it was no longer the first time she pulled off such a feat, and she had learned from the mistakes she made in the past – while keeping her spear twirling in front of her to block off enemy arrows. To her sides she saw how the other soldiers lifted up huge shields for the archers to take cover behind, at least for the ones who weren’t making use of a murder hole.
Both sides had their archers shoot at each other intermittently, as they took cover behind large shields while nocking a new arrow and only revealed themselves briefly to aim and shoot. A few did have the misfortune of revealing themselves right when an arrow arrived at the gap where they were shooting from and died that way, but such instances were few and far between.
Meanwhile, the majority of the demon troops were charging towards the fort’s walls, which were now pitted and scarred all over, far unlike its pristine appearance only weeks before. Siege ladders were laid against the walls and anchored into the ground to make it harder to push away, while others threw grappling hooks from which a rope ladder hung.
The defenders atop the wall fought them off as best they could. Some hurled javelins at the climbing demons. Others chopped down the rope ladders while risking themselves as they were exposed while doing so. Yet others used long bidents to push away the siege ladders the demons set up, working in teams to uproot and topple the ladders.
Other, more primitive means were also used by the defenders, as large stones were hurled down at the demons from above. Large buckets of dirty water were boiled and then poured over the wall to the demons below, the heat from the water directly scalding the demons unfortunate enough to be splashed by it.
Even with how the defenders made use of every means at their disposal, however, the situation atop the walls was less than stable, as every now and then, a fourth tier demon would leap up and strike, often creating a temporary foothold at the top of the wall. Their presence meant the deaths of many defending soldiers, as the only real way to match a fourth tier was with another.
While the defenders sent their own fourth tiers to counter such incursions, the damage had been done, and the demons weren’t so foolish as to overstay their welcome. They leapt back down after a short clash against their defending counterpart, for the most part. Only when they felt that they had an advantage would they attempt to push the matter.
Of course, the defenders would send in more people against them, to the point that the demon’s life might well be at risk.
Alissa made that point when she rushed over to help out the fourth tier fighter to her east who was struggling against a large demon who overpowered him. The demon had been so engrossed in its fight against the human fighter that it failed to notice Alissa coming until it was too late, and only a last-second dodge allowed the demon to avoid getting impaled through the heart by her spear.
Despite that, Alissa still pierced through the demon’s lung with her strike, and as she had activated [Truth is a Bitter Pill to Swallow] – by this point the skill practically refreshed itself every ten minutes or so, so she made use of it as much as she could, given its lasting effects – the wound hemorrhage badly, while the suffocation effect was further emphasized given that she damaged the demon’s lung.
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The demon managed to step back before Alissa could wrench her spear sideways in an attempt to cleave through its heart, so her strike only resulted in a large, bleeding gash on the demon’s chest instead. At the same time, however, the fourth tier fighter she saved struck back and sliced across one of the demon’s eyes despite its attempt to block.
Had they gotten a chance to make another move, the fourth tier demon would probably be forced to die where it stood, but at the last moment, a second fourth tier demon leapt up from below and parried their strikes with the pair of axes she held in her hands. Then the she-demon – a late third tier [Champion’s Retainer], Alissa noticed – bumped off the injured demon and fell back off the wall together with it.
Unfortunately it was too much to wish for the fall to take care of the rest for them, as the demons below noticed their descent and worked together to catch them before they could hit the ground. The injured demon was carried away towards the back of the demon lines, while the [Champion’s Retainer] Alissa noticed vanished amongst the throng once more.
Alissa kept the [Analysis] result in mind for later reporting.
[Hunter’s Child Lvl20/Axe Warrior Lvl20/Champion’s Retainer: Cleaver of Bones Lvl17]
The [Champion’s Retainer] was higher leveled than herself by quite a bit, but Alissa felt that she was stronger than the demon even so. Someone like Nadine might have more trouble with them, however. She kept that in mind to give the Fifth Princess a warning later on. More than that, however, the presence of the demon reminded her of the invisible assassin she ran into a while ago, and Alissa couldn’t help but look around with some vigilance.
Such a chaotic battle would be an ideal place for such an assassin to take advantage of the situation and strike unseen, though given how Alissa had shown that she could counter the assassin’s invisibility, they might be wary of her presence.
As she noticed nothing out of the ordinary – other than the ongoing battle, of course – Alissa continued to roam around the wall. They were told to not remain stationary, as if they did so, it would be far too easy for the demons to skirt around them. As such, Alissa and the others roamed around the wall in irregular intervals instead, only stopping when they needed to lend a hand.
A couple dozen steps further east, Alissa found another situation where the demons were making another foothold at the top of the wall through a siege ladder. The defenders of that section were fighting with all they had, but they were being pushed back step by step, and all their attempts to dislodge the siege ladder failed as a particularly large Ma’Varok held it steady and acted as an anchor for it.
Alissa barged into the fight as she stabbed through one demon and another behind them at the same time with a thrust of her spear, then dove in closer while she pulled her spear out from their bodies and landed a brutal uppercut using her shield on another demon. The blow directly tore the demon’s lower jaw off and snapped its neck at the same time, as the dead demon toppled over backwards like a felled tree.
Before the rest of the demons managed to react from her sudden appearance, Alissa leaned into the swing of her punch and spun around completely, lashing out with her spear in a backhand sweep. The bladed spearhead at the end of the spear sliced through the throats of two demons, before she caught and snapped a third’s neck with the shaft and sent the body flying against a fourth.
Two demons behind the ones she just killed – both in the late third tier – charged at her with a deafening bellow before she could withdraw her spear. Alissa avoided the first demon’s axe by leaning further into her spin and narrowly avoiding the blow, while she used her shield to shove the second demon’s blade careening off to the side.
Before either demon managed to recover from their all-out attack, Alissa stomped down on the blade wielder’s foot with her left heel, hard enough to shatter the bones in the demon’s foot. She followed it up by driving her other knee as hard as she could into the demon’s groin, which caused him to keel over, curled up like a shrimp.
At the same time, she delivered a downwards chop using her shield arm towards the back of the axe-wielding demon’s neck. The edge of her shield directly struck the nape of the demon’s neck and shattered his spine like it was a twig, killing the demon on the spot as his dead body collapsed like a sack of potatoes on the walkway.
One quick downwards stab with her spear finished off the other demon before it could recover, and the sudden loss of nine of their number caused the remaining demons to pause for a moment. She did not know whether it was out of fright or some sort of tactical decision on their part, but that pause bought the defenders enough time to rally themselves and pushed the remaining demons back towards the wall’s edge once more.
Since the soldiers were doing well enough to push the demons back, Alissa switched her attention to the bottom of the wall, where the large, troll-like Ma’Varok was still holding the siege ladder steady, unaware of what was happening above.
Alissa pulled one of her short javelins out, took aim for a moment, then hurled it towards the Ma’Varok from above. The demon noticed the coming danger too late to avoid it, and the javelin pierced through its head from above, the tip emerging out below its chin. With the demon removed, the defenders in that section soon managed to drive away the rest of the demons and topple the siege ladder they used.
As for Alissa, she had already moved on by then, as she roamed the section of the wall in search of other situations where she could lend a hand. The intensifying battle meant that she was never wanting for such situations, as new trouble sprouted out mere moments after she put one down. All she could do at that point was to rush from one troublesome spot to another, as fast as she could.
All over the wall, similar situations played out as the demons made their push while the humans did their damndest to keep them out of the fort. People disregarded fatigue, and at times, even their own lives, in order to keep fighting, knowing all too well that all might be lost – at least for them – should they give in.
Fangs were bared as both sides met each other at their most savage.