A Storm Is Brewing

From this day on, all revenues of this city will be shared with the Golden Stone Empire.

Mofei had never been a petty man. This city lay at the heart of several great nearby cities, and any movement in those places could be seen at a glance so long as the little city kept watch.

Under Elder Ove’s management, it would without question become the center of those great cities. Mofei believed that in the not-too-distant future, Storm City would be the largest and most prosperous metropolis on this continent.

With the troops he had now transferred here, together with the thirty-five thousand heavily armored cavalry originally dispatched, Mofei now commanded a force of ninety thousand men. When the Grand Elder of the Minotaur tribe heard the report from his warriors, he immediately sensed, with keen instinct, that the tribe’s chance had come. The Minotaur tribe had waited far too long for this day.

When the Grand Elder of the Minotaur tribe arrived with the entire strength of his people, Mofei felt excitement, but also pressure. What excited him was the Minotaurs’ joining the cause; it would make Elder Ove’s logistics much easier. The pressure was simple enough: the Minotaurs had placed all their hopes on him. If he failed...

I will not fail.

Mofei silently said this to himself. Whatever he had set out to do, he had brought to success. Even an empire had been built already. At first, knowing nothing of the Bear Clan, he had truly thought them terribly powerful. Only after arriving on their continent had he discovered that the matter was nothing of the sort. He still did not know how their strength could fluctuate so dramatically. Warriors who had once been fierce beyond measure became nothing special at all the moment they changed lands.

What Mofei did not know was that the Bear Clan, in order to plunder, had spent nearly half a year merely assembling their army, and then another half year training and brainwashing those troops, drilling into them day after day how weak the enemy was supposed to be. They were told that if they achieved this or that feat in battle, they would receive this and that reward. After half a year of such indoctrination, all those Bear Clan warriors could think about was how to hack and slaughter. The moment they landed, their ferocity erupted, unleashing at once the desire and killing intent they had been storing up for months. That was why they had been victorious in every battle and undefeated in every assault in the early days after landing.

But once they were stalled for too long, and if they were forced to endure heavy casualties, their combat strength would be greatly diminished. That was also why, when their commander, the young chieftain of the clan, saw that Heavenly Dragon City could not be taken quickly, and after witnessing the warriors of the Death Empire, especially the ferocity of the Death Cavalry, which was no weaker than their own troops, he began to think of withdrawal.

Once those troops returned to their main camp, they were immediately disbanded and sent back to their original homes. Having just suffered defeat, how could the Bear Clan warriors possibly recover their fighting strength so quickly? More importantly, the savagery of the soldiers of the Death Empire surpassed their own. If any of them had withdrawn from the previous battle and now found themselves facing the black death warriors who had brought down their army before, a shadow would at once fall over their hearts. The enemy had come straight to their door, after all. Once fear took root, it naturally spread to the other warriors who had not experienced the last war. Under such conditions, how could they fight well?

That was why, over the past ten-plus days, Mofei had been able to gather nearly a hundred thousand troops in this city without yet seeing the Bear Clan army arrive. The Bear Clan was simply too scattered. They had more than one hundred thousand garrison troops in the land of their chieftain’s residence, but last time they had come with seventy thousand and returned with a little over thirty thousand. With their forces so badly reduced, how could they dare come again without first concentrating their advantages? Besides, assembling an army always took time. It was nothing like Kane, who watched every move Mofei made with the greatest caution, fearing that anything might happen to him. For that very reason, after Mofei left the continent and came to Demon Island, Kane’s instincts told him that perhaps the battlefield would shift elsewhere. So instead of scattering his forces to guard strategic points, he concentrated them near the capital. He even brought more than thirty thousand light armored elven crossbow cavalry from the Elven Kingdom.

The wait was not long. Mofei summoned them here, and his eye for talent had also done him a great service.

Now, aside from the Minotaur warriors brought by the Grand Elder and his people, all the troops Mofei had gathered were cavalry. On a broad plain like this, it was the ideal terrain for mass cavalry warfare. The field of vision was wide and open, leaving the enemy no room for tricks. The plain was vast enough that cavalry could maneuver with complete freedom. Perhaps that was the very reason the Bear Clan, while constantly assembling its forces, had not rushed here. Perhaps they were also studying how to offset the advantage of Mofei’s Death Cavalry. Yet in doing so, they had given Mofei precious time.

One hundred days was neither very long nor very short. Kane made good use of several captains from the berserker cavalry detachments, dividing the ninety thousand cavalry into three combat groups. Each small-unit commander led one group, and the three groups cooperated with one another, each encamped eighty li from Storm City. Together with the scout teams sent out by the three combat groups, an immense net, both visible and invisible, had been cast to envelop Storm City in the center.

With the help of the Minotaur tribe, logistics were no longer a problem for Elder Ove. Not only had he brought over the entire established system from the empire, he was also recruiting construction laborers in great numbers from this continent. Although war still inspired fear, the generous wages offered by Elder Ove had drawn more than a hundred thousand laborers to Storm City in short order, and the number was still growing. If the Golden Stone Empire’s gold coins had not been delivered in time through Mofei’s magical teleportation array, Elder Ove would truly have been in serious trouble.

This time, city building was nothing like the founding of the capital of the Death Empire. The stone for the walls had to be transported from mountains nearly a hundred li away into Storm City, and so along that broad, busy road, cavalry detachments were instantly stationed to protect the convoys. The dwarves under Elder Ove also gave full play to the wisdom of their race. Their newly invented flatbed transport carts, pulled by hauling beasts, carried enormous blocks of stone continuously from the mountains to the city.

Storm City had now expanded to nearly ten times the size of the old city. That was also why Ove had asked Kane to station the troops eighty li outside the city.

The city had been under construction for half a year now, and the encircling walls were slowly rising, taking on a real shape at last. Yet throughout all this time, the Bear Clan army still did not seem to have fully assembled. No one knew how many men they intended to gather before they would strike. Over these six months, only the scout teams dispatched by Kane’s three armies had fought a few encounter battles with the Bear Clan’s forward forces. Each time, the scouts were outnumbered, yet each time they beat the enemy so soundly that they were left reeling.

The Bear Clan warriors had actually equipped themselves with special shields, but it was obvious that once they relied on those shields, they could only defend. They still had not trained up the tactics needed to coordinate attacks with the shield troops. Thus, after a volley of arrows from the scout teams, they all ducked behind the shield bearers. With no threat from the flanks, the cavalry scouts swept around from both wings and, every time, managed to carve up a number of their foes.

When the scout teams reported these changes among the Bear Clan warriors to Kane and Mofei, Mofei knew that the Bear Clan was improving the way it fought cavalry. Perhaps in the near future, his cavalry advantage would be partially neutralized.

And indeed, Mofei’s judgment was correct.

Since the last war and the earlier battle, the Bear Clan had suffered bitterly from the ranged attacks of the Death Cavalry. Lacking the ability to produce heavy armor that could withstand crossbow bolts, they had no choice but to focus on shields. The shields were finished, yes, but tactics could not be changed overnight. The reason the Bear Clan had not yet marched out over these past six months was that they had been continuously drilling new tactical combinations.

The walls kept rising, and day after day passed. The elven scouts sent to investigate the Bear Clan army helplessly discovered that, despite all their skills, they could not even approach the Bear Clan camp by a single step. In order to secure an absolute victory in the next confrontation, the Bear Clan was also training with fierce intensity. Their outer perimeter was guarded so tightly that not even rain could penetrate it. Day or night, the area outside the Bear Clan camp blazed with light, and even local people were forbidden to approach, let alone the elves from the other continent, whose foreign origin was obvious at a glance.

“Since they cannot get close, Kane, pull them back. Do not let them keep trying. I do not want to lose a single warrior before the great battle.”

After hearing Kane’s report, Mofei gave the order without hesitation.

“I understand, Young Master.” Kane was plainly at his wit’s end as well. “Young Master, there is something else.”

He suddenly recalled what the elven scouts had reported.

“What is it?”

“The scouts we sent out discovered that the Bear Clan is felling trees on a massive scale, and their iron mines and gold mines are all working through the day and night. I do not know what they are making.”