Behind the rubble of a crumbled wall, a young knight clad from head to toe in plate armor commanded a group of hastily formed militia to establish a defensive perimeter using whatever they could find from the ruined city's outer rim, which had been ravaged by a slew of supposed magical explosions.
Many of his superiors had already abandoned the front lines due to the blasts and had huddled themselves inside the castle high upon the hill. He couldn't really blame them, who would have expected the wall to fall this quickly, or the enemy to be this fierce?
And so, in order to vouch for his wife and daughter safety, he had to remain at the front line. Since the city's moat still remained intact, it might take some time before the enemy reached this point. There was still hope left, even if it was as small as a lone candle in a dark forest.
"Get a table and a crate over there!" he shouted in command as a group of militiamen ran about, hauling different pieces of furniture in a hurry to construct a barricade along a street where several damaged buildings flanked it, forming a natural chokepoint.
But just as the barricade was about to be finished, something else happened.
From far, far away, beyond the crumbled walls and the villages and farms surrounding them, at the edge of the forest that encircled the far outer rim of the city like a natural bastion where the enemy forces had gathered, many streaks of light were shot up from the ground like arrows made of starlight and sunshine.
As those arrows reached their peak in the bright blue sky, they exploded with somewhat harmless *BANG* into a slew of confetti-like brilliant lights that shone bright red, contrasting against the blue midday sky like a solitary red flower in a plain of indigo grass.
The visuals were brilliant and beautiful.
Yet, considering everything that had happened since the invasion forces appeared, it might just be another spell destined to bring about their destruction.
Some militia were scared to the bone, their faces pale as corpses, their skin crawling with fear as their gazes fixed upon the brilliant lights in the sky, they feared them like cavemen fearing the darkness of night.
"Take cover behind the barricade and ready the crossbows!" he barked orders to the militia while his armored feet ran to take cover alongside them.
Then an uneasy calm descended as the red lights in the sky disappeared, leaving only the normal blue heaven and fluffy white clouds, nothing but the fearful murmurs of the militia and their heavy breathing that's filled the silent air with an atmosphere of despair remains, as though they were pebbles in the road about to be trampled by a war chariot.
And in that moment of calmness came a loud voice shouting from just beyond the rubble of the fallen wall.
"Men of Vertenville listen! I'm gonna give you three minutes to surrender and let us pass through freely, or be annihilated thoroughly. The choice is yours!"
The voice sent young knight's mind into confusion. If they were that close to the wall, that meant they had somehow already crossed the moat and were literally just standing outside the wall.
"Surrender... no... my wife... my daughter..." he thought to himself as he steeled his resolve and stayed silent, signaling with his hand for everyone else to do the same.
One minute passed.
And the uneasiness grew.
Two minutes passed.
And his heartbeat pounded like a war drum.
Three minutes passed.
And thus, silence abruptly ended as a cluster of objects that looked like round spheres of cast iron ball were flung from outside the wall, landing just behind the barricade where they were taking cover. The balls came with a strange *fizz* sound as fire sparks on their wicks.
Everyone, including him, looked at the strange iron spheres in bewilderment as the wicks burned quickly down to their base.
Then...
*BOOM*
Those iron spheres exploded, sending shockwaves and shards of sharp metal across the area, throwing everyone into shock, panic, injury, and even outright death.
His brain blanked for a few seconds, he had never witness such thing before.
In that split second of thoughtlessness, his vision turned black as a bullet passed through his helmet and penetrated his skull, turning his brain into a mess of gray and white matter that splattered across the barricade, awhile his men met a similar fate as a storm of bullets tore through their bodies.
------
"Initial threat has been neutralized!"
The machine gunner, currently resting his weapon upon the rubble, turned and shouted a situational report to a man in a white uniform clad in acid-treated, blackened half-plate armor.
He's Konrad, the squad leader of the First Stormtrooper Squadron, who was watching the situation unfold with a sigh of relief.
"Everything is going smoothly, just as I expected" he thought.
Around him, a group of his fellow stormtroopers packed up their trench crossbow-catapult grenade launchers based on the French 'Sauterelle' and the British 'Leach Catapult', while picking up their trusty SIR-01 rifles and SMG-01 submachine guns to prepare themselves for the coming assault across the wall. Meanwhile, the assault engineer squad busied themselves assembling more temporary wooden pontoon bridges across the moat.
"Assault element, get into formation! MG squad, prepare for supporting fire! Signaler, contact HQ and update the situation!" he barked commands as his stormtroopers assembled into an wedge formation, forming a spearhead.
"Visors down! At the ready!" he shouted as he took position at the tip of the spear. His hands reached to his armet-like black helmet and pulled down the visor, preparing himself for the frontal attack. Every trooper around him lowered their visors down as well.
He inhaled deeply and steeled himself for the inevitable charge, then he slipped a whistle in between his lips.
*Tweet!*
The whistle blew, sending every man of the 'First Stormtrooper Squadron', whose role was to lead the assault, charging up the piles of fallen rubble like a tidal wave of madmen.
But as they ran past the summit of the rubble and the interior of the city came into view, they could not help but feel surprised.
As they descended from the rubble piles, they discovered that the resistance was nonexistent.
Ahead of them stood hastily assembled wooden barricades riddled with bullet holes and stained with blood, clearly abandoned and broken.
As they spread out searching for any sign of resistance, all they found was a single militiaman armed with a spear and shield, sitting alone in a crumbled house filled with corpses, his body shaking, his mind broken beyond repair.
"What should we do next, sir?" one of the troopers asked, not sure of what to do next.
"Get the other squads here and report the situation, we're going to push forward!" Konrad replied with a voice filled with sheer determination.
Then he turned toward the broken man with a concerned look.
"Someone fetch a field medic for that man too!" he added in a quieter, solemn voice.
Thus, the battle continued, as 'Second and Third Stormtrooper Squadron' pours into the area like a continuous torrent of men, and readying themselves for a mad dash straight to the Blackstone castle with overwhelming violence and fire power.