Chapter 37: Complete Victory
Immediately afterward, a continuous string of gunshots rang out as five giant balls of flame erupted in the air. The cannon shells fired by the Dong family private army had all exploded in mid-air.
Qianye glanced back, astonished, and found that a lady had appeared atop a shooting platform on one of the sentry towers.
She was indeed an impressive sight to behold—her long ponytail was flying wildly behind her head, and her tight-fitting clothes outlined the beautiful and energetic curves of her body. She was fairly tall and possessed a pair of astonishingly long legs. Her figure was slender to the front and curvaceous toward the back. One didn’t need to see her face to know that she was a great beauty.
She was holding onto an assault rifle with one hand, and the origin array on its muzzle was still glowing.
However, Qianye had been able to discern that the drawn-out rumble from just now actually consisted of five shots, which meant that the lady hadn’t missed a single shot—she had detonated all the incoming shells with an ordinary assault rifle.
It seemed shooting down five cannon shells in one go wasn’t enough to satisfy her. She extended a hand backward and said, “Give me something more powerful!”
Two ladies clad in similar combat attire brought over a handheld origin-canon. Its caliber was so large that one could almost stuff a watermelon inside, but that lady lifted the weapon with relative ease and clamped it under her arms. She then took aim at Dong Qifeng who was hovering in the air and opened fire!
The origin cannon rang out with a world-shaking rumble. The wall under the lady’s foot was immediately split apart as surging origin power fluctuations began to spread outward. Zhang Zixing immediately rose into the air and, with a wave of his hand, drew out an origin power shield to protect the noble ladies. However, some residual waves still managed to slip past, and the impact even caused some of the warriors to lose their footing.
The cannon spat out a red ball of flame which flew across the sky like a shooting star and blasted toward Dong Qifeng. Seeing this ten-meter ball of fire, the expressions of Dong Qifeng and the other two champions changed immediately. They didn’t dare to block the attack at all and had to evade one after another.
He had just sidestepped ten meters away when Dong Qifeng suddenly remembered something, and his heart screamed in distress. The fireball advanced with unreduced momentum and was hurtling toward the airship behind Dong Qifeng’s back. That was his flagship!
The fiery ball sunk into the airship with relative ease. The very next moment, streams of raging flame erupted therein, and a dozen-odd figures were seen jumping out from the airship and falling to the ground. An earth-shattering explosion soon followed as the airship transformed into a giant ball of flames which swelled up and then dispersed in the air. Those who failed to escape in time were turned to ashes along with it.
“Now that’s satisfying!” the ponytailed lady cried out and tossed the handheld cannon back to her maids.
It wasn’t just Qianye—everyone else who had witnessed this scene showed different degrees of changes in their expression.
The might of this cannon had exceeded all expectations and was probably the most powerful attack Qianye had witnessed apart from the Red Spider Lily. In terms of pure firepower, it had already surpassed Zhao Jundu’s Blue Firmament, and even Qianye’s complete Twin Flowers reinforced by the Wings of Inception still fell short.
It was at least grade-seven, and even then, it must be an item of premium quality. Qianye immediately formed such an opinion of this terrifying handheld cannon. Those who could use a grade-seven weapon couldn’t be a nobody. However, Qianye had no impression of this person.
Qianye’s eyes swept over the group around him and concluded from their expressions that this unidentified lady wasn’t their comrade. Wei Potian and Song Zining didn’t seem to know her either.
He suddenly discovered something wrong with Zhang Zixing’s expression after he saw the woman. It wasn't astonishment or fear, but rather… annoyance? It was as if his distressed expression after seeing the group of noble ladies had been magnified by a dozen times.
But there was no time to look into the details at this moment. Since Dong Qifeng had already opened fire, Zhang Zixing naturally wouldn’t be so polite. He immediately issued the command for an all out attack.
The cannonfire on the walls almost shook the sky. Roughly fifty heavy cannons belonging to Dark Flame and the third army corps rumbled continuously and bombarded the attacking unit with great ferocity.
Dong Qifeng couldn’t help but become petrified after seeing the abrupt and violent assault. He simply couldn’t imagine how Blackflow City, with its chaotic troop formation, had been able to retaliate with such concentrated firepower.
The artillery barrage was so fierce that even the three champions and those high-ranking officers were only able to destroy a small portion of it. Most of the shells landed amidst the besieging army and blasted entire groups of warriors into the air.
Following which, Dong Qifeng witnessed a scene he would probably not forget for the rest of his life. In the sky just beyond the city, airships were rising one after another in quick succession, and at the very end, a terrifying giant battleship, hundreds of meters in length, revealed its sinister face. It looked as though an entire street block had risen into the air.
The smallest among the dozens of battleships were corvettes. Meanwhile, A flag was gradually being raised on the biggest airship—it was evidently an imperial airship on active duty!
Dong Qifeng’s brain had gone blank at the moment and he almost couldn’t believe his eyes. An entire squadron of imperial airships had appeared in front of him!
Even if all of the Dong family’s airships were added together, they couldn’t stand a single blow from such a squadron.
Dong Qifeng nearly thought he had come to the wrong place. He had the illusion that the city in front of him wasn’t Blackflow but an important county of the empire.
As soon as the fleet appeared, it rained down a layer of flames toward the troops on the ground and threw them into complete disorder. The Dong family warriors could no longer care about attacking the city. The troops immediately switched to an anti-air formation, and the heavy cannons began to raise their firing angle. The small gunships were frozen in the air. One of them courageously wanted to meet the enemy head-on but was fired upon by numerous fiery beams and soon exploded into a ball of flames.
Qianye suddenly leapt atop the wall with a two-meter long grade-five sniper rifle in tow and directly jumped out of the city.
Song Zining grabbed a bronze spear from one of his personal guards and leapt out at almost the same time.
Qianye then ran toward the the place where the three champions were hovering in the air with Song Zining at his heels. The two possessed largely different motion patterns—Qianye was running in an irregular zig-zag motion, a method widely employed in the army to counter snipers. Meanwhile, Song Zining’s figure faded in and out like a phantom.
At this moment, the aerial barrage had just ended on the battlefield, and there was smoke and residual fluctuations everywhere. The Dong family army had already retreated to a point three hundred meters from the city walls and was in the process of reorganizing. Almost no one noticed the two of them. The occasional origin power shockwaves and sniper shots were either evaded or blocked by Song Zining’s spear.
Atop the gate tower, Wei Potian’s expression was dark. By the time he had squeezed his way out of the three layers of noble ladies and approached the city walls, Qianye and Song Zining had already landed on the ground and covered at least a hundred meters. He had the sudden urge to smash something with his fists but had no target.
Zhang Zixing who had been issuing instructions from the air revealed a faint smile. His duty was to protect those noble ladies, and there would be no danger to them as long as Wei Potian behaved himself and stayed in a safe place. This work wasn’t so bad after all.
Previously, the three champions on Dong Qifeng’s side had arrived quite close to the battlefield in order to protect the troops from the cannon fire. As such, Qianye had spent only minutes before arriving within his sniping range of a thousand meters.
Dong Qifeng, who was still somewhat in a daze, felt a sudden sharp pain in his chest as if he had been pricked by a needle. He suddenly realized something and glanced instinctively toward Blackflow City just in time to see a blazing radiance approaching at lightning speed.
Following which, his entire body quaked from the impact as a large hole opened up over his heart.
Dong Qifeng immediately sobered up from the intense pain. He covered up the wound with his hands and immediately turned to flee. His ability to escape decisively had saved his life numerous times in the past. Naturally, he had also sent no small number of comrades to their deaths in the process.
However, Qianye would never give him such an opportunity. He pulled on the trigger once more—a blue color suffused his eyes just as the bullet flew out of the muzzle with Dong Qifeng’s figure clearly reflected within it.
Eye Ability: Control was activated within a split second. Dong Qifeng’s heart was suddenly afflicted by an intense pain, and he couldn’t help but bend downward. It was during this moment of delay that blood sprayed out from Dong Qifeng’s back, and the man fell straight down from the sky. This time, Qianye had blasted him with the Black Titanium Bullet of Annihilation and ended his life completely.
And thus, the eldest young master of the Sishui Dong Family, the rank-ten champion Dong Qifeng, unexpectedly died at Blackflow City on Evernight Continent.
As soon as Dong Qifeng died, the private army under his command immediately fell into chaos. The other two champions no longer dared to linger and immediately left the battlefield.
Soon, Blackflow City’s gates opened wide and Dark Flame soldiers swarmed out. The Dong family’s private soldiers had completely lost the will to fight and began to surrender in large groups. The cargo airships as well as the two gunships didn’t dare move at all in the face of the imperial squadron. A small number of them refused to surrender and chose to escape into the wilderness instead. However, this was Evernight Continent—their fates wouldn’t necessarily be better than becoming prisoners.
The battle had been won, and Blackflow City took almost zero casualties. The noble ladies atop the wall were all in high spirits as if they had won the war themselves.
Honestly speaking, the Dong family’s forces weren’t that bad. They had the ability to fight a proper battle even against an imperial regular army corps. But the lightly armed unit had no way to resist the suddenly appearing imperial airship squadron. Add to that the death of their leading general, they naturally collapsed completely.
Taking post-war inventory, merely the prisoners of war numbered close to ten thousand along with countless armaments. Zhang Zixing naturally paid no attention to the trifling matters regarding the clean-up. He claimed that Qianye was the actual Blackflow City Lord and pushed all the work to him.
Settling and handling so many prisoners wasn’t a simple matter at all, not to mention the horde of curious noble ladies causing trouble nearby.
Song Zining knew what Qianye was distressed about and immediately said with a smile, “This is a small matter. Watch me!” He looked around and then walked over toward one of the noble ladies with a smile. The other party also recognized him and immediately returned a smile.
Song Zining greeted, “Dongqi, long time no see!”
That noble lady was precisely the eldest young miss of Marquis of Righteousness, Shi Dongqi, who had met Song Zining numerous times before.
Song Zining’s appearance was elegant and his temperament was gentle. The miscellaneous arts which people considered useless were, on the contrary, extremely appealing to these young ladies. As such, he had always been well-received by the ladies in the empire’s social circle.
He was already engaged and thus didn’t fall within the scope of potential marriage for these lineal daughters. This posed no hindrance to friendship, however, and those ladies from lesser aristocratic families were fairly intimate with him. A prime example would be the lady standing behind Shi Dongqi who belonged to one of the Shi clan’s branch families; she was smiling rather passionately.
Song Zining waved his fan and said with a smile, “Eldest Young Miss Shi, our empire puts great emphasis on military accomplishments. Since the young ladies achieved the first merit in this battle, I feel that a celebratory banquet is in order. Moreover, the soiree definitely has to be large-scaled. An idle person like me has no place participating, but an honored guest like the Bowang Heir can’t be absent.”
Shi Dongqi was immediately enlightened. A celebration like this was a great opportunity. When everyone had gotten tipsy and merry, she might have an opportunity to seize Wei Potian on the spot and confirm the marriage affair. She immediately thanked Song Zining and left in a hurry to arrange matters.
Song Zining watched the figure of Shi Dongqi’s back as she left, a barely discernible shade of schadenfreude emerged within his smile.