The behemoth dragged by bison, horned deer, and orcs looked more like hills made of rough wood.

The trailer came to a halt about five hundred feet from the walls of Thundercastle, and orc and human craftsmen began assembling the wood of various shapes.

"We can get our soldiers into battle. Baldwin said that he was not talking about the soldiers of Thundercastle, but about the prisoners who had been sent in by the royal capital and elsewhere.

They had been stripped of their collars and shackles for the previous days, and had eaten meat, onion soup, and less black and hard bread, and Baldwin had taken out his savings and equipped them with clothes, armor, and swords—though many thought they were not necessary, but to Baldwin they were his soldiers, even if they didn't want to.

A herald read out the forgiveness of the royal capital as written, and as we said before, they were forgiven of their past sins as long as they were able to accomplish their task. Even if they die, their families receive a small pension.

There was not much joy on the faces of the prisoners, some of them may not be so guilty, but more of them were thieves and assassins who had been involved in theft, robbery and murder, and some were members of the guild, and they were certainly not ignorant of the ferocity of orcs and orcs, and they had faced one, two, or ten orcs at most, but now they had to deal with hundreds.

But they had no chance or ability to resist or escape, and although they had weapons, the real soldiers kept a close watch over their every move with crossbows, and they slid down the walls one by one with ropes hanging from the passes of the breastwork, some of them clever men who wanted to get the last shred of life with their begging and lies, but the soldiers were used to it, so when a brown-haired prisoner screamed hoarsely that he saw a man who could prove his innocence, they simply pointed the spike of their spear at his chest in silence。

"I'm Gülen!" he shouted as he was pushed off the wall, shouting in despair, "Mage, I'm Gülen!

If it weren't for the snow, he would have broken his leg, and the thief Glenn struggled to his feet, his "companions" sneered, and his chest swelled with burning remorse and hatred. But he soon ran out of time to think too much about it—the soldiers on the walls threw torches and arrows, silently urging them to embark on the road to death as soon as possible.

A half-breed bastard with obvious orc blood picked up the torch, a bundle of greased pine branches, which had not been extinguished even if it had been thrown in the snow, and he picked it up and ran forward in great stride, shouting orc words in a loud voice, and dropping his sword and torch to the ground as he approached them, and he knelt down towards his people and stretched out his hands.

At the forefront were the half-orcs who were already adults, shorter and thinner than the adult orcs, for in the tribe they were only a little better than the human slaves - they had been hungry for some time, and before the battle they had temporarily deceived their stomachs with broth and blood-soaked winter wine, but now they were preparing to riot. Without hesitation, they pounced on the self-disarmed bastard, the poor ghost, who was stronger than the two orcs, but whose wildness had long since been washed clean in the soft sleeper of human wine, and who wore his shirt and trousers and boots like a human, and whose eyes were only wide in vain when the orc soldiers pounced on him.

His fate deprived several of the orc-fantasted prisoners of their last hope, and they turned around and wept and slapped the walls until they were pierced by arrows from humans, "Die as a human." The soldiers of Fort Thunder shouted coldly.

The prisoners were forced to turn back to face the orcs - forced by the humans to wield torches and draw their swords, and better than the common people were almost all experienced in the use of weapons and killing, and the orcs were slightly less equipped - they had no clothes or armor, and could only resist the sharp blades with their pine resin-coated fur, and their weapons were of all kinds, from bone spears to rusted daggers, and only a few of them could pierce the hard armor - its outer layer was linen and cotton, but the inner layer was inlaid with iron plates.

But the orcs also had an advantage that the prisoners did not have, and that was their strength and claws, and they threw down their broken weapons, jumped up like wolves in the wasteland, pounced on their foes, and then let their teeth penetrate their necks or tear their stomachs with their hind paws.

Glenn plunged the torch directly into the throat of one orc, but his back was attacked by another orc at the same time, its claws piercing into his skin and muscles - as a thief, he was good at daggers and nooses, but he could also make a longsword taste enough blood - he reversed the sword and stabbed it out from under his arm, and when the tip of the sword was in the way, he pressed the heavy ball of lead from the longsword to make it up, "Go on, baby, go on." He cried inwardly, and at the same time arched his back with all his strength—the orc had scratched and bitten like a frenzy before he died, and his entire upper body was bloodied as a result, but there was no fatal wound, no, he endured it, not to let out a scream to attract the attention of the other orcs, and at the same time clung to his foe, and rolled as if the warm corpse could still fight him, and at last he let the dead orc cover his body like a stinking and bloody blanket- He eagerly stretched out his hands to dig through the snow and dirt beneath the dead orcs until he was completely buried in it - thanks to the guild for all that had taught him, a skill he had thought was quite useless, but in the end he was learning it very seriously.

It's not foolproof, orcs have sharper eyes and noses than humans, or orcs and humans still see him in the chaos - Gülen doesn't think that the so-called "companions" will allow him to live alone, but that's all he can do.

Snow and sludge surrounded Gülen, every inch of his exposed skin aching, and he reserved a small nest for himself that stored the air that humans depended on, but it didn't last long.

The lives of the two hundred prisoners were exchanged for the destruction of two small catapults and a drill, which were scorched - the battle between the sinners and the orcs continued, and while Berdwin did not approve of the royal capital's approach, he had to admit that he cherished his people more.

But the orcs assembled two giant trebuchets.

"With wheels," said Berdwin, "I saw a trebuchet with wheels for the first time." ”

The two mage apprentices stood quietly on the busy orc side, cardboard and pen in hand, they were not responsible for labor and combat, only for testing and recording, after all, this giant trebuchet was officially used on the battlefield for the first time, and they had to write down every one of its advantages that was worth proclaiming and the disadvantages that needed to be improved, as well as what to pay attention to when assembling and using it.

The bracket of this giant trebuchet looks like two equilateral trapezoids, with wooden bars crossed in an X-shape and an A-shaped pulley frame rising above the throwing arm.

Even with the use of pulleys, it still required forty orcs to pull up the thirteen,000-pound balance - the lead blocks attached to the back of the throwing arm, which were combined with a throwing arm cut from a whole masson pine, like a wooden pole pen with a strange nut - where the throwing arm was connected to the X-bracket with a huge wooden block holding it, wrapped in iron hoops and riveted, so that the weakened trunk would not break in half after the first throw.

The orcs' human craftsmen carved hundreds of stone balls weighing between two hundred and fifty pounds and three hundred pounds, which rolled to the ground gray and white, like human skulls.

The twelve orcs tugged at the fire hydrant, an iron wedge with a thick cowhide rope attached to the end, and inserted it between the chain ring that was fixed to the base of the trebuchet and the tip of the throwing arm—they grunted and pulled the rope back with all their might, but the fire bolt remained unmoving, and the orc warrior, anxious to see the result, brandished his whip and whipped them furiously, so that after a frantic howl of pain, the fire hydrant was finally pulled out— The moment it was pulled apart, the lead block at the end of the throwing arm fell suddenly, and the sinking tip of the throwing arm slammed into the ground and lifted upward, connecting it to the cowhide sling, and the leather bag at the end of the sling, the two hundred and fifty pound stone ball in the leather pocket was thrown up hundreds of feet into the air and flew towards the walls of Thundercastle.

The orcs shouted excitedly, but the mage, who was not far away, shook his head as the stone ball was thrown, and sure enough, the stone ball fell dozens of feet from the city wall, and the low landing point could only threaten a dwarf.

The loud mockery of the defenders of Thundercastle pierced through the entire Dragon's Belly Pass, and the tribal leader of the orcs bared his fangs in displeasure, while the red-robed mage simply calmly ordered the apprentice to shorten the length of the sling.

The iron wedge, named the fire hydrant, was greased, and this time it took only ten orcs to pull it, and the throwing arm once again violently threw the stone ball into the air, and the orcs could see that the stone ball was thrown higher and farther without the mage's reminder. It struck the wooden passage of the wall accurately, and the wooden wall about the width of three people was smashed to pieces, and the sawdust flew in all directions like tiny arrows, and the remaining stone balls jumped and rolled on the ground, ploughing out a shallow trench and smashing the foot of a soldier who had not been able to dodge in time.

The throwing arm swayed violently in the air, and the reaction force from the throwing ball was absorbed by the wheel, and it failed to fall apart as humans had hoped.

"Very well," the mage said mildly, "let's continue." ”

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