I, the prince in distress, send money

Chapter 72 Headache

"Come on, lazy bum, stop slacking off!"

"Snapped!"

"what……"

Accompanied by the supervisor's curses and the sound of whips, Melkan, with his upper body bare and a whip mark on his back still oozing blood, turned his head to look.

It was Father Duka from the neighboring house. He was very strong, but under the whip wielded by the soldiers in mail, he was as thin and fragile as a fallen leaf in the autumn wind.

It only took two lashes for Father Duca to fall down, because one of the whips hit his head and popped his eyeballs. The pain made the strong man roll on the ground.

Seeing this, the whipping overseer said something to the soldier beside him, who then raised his spear and stabbed Father Duka, killing him in front of the many civilians nearby.

Melkan couldn't hear their conversation, but he guessed the general content... This man is useless, just kill him.

Melken looked numbly at his neighbor lying on the ground with his hands and feet twitching, then he lowered his head and continued to wave the hoe in his hand, digging the stiff soil.

Melkan and other farm workers were digging a hole.

Melkan was captured the day before yesterday. A group of terrifying white-robed horse-mounted soldiers attacked the village. They moved quickly and fiercely, and everyone was trapped in the village before they could react.

Maybe some escaped, maybe not, Melken didn't know. The only thing he knew was that all the old people and children in the village were killed, most of the women were taken away, and all the men were captured.

The food that every household had hoarded and hidden was taken away. No matter how well they hid it, it was useless because the white-robed men who attacked the village tortured the men horribly, whipped them if they didn't talk, and killed the women and children.

In addition to torture, these people not only had a better training advantage than the bandits, they even brought dogs with them, allowing them to conduct extremely detailed searches of the village.

The cellar exit hidden in the pigpen at Melken's house could not be avoided, and a bag of rye was sniffed out by a big black dog.

Originally, this shouldn't have happened, as pig manure could perfectly cover up the smell of rye, but the Melken family's pigpen was empty because the pigs had been captured by the Republic tax collectors who came to collect grain last time.

Without pigs, the pigsty would no longer have the stench of manure, and the rye would no longer be hidden.

As a price for Melkan's silence, he was stripped and whipped on the back, a whip that knocked him unconscious.

When Melkan woke up again, he was already at the foot of a hill outside a stone castle. Soldiers in white robes were whipping him and thousands of other poor people to work outside and dig pits.

Some logs were placed on the side, waiting for people to stuff them in to form two wooden walls.

Simply fill the wooden wall with soil and then compact the soil to form a simple rammed earth wall.

It’s hard to say how long such a rammed earth wall can last, but in the short term it can definitely withstand bombardment from bullets and small-caliber artillery.

Some people tried to resist, but how could unarmed and untrained peasants be a match for soldiers armed with swords and wearing armor?
It was easy for the latter to deal with ten peasants.

Some people tried to escape, but they couldn't because ropes were tied around everyone's feet and tied in a knot, with the ropes for every ten people connected together.

The supervisor said that as long as the rope was not untied, everyone could survive. If one person untied the rope, the other nine people would die.

There was an actual case where someone secretly untied the rope around his feet and tried to escape. Not only did he fail to escape, he was shot by soldiers armed with bows and arrows, and the ten people in his group were hacked to death on the spot.

Therefore, the first hurdle that every escapee needs to face is not the dozens of soldiers at the construction site, but the other nine people around him.

At this point, most of the poor people had lost the courage to escape or resist. They worked numbly, tortured by hunger and fatigue.

"Come on, lazy bum, I see you're slacking off!"

……

Called Cool Guy, he was lying behind a bush on a small hillside. He was quietly and silently observing the fortress a thousand meters away with a monocular telescope covered with a thin black gauze.

Bolas Fortress.

A stone castle embedded in the mountain, it is a typical knight castle style, with cliffs on two sides and slopes and winding mountain roads on the other side.

The castle is composed of walls of varying sizes, towers and sturdy gates. It has a tall main castle and a small, low secondary castle.

The main fort is against the cliff, and the secondary fort stands on the side, slightly protruding forward, which can form cross-fire with the main fort on the winding slope road in front.

The attacker attacks the main fort in front?
Then the rolling stones from the towering city walls and the rain of arrows from the arrow towers will make you suffer. If you raise your shield, the guardian of the secondary fort on the other side of the cliff will use bows and crossbows to attack the side of you that you cannot cover.

Do you want to take the secondary fort first?

Behind the secondary fort is a suspension bridge that connects to the other end of the cliff, where there is a road leading to the interior of the Republic.

In other words, if the attackers could find a way to bypass the fortress and launch an attack from the Republic-controlled area, that would be a solution.

However, if they did so, the attackers would have to stand on the pontoon bridge, facing the heavy fire from the main fort on the side, and break through the defense line of the secondary fort guards at the end of the pontoon bridge head-on.

This is also a dead end, and the attackers have to face the risk of the defenders of the secondary fort cutting off the pontoon bridge.

Even though Cool Brother didn't know much about military knowledge, he felt a chill in his heart just by looking at the Bolas Fortress.

Damn, how can we take the fortress?

Cannon bombardment?

There is an open space at the foot of the hillside, more than a thousand meters away from the fortress, which is very convenient for setting up artillery positions.

The problem is that when Cool Brother was observing, he also saw the gun positions on the walls of the main and secondary castles. Although he did not see the cannons, he did not know their caliber and quantity.

But even if the castle guards only have a few cannons, even small and medium caliber ones, they can easily beat the players on the open ground to death with their advantage of being high above.

Even if the enemy's artillery shells are not very accurate, they are whistling towards you and it is difficult to fight back, which is also very scary.

Not to mention that the soldiers stationed at the castle captured thousands of farmers to dig trenches and build rammed earth walls at the bottom of the hillside below the castle.

This trench was obviously prepared for the castle's guards. Once the enemy attacked, they would hide in the trench and, under the cover of fire from the fortress above, climb up the rammed earth wall to resist the attackers.

Taking down the rammed earth wall defense line does not mean the fortress has fallen. There are still steep slopes and towering city walls to attack.

Cool guy didn't know how many lives he would have to sacrifice before he could capture this fortress that could easily accommodate a thousand people.

"It's a headache... I don't know where Xiaodao and the other brothers went. What were they doing?"

(End of this chapter)