Chapter 60: The Siege of Friendly Forces (Please follow! Please add to library!)

"Your civilization shaping has begun!"

"The Chivalrous Expedition has launched an attack on your city. The number of participants in this Chivalrous Expedition is 45,000! (It should have been 5,000 originally.)"

"Due to special reasons, your enemies will receive the help of the God of Struggle during the Chivalrous Expedition!"

"Due to special reasons, your enemies will receive the help of the God of Life during the Chivalrous Expedition!"

"Due to special reasons, your enemies will receive the help of the God of Joy during the Chivalrous Expedition!"

"Due to special reasons, your enemies will receive the help of the God of Wisdom during the Chivalrous Expedition!"

"Factions that view you with hatred will choose to launch an attack at this time!"

"The difficulty level of this civilization shaping crisis is: Highest Level!"

"The civilization traits shaped after this crisis will definitely be considered the highest-level civilization traits."

"The civilization traits shaped after this crisis will have all negative effects removed."

"Please note, this is a war of the era! It is a trial you must face! A civilization may yield, but it can never sever its roots! Protect your culture and city well to meet your final test!"

"..."

It is terrifying.

Just from the numbers and the associated red warnings, one could tell that this operation was absolutely not a joke.

Otherwise, Li Ang would not have briefly abandoned his series of research and related tasks to begin preparing for the fortress complex of the Fairy Fortress—now called the Heavenly Fortress.

On the surface, the opponent seemed like a rabble with no coordination between them, and Li Ang clearly knew their attack routes and had players providing support, knowing their abilities and various supplies and troop progress, but the disadvantage was still incomparably huge.

Simply put, the pure population gap was fifteen-fold.

Other gaps were even greater.

The opponent was an army of 45,000 people who possessed combat experience and had a certain degree of coordination.

As for Li Ang's side, apart from the approximately two hundred knights who had already been converted into Holy Tree Knights, there were only four hundred or so Norsca Raiders and a roughly equal number of Norsca civilians with combat capability.

The remaining two thousand people were either the old, weak, women, and children of Norsca, or civilians from the Southern Kingdom, or serfs and ordinary slaves who had been raided. They were well-protected and had not undergone any combat; their morale and training level could not be counted on at all. Therefore, Li Ang only placed them in the Giant Tree Outpost fortress for training, to be used as a final reserve force.

Thus, on the front line, the population gap was a staggering forty-five-fold. Even with the advantage of intelligence and knowing the opponent's attack route, without naval warfare, he could not gradually erode the opponent's effective strength. He could only rely on the sturdy fortress complex and spells to resist.

Before the Chivalrous Expedition arrived, the worst-case estimate Li Ang made was that with most of his city destroyed and only 20% of the current population remaining, he could probably obtain about 10,000 people in manpower.

Because in Li Ang's calculations, although his own abilities were very powerful, the vast majority of his strength needed to resist the miracles of the Evil Gods. With the four great Evil Gods waiting on him alone, could this blessing be any less? Moreover, the opponent also had mercenary mage groups and accompanying Mage Attendants.

Everything about this signaled that a difficult war was about to begin. It could even be said that if he hadn't set up the Heavenly Fortress and the traps at Fool's Beach in advance, causing the opponent's strongest 3,000 professional soldiers to fall into a state of waiting for death, he would have gone up and smashed them with psionic power himself if it were a normal battle.

However, once the fighting actually started, Li Ang found that it didn't seem to be like that at all.

In Li Ang's conception, the enemy had the God of Wisdom devising strategies, the God of Struggle fighting bravely forward, the God of Joy maintaining morale, and the God of Life maintaining the front line, but the reality was not so.

The followers of the God of Struggle unhesitatingly hacked the servants of the God of Wisdom to death, the reason being that the latter were spreading fallacies and disturbing the army's morale. And the leader of the God of Joy's followers, Joshua, according to information revealed by the players, had slaughtered all the military doctors who believed in the God of Life before boarding the ships, then took their mutated bodies and claimed they were unclean. Let alone working together, two of the four paths of Evil God protection were gone within a few short days.

And seeing that the path of the God of Struggle had killed the mages and then crashed into the Heavenly Fortress, it was clear they were finished. Only one of the four great Evil Gods remained.

Then, even more terrifyingly, the followers of the God of Struggle, due to a boring sense of honor, were still circling around Fool's Beach to this day, not even having entered, let alone sending a signal to the overseas fleet. And the great fleet, having received no signals or data, was left wandering and lost at sea.

It had been three days; without confirming the surrounding environment and landing site, the main force could only bite the bullet and follow the old route.

However, in the process of passing through the strait between Albion Island and the Norsca Peninsula, they encountered the Sea Elves who had come to seek revenge on Li Ang. This force, which should have joined together, after an initial exchange, insisted that the other side were all Chaos-infected beings and beastly long-lived species, and they had a great sea battle in the Albion Strait.

The war lasted for a day and a night, and the situation was extremely tragic. Four-fifths of the player fleet was destroyed, one-fifth of the Chivalrous Expedition fleet was damaged, and at the cost of staggering casualties, they killed three sea beasts and fourteen beast tamers of the Sea Elves.

Furthermore, after the war, they took away some of the Sea Elves' beast-taming tools and corpses, making the Sea Elves swear to make Bretonnia pay the price.

At the very beginning, Li Ang even doubted if he had gone mad and was hallucinating.

This was not what surprised Li Ang the most.

What was most surprising was the third fleet.

The third wave of the main player fleet and the escort fleet encountered a Fairy descent while passing through the Claw Sea during the assembly process.

The communication between the players and the Fairies was quite smooth; at first, everyone was laughing and talking, until a Fairy smilingly dissected a player and ate their heart, and only then did the player faction realize the beastly nature of the Fairies.

Through the forums and signals from the Fairy Realm, both sides immediately began to use their own traits to start a battle royale in the Claw Sea. Countless Fairy and player ships ran aground and sank on the edges of the Norsca and Empire coasts, or hunted each other's existence in the icy, snowy, and damp, cold forests.

For the Fairies, hunting players whose flesh could automatically grow was a very interesting thing. And for the players, since they had been attacked, it was impossible not to take revenge.

Thus, while Li Ang sat in the Observatory waiting for the unprecedented great war to arrive, the expedition fleet had already lost half of its strength in the process.

Along with this Chivalrous Expedition, from Bretonnia to the Norsca Peninsula and then to the Chaos Sea, the entire route had turned into a mess, and only the beach Li Ang had prepared was empty. The great chaos simply didn't include him.

He had already planned to fight a positional war and a fortress war, but after waiting in battle readiness for most of the day, a large number of the enemy died in civil war.

Don't die, you guys! If you all die, where am I supposed to find manpower?

Looking at the dozens of large and small battle locations marked on the map, Li Ang only felt his heart bleeding.

That was all his manpower! His!

If you fight a civil war like this, how can I scrape up manpower to build a city and civilization! "... Forget it, go to the Heavenly Fortress, I'll scrape up what I can."

It's just Chaos Infection, it can still be saved.

Looking at the structure on the sand table, Li Ang sighed, his figure instantly disappearing from the Observatory and arriving at Fool's Beach.

And facing the Gede Knight who was half-kneeling on the beach and panting, Li Ang instantly found a sense of balance, and a smile could not help but hang on his face.

I really beg everyone to promote this more and keep up with the daily updates. A newcomer like me with a new book can only manage two updates of four thousand words, otherwise, I won't be able to get many recommendation slots. And with over a thousand readers following now, getting into the Sanjiang list is very difficult, but there is still a glimmer of hope. I really beg you readers to help promote it and keep up with the updates, I thank you all here!

(End of chapter)