Chapter 447: Fire at the City Gate
A drunk staggered out of the tavern, but was accidentally pushed to the ground by the people passing by.
First, a few kind-hearted people who discovered the person fallen pounced on him like wolves, and then more and more people who noticed the person fallen came one after another.
The guards had not arrived yet, and thanks to these kind people, the person who fell to the ground was not trampled to death.
The patrolling guards soon noticed the chaos here. Lynch looked at the crowd dispersing and the naked drunkard on the ground, and he seemed to understand the civilized world.
Apart from his underwear, which was impossible to remove, he had nothing left.
At least he was not thrown directly into the sewer. If Middenheim had a drainage system, it seems that there was one. Thinking about it this way, the civilized world is not too bad.
God knows how Sorian became so successful in the local dwarf community, probably because of the power of money.
It was already afternoon when Lynch slowly strolled to the central square. Perhaps everyone had no place to vent their energy after eating and drinking, so Lynch looked down at the lowlands and the streets where demonstrators were gathering and causing trouble.
In fact, there are troublemakers everywhere, and some of them are quite legitimate - genuine followers of Verena, although their church may not be willing to lower its face to acknowledge them.
The most interesting thing is the reaction of the bureaucrats. They seemed to be troubled by another matter, and even the priority of quelling the riots was lowered. Heinris, one of the Lords of Law and the Minister of the Elector's Palace, disappeared.
Along with the Lord of Law, many members of Middenheim's committee also disappeared, which made the remaining officials quite flustered. Lynch knew why the troublemakers in the morning had been rampant for a while.
Normally, such a protest march should have been dispersed at the first opportunity. Middenheim is not an open system and the nobles still hold important power.
It now appears that bureaucrats are more concerned with filling the gap than suppressing the chaos.
Based on what they discussed, Lynch guessed that the bureaucrats had disappeared for several days, and it was only recently that other officials determined that the missing persons would not return and that they had indeed encountered an accident.
Lynch hoped to get an accurate time, and after eavesdropping several times, he determined an interesting truth.
The missing bureaucrat can be presumed to have disappeared from Middenheim during the chaos in Duncanwald Forest.
Of course, we can't just throw dirty water on them. It takes more than a few hours to get from Middenheim to the scene of the incident.
There may be other reasons, but Lynch no longer cares about the specific circumstances.
As long as it has nothing to do with the devil, they can do whatever they want.
God knows how the riot turned into a mutiny. Perhaps the guards enforcing the law were too violent. In short, blood was shed during the dispersal.
The verbal protest instantly turned into a full-scale resistance, with citizens and passers-by picking up tables, chairs, stones, and sticks at hand and fighting with the guards.
The outnumbered guards were beaten back step by the mob. It was a ridiculous situation that they were defeated by a group of rioters who used tables as shields and wooden sticks as swords.
Lin Qi had just been stunned for a moment when the chaos spread from one street to the outer ring, and then went up the hillside, quickly infecting the upper commercial district.
Perhaps it was not excessive for the Knights Templar to order a charge on the citizens at this time. Lynch was not sure whether this was against the rules, but they did it anyway.
Before the knights, whose horses were covered in heavy armor, rushed into the crowd, the mob was frightened by the sound of horse hooves. The riot might have ended at this time, but the knights who were suppressing the riot did not stop. Lynch thought they were just threatening, but they really crashed into the crowd.
The first dead person appeared, and one after another dead and wounded appeared on the road where the war horses were galloping.
What's worse is that there seems to be a conflict among the knights. Some White Wolf Knights who were driving away the mob decisively turned their horses around after discovering the atrocities of their colleagues and demanded an explanation from them.
As you can imagine, the soldiers who were blinded by rage had no explanation.
The knight who took the lead in questioning his colleagues was pierced through the body by a hidden arrow shot from nowhere, and Lynch saw the crossbow taken out by the citizens.
The conflict reached its peak in an instant. Some knights understood their colleagues' actions out of anger, while the remaining small nobles who were still hesitating mourned the death of their companions and did not continue to question the riot, allowing the soldiers and citizens to turn their swords against each other.
It can be imagined that many soldiers decisively turned their attention after discovering that there were indeed casualties. Except for a few professional soldiers, most people still had concerns in the city, and their families were also citizens.
The Elector's officials left in Middenheim were strangely indifferent to this, or rather, they were no longer able to pay any more attention to anything else.
Some wizards who lived in seclusion in Middenheim turned against their allies in public. The first magic appeared in the sky, and the subsequent spellcasting, counter-spelling and fighting triggered a series of chain reactions.
The foreigners in the city were as dumbfounded as Lynch. The halflings huddled in the corners and behind the collapsed carriages. The elves wisely avoided all the crowds and relied on their agility to hide from the disaster on the roofs.
The dwarf gathering was forced to stop, and Lynch found that Sorian and his people had all run to the White Wolf Temple or the Elector's Palace, apparently seeking the advice of the local ruler.
The rioting citizens were as martial as Lynch had guessed. They built makeshift shelters with carriages and wooden frames, and used a series of obstacles to block the knights' charge.
But the knights were also well-trained fighters when they dismounted, and the citizens were just resisting with crossbows and spears.
Something even more unexpected happened. A hunter stood up on a street that was about to be broken through by the knights. He was only wearing a simple leather coat. After discovering that the arrows could not penetrate the plate armor, he decisively took out a hammer used to smash animal bones, and fought the well-equipped knight on equal terms.
More "hermits" appeared one after another and stopped the Knights from suppressing the mob.
Before the riots, Lynch had no idea that there were so many masters hiding in this city.
Officials at city hall belatedly appealed for peace over a loudspeaker, pleading in vain for both sides to stop the bloodshed and sit down for a good talk.
Obviously, no one can listen to reason at this time, and fists are their only reason.
Even the dwarves were reluctant to intervene, even though they were Middenheim's allies since ancient times. Were they asked to defeat the local king or to massacre the people of Middenheim? The far-sighted wizards tried to suppress the chaos with magic, but their attempts to mobilize the wind of light magic were mistaken by other spellcasters as hostile wizards accumulating magic power, and the colorful magic luster just stagnated in the sky.
(End of this chapter)
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