Stormwind Wizard God-Chapter 620: The Siege of Lordaeron

The thousand-year-old city of Lordaeron was about to get hit with a second helping of absolute hell since its founding, courtesy of a surprise attack that nobody saw coming.

But this time around, there was no Duke charging in like the cavalry to save everyone's bacon.

To put down that orc uprising a while back, Lordaeron had shipped out practically every soldier worth their salt, leaving the city defended by whatever scraps they could scrape together.

Thanks to the bad blood between Uther and Arthas, the Silver Hand knights had been packed off to Andorhal—hundreds of miles away from where they were desperately needed.

What was left behind were nothing but green recruits and weekend warriors, and they were getting blindsided by their own damn prince. The people of Lordaeron were getting sucker-punched by fate itself.

One moment the city was basking in glorious sunshine, the next it was colder than a witch's heart. Sinister dark clouds rolled in faster than bad news, swallowing the entire city whole. People watched in horror as their world went from blazing summer heat to bone-chilling winter in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but patches of evil-oozing "clouds" hanging in the sky like death's own curtains.

The wind was howling like a banshee while the air itself seemed to hold its breath.

Those pristine white city walls started sprouting thick ice faster than you could say "holy shit," climbing up the stone like some kind of frozen plague. The joyful celebration of the prince's triumphant return had turned into a complete nightmare, because screams were echoing through every street and alley, getting more frequent by the minute and driving everyone stark raving mad with terror.

"AAAAHHHHH——"

"What in the seven hells is that thing!?"

"City Guards! Where the hell are the City Guards!?"

"Mommy, a skeleton took my plushie!"

Chaos was running rampant everywhere, while the areas closer to the city's edge had gone quiet as a graveyard.

And that wasn't just a figure of speech—everyone on the walls and outside the gates was stone-cold dead.

You can bolt your doors against burglars all you want, but when the wolf is already inside the henhouse, you're screwed six ways from Sunday.

Being the kingdom's only heir meant Arthas knew where all the bodies were buried—literally and figuratively. Hell, the old king had been keeping him in the loop about every dirty secret and strategic weakness, thinking he was grooming his successor.

Every bit of that insider knowledge became prime rib for this feast of slaughter.

Undead—those nightmare fuel creatures straight out of the Northrend frozen wasteland. Fearless as hell, cold as ice, and they didn't need to breathe, which made them the perfect killing machines. They kept churning out death like a factory, dragging every living soul into the Grim Reaper's embrace, then immediately making those fresh corpses stumble back to their feet like drunken marionettes, forcing them to turn their weapons on the very people they'd been laughing with just moments before.

Going from the dog days of summer to endless winter in a heartbeat, with undead butchers running wild everywhere—this hit the citizens of Lordaeron like a ton of bricks. These folks had been living the good life for over ten years since the Dark Portal mess, and suddenly they were staring down the barrel of the apocalypse.

Under normal circumstances, what should've happened next was a repeat of history's greatest hits: more than 300,000 soldiers and civilians getting massacred by Arthas's undead army, then the bastard using those hundreds of thousands of fresh zombies to steamroll across the entire northern continent like an unstoppable avalanche of death.

But then something happened that Arthas never saw coming—a real curveball that threw his whole plan into a tailspin.

At first, he couldn't have cared less.

His death knights came running with reports that humans in the southern part of the city were putting up one hell of a fight.

Resistance!?

What good was fighting back gonna do them? It was like bringing a knife to a gunfight!

The three biggest barracks in Lordaeron City had already been hit by his undead strike teams, no sweat. Nearly 100,000 fresh and veteran undead soldiers were now charging into the city from the east, north, and west through the wide-open gates, surrounding the living like wolves circling a flock of sheep.

But...

The situation was spinning completely out of control, way beyond what this newly crowned King of the Dead had bargained for.

"Haul ass! There's boats heading south! Get to the south gate if you want to live!"

"Those damn monsters are crawling all over every inch of land!"

Not only were folks shouting through makeshift megaphones, but bright flaming arrows started appearing on every landmark in the city—clock towers, church spires, you name it.

Every single arrow was pointing in one crystal-clear direction: south!

That's when something clicked in the minds of Lordaeron's citizens—a memory that had been gathering dust for years.

Evacuation Drills!

This was a brainchild that started three years after the Dark Portal incident, dreamed up by Edmund Duke when he was the Alliance's deputy commander. freewёbnoνel.com

Duke had said back then: "Look, we've already watched three Alliance capitals get steamrolled, and it cost us more lives and treasure than we can count. So we don't get caught with our pants down again, I'm proposing every nation cook up a custom evacuation plan based on their capital's layout. That way, when the next shitstorm hits—and it will hit—at least most folks can get out with their skins intact."

At the time, every kingdom was up to their eyeballs in post-war cleanup. Compared to the knock-down, drag-out fights over Alterac's territory and who got to call the shots in the Alliance military, this evacuation resolution that every nation rubber-stamped was just another piece of paperwork in a pile of over 100 Alliance agreements.

While Duke was running the show, he'd twist arms and kiss babies to get every country to run practice drills every summer.

After Duke vanished into thin air, the first three or four years saw nations still going through the motions with evacuation drills. But once peace settled in like a comfortable old chair, the bigwigs in every capital got lazy as Sunday afternoon.

Fast-forward ten years, and only the three kings of Stormwind, Ironforge, and Aerie Peak were still bothering to keep up the tradition.

But having done it at all meant something had stuck in people's heads.

After the initial blind panic wore off, Lordaeron's citizens—especially the old-timers who'd been there for over a decade—suddenly had their "aha!" moment.

That's right!

We practiced this dance before!

Just follow the damn drill like your life depends on it—because it does!

People started racking their brains, trying to remember what they were supposed to do. Humans are pack animals, and when the first brave soul followed the drill and started booking it toward the southern part of the city, following those flaming arrows like breadcrumbs, more people started getting with the program.

Citizens were running for their lives, but the killing spree kept rolling on.

Nobody in their wildest dreams thought that crack troops couldn't stop the Scourge. Neither could the city guards with all their fancy weapons, nor the gladiators and pit fighters from the arena who could normally tear a man in half.

What actually put the brakes on the Scourge was... the Edmund Chamber of Commerce.

Now here's where things get really weird. Under the business genius of Ilucia Barov, the Edmund Chamber of Commerce had planted 36 different branches throughout the fertile city of Lordaeron like seeds in rich soil. Their business empire covered more fields than a county fair, but only one was their real bread and butter: booze.

They'd take wheat from Lordaeron's rich farmland, brew it into every kind of liquor you could imagine, then sell it faster than hotcakes.

And that's where the magic happened.

After the initial pants-wetting panic, practically every shop owner suddenly started bellowing like drill sergeants.

"Why are you losing your minds? Stick to the plan when the monsters show up! Don't forget what the Chamber of Commerce drilled into your thick skulls!"

Bottle caps started popping off liquor bottles faster than champagne at New Year's, and dry white cloth strips that had been prepared ages ago got stuffed into those bottles quicker than you could say "fire in the hole." Then boxes of these improvised weapons got wheeled out to every major street and intersection by Chamber of Commerce workers, with their guards standing ready like they were manning battle stations.

The moment they spotted undead charging at them like rabid dogs, they'd light up that cloth with a torch and chuck the whole flaming bottle right into the thick of them.

"THROW THE MOLOTOVS!" With that beautiful sound of breaking glass, entire areas would go up in flames like the Fourth of July.

Fire—the one thing that could make undead think twice about their life choices.

Under those roaring flames, the Scourge's advance got stopped dead in its tracks like a freight train hitting a brick wall.

The mindless undead kept charging forward because pain was a foreign concept to them, but their skin and muscle started getting cooked faster than barbecue. Regular zombies would collapse before they could stumble more than 30 meters through the inferno.

The Lordaeron city guards stood there with their jaws hanging open, watching this incredible scene unfold.

Of course! This was the Edmund Chamber of Commerce's specialty—good old-fashioned Molotov cocktails.

They called them "homemade incendiary bombs," but everyone knew what they really were!