More than a hundred runners galloped through the army, carrying Ning Chen's order.

Half an hour later.

The men holding the west gate received news that sank their spirits: the south gate had fallen.

Zhang Tianlun had put ten thousand men at the south gate.

But Lei An and Wu Tiezhu had led an army of twenty-five thousand, and five thousand of those were the Ning'an Army.

When the two of them fought their way into the city at the head of that army, Zhang Tianlun's ten thousand had almost no fight in them.

A weak soldier is one weak man; a weak general is a whole nest of them.

Zhang Tianlun himself had little mettle.

Besides, he didn't have a single general of any name under him.

Most important of all, they were all sons of the Great Xuan. Each of them carried a scale in his heart and could tell right from wrong.

They were men of the Great Xuan made to fight the Great Xuan, and they had no choice in it.

What was more, the man they faced was Ning Chen, the god of war of Great Xuan, the man they worshiped above all others.

This was a battle they would just as soon skip. Above all, they simply couldn't win it.

So the ten thousand defenders of the south gate put on a show of resistance... When they heard Ning Chen's men promise quarter to any man who surrenders, they simply gave up.

All told, there were no more than five hundred casualties. The rest threw down their weapons and surrendered.

But the news badly shook the morale of the men holding the west gate.

The west gate was garrisoned by thirty thousand, all the army's best, and half of them were archers.

Zhang Tianlun was short of men, too.

He had pulled forty thousand of the eastern frontier army back to his island.

Xiangzhou had only a hundred thousand men left.

Thirty thousand held the west gate, ten thousand the south gate and thirty thousand the north gate. Ten thousand held the east gate,…