The fighting continued intermittently until evening, and as the sunlight began to fade, Zhang Zhiyuan and the others finally breached the lord's manor, capturing the political center of Thistlefort.
Although the players' weapons were superior, and they even summoned armored vehicles for support, their numbers were ultimately too few, so they could only rout the enemy instead of annihilating their fighting forces. Most of the Kingdom's defenders fled into the forests after their defeat, including the commander of this force, Airco, who escaped through a secret passage in the mansion and is currently missing.
"Suka, I didn't expect this last bunch to be so tough to crack; they turned the entrance of the manor into a fortress," Anthony complained. "Without heavy firepower suppression and Cloud-Burst Bomb support, we would have died a hundred times over before breaching it."
