A few days after the outer wall fell completly to the hands of Romanus, the city no longer breathed as one.
Its rhythm, once steady, had splintered.
The noble quarter rang with the sound of hammers, priests' chants, and cries of fanatics clamouring for the blood of the invaders.
The ruins of the commoners' district—what the legionaries now called no-man's land—groaned with the noise of scavenging, slaughter, and fire.
The Romanus machine had broken through the skin of the city, and now it dug deeper, bleeding the flesh within.
The streets between the two walls became killing grounds.
Squads of legionaries advanced through the wreckage, their shields locked, pila leveled, every alley tested for ambush.
Francian holdouts sprang from cellars and lofts like rats cornered in their burrows.
Some were soldiers separated from their units during the retreat, others were merely desperate townsfolk clutching sharpened poles or butcher's knives following the supposed will of Joan.
