Perhaps it was to be expected, but just because Alissa and her party contributed greatly to winning one battle, it didn’t mean that the war was won.

If anything, what they did merely affected one small part of the war, which spanned over the entire border between the human Kingdom and the demon Territories, a border which spanned thousands of miles long, at the very least. It was somewhat disappointing for the three [Heroes] to see their contribution meaning so little to the overall effort, though the locals seemed to have taken it in stride instead.

After all, they were born and raised under the shadow of the war between humans and demons, with their history full of stories from the previous wars. They knew better what to expect.

The loss of nine fourth-tier warriors made the demons wary of commiting to another assault for a good while after the battle, which bought the defenders in Fort Ixlay time to recuperate and take care of their wounded. At the same time, another convoy of reinforcements also arrived at the fort during that period, further replenishing the defenders’ numbers.

On the demon side, intelligence suggested that they had to reshuffle personnel from elsewhere in the frontline to make up for the sudden loss of nearly one-third of the fourth tier warriors from that one battle. In turn, that slightly weakened the demon forces on several other locations, which the human side made use of by pressing the temporary advantage as best they could.

In most cases, these just led to stalemates, but in one particular case further to the west, around a month away from Fort Ixlay, the humans managed to exploit that temporary advantage to drive the demons away from their defensive fortification and took it for themselves. At the moment the Kingdom rushed to deliver more reinforcement and supplies to that front, to allow the gains to be preserved at all costs.

At first, Alissa, Ethan, and Joshua wondered if they would be shifted towards that front as well, but in the end, the decision was for them to help defend Fort Ixlay instead. The three of them had been laying low since the ambush, while the higher-ups had sent some people who resembled their features away towards other bases, in the hopes of lulling the demons into thinking that the [Heroes] have left the base.

With some luck, they hoped to lure the demons into another crippling ambush.

The valley route defended by Fort Ixlay was one of the most crucial passes on the eastern side of the border, so if the Kingdom managed to weaken the demons enough to make a push through the valley a tenable option, it would win them quite a bit of initiative in the war situation. It was one reason why both sides had tens of fourth tiers stationed there, including some of their best.

“I know you all are probably hankering for a fight, but have patience,” said Sir Inolet to the [Heroes]’ party, roughly a week after the successful ambush they pulled off. Over that week the group had hidden themselves from most everyone else in the Fort, other than the few who came with them like Sir Inolet, Magus Drummond, Cerilla, and Vesta. “There’s a purpose to this hiding around, trust me.”

“We get the general idea,” said Ethan with a nod. “Still, can’t help with getting bored from doing nothing over the past week, you know, sir? There’s only so much to read and all, since it’s not like they paid much attention to furnishing the fort’s library when they built it. I think we all just wished we could be doing something instead of staying all cooped up in our rooms like this”

“Give it another day or two. By then the lookalikes we sent out to pretend to be your party should have reached their destinations and shown themselves around. You all can go out by then,” said Magus Drummond from the side. “With the lookalikes present, we’re hoping to confuse the demons into overthinking things. Ideally, they’d think that both you and the lookalikes are all diversions, while the real ‘you’ are headed somewhere else. If we can lure them into another good ambush, it’ll all be worth it, if not, it’s only a week lost.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” admitted Alissa with a defeated sigh, knowing that the course of action that the commanders had plotted was likely a wiser one. “How’s the fighting at the frontlines this past week, by the way, Sir?”

“The demons are afraid of another ambush, so they’ve been holding their troops back from pushing too hard,” said Sir Inolet with a smile. “In turn, that meant less casualties on both sides, though the demons still lost a good bit more than we do on a daily basis. They seemed pretty willing to throw away their weaker second tiers like that, since they have more people.”

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“They’re likely waiting for more reinforcements of their own,” noted Magus Drummond as he inhaled deeply from his pipe. “Some of their fourth tiers from closer battlefields had likely reached their camp by now, but if any were sent from further away, they likely will need more time to get here. Given their wariness, I don’t see the demons launching another serious assault for at least another week or two.”

When the [Heroes]’ party were allowed out of their room the next day, they felt far more relieved. Even physical training and sparring – they had not neglected their training while hiding in their rooms, but there had been no opportunity to spar during that time – felt fun to them, and they showed themselves at the fort’s wall on a regular basis, playing the part of “fakes” that were there to fool the demons.

True to Magus Drummond’s prediction, the demons mostly kept the daily clashes to light skirmishes at most for the following week and a half. Casualties from such skirmishes were low, sometimes not even reaching a hundred, as both the humans and demons were more fighting for the formality of it rather than trying hard to murder each other, and most of those casualties were injured rather than dead.

The decrease in the number of injured people meant that the healers in the fort were finally able to breathe a sigh of relief, as they finally caught up to the number of injured that had piled up from the constant fighting. Over those weeks, the backlog of injured people who crowded the fort’s infirmaries finally cleared up as the healers finished healing all of them, sending the now-healed men and women back to the line of duty.

Roughly two weeks after the ambush, two days passed without any attack from the demon’s side. That caused all sorts of speculation and suspicion to be thrown about amongst the commanders of the fort. Even the information they received from their spies indicated that at most, the biggest change was that there were more reinforcements which had arrived at the demons’ camp across the valley.

What all of them could agree on was that the quiet was likely a prelude to a larger-scale assault from the demons. None of them had access to better information that would allow them to guess what the demons had in mind, so they could only operate with what guesses and predictions they had. Sure enough, after two days of quiet, the demons launched a renewed assault on the third day.

Unlike before, there was something new to the demon’s assault, namely the horde of undead creatures that charged headlong ahead of their actual troops.

Necromancers who raised the dead to do their bidding weren’t that rare a class, though they were generally not favored as combatants. The main reason for that was because while being able to reanimate the dead sounded like a fearsome ability, it loses a lot of value when the dead were no longer capable of using any of the skills they had while they were alive, and were purely reliant on their stats.

Because of this, the threat necromancers possessed on the battlefield was only a danger to large groups of low-leveled soldiers, whereas against the elite warriors, or even those of the same tier as they were, their threat was negligible at best. They themselves tend to be weak and have minimal direct combat ability, entirely reliant on their undead minions to do the fighting for them.

The horde of undead that led the assault for the demons were no different, as the soldiers at the frontline barely flinched while they broke the corpses apart to the point that no amount of reanimation would be able to make them walk again.

In the end, the day’s skirmish was mostly a light one, with only the undead as a surprise at first. Even so, the undead posed minimal threat, and the biggest impact they brought to the battlefield was to disgust those soldiers unfortunate enough to be assigned cleanup duty that day. Cleaning up week-old rotten corpses would never be a pleasant experience.

For the next couple of days, the demons did the same, letting a wave of weak undead lead the charge before fighting half-heartedly against the human defenders. Some of the fort’s commanders even wondered if the demons were just trying to disgust them or something with these ineffective attacks, but others felt that the demons might be buying time to prepare something instead.

It was only on the fourth day, when the defenders expected more of the same, that the demons changed their strategy.

That day, the demons hid many third-tier soldiers amongst the horde of undead, which in itself was larger than the previous days. Those third-tier soldiers then struck the defenders by surprise, which threw the frontlines into chaos for a bit and allowed the horde of undead to further exploit the situation by pushing into the defense lines without any fear for their existence.

While that caused a bit of chaos on the defense’s frontmost lines, those behind them stabilized the situation and held on strongly. At that point however, the situation changed as a massive figure – easily four to five meters tall – that only looked vaguely humanoid charged out from within the demon lines and plowed into the defenders with fury.

The massive figure looked as if someone made a freakish patchwork creature using many bodies combined into one, with one massive, oversized arm on its right side and two smaller – but still large – arms on the left. It hunched over like a great ape as it moved, its form clearly top-heavy, and it rampaged through the defense lines, blows from its arms throwing the human defenders around like rag dolls, if not directly pulverizing them against the ground.

Only after a moment of surprise did the defenders manage to react and order their troops to avoid the rampaging monster even as a fourth-tier combatant rushed forward to meet it. To everyone’s surprise, however, the monster had the upper hand in the clash, and pushed the human combatant back ferociously. It was only after a second fourth-tier combatant dashed in and helped her compatriot that the situation was under control.

Even then, it still took the two fourth-tier combatants a good quarter hour of fighting to take down the monster they were fighting against. One of them was even injured pretty badly in the process, and the rest was unable to help them out as the demons also threatened to strike with their own fourth-tier combatants.

Oddly enough, none of the demon fourth tiers came to the aid of the rampaging monster, as if they were content to let it perish under the defenders’ blades. The reason for that became clear when another battle broke out the next day, as another monster – clearly different from the one before yet similar in many ways – once again led the demon army’s charge out of the valley.

By that point, it was clear as day that the demons had someone capable of creating monsters that were capable of taking on two lower level fourth-tier combatants at once, and do so repeatedly at that. Immediately the commanders thought of one of the rumored demon [Champions], who was said to have abilities similar to what they were facing.