“Wake up, O’Connor. It’s your shift on the wall now,” said Joshua as he entered through the flap of the tent where Alissa was sleeping.

Alissa woke up from her bedroll, one hand rubbing her still sleepy eyes. Privacy was at a premium at the temporary base they were constructing at the moment, and even having a private tent like her was a privilege few received. Of course, with the demons regularly assaulting the base at irregular intervals, everybody slept with their armor on anyway, just in case it was needed in a hurry.

Even Joshua himself looked as if he had some rough nights of late. The dark bags under his eyes hinted at the lack of sleep that all of them had been experiencing in the past week, since the demons particularly love to attack during the time they slept. Even his usually clean face showed a growth of unshaved stubble since he probably hadn’t got the presence of mind to shave in the ongoing mess.

Given how tired Alissa felt at that moment, she completely understood the feeling.

While the people from Fort Ixlay had rapidly set up a temporary fortification under Sir Marsten’s leadership the day after they took the encampment from the demons, and more aid was on the way from the Kingdom, the demons had not just watched them do it quietly. If anything, their response could only be called a vicious one.

On the fourth night after they took the camp, just one day after Alissa, Joshua, and Ethan had their discusion and went to bed, several demon fourth tiers – nobody was sure whether they were survivors from the encampment or came from elsewhere – struck at night. The demons immediately withdrew once they noticed the human fourth tiers rousing to meet them, but the damage had been done.

A couple hundred lower tier soldiers had died, but more serious was the loss of nearly forty engineers and craftsmen who were working on the fortification. Despite those losses, work continued the next day, as everyone considered getting the fortification done as their top priority now. The temporary defenses were far too weak to deter a fourth tier enemy, so their only defense against them were their own fourth tiers.

Attempts to snipe at the workers from afar were made during the day, while more night attacks – all done with great discretion with the demons fleeing immediately once discovered rather than fighting back – plagued the soldiers while they tried to sleep at night. In the end, after a couple days of such harassment, Sir Marsten had no choice but to have some of the fourth tiers, including Alissa and the rest of her party, stand guard at all times.

To play things safe, the party was split into four groups, each of which was responsible for a six-hour shift alongside other fourth tiers from Fort Ixlay. Alissa had Nadine and Maribel with her on the morning shift, while Joshua was up late in the night shift with Glenn and Benedictus.

A quick splash of water from the well to her face helped her drive away the remnant sleepiness. Fortunately the demons had paid attention to things like water sources and had already set up their own wells when they made the encampment, which made it easier for the humans to just take over and use those same wells for themselves.

She was joined by Nadine and Maribel just as she lined up to get some breakfast. Breakfast was a thick grain porridge flavored with slivers of salted meat which had also been used to make the broth to cook the grains in. It wasn’t particularly bad as military rations went, probably better than some of the school lunches she had in her previous world, even.

Nadine and Maribel – despite how they grew up in the royal castle and Nadine being literal royalty – didn’t seem bothered with the simple fare either and ate it up with gusto. All of them looked about as tired as Alissa felt, as none of them had gotten much of a good night’s sleep in the past week due to the frequent night raids by the demons.

The soldiers were less bothered by those, amusingly enough. They were experienced and used to going back to sleep the moment the commotion ended. On the other hand, despite all the training they went through, few of the people from the [Heroes]’ party mastered that ability soldiers often had to just sleep anywhere, anytime.

Out of the party only Glenn could do that. None of the members from either the Royal Guards or the Temple Guards could do it otherwise, so they have been quite frustrated at the disturbances at night. Part of the reason was because unlike Glenn, who grew up in the frontier and was part of the local militia before he was scouted into the Royal Guards, none of the others had needed to be able to sleep like that before.

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Temple Guards were as their name suggested. Most of them guarded the temples scattered throughout the Kingdom, as well as guard members of the clergy when they needed it. They rarely fought unless it was against monsters or wild beasts that threatened the place or person they were guarding. As a result, they lacked some things that soldiers in the army were mostly capable of doing.

As for the Royal Guards, they were similarly rarely deployed out of the royal capital. Their primary duty was to protect the royal family and the royal palace, and the only times they went to war was when the king or queen themselves led them to one. For that reason, they were similarly unused to having to deal with the high-stress environment on the frontlines.

It was better when they were in Fort Ixlay. The defenses there were more than sturdy enough to deter even the fourth tier demons from making sneak attacks at night as they knew that it would mostly be futile and only waste their energy. The temporary encampment’s defenses were much weaker, however, which necessitated the constant alertness and having the fourth tiers be on guard duty to counter such demons.

In fact, at any given time eight fourth tier combatants – or their equivalents, as Alissa and her party were all technically still in their third tier – were guarding the walls of the base, prepared to act as needed. Joshua was actually not done with his shift yet, but he had woken Alissa up so she could get prepared for her own shift which was soon. Everyone needed some time to prepare after they just woke up after all.

The three of them finished their simple breakfast quickly, washing it down with cold well water flavored with some juice from a large lime-like fruit. Apparently the extremely sour fruit juice was known in Ephemera for its purifying qualities. Even if the water from the well weren’t the cleanest, they would become drinkable after the juice was mixed in and allowed to settle for a bit.

Of course, that also meant that the water got quite a bit of a mouth-puckering sourness to it, but that was preferable to stomachaches or diarrhea, all considered.

By the time they headed towards their posts on the wall, the shifts for Joshua’s group of three just ended. Sir Marsten had arranged so that the [Heroes]’ party had staggered shifts with the rest of the fourth tiers, which effectively meant that some fourth tiers were always on guard, even during shift changes. The two groups passed each other and exchanged nods when they met.

Then Alissa climbed up the ladder that led to the walkway of the temporary palisades that encircled the encampment. Nadine and Maribel followed closely behind her, since the three of them were positioned on the south wall, which had faced the most attacks over the past week. In contrast, the western side was mostly quiet, though the east side also saw some assaults.

In order to get to the north side, the demons would have to circle around the encampment to get behind them, so there had been no attacks from that direction so far. Sir Marsten kept a strong guard detail at the valley’s mouth behind them to prevent such occurrences.

The old knight himself awaited Alissa and the rest atop the wall, as he too was included in the guard shifts. Generally, out of the eight fourth tiers on guard, four would be in the southern wall, while two guarded the east side and one stayed on the west side, just in case. The last member would be someone who had mobility skills that allowed them to react quickly no matter which side got attacked and was stationed in the middle of the encampment.

“They are pretty stubborn about not letting us relax,” noted Sir Marsten with a sigh. The way the old knight’s recently grown hair sprouted made it look like he just had a military-style buzz cut, which was a somewhat amusing thought to Alissa. “I’m guessing if not for the rest of the frontline making a concerted push they’d have probably sent more troops our way by now.”

“I feel the same way, Sir,” replied Alissa with a nod. All the disturbances when she was trying to sleep made her all too aware of the fact that the demons were very unwilling to give up on the base. Still, as things stood, the situation was at a relative stalemate, as the human side also didn’t have enough people to make a large-scale search of the demons that bothered them and guard the base at the same time.

They had taken too many casualties from the battle to do that, though they had enough that Sir Marsten and Sir Inolet both believed that they should be able to hold on to the base even if the demons sent troops from elsewhere to force them away. The two old knights, both having served the kingdom since before the previous war, were old friends and rivals, so it was rather rare that they agreed upon something so easily.

Just as they were about to continue the conversation, Alissa caught a blur of motion from the corner of her eyes and swung her spear in reflex. She struck down what turned out to be an arrow – aimed at another soldier near her – with the shaft of her spear, and realized instantly what it meant as she saw even more arrows raining down towards the camp.

“Enemy attack!” yelled Sir Marsten out, his voice echoing through the encampment, carried by one of his skills. Alissa wasn’t surprised that the long-time commander had some skills that let his voice carry a longer distance as it was something that he definitely used often. She herself struck down another two arrows even as she blocked a third one that happened to be aimed towards her using her shield.

The demons were apparently firing their arrows from within the forest a few hundred meters to the south of the encampment, using the trees as cover. Despite that, the human archers returned fire almost immediately. It was difficult for most of them to shoot accurately over such a distance, so they mostly shot at the general area they saw the enemy arrows came from.

Osmond was the exception, as his build was very much one tailored towards archery. He dropped two demons from atop the tree branches they perched on in quick succession, though the next demon he shot at seemed to have jumped down on their own before his arrow hit. The assault itself quickly ended after that, the demons withdrawing once they started to encounter resistance.

It wasn’t that much of a threat, but it kept the human defenders on edge because of the frequent, unpredictable attacks.

In terms of damage, the attack barely did any, to either side. One unfortunate soldier died because a demon’s arrow hit him right in the eye, the arrow going straight into his brain. Around another ten were injured, but they would recover. When the scouts were sent to the forest, they found no signs of the demons, but chances were high that Osmond had taken out at least two of them.

Negligible numbers, but an annoyance nonetheless.