“Don’t these demons ever get tired!?” complained Alissa two days after her encounter with the naked demon assassin. The fighting had not ebbed in the least after the incident, and had only intensified, yet at the same time, the demons kept sending low-end soldiers, those in their second and early third tiers at best, as if they did not care about the lives of their own people.
“I think you’re killing them too quickly, Alissa. They’re already dead before they get tired,” joked Nadine from nearby. While the Fifth Princess had delivered her words in a joking manner, she was resting by putting her weight on her sword with her knees half-bent, a brief reprieve in a short lull during the intense combat.
The intensified fighting put quite a lot of pressure on the fort’s defenders as the demons kept swarming them without end, seemingly unafraid of death as they rushed towards the fort. Even with their fortified physiques backed by their Body stats, people from the [Heroes]’ party left the walls exhausted once their shift was over, as they were practically fighting for hours on end with barely any rest.
Due to the intensity of the fighting, it was not only their bodies that were fatigued, but also their minds, as they had to keep up their concentration all that while. More than a few of the fort’s less powerful soldiers had already fallen as their bodies or minds failed to keep up with the intensity of the fighting, and while the casualties taken by the defenders were still a low fewer than what the demons took, they had to keep in mind that the demons had yet to truly bear their fangs upon them as of yet.
In the few days of the siege, the demons had gotten another batch of reinforcements, which further increased their numerical advantage over the defenders. Their willingness to sacrifice as many of their own soldiers as it took to wear down the defenders, coupled with the fearless advance of the demon soldiers despite their high casualty rates, were starting to take its toll.
Even if the defenders managed to kill three to four demons for every one they lost, they would end up running out of soldiers first at the current rate. The constant attrition also meant that the human defenders had not only lost second and early third tier soldiers, but also some who were higher in the third tiers, who had grown fatigued from the fighting and made mistakes which cost them their lives.
Logically, Alissa knew that siege battles like these could last months, maybe even years, at least in the history of her world. With how solid the fort’s defenses were, and the fact that they had a secure supply line to the rest of the Kingdom behind them, it was not an impossibility for them to hold out for that long, though that would only likely happen if the demons adopted a more passive stance.
As it was, with the demons assaulting them like ants crowding around a pile of sugar, that was unlikely to be the case. If even members of Alissa’s party were being worn down by the intensity of the battle, it must have been even worse for those weaker than them, which amounted to the vast majority of the troops that defended the fort.
It was no insidious plan done discreetly. The demons plotted against them openly, trying to grind down the perseverance of the defenders using their numbers. It was the hardest sort of plot to fight against, as there was often little that could be done about it, even though the defenders knew full well what was being done to them by their foes.
They were already stretching the shifts to the limit in an attempt to keep the people fighting from succumbing to fatigue, as well as rotating the night guards so that every person could at least have a proper night’s sleep every third day or so. Once their number started to noticeably decrease, however, it was inevitable that the shifts would have to be prolonged, and there would be fewer chances to get proper rest for everyone involved.
The demons unfortunately did not face the same issue as they simply rotated in a fresh batch of lower-leveled soldiers every day, while allowing the injured from the previous day’s battle to recuperate from their injuries. Despite their heavier casualties, Alissa remembered that the demons had a larger populace than the humans since they had been winning the last three wars in a row, and thus had more territory to support their growth.
Especially in the past few generations, where they held over half of the continent under their reign.
“They’re also keeping that into consideration,” said Nadine when Alissa brought the point up with her after their shift on the wall was done later that day. Each of them must have killed dozens of demons throughout their shift, but it felt as if they were trying to chip away at an endless army with how more always came behind the ones they killed. “You probably noticed already, but most of the demons we faced were either Tesh’ka or Ma’Varoks or their hybrids.”
“I did, yes. What’s the reason for that, though?” asked Alissa back at Nadine. The smaller-bodied Tesh’ka as well as people who looked like they probably had parentage from both the larger Ma’Varoks and the smaller Tesh’kas made up the majority of the demons they faced over the past few days. It was rarer to see full-blooded members of the other three demon races in comparison.
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“Well, Tesh’kas were known to be the demon race who were the most fertile. Supposedly they almost never just give birth to only one child, with two being a rarity. More commonly, they birth entire litters of three to seven children from a single pregnancy,” explained Nadine. Alissa’s lessons in the Royal Capital had not really delved deep into the demons themselves, so the information was new to her. “As a result, they’re the most numerous of the demons by far, and thus had the most people to throw away as sacrifices in battles like these.”
“Cannon fodder, then,” noted Alissa, earning herself a slightly confused look from Nadine, who wasn’t familiar with the term. “Sorry, that is a term from our world, for soldiers whose only real purpose was to die and exhaust the enemy.”
“About right, then,” noted the Fifth Princess with a nod. “I don’t know what a cannon is supposed to be, but fodder is about right.”
“What about the Ma’Varok, though?” asked Alissa, who nudged Nadine to continue her explanation.
“Allow me to front that question, Miss O’Connor,” interjected Maribel who arrived at their gathering bearing bowls of hot stew. The three of them were still in the same shift so they had been working together a lot of late. “You and Her Royal Highness can sup first while I explain,” offered the curly-haired Royal Knight with a smile on her face.
Alissa and Nadine did as she bid and carefully sipped on the thick, piping hot stew. The stew still had plenty of meat and vegetables in it, but that was a luxury that would likely go away after another week or two, so they cherished it while they still had some to enjoy. Not even the Fifth Princess bothered with table manners as she just directly sipped the stew from its bowl.
“The demons often interbreed between the different races, but not all such unions were fruitful. Some combinations are more prone to miscarriages than others,” explained Maribel in between sips from her own bowl of stew. “The Ma’Varok and the Tesh’ka however, were very compatible, and as a result, there are probably as many hybrids of the two races as there are pure-blooded Tesh’ka out there, and likely far more than the pure-blooded Ma’Varoks.”
“Their hybrid offspring would be weaker than a full-blooded Ma’Varok, but they would also be more fertile, and those qualities in turn get passed down over generations. Some later generation descendants that leaned heavy to the Ma’Varok lineage might not be much weaker than a full-blood, while likely having more offspring than them at the same time.”
“I’m guessing those that leaned the other way would keep the fertility while being stronger than their Tesh’ka ancestors then,” suggested Alissa with a nod. She understood the idea and reasoning behind the interbreeding, especially when the descendants would inherit desirable qualities from both of their parent races like that.
“About right. Usually those with particularly strong Ma’Varok blood would be able to advance further since they are stronger, but there’s so many of the Tesh’ka that out of their numbers, some talented individuals who could make up for their physical deficits would emerge and even the numbers,” noted Maribel. “Since the demons are mostly sending those against us, they’re definitely still keeping their best soldiers behind, likely waiting for an opportunity to launch an all out attack on us.”
“That’s obvious, yeah,” said Alissa with a shake of her head. “The only issue is that we don’t know when they’re going to spring those and any other unpleasant surprises they may have brought on our heads.”
“Moira also told me that her group ran into a different [Champion’s Retainer] at the end of their shift earlier. We’ll probably get briefed about them later, but at this point the buff-focused [Champion] is likely amongst our arrayed foes out there,” added Maribel. “Both of the [Champion’s Retainer] identified so far were supposedly working closely with them.”
“Great… So that’s likely two [Champions] we got bearing down on us then? I don't doubt the [Mother of Monsters] we fought would be looking for some revenge match after that loss,” noted Alissa with a groan. One oddity that Alissa found was that for some reason, she couldn’t name the [Mother of Monsters] when she was speaking to natives of Ephemera. The translation from her language skill automatically took over and translated the name to their class or title instead.
She could use the woman’s name when she was talking with Ethan and Joshua, and she had also learned that the natives could speak of the names of previous [Great Heroes] from the past, like how she learned from Sir Marsten that one of the [Great Heroes] of the previous cycle was the Empress Catherine of Russia, better known as Catherine the Great.
It was odd that they couldn’t seem to communicate the identities of enemy [Great Champions] even when they knew of it, though.
Alissa wasn’t sure why that was so. What purpose was there to prevent one side from learning the names of the [Champions] the other side had? Was it perhaps to prevent them seeing some relations amongst them? But that made no sense either. The natives were clearly aware that both the [Heroes] and [Champions] were summoned from the same world, seemingly at random.
As such they should have also realized long ago that it wouldn’t be strange for people related to each other to possibly be summoned on opposing sides, so Alissa further questioned why she couldn’t communicate that tidbit of information. To be fair, it was not like the natives knowing those names would have done them any good, since they would lack the context and history to associate with the names, but still…
It was just another bit of curiosity on top of the many unknowns that bothered her about Ephemera in general. If she wasn’t so busy being embroiled in a messy battle with a horde of what looked like bloodthirsty raving lunatics with no regard for their own lives, she would have loved to get to the bottom of things, but as things stood, she just had no chance to snoop around and look for information.
Not when lives were on the line and she could help directly with the matter at hand, at least. Still, Alissa promised herself that she’d try to look deeper into the mysteries when she next had the chance.