V6: Chapter 9

…

The typical response to the Death Lord crisis is really the typical response to every crisis.

Turtle up and fight them in your own turf. While they're suffering from being in your territory, getting raided, finding no food, and getting funneled into chokepoints, you get all the benefits of being at home. Your unit morale is boosted, the have lower maintenance costs since they don't need long logistical trains, and reinforcements can get to the frontline faster than the enemy's reinforcements can. So, even though the enemy has the numerical advantage overall, you can defeat them in detail, after you gut their supply lines, burn their stockpiles, and harass them incessantly.

Most importantly, though, you need to make sure that they have a way back home.

Cornered armies won't retreat, they'll fight for their lives, and they'll take your troops with them.

Given their numerical superiority, fighting them to the death would be a net win on their part, since you'd take more losses and expend more munitions to wipe them out.

It's always better to have the enemy deal with wounded, defeated personnel, especially since they're limited in terms of territory.

Well, the Death Lord is limited in terms of territory and resources, not the rest of the crises.

The monsters the Death Lord was gathering needed to eat to survive, and with their numbers that was an issue, since they weren't farmers. The Academy's lands were rich and bountiful, with lots of game roaming around, but foraging and hunting weren't enough to feed half-a-million monsters, which included the likes of Ogres and Trolls in their ranks. No, in order to survive, the Death Lord needed to take a citadel and usurp a whole faction's population and take their food stock.

Both the population and food stocks would be necessary to buy time to teach the monsters how to perform agriculture, since even the Citadel wouldn't be enough to feed them all.

Yeah, in the end, the Death Lord was a tutorial crises because it can be endured.

If it didn't take over enough towns, the monsters under its command will butcher each other for food.

If it kept getting halted by fortresses and chokepoints, then it won't be able to raid and pillage for food, leading to the cycle of cannibalism and in-fighting again.

Then, finally, after some time it'll just be the Death Lord and armies of Undead that would have to be dealt with and they'll be lacking in auxiliary support units, mages, cavalry, and even artillery.

It'll just have infantry, a lot of infantry, but that won't be enough to survive… let alone win.

At that point you roll in the artillery, and they do what they do best to massed infantry.

Fuck'em.

…

We kept gassing the tunnels leading into the Death Lord's lands, while the Forgers, Guardians, and Wardens created a coalition force. While I dealt and handled the logistics between their three separate capitals, and took what I needed from the Merchants, I expanded my efforts to continue to undercut and hamstring the Death Lord.

In-game, you could commit gold, resources, and Champions with their armies to act against the current event. Usually, it was a new menu with an event-based advisor guiding you through the whole issue. I couldn't recall his name, but there was that one Academy guard captain that was meant to be the Advisor for when demons popped out and wrecked the Academy. I should look into finding him, since he could manage to hold off an invasion on a shoestring budget, barely any troops, and crowd funding.

Anyway, the issue was that event screen wasn't popping up, so I was going to have to do it myself.

Thankfully, I'm surprisingly well-suited towards coordinating multiple teams of skilled individuals to do dirty work.

I blame Khanrow.

"Alright, this looks good." I had a command center set up in the Academy settlement that my established. With the Guardians, Wardens, and Forgers being the ones receiving the main army of the Death Lord, it was my job to coordinate deep strikes into his territory, cut off the monsters coming to help him, and generally sabotage his efforts to win. "This is the most recent map of the Death Lord's territory, correct?"

"It is." Ayah confirmed. We both looked at a massive table where the Death Lord established itself in an Ancient Tower. It was an eighth of the Academy's lands and north of its capital. The industrial heartland of the Academy, it didn't have much in terms of agriculture, but it had plenty of mines and former workshops. The vast majority had already been looted or scavenged, of course, but armed recon flights over the area confirmed that the tribes of monsters were getting to work bringing them up to functionality. Teams of monsters were scurrying around the shattered Academy capital, and we were scaring them off. "I am ready to present the most ideal targets for our troops according to your specifications."

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I gave the Ancient Administrator a nod and it placed four red flags on the map.

"The primary objective that you wish to strike is beyond our reach. The food and slave stores of the monsters are heavily guarded and under the direct protection of the Death Lord. Familiars sent anywhere close to its area of control are killed in an instant. The cost would be too great to bear." The first flag went right next to the Death Lord's Ancient tower. The monsters and undead it called upon had mages, but none that could strike at our high-flying transports. Unfortunately, the Death Lord itself was all the aerial denial that they needed. Ayah reached under the desk and pulled out a series of strings with distances marked on each one. "Here are the four flights that got closest to the Death Lord's main area of control. We can estimate a ten kilometer kill radius with the tower at the center."

If we can burn their food supplies and give their 'cattle' honorable deaths, the monsters will turn on each other, so overcoming an overpowered kill-zone was a necessity.

"Start preparing the materials and people necessary to send in saturation flights of familiars. I know that it's asking a lot, but we need to get in there." Familiars are used by mages as separate bodies while in a trance. They form a connection to a living creature that they've come to understand and who has accepted them. A mage feels their familiar dying, their connection to it end, and basically goes through the death themselves. I'd rather not do it… so, I wracked my brain and remembered something. "Wait, the Guardians have their new air defense system, right? Can that be modified to send in a decoy stream of dumb projectiles while the mages send their Familiars in?"

"It should be possible, by Lady Adil would have to reveal to us the secrets of her new weapon system for us to modify it into a pseudo-siege weapon."

"We'll negotiate with her. We need those food supplies burning and those people… spared any more indignity as cattle to monsters."

Ayah nodded at my decision, and moved in with the next flag for a potential operation.

Or, rather, two flags.

"Command and control over their efforts are consolidated. Heavily."

"Well, that's stupid."

"Indeed." Two flags were placed right next to each other on the map. I took note of the fact it was past the absolute defense zone that the Death Lord had, but it was close enough that a decent sprint could get the targets in there. "They are composed of the strongest and most influential of the monstrous tribes. The Death Lord has made them his officers and officials. They are his personal warlords and besides him, they hold supreme power over all others."

"Simple and effective, but its weakness is obvious. Kill one person and you basically take out their military and their civilian leadership at the same time." I mean, it made sense. These monsters and tribes barely have cave-painting and oral histories. There was no chance that they had a bureaucracy, let alone a bureaucracy so big that it needed more bureaucracy to support it, which gave governance a certain momentum that can carry plans through even with a few dozen officials somehow dying one way or another. "I'm guessing they're not all conveniently in one place?"

"No, they are not. They are in constant movement around the Death Lord's territory and even operate outside of it with their personal troops and tribal warriors. However, these two flags represent the most eminent of them. Those whom the Death Lord relies on the most."

"His Champions."

"Correct." Ayah handed me the report, which was in a three-ring folder. Did it give me flashbacks of high school and middle school? Yes, but it was cost effective, durable, and kept the papers in one piece. "The leader of the Harpies and the Feral Beast tribes. We do not yet have their names, but they lead large camps and clash with one another with the Death Lord as their mediator and superior. The former is a mage and the latter is a strong warrior."

"Stronger than the people we can send after them?"

"Yes, but we can investigate and find their lieutenants and incriminate them against one another. The Iterants assure me that they are capable of this. They will disguise themselves, infiltrate, and set them against one another."

"No, that sounds too costly. Even if they're creating more of themselves, we're not using them like ammunition against the enemy. It's not only wrong, but a waste of labor." I admonished Ayah lightly, but I knew the real ones proposing that plan were the Iterants themselves. They were eager to prove themselves. It was a good side effect of them being treated normally and having normal rights. Yeah, I'd rather the killer magi-tech terminators are patriots than enslaved peoples preparing for an uprising. "Focus on the edges of their people, but kept those two in mind. We'll infiltrate from the outside in, kill the small ones first, and create proxies. We'll take them out all at once they're absolutely surrounded by Iterants and have no chance."

Why send one infiltrator that's a living weapon with superhuman stats to kill your enemies when you can send a couple dozen?

I mean, yeah, it takes more time to set up… but I haven't gotten this far by taking risks.

Iterants will be found out sooner, rather than later, so while they were unknown and before countermeasures were made against them, I want to exploit their abilities as much as possible.

You can easily tell if someone is an Iterant or not by just poking their skin.

They don't bleed, after all.

"Then, with that project to be amended, there's only one that I can propose at the moment." Ayah presented the last operational flag. I knew exactly what it was. I'd been preparing for it and spending money like crazy. "Emissaries of the Death Lord through the tribes of monsters under his command have begun to recruit brigands and other bandits and they are answering its call. We can infiltrate his people through their recruitment efforts via the mercenaries that we have been gathering in secret."

When the Intrigue features came in during one of the game's expansions, the Death Lord tutorial was given a new feature along with all the crises, so that they could be affected by infiltration.

The Death Lord's was the most straightforward and didn't require any specific research, captured Champions, and enhanced interrogation methods.

Or, you know, vivisection and dissection.

Just have a mercenary unit read for it to "recruit" in the intrigue layer, so you gain access to its plans for the coming turns and more eventually.

"Understood, it will be done." Ayah gave me a nod, before planting the final flag down. Infiltration and subserves ion of the enemy was a go. "I recommend placing Iterants with these mercenaries in order to ensure that they can succeed in their missions given to them by the Death Lord."

Right, in reality, things weren't as simple as placing people into an assignment.

The people I'm sending to work for the Death Lord would have to work for the Death Lord in order to be double-agents.

"Make it happen. Prioritize our Iterant's lives over the mercenaries, though. They need to make sure things are clean if any of them are caught." With a few words, I condemned the mercenaries to death so that they couldn't leak any secrets. The only silver lining was that we informed them of this. "They're being properly compensated for this risk, correct? They're aware that they can't be captured?"

"Correct. Only those who have accepted the conditions have been given the position. They are also being paid twice the normal mercenary rate. Succeeding in this mission will allow them to retire in peace, as well." Retirement wasn't much of a benefit. Everyone's going to have to end up fighting soon, anyway. Still, I suppose that the offer was sweet enough for most to take, despite the chances of them being killed the moment they were about to be captured. "The pills that you commissioned from the Citadels have been given in case of capture, as well. They are being implanted as we speak."

Suicide pills hidden in molars, in other words.

This one would put you in permanent sleep and then make you stop breathing. Painless as far as deaths go, and it's also a pain reliever.

Also, well, I didn't want my soldiers getting harvested by any of the bigger enemies out there.

It'll be optional for people fighting on the front in the future, so that they couldn't be turned into living art pieces, mutated gestational devices, test subjects, or infinite dinners.

For the mercenaries going on the infiltration route, just like my non-Iterant infiltrators, it'll be mandatory.

"Good. That takes care of what we can do in the dark. Time to put our actual military to the test." Ayah nodded at my words and turned to a small chest, and from it she produced fabricated pieces that would represent our armies. We were finished with our testing, with our preparation, and we knew our limits. Every piece being put on the table was a known entity. We know how far they could go in a day, how skilled their average soldier was, and how well we could supply them. Their officers were good, they can support each other, and they can win… as long as the strategic objectives they were given allowed them to. Thankfully, the first course of action using our new system was simple. "Alright, then. Let's open up a second front right in our killbox."

The Death Lord has so far tried to ignore us at its back, even as we built castles and set up siege works.

Well, that was its mistake.

Time to teach the Death Lord that giving an RTS player time turtle up is an absolutely stupid move.