The first thing that Matt did when they were fully reunified was to divide their fledgling army into manageable units. Skirmishers and scouts were divided into self-organizing squads, and since they had no real cavalry to speak of, they were given what few horses the army had so that they could scout the nearby targets that the centaurs pointed out to them.

They were not to engage if they could help it, of course. With ten to fifteen warriors, each group was large enough to defend itself but not so large that they’d be encouraged to take more risks than they should. Once all thirteen squads were dispatched in every westerly direction to find the best way forward, the rest of the army was split into three parts: warriors, archers, and healers.

Those who were too badly injured to fight were also included in the last category. This, unfortunately, made it the second-largest group. They’d be sitting the battles out for obvious reasons, but they’d be saving lives, and that was more important than taking them.

Benjamin could barely keep up with his friend as he rushed around the camp, shouting orders and turning the pieces of the armies that they had left into something that resembled order. Apparently, Matt had learned a lot about war from the stone children while Benjamin had been busy building weapons. Even after all that was done, his friend went still further to divide those groups into units and cohorts to make what they had as flexible as possible.

“Our resources are diminishing too quickly to squander them,” he told one of his lieutenants when they asked if all this was necessary. “Every person we lose is one we might never get back, so from now on, we fight with teamwork and strategy as much as spells. ”

Benjamin didn’t disagree with any of it. He didn’t have any idea how he could coordinate squad-level spells yet, but he felt like group buffs wouldn’t be impossible. He just had to devote some time to it.

Teamwork or not, though, more than half of these people weren’t zealots. They just wanted to push back the enemy long enough to have a nice, peaceful life or even find their way home. Emma and those like her who sought revenge at any cost were in the minority, and because of that, it was easy to make sure that none of them ended up in their scouting divisions.

She probably could have snuck into one of the plantations or one of the larger forces moving around the battlefield and single-handedly killed the Summoner Lord before escaping into the night, Benjamin thought. Even if that was true, though, there was no way Matt would risk losing her like that.

“You know, now that you’ve split everyone up, we’ve only got a thousand warriors worth the name on the front lines,” Emma told her man that night when the four of them were alone by their fire. “It won’t be hard for the Summoners to overwhelm that practically as soon as they pin us down.”

“Then we won't let them pin us down,” Matt said confidently. “There are plenty of targets. We’ll just hit the one they aren’t expecting.”

“Yeah, well, since we’ve been doing that for pretty much the whole time now, there’s pretty much no way they’ll see that coming, right?” she laughed.

“You know - she might be crazy sometimes, but she’s got a point,” Raja chimed in. “So what does that mean? We attack their most heavily armed target because they won’t be expecting it?”

“If we start thinking everything is a trap, then we’ll be second-guessing ourselves at every turn and jumping at shadows,” Matt answered firmly. “You can’t win a war like that. You have to take the best option, and sometimes, that won’t turn out the way you hoped. Hopefully, with Benji’s new artillery mode, we can defeat some of these strongholds before they even get the chance to fight back.”

“Yeah, or maybe we can all die tragically when they get wise to that, too,” Emma snarked as she poked the fire. They were all sitting around with sticks. “Not that I mind dying, you know; I just want to kill that motherfucker Lord Jarris first.”

“No one’s dying this time,” Matt sighed. “Not you, and certainly not Benji. He’s died too many fucking times already.”

Everyone laughed at that, even Benjamin, but that didn’t settle the issue. Emma simply refused to drop the glass half-empty outlook, and the three of them argued about whether or not they were going to die for some time after that. Benjamin mostly stayed out of it. Instead, he focused on what Emma had said. That’s pretty much what we’ve been doing for the whole time now.

She was right. She was undeniably right, and even after they slept and got to work on continuing to organize their army and work on other small tasks like making more arrows or hunting for additional foodstuffs, it never quite left his mind.

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While he pondered what sort of spells he could squeeze into obsidian arrowheads that cost less than two mana, he thought about it. While he and Matt discussed where his turtle howdah would be amidst the overall array of forces, he thought about it. He just couldn’t escape the biting clarity of her words.

Still, despite that persistent distraction, the next day and a half were productive ones. Thirty-six hours after their departure, the scouts started trickling in, one group at a time. None of them had experienced any problems as they cut through the sea of grass.

One larger unit of several hundred men had been found on a road moving between two plantations, but on the whole, every group told the same story. Every target within reach was basically an armed camp that was already bracing for impact with both extra guards as well as patrols that made it difficult to approach closer than a couple miles from the stubby walls that surrounded each outpost.

That trend kept up until two of the last units to return reported one that wasn’t. It was exactly the sort of thing that Emma had predicted, and after hearing what the scouts had to say about how there were barely any guards, almost everyone agreed that it was a trap.

Benjamin was honestly much more surprised that all thirteen groups had made it back than that they’d found a trap. As far as he was concerned, that was a given, and while everyone else discussed it, he rifled through the returning scout’s systems to make sure they didn’t have any double agents that might have met a Summoner Lord while they were out in the field and been convinced not to remember it.

Matt didn’t try to argue that. Reluctantly after that, the debate became about whether to attack one of the entrenched areas or bypass the whole region and look for something less well-defended further away from here.

Some argued that since they might well be the last army based upon what the centaurs had told them, they should assume it was going to be like this everywhere, while others argued that they shouldn’t throw lives away by attacking where they were expected. It became heated, and when Matt finally asked Benjamin for his advice, he stunned everyone.

“I think we should fall into their trap,” he told them in an even voice. Several people, including Emma, looked at him like they’d misheard him, and when he repeated himself, most everyone switched to looking at him like he was crazy instead.

“At every phase in this war, we have made the same mistake: we have found a tactic that worked, and we have used it over and over until our enemy figured it out before we switched to something new,” Benjamin said finally. “First, we stole their soldiers, then we engaged in hit-and-run tactics, and now… well, they are sure this is what we will do next. They expect us to attack here at Plantation 87, which makes that our best choice to make it their most painful loss since Arden.”

“How so?” Matt asked, not following him.

“Because the Rhulvinar are almost as predictable as we are,” Benjamin said as he cast a minor illusion to create a map of the region around the plantation they were discussing as it had been described by the scouts.

“I would bet any amount of money that as soon as we strike this spot, gates from all the other plantations are going to open up and pour out reinforcements to surround and trap us,” Benjamin said. With a wave of his hand, he placed his hypothetical army on the board as a series of red blocks with smaller blocks or archers and healers behind them. Then, in a flash, he made three more Rhulvinarian armies appear all around them, pinning them in place. “The plantation will be the anvil, and the armies will be the hammer, and they will crush us between them with all manner of insane demons. I’m sure of it.”

“If you’re so sure of that, then why in the name of the Thrones would we ever want to be there?” One of the older men asked. Benjamin thought his name might be Ryan or Rubin.

“Yeah, I mean, I’m with him on this, Benji,” Emma said, "the whole point of a trap is that once you see it, you don’t step in it.”

“Ah, but any good move has a counter move,” he continued. “The beacon in the Plantation will draw them into it if they approach within a couple miles. So they will open rifts further out than that, and worse for them, we can build a second and third beacon here to force their reinforcements to appear in the spot of our choosing. If we play our cards right, we can turn their trap into an entirely different trap.”

“Well, won’t we still be trapped between two forces rather than three or four?” Raja asked, unable to resist repeating that word one more time.

“Yes and no,” Matt said, interrupting Benjamin now that he saw where his friend was going. Benjamin might be pretty bright, but when it came to tactics, his friend had him beat by miles. Now that Benjamin had inspired Matt, the man had taken the ball and was running with it. “The anvil in this metaphor is meant to be a static, defensive force. We don’t need to fight them, at least not at first. All we need to do is get them to sound the alarm and then leave them alone to fight whoever comes running.”

“In theory, that could work Raja said excitedly, but we’d still have to deal with at least one or two groups of ambushers. The Rhulvinairans are little bitches, but there’s an awful lot of them.”

“Their resources are finite, just like ours,” Benjamin said. “If we get to choose where they stand and face us, and we can make that ground into a killing field, then when we want thousands of them to come through those rifts. We want whole armies to face us just so we can crush them.”

“Well, maybe just one army the first time,” Matt said, cracking a smile for the first time during the whole war council. “After that, well, we’ll see how it goes.”

There was a lot to be decided after that, of course, but as far as he was concerned, it had been decided. Go big or go home, and since going home still wasn’t an option, they were going to have to go big.