“You can think of siege warfare like two pieces of walnuts. They’d rub their shells and press against each other, slowly grinding each other away at the same time. Whichever cracks first, loses, but sometimes, there’s more than one layer of shells on them.” - Ingrid Edelstein, Captain of the Free Lances mercenary company, circa 582 VA.

By noon of the first day of the siege, it was evident that the besiegers weren’t making a serious attack at the seventh wall. They were still in the process of building siege ladders – a literally tall proposition given the ten-meter height of the outermost wall – in their camps, an activity that couldn’t really be hidden from the sight of the defenders.

Instead of the siege ladders still being made, the besiegers attempted to use ropes tipped with grappling hooks to climb up the seventh wall, or to use wooden logs carried by groups of strong soldiers like makeshift battering rams against the sealed gate or the weaker-looking sections of the walls. None of the efforts bore any fruit, but the besiegers hadn’t really put in that much effort either.

Instead, it was the archers on both sides who put in the most work that day, both those part of the besiegers who shot at the defenders at the top of the walls, or the defending archers who rained down arrows at the invaders from their position on the battlements. Tens of thousands of arrows were used by both sides that day, at the very least, and Reinhardt noticed that the local fletchers had already chopped down most trees in the vicinity that were suitable for making arrows with, leaving the invaders empty-handed and reliant on the stock they brought with them.

The alternative for the besiegers was to send people deeper into the woods to look for suitable trees for arrow-making, where Reinhardt’s people laid in wait to ambush them, so that wasn’t a pleasant proposition either.

As might be expected out of what basically amounted to an exchange of arrows by two well-prepared parties, casualties were light on both sides. The besiegers set up large wooden shields, staked to the ground, where their archers could take cover between shots. Similarly, their infantrymen who were attacking the walls all carried large shields to cover themselves with.

The defenders were similarly prepared, their archers using the crevasses of the battlements for cover, while yet others shot from holes meant for their use – at least what few still remained on the badly damaged seventh wall – which gave them even more safety. Such holes were narrow to the outside but wider on the inside, which made for a far harder target for enemy archers to shoot through compared to the defending ones.

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With both sides so well protected, injuries and deaths were rare, mostly happening to unlucky people. In fact, most of the injured and dead were amongst the archers themselves, as they’d inadvertently exposed their bodies when they leaned out of cover to shoot. In comparison, the soldiers simply kept their heads down and shields up, which made it far less likely for them to be injured.

Reinhardt thought that at most, both the defenders and the invaders took maybe a few hundred casualties each, which was a very, very low number given the amount of soldiers involved in the day’s “battle”. He wasn’t certain whether the besiegers hoped to make the defenders complacent or on edge, though he expected the experienced old half-elf lady inside the walls to know how to deal with it regardless.

Unfortunately, as he expected, the enemy camp – now almost finished – was guarded in a perhaps excessive manner, with patrols of twenty soldiers each constantly roaming the camp’s vicinity while keeping in sight of at least two other groups and the people stationed on the camp’s watchtowers. The security was very tight, set in such a way as to ensure that they would be able to warn the camp of any incoming attack before it reached there.

Perhaps Reinhardt had overdone it a bit with the way he had his people torment the invaders on their way to Levain, but then again, he was just doing the best he could. The way the security was set up, it pretty much removed sneak attacks at night from the table, as they would be discovered easily before they could do much damage.

Instead, his thoughts turned to large-scale decoy attacks – something he was quite sure the volunteers would be willing to risk their lives on – to hide the presence of a smaller, elite team of raiders who would go for high-value targets. The only problem with that was the fact that his enemies had yet to reveal any such target. The tents where their commanders reside were positioned very deep in the camps and closely guarded, so those were not an option, while the siege engines had yet to show up so far.

Due to the close proximity between his and Lars’ group to the north-west of the city, it was easy for both camps to exchange information at the present, but they couldn’t regroup yet as it would need them to go out into the open before their enemies. That would probably have to wait until Estelle’s forces arrived so their enemies had something else to occupy their attention.

From the exchange, he found out that the situation was similar on the northern side. Apparently Lars had done a splendid job to make their enemies paranoid of the situation, to the point that they jumped at every shadow. That resulted in the defenses of the enemy camp being far more secure than Reinhardt liked, but since the most important of their objectives was to buy time, it was worth doing so.

One thing that made Reinhardt breathe a sigh of relief was the knowledge that Elfriede and Erycea were fine, despite their habit of leading from the front. He knew that it was perhaps a bit hypocritical for him to worry about them when he was dealing with an even more numerous enemy army, but the thought came unbidden at times to him.