“It is only bad manners to laugh at another’s misery if you can’t get away with it, or if they’re not already an enemy of yours.” - Saying attributed to Xaliburnus the Conqueror, First Emperor of the Elmaiya Empire.
“They’re not all afluster from losing those officers, it seems,” noted Reinhardt as he watched the battle go on from the distance. He was watching using his eye piece as usual, which relayed what the field of vision from the orb Hannah carried high above, while Erycea was standing on a branch next to his, watching the battlefield with a spyglass. “Can’t say that’s unexpected, but I had hoped we’d be able to affect them more with the assassination.”
It helped to have multiple points of view on the situation, after all.
“They’re fighting more conservatively, from what I can see. Playing it safer, not pushing as hard as the past week,” said Erycea as she offered her own observations to add to Reinhardt’s own. Reinhardt’s bird’s eye view gave him a far superior observation of the overall battlefield situation, but Erycea could make out more detail with the spyglass, if over much smaller areas. “Think that’s enough to conclude that they had a change in the leadership?”
“Either that, or we spooked them pretty badly with the assassination,” said Reinhardt in reply. He had his own experience of decades as a mercenary to call on, and was familiar with things the way his younger daughter was not quite as knowledgeable yet. “People have a tendency to favor a safer approach after facing threats to their life. While it is not the most commonplace amongst military officers, that always remained a possibility.”
“They’re definitely retreating from their sorties sooner. More withdrawal amongst the injured compared to before, and more frequent replacements of the frontline,” added Erycea after some more observations of the ongoing battle. “If I were to make a guess, I’d have guessed that their commander got replaced with someone who actually cared about their soldier’s lives. The way they fought these past few days has been horribly wasteful.”
“Wasteful, yes, but also effective. They have the numbers to spare, and fighting an enemy that fought recklessly like that tires out our side faster. Some of the Kolitscheians might have broken or otherwise made a mistake if they kept up the previous intensity for another week or so, they’re mostly young and unblooded,” commented Reinhardt. Of course, when he mentioned the defenders breaking, he just meant those in the first defense lines. The Hellraisers had taken precautions and raised multiple defense lines to watch out for such a possibility themselves.
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“Either way they’re not going to get through here anytime soon. Unless they make a silly mistake, I don’t see this battle going anywhere until some reinforcements arrive from either side,” he continued. “Our enemies don’t seem to be in a particular hurry, otherwise if they kept assaulting our defenses day and night without a care for their casualties they might have pushed us back by now already.”
“And we lack the numbers to push them back, so we’re reduced to the current situation,” supplied Erycea with a nod. “Do you think we can do more to change this situation, father?”
“We’d need the enemy to make a mistake first, like showing us who is actually in charge of their command so we can get rid of them all in one fell swoop,” replied Reinhardt with a shake of his head. So far the invader commanders had yet to even show themselves in any noticeable way. While it was easy enough to tell who were the officers amongst the enemy army, there was little to differentiate the various officers in terms of what they wore, which made it hard to pinpoint which one was a general, if any.
And that was assuming the generals even showed their face on the battlefield. When the twins scouted out the enemy camp before, they noticed that the enemy general often just gave out commands from his tent, and only occasionally walked around to view the situation at the battlefield personally. That sort of commander was the troublesome one, because even if they turned out to be easy to kill, getting to them in the first place was the hard part.
It was far easier to take the head off a general when they were the courageous sort and led their soldiers from the front, even if that meant more of a fight.
With only two thousand men, there was no way Reinhardt would risk attacking so deep into the enemy camp, since the enemy never left their camp entirely unguarded. They had enough troops to have the leeway to do that, and what was left in the camp had the numbers to overwhelm the Company with their numbers alone, or at least buy time for the commander to escape.
On the other hand, for Reinhardt and his company to escape from such a foray would be far more difficult, especially if they failed to get the enemy general, so it was a risk that was too great to even consider for the time being. He had allowed the assassination attempt because that had the potential to pay great dividends – though the results were still being confirmed, with the heads sent over for identification by the captives in the main camp – with more acceptable risk of losses.
So far, however, he was as yet uncertain whether the shift in the enemy’s tactics was worth the loss of three of his men, since there was no guarantee that they had gotten the enemy general last night. It was something that would need more confirmation from both sides. Something made only more troublesome since neither side speaks the other’s language.
Because of that, Nestor had asked Reinhardt to try catching an officer of some sort the next time he had a chance to do so, in case the higher-ups of the invaders were more educated and maybe learned other languages. Reinhardt had yet to have a chance to fulfill that request so far, but he planned to do it when the opportunity struck.