“You need to be at the right place and use the right sort of bait to fish properly. Once you have both, all that remains is to have some patience.” - Heine Grunwald, fisherman.
The lunch went by quickly, with most of the group making small talk about the situation of the battle, other than Hua-Li who was clearly behaving like a fish out of water in such company. The girl just kept her head down and ate quietly, afraid to barge in on the conversation between the nobles, unless directly addressed by one of them.
Reinhardt mostly watched with amusement as the captive girl fell deeper into Nestor’s little ploy. Either the girl was a very good actor, or she had completely swallowed the bait, hook, line, and sinker. Given the way the girl had acted over the previous day, Reinhardt doubted that she was a skilled spy their enemies had specifically sent out to be caught.
Of course, even if the chances were remote, it remained a possibility nonetheless. The girl happened to be the only captive they caught that spoke their language so far. A clever commander might have used her as a spy to feed the enemy with false information or worse. In fact, the information that the enemy might possess as many as two million soldiers would have been demoralizing if it spread amongst the troops. If it was false information, then she sold it convincingly, to say the least.
Which was also why Nestor and the rest kept their guard up around the girl, despite treating her well otherwise. What Reinhardt could think of, they had naturally also considered. It was also why Hua-Li had been kept mostly away from others, the Dukes having declared her to be an important captive and set their own trusted people to guard her when she was not in their company.
On the surface, it was to ensure her safety. She was a captive from the enemy army after all, and people got emotional after battles all the time. In truth, they were there to ensure that Hua-Li did not have contact with the rank and file of the coalition army, so that she would not be able to learn much if anything of the army’s actual situation or talk about potentially demoralizing things to them.
After having delivered the girl and the rest of the captives they caught along with her, Reinhardt and Elfriede returned to the forest camp, with a request from Nestor to try to capture more people if they saw any opportunity. Sadly the enemy army had learned from their mistake, and commanders of the rank of Hua-Li’s superior kept their distance from the southern forest since the raid.
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The army itself still managed to get captives just from the fighting, but they were very low in rank, as the higher-ranked officers of the Imperial army stayed away from the front lines. It was not feasible to force a charge just to capture some of them unless they strayed closer like in the successful raid Reinhardt pulled off, so the situation devolved into a stalemate once more.
Meanwhile, with Hua-Li’s aid, Nestor interrogated the other cooperative captives they had. Most of the information the girl reported back corroborated with what she had told them previously, but some of the captives added local information she did not know about. It made sense since they came from different regions of the empire, and each would naturally be more knowledgeable about their home region.
As they did that, Nestor grew to believe the girl more, as it would be very difficult to keep the story straight with such a large amount of information if she was a spy. There was simply too much information she translated for them, in too great a detail, that if a comparison was made, any made-up parts would cause a discrepancy all too easily. He felt that if the girl was a spy, she would be providing them with more vague information, things that would be harder to confirm independently later on.
They also naturally did some research about the Empire from their side. Old Duke Banitu had his people in Kolitschei scour his personal library for any relevant information, and they found old records that corroborated Hua-Li’s information. People from the Empire – or at least, part of it – traded with Posuin centuries in the past, before suddenly cutting off all contact.
Unfortunately, Posuin never actually managed to establish a two-way trading relationship with those people. It was always they who visited Posuin by ship, and their people who learned common to communicate with the locals. There were no records of people from Posuin who went to the Empire or learned their language.
Even if there were such people, they would most likely be in Wanarua territory, which the Imperial invasion conquered first, since their main force made landfall there. As such, they were out of Nestor’s reach. The initial invasion had happened so suddenly that the Wanaruans didn’t manage to escape before they were overrun by the invaders, so there was nobody to ask from that side.
The battle between the Imperial invaders and the defending coalition forces continued at an uneasy stalemate for another week. During which time Nestor had received news from the south, which contained both good and bad news. The news stated that former Duke Emil Bostvan was killed in battle when he was leading a large-scale attack against the invaders.
His death caused quite a bit of disarray amongst his forces, but fortunately by then Duchess Angela Utghwes of Dvergarder was already there with her reinforcements and managed to take control of the situation. In fact, the cooperation between the remaining Bostvan forces and Dvergarder’s troops became smoother after Emil Bostvan’s death, since he and the Duchess often butted heads and disagreed over many things.
It was also then that they received the news they had been waiting for. Messages from Dvergarder arrived and stated the arrival of a large contingent of troops from Knallzog, who were rushing towards the two battlefronts after they split up.