“You’d normally think that reaching a massive city with seven layers of wall that you had to siege would be a depressing situation, so imagine how bad it must have been to get there for the soldiers to cheer as one upon sighting the city instead.

While the harassment we endured along the way did not inflict that many casualties amongst the soldiers, the absurd ways with which our foes struck unseen turned everyone paranoid and jumpy. Everyone had suffered quite a lot along the way.

To the point that the thought of a properly built siege camp was enough to lift their spirits.” - From the diary of Simeon Durant, General of the Podovniy March.

“Fucking finally!” cursed Marquis Viktor Esvant when he saw the walls of Levain city in the distance. After a prolonged march rife with frustration and suffering, his army finally arrived at their destination, and the vanguard elements of his force were already in the middle of building a siege camp on the city’s eastern side.

Surprisingly, despite the delays they encountered, their allies from the Anduille Regency had not arrived as of yet. Given the torment his army had been through, the Marquis thought that likely the Regency army met with their own misfortune along the way.

In terms of deaths, the frequent harassment had not killed that many people. Maybe a couple thousand had been lost. A pittance in an army nearly a hundred thousand strong. That said, the harassment also periodically sidelined some soldiers, and while those soldiers were able to return to active duty after a while, morale remained low overall.

Mostly because of the various indignities that the harassment inflicted upon the soldiers.

The last batch was the worst one. After a night raid where several clay urns were found thrown into the camp yet seemed to do nothing, people started getting sick as early as noon of the next day. If it was just a common illness, that would have been fine, but the way the illness manifested itself did bad things to troop morale and the dignities of the people affected.

Those afflicted with the illness – mostly the people who were near where the urns were discovered – fell into a bout of constant vomiting accompanied by explosive diarrhea, often spewing from both ends. It didn’t help that the noble-born commanders seemed to be more prone to getting the worst of the illness either, whereas the rank and file that hailed from the peasantry seemed to only get a milder case of it.

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Even so, the sight of a noble-born commander shitting all over herself and her horse in the middle of the march was something the Marquis felt as belonging to the category of “once was too many already”. To think that it happened repeatedly as dozens of people were afflicted with the illness was not a pleasant scenario for him to contemplate, though he was spared from witnessing it himself due to it happening closer to the vanguard.

The stench was still prevalent when he passed the area later on though.

It was with relief that he led his elite troops towards the siege camp being built in the distance. There was a good thousand paces between the siege camp and where the forest ended, and roughly the same distance to Levain city itself. Enough distance to allow sentries to spot any enemy activity in the vicinity, since they had also cleared the surroundings of the siege camp.

At least the soldiers could sleep with a peace of mind that they wouldn’t suddenly be awakened in the middle of the night because some damned mercenaries had the idea of tossing some horrible stenches or burning jars of oil into the camp like they did during the journey.

What frustrated the Marquis the most was how the mercenaries never ever properly showed themselves other than those cavalry raids when they crossed the plains. They only struck from the shadows and prepared ambushes, often decimating those foolish enough to attempt a pursuit despite direct orders not to do that.

The sick wagons still carried a couple thousand injured soldiers whose injuries couldn’t be handled quickly, while those with lighter injuries were mostly already back on duty. At least they could be treated better once they reached the siege camp.

Marquis Viktor Esvant then turned his thoughts to the walled city that loomed in the distance. Levain used to be the crown jewel of the Clangeddin Empire, the eternal city from where the empire first originated, and also the most fought-over territory early in the civil war. The fighting over the city had decimated several of the more powerful splinters of the empire back then, as they smashed against each other over ownership of the city.

He found it highly ironic that in the end, it was the city’s own peasants who rose up and took the city for themselves.

With the examples of the splinter forces who fought over the city – all of which had been consigned to the pages of the history books by now – the surrounding forces were more wary about fighting over the city. It would be an extremely costly endeavor in most cases, one that made them wary about committing to an assault.

Viktor himself only dared to make his move since he knew a good chunk of the best forces that defended the city would be gone, and he was also working together with the Regency on top of that. It was a rather ambitious gamble, one that could see the Podovniy March rise into the unquestioned ruler of the fertile lands that used to be the Empire’s breadbasket region.

Many of those fertile fields had been damaged by the fools who fought over the city early in the war, and while the local peasants had worked on repairing the damage, it still meant that for a good while, Levain was far more trouble than it was worth for its neighbors to consider an invasion.

Now that the fields had been repaired and were producing great amounts of foodstuff once more, Levain’s value as a target increased, which in turn led to the gamble made by the Podovniy March and the Anduille Regency.