The explosion woke up all the sleeping enemy troops. Many individuals are scrambling to find the enemy and prepare to fight. Those who were closer to the fort are making their way into the fort to try to help anyone harmed in the explosion. Although they might save some people in the fort, the entire inside of the fort is probably full of sulfur dioxide gas. Anyone going in to save others is going to be affected by it.
After a few minutes, it becomes clear that there isn't any further attack happening from our side, and it looks like those near the fort are now very aware that there is some form of toxin in the area. Everyone is retreating as far from the fort as they can. There seem to be a lot of individuals covering their mouths and noses, and a lot of individuals are coughing. Sulfur dioxide is quite pungent, so they're surely aware of the poison in the air. Depending on their backgrounds, some might even recognize the smell.
A few individuals have already collapsed close to the fort. In retrospect, without immediate modern medical treatment, sulfur dioxide is more deadly than I initially estimated. In the modern day, with modern medical equipment, you can help individuals survive the deadly and long lasting pulmonary edema. Honestly, even if they have a bunch of magic healers, they'll likely lose a lot of individuals to that alone. Depending on how their healing magic works, the pulmonary edema might return over and over after being healed, meaning they'll be highly limited in who they can save.
Unfortunately for us, it seems like their leadership wasn't actually in the fort, but they were nearby. I'm only guessing based on watching individuals giving orders though. It seems like most of their command structure seems to be intact, although quite a few of them seem to be suffering from some amount of coughing.
As they gathered more and more people on the furthest edge of the beach, more individuals started to succumb to coughing fits and collapse. It really is quite the gruesome scene, it seems like a third of the forces were affected in some way, although only about a fifth of those seem severely afflicted. I watched carefully, looking for more information on how their army handles injuries. It's clear they have a few individuals with healing magic, but not all of the healing magic seemed to work the same way. Initially a few individuals seemed to be treated, and they stopped coughing, and were able to get back on their feet, only to start coughing again within minutes.
The medical treatment shifted after that, as they moved to commanders first, and started a longer magical process on them. After they were treated, I no longer saw any of them have their cough recur. However, less than half of the healers seemed capable of that process. Those who couldn't focused first on temporary treatment for other individuals. I couldn't discern what criteria they chose for who they temporarily treated. Though they only had a few hundred healers, so they were fighting a severely uphill battle.
Of those who were able to do the more complex and permanent treatment only about a quarter were able to repeat that treatment again immediately. I'm assuming that it drains a significant amount of mana, and they are now waiting for their mana to recharge to try to cure others. I scan the beach to see what other individuals are doing.
It seems like most are on guard and seem to be fueled by adrenaline. Almost no one has returned to sleep, and given how much coughing is going on, I doubt they will. I tried to keep my eye out for any of the potential dark elves that I was warned about, but don't spot any. Everyone on the beach appears to be human.
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As I'm looking, I feel a small drop of water land on me. Looking upwards, the clouds have gotten darker, and it seems like it's starting to rain. That's actually some good luck for us. The enemy will be relieved from breathing in more sulfur dioxide, which is a little bit of a break for them, but something worse is going to happen to them as a result.
It's only been about forty minutes since the explosion and deflagration. Given the nearly non-existent wind in this bay and the density of sulfur dioxide, it has only slowly dissipated by diffusion into the rest of the bay area. That means that the fort should still be heavily laden with the stuff. As the rain falls, it will mix with the sulfur dioxide. On earth, in faint amounts in the upper atmosphere, sulfur dioxide was one of the causes of acid rain.
When sulfur dioxide mixes with water, it forms sulfurous acid, and a portion of that further converts to sulfuric acid with any extra oxygen. It's very bad news for the fish in the bay, who are going to experience a mass dying event. It's even worse news for the enemy army, who spent the better part of the evening moving supplies into the fort. All those supplies are about to get a heavy dose of acid. Unless they somehow packaged everything in watertight containers, I expect the damage to their supplies will be quite severe.
I noticed one interesting thing before I left to retreat to my next position. They seemed to be moving the very ill individuals into small pods, and assigning higher ranking individuals to watch over them. Initially, this confused me. Why assign captains and commanders to watch over the individuals who were basically being left for dead?
Then it hit me. When we killed the eagles, the individuals who were closest to the eagles got the most levels. I hadn't really thought to check if you actually had to kill the creatures, or if them dying by any means was enough to gain levels. Further, Shasta had talked extensively about leveling sickness before. I hadn't asked before, but I'm starting to infer that higher level individuals within the humanoid races have a harder time leveling as they reach higher levels. Their commanders are probably seasoned veterans, and can potentially handle absorbing all that experience without actually gaining so many levels that they get leveling sickness. They're essentially recycling the levels of their dying.
That's good to know. It means their strongest individuals are probably going to be ridiculously strong. With that knowledge in mind, I began retreating from my viewing perch. My next job is to retreat back to the city. There are a lot of our troops setting up even more traps and ambushes between here and there, but I'm not supposed to risk myself in those skirmishes, as it's important I'm available for adapting our plans if the city needs it.
There is some concern that the enemy will potentially be sieging the city already. We don't know if this landing contained all of the soldiers or not, although I doubted it was. If they have other landing sites, not all of them were likely defended. Lack of infrastructure in other parts of the island would make landing with even a medium sized army a bad choice in most places. The time and effort it would take to navigate the island would make it unlikely that anything more than small strike forces landed anywhere that we didn't have the road.
Which means that my own trip back to the city is actually somewhat dangerous, as I could run into a moderately sized force between here and the city. We left approximately five-hundred soldiers in the city, half our fighting force, to defend it. Even if a landing happened near the city with an army of equal size to the one we fought on the beach, they should hold out for a few days minimum with our tiered defenses, which is enough time for me to make it back.