Rations were surprisingly fungible. Whenever food was distributed, natural Changemancy/Moneymancy ensured that each unit drew from the supplies exactly enough to cover their upkeep… even if it looked like all of the units ate the same amount.
A level 2 city cost about thirty thousand shmuckers to set up, and yielded 70% of that when razed. The larder had a large amount of sausages stored, which the weinerrammers appreciated a lot. The city had about ten thousand shmuckers of sausages total, with another two in beer and miscellaneous foodstuffs.
Units could generally carry enough rations to cover half their upkeep for four turns without being impeded. 24 knights, all ranging from level two to four, two warlords at three and four, and Tanya herself totaled about four thousand, with Sylvia's larger mounted force being about twice that. So they split the food to feed the group for both this and next turn, and the shmuckers evenly. Tanya used Moneymancy to get some extra shmuckers out of the enemy bodies, but they were mostly garrison units so she could only get four to six shmuckers out of each infantry. There were about five hundred of them, though, so that still boosted her income from the fund razer by nearly four thousand shmuckers with the warlord, knights, and field units taken into account. Naturally, Tanya declined to mention this additional income to Sylvia.
Theoretically, she could have gotten more schmuckers out of them by cashing in their equipment instead, but that's less juice efficient, a more difficult spell that she hasn't managed to succeed at yet, and she wanted to save most of hers in case they get counterattacked in the morning.
The campfire light seemed to suit Lady Sylvia, once she lit it she sat back, letting the rest of her troops handle the rest of camping. She watched the fire, entranced, giving a small smile as if she knew something others didn't. "...you think they'll attack?" She asked idly when Tanya settled in beside her.
"I'd give it good odds." Tanya replied, idly cooking a sausage on a stick. "They were clearly banking on delaying you rather than stopping you, from their disposition. This implies that reinforcements were en route."
"They'd expect us to be injured though. And we're not." Sylvia observed.
"If you'd prefer for me to Iet you handle the counterattack on your own, I'll have my forces stick to the airspace." Tanya offered, inspecting the char on her sausage. It needs more cooking time.
One of Sylvia's retainers passed her a cooked sausage, and she bit into it gleefully. "This is good stuff. What is that flavor?"
After examining her own snack and deeming it ready, Tanya bit into her own. Kind of a sour note, with a sweetness… tomato? "Oregano, I think." She eventually decided. It tasted like pasta sauce. "Beef with tomatoes, mixed with spices."
Lady Sylvia's eyes sparked in recognition. "That's how I remember this taste! Those meal troughs they make for the Mondays have this mixed with pasta. I captured some five turns ago, the pasta really changes the texture by a lot…"
That broke the ice. Lady Sylvia was rude, but she was also not shy. She liked bragging about her past exploits, and she eagerly listened to the story of Tanya's plan, every layer, for the defense of Gobwin knob before Stanley croaked and Wanda abandoned the side. She did leave out sensitive details, though.
"You know princess? You're alright. You had your back against the wall, but you fought for it, you fought mean, and you could have won." She snickered, "Well, you could have if you weren't against me."
Accepting the empty braggadocio for what it was, Tanya yawned and got up, walking to her tent. "We'll see if we need to fight in the morning. Good night, Lady Sylvia."
"Night, Princess."
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Tanya had gotten used to fighting. To croaking people. It helped a lot that people in this world didn't seem to bleed. The gore was sanitized to a point that it was hard to take it seriously. They barely registered pain from injury at all, in fact.
But so far, in the nearly 50 turns that she had been in this world, she had always been the one attacking. Never defending.
The waiting was the worst part. The uncertainty on whether or not they would need to fight for their lives at all. Tanya had decided to array her forces in one large stack, spreading her full leadership bonus to all twenty-seven units. Her plus ten equipment bonus from her artifacts still made her the hardest target in the hex even without the stack bonus, after all. Also, they wouldn't get that bonus if Haggar sent dancefighters, anyway.
"Men." She said, silently ordering them to stand at attention. "Until today, you have not known war." Anger strummed her Knight's heartstrings, even as their faces remained disciplined. "Until today, war was something you did at your own pace. You flew in, attacked, and retreated to safety." The anger dimmed, but did not abate. "But today, there is no safety. Haggar, King Dickie, will surely attempt to croak us all in vengeance for pointing out how open his city was."
Tanya paused, silently assenting for her troops to express themselves. They did not disappoint, shouting out their disapproval for Haggar, the blind patriotism good to see in this grim circumstance. They'll need that morale.
She will too. "But we will not fall!" Tanya shouted, continuing her speech. "They will strike only wind, and our spears will strike back with the strength of thunder!" Tanya knew that her troops' fragility would be a problem, but with her full bonus, even the weakest knights, at level two, had twenty-five defense. It would be difficult for the enemy units to score hits. Or to dodge her stack's attacks. "This is the battlefield, where the Titans have, through their design of the rules of the world, declared to be the only place where our lives can have meaning, in the creation of their favorite offering: Enemy bodies. Will we disappoint them?”
“NO!” Her knights replied.
“Then prepare for battle!” Tanya shouted. On cue, the Haggar forces entered the adjacent hex. Ah, so that does work.
Lady Sylvia’s strike force was potent: twelve stacks of knights mounted on weinerrammers, plus four warlords, although two were level one, here to gain experience. Weinerrammers were very cheap and fast siege units, but they were weak, so you needed to use them in large numbers if you wanted to actually break anything that wasn’t a level 1 city. The Knights were the actual combat force, meant to shield their mounts rather than the other way around. As such, they were armed for that purpose, with actual shields in addition to their axes. Axemen had a small bonus against fortifications, so they were well chosen.
To combat this, Haggar sent an army of infantry, sixty stacks of them, led by two stacks of mounted knights with warlords. A potent force… but they were also reasonably disposable. Tanya suspected that they were supposed to reinforce the city’s defenses, but could not make it in time. In addition, and this was something Tanya suspected was specifically because of her knight’s presence, they had sent fifteen stacks of orlies, which was not enough to trouble her. Delay her from assisting Sylvia, on the other hand… maybe?
Dice probabilities weren’t that difficult. She spent a few drops of juice to accelerate her napkin math, as it’s much less expensive if she’s working with pure numbers. Orlies have a base two… nine, then? Prince Sammy was level eight, so his chief warlord bonus was pretty high, just not as high as hers. Sixteen point lead is fifteen out of four hundred, assume three stacks croaked per exchange, led verses unled gives her the initiative, total incoming attacks would be two forty, so assume nine hits total. Her knights were fragile for knights, but infantry would still need at least three hits on the same target to croak on good damage rolls, so it’s an easy, quick win with no losses and no juice expense needed. The Leadership gap was insurmountable in this case, which made Tanya think that Haggar didn’t know that a Chief Warlord was part of the sacking. It was her first military action in the theater, it wasn’t that unreasonable of a supposition. Taking out so many orlies will be a boon, it was likely a large fraction of their available air forces.
Wait… who was that unit? Looking closer, Tanya noticed that there was a third warlord leading a stack of infantry on foot. He looked like an older man, wearing a white button up shirt and a black vest wielding a pair of light wooden maces. His role was clear once the infantry all restacked before entering their hex. “Dancefight!” Tanya shouted down at Lady Sylvia. “Stack up!” She ordered Gratz to send the Unaroyal warlady his view of Haggar’s reorganization.
Lady Sylvia shouted imprecations about both Tanya and the warlord in question, but did what Tanya recommended, ordering the non-led knights to stack up with her. Presumably, the other, led stacks would engage the other mounted knights. They will have to suffer the dancefighting malus, but Tanya’s in-hex bonus will make up for that.
Haggar’s troops started to enter the hex. The infantry marched in a peculiar way, taking two stomping steps and then clapping their hands around their spears. It created a musical beat, so it was clearly just part of the dancefight.
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The Orlies started to flood the skies, and Tanya silently charged the owl-like bird units, each of her stack striking down one of the birds in a single stroke of their weapons. The birds could speak in a limited, broken way, squawking imprecations at them as they croaked uselessly. “WTF” “HAX” “GG NO RE” “WORTH” “U MAD” “TRYHARD” “O RLY?” “EZ”
Either they had a bonus Tanya didn’t know about or just good luck, but they scored six more hits than expected, but none of her knights got more than one injury, so it was acceptable.
The cadence of the enemy marching continued as they fought in the skies. Stomp stomp clap. Stomp stomp clap. Wait… she knew that beat.
“Lady, you’re a stabber, make a big noise, fighting in the ruins gonna be a chief someday,” The Haggar warlord sang as his troupe engaged Lady Sylvia’s stacks. “You got mud on your face, big disgrace, kicking your dogs all over the place.”
His troupe all sang the chorus, creating a cacophony of noise. “WE WILL, WE WILL, CROAK YOU!” they shouted, “WE WILL, WE WILL, CROAK YOU!”
Despite their proclamations, Lady Sylvia’s stack did have a significant leadership edge over the enemy warlord between her higher level and Tanya’s in-hex bonus, and her knight’s greater base stats allowed them some additional leeway to weather the enemy blows. The warlady herself was in the thick of it, laughing off their attempts to croak her while she lashed out, each swing taking out another enemy. Her stack was much less fortunate, having taken a few casualties in the time it took for Tanya’s stack to finish the distraction.
…Yeah, she should intervene. Which battle, though? She could either take out the mounted knights or the dancefight… Would Sylvia be angrier at Tanya intervening in her own fight or at killstealing her other warlords?
After a heartbeat, Tanya made her decision. Counting out a beat, she spent a chunk of juice to create the sounds of music sent to oppose the enemy dancefighters. “Dive, Charge, Dive, Go!” She sang, her voice slipping into the Imperial tongue for reasons she wasn’t quite sure. Following the magically-granted inspiration, she continued. “Attention, Flank them, Strike out, Back!’
Her stack spread out to surround the hundreds-strong army, each one dancing in and out of reach as they lashed out to strike the dancing infantry straight in the hearts. “To the battle, to the frontline, straight to the edge of naught! Throw your lives away, show me the power that lives inside you!” She sang in Engl- Language. “I’m sure that you can hear, endless blades clashing, the sounds of enemies, trying to defy us!”
Sylvia’s warcry redoubled her troop’s fervor, as Tanya’s small but extant dancefighting bonus made her troops even better at battle. “Show them to their end…” Tanya continued to sing, “Show them to their end…” Before switching back to Imperial for the chorus.
After the fight’s conclusion, Tanya checked over her troops. The Haggar warlords were higher level than the ones Unaroyal had brought, but the two-to-one odds did allow them to win with just Tanya’s in-hex bonus bolstering them further.
The gap wasn’t as large when facing these units, so her knights took a fair few hits, but she played things conservatively, using the dancefight’s rhythm to re-organize the formation so that the attacks were directed at those who had yet to take a second hit. While there wasn’t a single knight that was uninjured, she had managed to avoid any of them croaking.
All told, the downed dogs and Mondays were harvested for meat rations, many of the bodies were claimed for consumption by the living dogs, and at the end of things, Unaroyal’s twelve stacks and five warlords became eight and four, one of the level 1 warlords croaking. The other one leveled to two, though. Oh, and Tanya planned to turn the rest of the bodies into more shmuckers when Sylvia left.
“Damn dancefighters.” Lady Sylvia spat after the post-battle management was complete. “You dancefight?” She asked.
“I’ve been learning.” Tanya corrected. Surprisingly, dancefighting was actually able to be learned, although there were… caveats. If Sylvia knew much about the subject, she’d notice that Tanya was lying. “The key is to maintain your sense of timing. You need to keep the beat. This can be difficult in the middle of a fight.” This was a lot easier if you just used Rhyme-o-mancy, but she didn’t need to know that.
Suddenly, the sweat and dirt that had accumulated over the fight vanished, the swirling nimbus of Titanic magics washing away Tanya’s ability to focus on anything else. “Our turn!” Lady Sylvia declared.
“Scout!” Tanya commanded, and her knights scattered, giving Tanya a clear mental image of the surrounding area. A few drops of juice were used to help her maintain that image, creating a tiny foolamancy version of it in front of her eyes. She flew upwards to block this detail from being noticed by Lady Sylvia.
Unlike before, the scouts were instructed to not return immediately, as Yojo Mojo had an advantage that they had not yet used. At the order, Maggie’s voice rang out in Tanya’s ears, sounding exactly as she would over the phone for some odd reason. “Yes, Princess?”
“I’ll need some field coordination this turn, so don’t link up with Sizemore. Give him the day off in the Magic Kingdom, let him earn Rands and improve our relations with the barbarian casters.” Tanya replied, “Stand by with a hat.” Maggie’s line cut off, but Tanya didn’t bother second-guessing the serious caster’s compliance with the orders.
Lord von Newsman passed her a large piece of parchment, and she quickly sketched out the scouting report. Once her foolamancy map was no longer necessary, she floated back down and showed Lady Sylvia her options. “There’s a level one city we could theoretically sack, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the time.” The city was named Pansushot, which did not sound like a place she wanted to be. “It’s thirty hexes away, so two turns for you.” She then pointed to one of the edges of the map. “Or we could rejoin the Jetstone column. You have taken significant casualties, after all.”
“Bah!” Lady Sylvia shouted. “The point is to wreck Haggar until King Dickie knows he’s beaten. Just croak those field units he’s got, and I’ll start marching to that city.” She ordered her knights to mount up and then started riding off.
After she was gone, Tanya waited a beat and then looked at the fallen bodies. Many of them were gnawed on by the weinerrammers, but they still held value to the right buyer. “Time to salvage these human resources.” Tanya said, smiling a little at her little joke. A bit more literal than it used to be, eh? The infantry were field units, so she got another turn’s worth of upkeep out of them, about four thousand. Normally, this kind of additional income would require risking one’s moneymancer on the front lines. Not something most people are inclined to do.
Well, also Jetstone was paying Yojo Mojo’s treasury equal to her and her knight’s upkeep every turn, so all of this upkeep mitigation and loot was pure profit.
Writing down more orders, she sent them to Maggie so they could be relayed to the field units. Haggar had quite a few weak stacks of units or isolated scouts scattered about, plus one moderate strength hex… and they can all hide in that heavy forest hex during the enemy turn. Not that Haggar couldn’t find them, that was inevitable with the enemy Findamancer, but flying units can’t be attacked by normal units when in a heavy forest hex, they can just stay in the trees.
After the fourth set of instructions, Tanya felt Maggie opening up a thinkagram. “Princess, your efforts to conserve my juice are appreciated, but I am having trouble understanding your shorthand. Please explain your plan.”
With the full bandwidth of the telepathy magic, Tanya ordered Maggie to relay her orders more precisely, and started to fly on the route she had planned for herself. A few hundred shmuckers here, a few there… she gathered her units above the moderate strength hex, twenty stacks of infantry compiled into a troupe led by yet another dancefighting warlord. “Lucky Clover Heart Attack.” Tanya shouted in Japanese, croaking the enemy leadership as well as his screens in one attack. The rest of the infantry panicked uselessly. She turned to her two warlords. “Okay, you have all fought together, danced together, even boop-" Boop it. "-crapped together here on the battlefield. Your bonds as soldiers should be stronger than ever.” She fed her mind juice again, focusing on the heartstrings of her knights. They were in much better shape than before the battles. But was it enough?
Janis had elaborated, when Tanya sent her a letter through Sizemore, on what she meant by the spell lasting until the units in question ‘unstack’. It was more accurate to say that it lasted until the units stacked outside of the group, as they could unstack at night easily, and in the case of scouting units, could unstack to cover more ground without breaking the spell, as long as they reunited before engaging anything and didn’t end turn apart from each other.
“Espirit de corps!” Tanya shouted as she bound her knights together into two twelve-stacks. It was expensive, but hopefully it’ll last for the war, at the very least.
With her blessing, Newsman and Kurig both descended, leading their new stacks, and battled the unled, improperly stacked mob of infantry with ease. Newsman even leveled up to four, both of them now having that distinction. That was considered to be the last ‘easy’ level for warlords to reach, however, so it was going to be a lot harder to level them up from here.
With that final bit of slaughter finished, Tanya used moneymancy to add another two thousand shmuckers to Yojo Mojo’s treasury and led her units to the heavy forest hex. After spending over half of her juice on that date-a-mancy, she didn’t dare try for more. She had just enough juice left for one good shockamancy spell in case they attack. Well, that and her small supply of scrolls. One healomancy scroll from Chief Pierce in return for the juice, one fire-extinguishing dirtamancy scroll, a few thinkamancy scrolls (including, amusingly, a ‘cure headache’ spell), and the last good foolamancy scroll, although with Findamancy guiding the enemy that one wasn’t going to be too useful here.
Still, there was plenty of turn to spare, so she spent the rest of it writing letters to people in an attempt to stay up to date, sending them via her tiara’s message hat function. How did that city defense go, anyway?
As it turned out, it went poorly, but they did end up winning, capturing Prince Sammy. Surrender terms were expected next turn. Excellent news. She sent a missive to Lady Sylvia informing her of this fact. Now, whether she interpreted it as ‘double-check whether she should still be raising hellabad before attacking’ or ‘hurry up and take it before King Dickie surrenders’ was completely up to her.
Tanya suspected she knew which one the battle maniac would pick.
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While they were able to camp on the ground, once morning came they had to immediately go up into the trees, else they forfeited the terrain bonus. Fortunately, there wasn’t an immediate attack the instant Haggar’s turn started at dawn. She was not looking forward to when there were more than two sides/alliances in a given battlespace, which promised to be painful.
She had her knights keeping an eye on the adjacent hexes, while she… well… they were the ones who suggested it…
She was using one of her knights as a chair, another one as a writing desk, and Lord von Kurig was handling the actual transport of the notes with his message hat. She still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of relaxing in mid-air yet, her past lives of being unable to fly making the action less natural and thus more stressful to her than it is her knights. Thus, the solution.
About an hour into the enemy turn, a scout from Haggar attempted to enter the hex with a burning torch. This was easily handled, but it made the weight of the scroll that Sizemore made sure she had all the heavier. Fortunately, fires couldn't go into other hexes on their own, although there were… caveats there. Nevertheless, they can't just burn the surrounding hexes and let it spread, which was good enough.
When she reported this to Ossomer, he had said it was "a rather underhanded strategy, but he expected no less from perfidious Haggar." From experience, Tanya knew that 'underhanded' and 'cheap' tactics were ones that didn't benefit the one who used them, only hurt the enemy. Giving up on the levels from a successful battle was seen as foolish in the long term, and given that wars between royal sides were more for posturing and profit, this made sense as a cultural development.
Personally, Tanya thought that attitude was problematic, but as she was just helping in Jetstone's war, she won't raise a fuss over things. Even in a heavy forest hex, vigilance can prevent such tactics.
Eventually, Ossomer sent a message about Haggar agreeing to the surrender terms that Ossomer demanded for the return of Prince Sammy and the cessation of hostilities. Tanya snorted as she imagined how incensed Lady Sylvia would be over the news.
King Dickie was no fool; both of his attacks failed, and they were primed to wreak havoc on his ability to do anything but turtle up. Without their Chief warlord, that was a losing proposition.
That didn't mean Tanya didn't call Ossomer on a thinkagram to confirm the news once their turn started before leaving the hex, but that was just good sense.