Now that my newly armed force was ready, it was time to strike back. I went looking for the closest raiding party, and it didn’t take long to find one, it’s Collector construct gorging itself on a beetle in the midst of its retinue.
My Spiders marched as ordered, flowing through plants and grass like a living avalanche, impossible to make out where one's legs ended and another’s began. The stony tide turned around ponds and flowed past feather trees until the enemy came in sight. They had noticed the thundering approach long before we arrived, and their ranks had turned toward us. The scouts were already spreading out, fifteen against thirty, but their weapons were sharp and armour sturdy. Whether ours were greater or lesser would show itself soon.
I ordered my spiders to assemble in rank, forming a shield wall as I had been taught long ago. Of course, they had no shields, but their backside was almost as good. A round expanse of smooth armour, unlike the mess of eyes, joints and other weak spots that was their front. Half of them turned about, facing away from the enemy, and the others climbed atop. More literal wall than shield wall, with my soldiers poised to strike from above. A handful were ordered to guard the sides, entangling any who’d try to pass around it in skirmishes until reinforcements could be sent.
As it turned out, the last precaution was largely unnecessary. The smaller scouts simply clashed into the wall, trying in vain to reach atop it and strike at the defenders. The half that provided the wall were barely harmed, only an occasional scratch or bite that didn’t penetrate deep into the body. The scouts didn’t seem to realize that the wall was as much their enemy as those that harassed them from atop.
The new fangs worked wonders. Though it didn’t cut as easily through the crystal like the centipede had cut through stone, it left scratches with every bite. Once or twice, one of mine managed to get a limb in their fangs and hold on long enough to sever it entirely, but the scratches did more work than the occasional dismemberment. Every scratch was a wound bleeding mana, sapping away the force that animated the constructs, and mine were getting in more hits than the enemy. Already the scout’s movements were getting stiffer, more sluggish, but victory wouldn’t come just as easy as that.
The enemy's goliaths, the hulking monstrosities three times the size of my spiders, advanced towards my wall. Not all four of them, though. One remained, protecting the Collector. Meanwhile, a handful of scouts, those with the least injuries, broke away from the fighting and retreated. Back to the Collector and the Goliath that carried it away.
I took the chance and collapsed my shield wall. Outnumbering the enemy three to one, I would take my chance in a skirmish. The wall wouldn’t have held against the heavy hits of the goliaths, I suspected. The would likely have been able to simply use their superior size and strength to push through the ranks, if not outright crush them under a strike of their limbs. Better to clean up the scouts quickly and deal with the goliaths on their own.
A frantic trade of blows followed, as the spiders I had set to guard the flanks now circled the enemy and attacked them from the back, while the majority of my force was keeping their attention on the front. With the scouts unable to turn around to deal with the smaller party, due to that exposing their vulnerable back to even more biting fangs, my army made quick work of them. Their movements had already been sluggish, so mine were able to evade the worst of their attacks, if not all. By the time the last of the scouts was dead, I had lost five of my own, and three more likely wouldn’t make it past the battle the way they were bleeding from severed limbs and gushing wounds.
I had just about enough time to get my spiders in order before the goliaths reached the battle. Their enormous size might make them a considerable threat, but it also slowed them down immensely. I decided to take advantage of that, sending ten of my spiders to follow the fleeing collector and its guards, while the rest were set to harass the goliaths. My spiders were much swifter, so I reasoned they would likely be able to run literal circles around these giant foes and attack their backs without taking too many hits of their own. Since the enemy didn’t seem to use any formations of its own, I wasn’t worried about them guarding each other’s rears.
With orders given, I followed the detachment I had sent after the collector. The scouts had formed a loose protective half-circle around the goliaths back, on which my target was perched. So they might be using formation after all. This boded ill for my abandoned soldiers, but the collector was too valuable a target to turn my attention away now. If it could deliver its stored magic to its master, that would only mean more constructs raiding my garden soon.
So, I decided to try my luck. The five spiders were ordered to attack the enemies scouts in a frontal assault. I didn’t fancy their chances in taking on the goliath in a frontal assault, and my force still outnumbered the scouts two to one.
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The skirmish was quick and violent. Without me being able to encircle the enemy, due to them keeping their backs close to the goliath, and my own forces just as wounded as the enemy this time, the scouts quickly won the upper hand. At first, it looked rather balanced, with them trading blows one for one, but then one of my spiders died due to an unfortunate strike to the head. The other one that had been engaging the same enemy quickly followed, so now that scout was free to help another, and it only got worse from there.
My detachment was wiped before I could even signal a retreat. Not that I thought that would have helped, considering the scouts were just as fast, if not faster, than my own. I returned my attention to the other battle, and saw it was coming to a close as well, but a far more favourable one. The goliaths had slowly been exhausted by constant harassment, as I predicted. It wasn’t a victory without loss, though, as evidenced by the crushed and bisected spiders littering the field. The sorry state of the remains made counting them harder, but I estimated them at no more than ten.
As the goliaths bled more and more power, it only got easier for my spiders to evade their strikes, so the rest of the battle was a done thing, even if it was still to be fought out. I kept my eye out for further reinforcements while my forces finished the clean-up. Luckily, there seemed to be no coordination between the enemy’s raiding parties, as neither of the other two within my territory went in our direction.
As the last goliath finally came to rest with a last, stuttering step, I signalled my spiders to retreat toward the breeding contingent I had set aside. On the way there, I tried to mend what I could for the wounded, channelling mana to speed along the bodies healing. It was similar enough to the workings of spending along their growth, so I had little difficulty in mending cuts and open wounds, though lost limbs were beyond my ability to heal. My workings simply sped along what the body could already do on its own, after all, and though I didn’t doubt there was a way for me to heal those wounds as well, now wasn’t the time to figure that out. I had already spent too much time on study while my garden was under attack.
Fourteen foes slain, fourteen of my own as well, sixteen returned from battle. Now that I had time to count my ranks, the numbers didn’t look as encouraging as I had first hoped. If I couldn’t shift that trade of bodies more in my favour, the war would be a thing of attrition, coming down to who’d be able to produce more bodies faster. And though I had no doubt the numbers would have looked even worse had I not given my soldiers their new armaments, it evidently wasn’t enough on its own, and the enemy had already shown it could adapt as well.
It was evident that the enemy understood little of battle formations, but that advantage was limited. With enough battles to study, it would likely pick up many of the tricks I had used today. Assuming it was able to study the battles, that is. After all, I was not able to look into its territory with all too much clarity, so it stood to reason the same applied to it. That might also account for the terrible coordination of the raiding parties, both between members of the same, and different parties altogether. They might simply be running on instructions given before they were sent out. If that was the case, it was an exploitable weakness, but I was too weary to accept is as truth just yet. Until I was able to verify this theory, I would assume it to be false.
No, I would need to create other advantages to win this war. The lizard project seemed a promising route, with a properly improved unit of them, I would be able to strike at collectors behind the enemies defensive lines and deny it that mana. It would still be able to draw on ambient mana, true, but its territory was smaller than mine, still restricted to the crater my original mistake had created. I didn’t know if that was due to a decision on its part, or somehow the rest of the cave had already been claimed by me already. Or maybe there was some more complex, arcane reasoning related to the exact manner of mistake my working had been. No matter what, if I could deny it the extra mana it was collecting from my denizens, I was sure I could win the battle of attrition. My territory was larger, thus the amount of ambient mana I was collecting would be as well. Besides that, I was also sure its method of creating servants was more mana consuming than mine. After all, it had to work from scratch to create every one of them, while I simply had to speed along natural processes, and if my first experiment had taught me one lesson, it was that going against the grooves of the universe was much costlier than moving inside them. True, my creatures required food and space, which all required their own mana too, but that was already there. Unlike the concentrated workings I used to grow them, their natural use of many simply cycled it from their surroundings into their body and back again. There was nothing spent there. On the contrary, that forceful mingling of my own mana with ambient one even increased the rate at which it was converted.
Yes, if I could consistently take out the collectors, I would be able to starve the enemy out. That would have to be my ultimate strategy.
The working I had set up on the breeding pair of lizards was still in the back of my mind, so there should already be a clutch of eggs there, if not a small pack of young ones. And when I checked, true enough, there were a dozen small lizards crammed in to the crack with their parents. It was incredibly tight there, but the lizards didn’t seem to mind much, especially since I was still leading a constant supply of food to them. But if I wanted to not only raise the population to a stable level, but one that could sustain battle and ensuing losses, they would need more space.
Luckily, I had just acquired a new work force, equipped with claws capable of digging into solid stone who’d also appreciate a safe, secluded space to rear their young in.