Alvis was racing across the Morey Plains, the fierce night winds whipping his military greatcoat loudly.

Large bands of demi-human soldiers and vigorous hammer drakes galloped alongside him. Stimulant drugs kept their organs and nerves in a heightened state of arousal, as if an endless stream of energy was surging from within, making the fatigue of the long march seem trivial.

The silence of the march was shattered by a piercing sound. Alvis withdrew a communication orb from his spatial ring, its crystal surface now shrouded in a red mist.

"Has something happened to Erl?"

He couldn't help but furrow his brow, the ominous bloody mist a sign of grave danger. His entire family was still there.

"Lord Raphael?"

Alvis established the connection.

On the other end, the crimson dragon sounded utterly exhausted, his muffled grating voice inquiring about the direction of the coming battle.

"Is the situation in Erl really that unfavorable?" Alvis asked.

"Indeed, the human forces are too strong. They overran my old lair in just one day, and Erl's southern suburbs have also fallen. My forces are now compressed into the area around Pillar Mountain and the city center. Over half of the dragon kin have been killed or wounded."

Alvis fell silent, unsurprised by these results. As an former imperial officer, he knew well that in this new age of combined theory and weapons, humans could sweep across the entire continent if they wished - they simply dared not wage total war against the dragons and orcs.

"I imagine you may have to abandon even Pillar Mountain, if necessary," he said after a long pause.

The crimson dragon on the other end abruptly went silent. Then a muffled growl, suppressing immense fury, came through:

"My dear Deluca, captain of the guards, you should understand why I attacked the humans and established a puppet regime with defenses, shouldn't you? If not for that gold, how could I ever have left the dragon land!"

"But you must come to the southern front to stabilize the situation. Otherwise, Ryton's air fleet will seize air supremacy over the Pillar Mountain battlefield. They'll be able to penetrate the city at will and destroy everything. It's better to just cede Pillar Mountain to them to stall their advance. The battle dragons will hold defensive patrols to protect the climbing land troops. Then we can take the opportunity to crush the imperial allied forces."

Raphael's roar immediately erupted: "That's impossible! I absolutely will not relinquish a single coin! Not even a grain of gold sand!"

Alvis tried to reason with him: "This is just strategy. We must concentrate all our forces into a single sharp spear, to end the war in the south as quickly and decisively as possible. That way, we'll hold prisoners to have a platform for dialogue with the nations, and still have strength left to hit back hard at the Rytons."

"As I understand it, their resources are scarce - uranium fuel, food, clothing, iron and copper ore are almost all imported. We can use the prisoners as hostages to force the Empire to make them withdraw, without even another battle."

After saying all this, Alvis clearly heard the sound of fangs grinding from inside the communication orb. He prayed fervently that Raphael would agree, because the imperial allied forces also had battle dragons.

Without a powerful crimson dragon garrisoning the area and singled handedly opposing all human air forces, ground operations would be impossible.

"...Very well..." An unwilling, resentful draconic howl emerged. Alvis breathed a sigh of relief.

"Alvis, I entrust all my resources to you in the past. Today, I also place all my hopes for this enterprise upon you. Do not disappoint me."

"You can count on me!" Alvis said firmly with a wry smile. "I've already lost everything in the human world. Years of defending home and country only earned me cold stares and venting of rage. So I've placed my most precious family under your command. We were fated for this path from the moment we met in that desert so many years ago."

Raphael let out a long sigh. "So be it then. May victory favor you."

Alvis ended the communication and took out a map to study it.

The night sky was pitch black, a moonless night, so he had to take out a daylight stone lantern to provide illumination.

"We're approximately in this area now," Alvis said, pointing to the outskirts of Oakland City. "The Karuks have surely already sent word of the attack to Cornet. But knowing his personality, he won't cower and reinforce the flanks of his clustered army groups. He'll more likely press the attack night and day."

He pondered for a moment, then asked the rat dragon in front, "Kururu, what time is it now?"

"Probably around 11:40 PM."

"Then we're making excellent progress. The stability and speed of Ground III are even better than I imagined," Alvis said.

Previously, Alvis had conservatively estimated they could reach their destination around 1am, but they were making even better time than expected.

In the distance, the dark silhouette of Oakland's ruined walls could already be seen, but in the pitch black of the moonless night, the remains of that once mighty city quickly blended into the surrounding darkness, making one question whether any structures even existed there at all.

The blood wyverns silently returned to Alvis's side. "We've detected numerous scattered heat signatures around two kilometers out, likely sentries."

Alvis nodded. "Order the army to halt."

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Soon the entire marching column began decelerating. The billowing dust and smoke were silently swallowed by the night, with bloody shadows occasionally streaking across the sky.

Anubis approached. "We're here, sir! The lads are eager for a good scrap!"

He grinned wolfishly, licking his lips - he relished these opportunistic ambushes.

"The Oakland garrison doesn't seem to have constructed any fortifications," Alvis analyzed after hearing the scouts' reports. "Their positions only have a few bunkers and trenches. There are many charred destruction marks on the ground, likely left from Raphael's recent harassment raids."

Anubis struggled to contain his eagerness as Alvis continued pondering without giving the order. He thought they could simply charge in for an indiscriminate slaughter - why bother with all this complexity?

But Alvis was considering how to defeat these garrison troops with maximum efficiency. He couldn't afford to waste any effort now.

…

September 5th, 12:14am

The few Oakland garrison soldiers were snoring loudly in their underground barracks - a relatively secure location, since the dragon had been bottled up in Oakenburg and couldn't easily get out.

Those left behind were mostly logistics and transportation personnel. Even the combat engineers had been redeployed to the front, as Cornet believed the Oakland position had lost its importance for heavy fortification - better to concentrate forces at the main battle.

So when sentries began getting silently killed one by one by the blood wyverns, no alarms were raised. People let their guard down easily when danger lurked unseen before them.

Until an immense explosion thundered across the silent night sky!

The shockwave rippling up from the surface jolted every soldier awake. Dirt and pebbles rained down from the underground bunker ceilings, nearly burying them alive.

"What's happening?"

"Enemy attack! Enemy attack!"

Alarms blared throughout the camp as drowsy Natterians and Moreys were startled awake, first thinking it was just another dragon raid.

But the shaking of the entire underground complex felt ominous - neither fire nor radiant breath could cause such tremendous quaking, more like thousands of field magic cannons erupting on the surface.

"Send some men to check it out!" an officer ordered.

But then the tremors intensified even more, with huge chunks of earth beginning to collapse inward!

"Abort! Get out of here! This place is coming down!"

Everyone had to abandon the doomed underground works, scrambling through the maze of passages to reach the surface exit.

But when they emerged, cold sweat drenched their terror-stricken faces.

The pitch-black sky was lit up by the flickering glow of cinder shells - those volatile spheres trailing fire streaked down like meteors, pounding the Oakland emplacements with pinpoint accuracy.

Raging fires and explosions quickly engulfed the area. The massive stockpiles of rations and munitions staged here for imminent transfer to the front were almost all destroyed.

"Return fire! Fight back!" some brave officers and soldiers still rallied their comrades to regroup and fight.

The griffin Scouts quickly pinpointed the enemies' location a kilometer away.

"It's a band of dragon kin - don't know how they got around behind us!" they shouted as they flew low over the positions.

The garrison forces opened fire in the indicated direction with their pitiful few field magic cannons, but the scattered barrage couldn't suppress the enemy.

One cannon's uranium power cell was quickly depleted. Artillerymen rushed to reload a fresh power pack and clear radioactive fouling from the barrel to continue firing.

But suddenly, their surroundings plunged into darkness. The soldiers froze, instinctively looking up.

The hammer drakes' cinder shell bombardment had ceased. The intense explosions faded to ringing echoes amid the crackle of raging fires.

"Are they out of ammunition?" some thought.

But the officers and grizzled veterans stared ahead tensely, seeing this as the prelude to a close assault.

But nothing happened. The allied soldiers couldn't help but stand taller, trying to see what was going on.

"Sir, perhaps we should recon…" As one sergeant was about to suggest scouting to his superior, a uranium round punched through his chest from the flank, blasting an eruption of blood from his body.

Before the officer could react, several flare grenades came arcing in from somewhere, shattering on impact to fill the entire area with blinding light.

Then he only heard a tremendous roar before searing agony lanced through his own body, and he crumpled to the ground in torment.

Over ten thousand demi-human warriors had circled around to the north while the hammer drakes pinned down the garrison with their bombardment. As soon as the cinder shells stopped, they charged in to utterly crush the exhausted allied troops.

"Run! Run for your lives!"

Riding in Ground III, the demi-humans rapidly closed on the defenders' positions.

Then they dismounted and began indiscriminately slaughtering the humans with repeating bowguns.

This was far more demoralizing than enduring distant artillery fire and unseen enemies - seeing comrades cut down one by one by visible, tangible harm. The foes seemed hellish demons mercilessly reaping lives. Military police and officers struggled to rally morale in close combat when each soldier felt isolated on their own island.

Without that collective cohesion, the weaker individual instincts for self-preservation and cowardice became amplified. The garrison troops finally broke under the strain and began fleeing in blind panic.

One runner prompted two, then two prompted ten more. Finally, amid the hammer drakes' stampeding assault waves, the imperial allied Oakland garrison completely collapsed into a disorganized rout fleeing aimlessly into the all-consuming darkness.

"Orders from the commander - do not blindly pursue the enemy! Prioritize seizing needed supplies and replenishing resources!"

Blood wyverns winged back and forth along the army's lines, bellowing to restrain the demi-humans' hatred and bloodlust.

Alvis waited in the command vehicle a few kilometers away until the wolfman Anubis brought word of their victory.

Anubis laughed uproariously. "Your strategies are brilliant! Those humans really never noticed our flanking force at all. And just one charge was enough to break their will and send them fleeing - spared us a lot of effort in mopping up."

"Such is the frailty of the human heart - I merely took advantage," Alvis said confidently.

He hoped to rapidly seize this position and prevent the enemy from harassing him further - ideally ending the battle within an hour.

This required exploiting human psychological weaknesses. In modern warfare, ranged attacks were the primary means - infantry often barely glimpsed the enemy. So once melee combat began, victory was imminent.

The skill requirements for individual soldiers had decreased compared to the old sword-hacking eras.

Alvis judged the garrison troops here to likely be inferior quality, with the elites at the main front. So simple feints and envelopment, combined with the demi-humans' furious assault, easily broke the enemy's will to resist and prompted mass flight.

He had even deliberately left an escape route to the south to encourage their panicked retreat, as long as they didn't linger and delay his forces.

"Sir Alvis, we've found a port facility with several ships - it appears to be a resupply line for the human army groups," a blood wyvern suddenly reported, winging over.

"Oh? Recently arrived shipments?" Alvis asked curiously.

"Yes, there was barely any security. We overpowered the few humans and captured the rest," the wyvern's eyes glinted bloody crimson.

"I'll take a look." Alvis ordered the rat dragon guard Kururu to maneuver Ground Transport Three toward the port.

The area was now swarming with figures - over a dozen wooden ships docked at the piers. Demi-human warriors constantly trod the gangplanks, hauling off supplies while over a hundred captives in sailor and crew attire huddled under guard.

Alvis's boots crunched across the burnt, ashen earth as he strode expressionlessly up to the prisioner group. They didn't dare meet his gaze, only trembling at the approach of the one who seemingly held their fates.

"Which of you can tell me when Cornet's army group was scheduled for its next resupply run? It may determine whether that gentleman gets to reunite with his family," Alvis said coldly.

"You? You are?" a bearded man blurted in surprise, looking up.

Alvis frowned in annoyance at the interruption, but then a thoughtful look crossed his face. "You seem…familiar to me. Weren't you the captain who helped smuggle me out years ago?"