Iliyal took long steps as he marched in front of the line of men, his eyes flicking over them as they stood in silence. There was a line of police officers them, and each of the prisoners looked on with hard eyes as they met his gaze. No one backed away, no one said so much as a whisper. A few were scarred, every man was either huge like a bear or lean like a jaguar. A few had bruises on their knuckles, no one seemed to mind the fact they were in dirty clothes either, nor did they react to the bite of the night’s cold winds.
He was impressed. Honestly, they weren’t half-bad. He could make use of people like this.
Kassandora walked around her map of Kirinyaa once again, in her black uniform, coat trailing behind her as she made long strides akin to military marches, each footstep a slam of her boot against the wooden floor. Was it bad? She supposed it was. Maybe other people would panic about the situation and throw in the towel, maybe they would wave the white flag and surrender in some vain hope for mercy or maybe they would simply panic and be brought to paralysis by the thousands of things to do and manage.
In fact, it wasn’t bad. It was beyond terrible. Elassa’s mages destroyed what remained of Sokolowski’s army-centre. It wasn’t so much a counter-attack after Fortia’s failed assault with Waeh but a total and crushing push, army-centre had effectively ceased to exist. They were looking at a solid average of a third across all of Sokolowski’s twelve divisions, with the Ninth and Eleventh Infantry reporting total losses. Ninth Infantry had lost all of its officers and staff, the reports had been submitted by some Clerical auxiliaries to Kavaa and then passed on to Kassandora. That was another thing to fix, troopers needed to know that if the chain of command broken, they should report to the Goddess of War directly.
“So it’s gone.” Kavaa said. She was the chief logistician, so she was practically always at Central Requisition. Iniri had been recalled too, Kassandora was preparing for a siege. The first thing to fail in sieges was the food, then it’d be the morale. The two Goddesses stood there as Kassandora stalked around the table, both in their black HAUPT uniforms. Long coats and leather boots that curled around the calf, Kavaa had her emblem in silver stamped onto her tall black cap and belt, a winged staff with a snake coiling around it. Iniri had a tree with roots flaring out to tall sides. “Properly gone, there is no Army Centre anymore.”
Kassandora stalked around the table again. She didn’t even need these two here, she just wanted to share her joy with someone. She felt it honestly this time, it wasn’t the sweltering heat of battle, where instinct dominated long reasoning and actions had to be instant. No, this was the searing joyous heat of a war. The orchestra was playing constantly in her mind now, it never turned off. No matter if she was planning or looking through her men to perform inspections, this feeling…
This feeling, put very simply, is what she needed.
“Army Centre has successfully pulled back to the mountains.” Kassandora’s voice boomed throughout the wooden room. It was inside of one Helenna’s massive oak trees she grew to quickly grow CR. Arascus had said the trees could be turned into a tourist location once the war was over. “Currently, we have around eighty thousand men garrisoning the Central Mountain Range. Sokolowski’s artillery has been hidden, we’ve lost roughly half the guns. None were reclaimed.” Kassandora wagged her finger at Kavaa and Iniri. “That’s the important part.”
Kavaa flicked her pale grey hair away, those eyes of the same colour didn’t look impressed. Iniri smiled, giggled nervously, and nodded. “So?” The Goddess of Nature managed to squeak out the one word.
“So I had been aiming for fourty thousand to make it in the retreat.” Kassandora replied. “We have double that. Sokolowski can command, Iliyal would have pulled out maybe ninety thousand, I wouldn’t be able to do better either.”
“You could not?” Kavaa asked.
“If I was there, Elassa would hunt me down and give chase.” For once, Kassandora did not mind the questions. The drums in her head began another chorus, men began to train outside. Practice with the new artillery rounds that had timed fuses. There was no sound though, the tree insulated them from the outside’s prying eyes and ears. “So we’d be down me, and most likely some fifty thousand.”
“I see.” Kavaa said. Kassandora did not care one bit if Kavaa saw or not, right now, she was enjoying the sound of her own voice.
“Elassa won’t be able to push to us immediately. Even given that her entire army flies.” That, Kassandora did not expect. It had been planned for, of course, as everything was, but the better move was to advance in a sweeping line with Guardians and Paladins serving as meat shields for the mages. “Elassa herself won’t come here alone.”
“Why not?” Kavaa asked.
“Because we have Anassa, Fer, Olephia, you two and me.” Kassandora raised her arms, stood before the map, on the other side of the table to the two Goddesses, and slammed her palms down. It was one solid chunk of wood, simply grown out of the floor through Iniri’s magic, but it still somehow gave a shake underneath her weight. “Even if it was just Anassa and Olephia, would you risk an engagement like that?”
Stolen story; please report.
“Mmh.” Kavaa replied.
“So we’re letting her come to us?”
“Indeed!” Kassandora shouted excitedly. “I give them one week, they crossed a third of the mountain range today, so three days for the mountains, four days for the Jungle.”
“And if they don’t?” Kavaa asked, her eyes narrowing as she put her finger down onto the map of Kirinyaa. The mountains curled around towards the west. Below it was a massive natural jungle, one of the last ones remaining in Arika that weren’t tainted by the creeping woods that Kassandora had initiated the Reclamation War on. “They could circle east and cut off Zalewski’s front from supplies. Then Maisara comes down to smash them, the coast is open and it’s…” She looked up. “Well, it’s over.”
“But they will.” Kassandora said. “Because we’ll make them.”
“How?” Kavaa asked.
“If they do stop, which I doubt in the first place, Fer is already somewhere here.” Kassandora used her finger to draw a circle close to Kavaa’s. “Can you afford to stay in a Jungle when the trees have eyes? When every leaf could have a gun behind it?” Kassandora didn’t let Kavaa answer, frankly, she wanted to listen to her own ideas out loud. “And if she does go towards the coast and cut Zalewski off.” Kassandora pointed to Nanbasa. “Arascus raises a home-guard and marches out to meet her, we force them to siege every city along the coast. As they’re wasting time on that.” Kassandora pointed to Ekkerson’s front. “Olephia moves north, we let one city fall, be burned, that’s the Olephia justification done, we let her run rampant. Then it really is over.”
At the end of the day, this war had been won before they started. The entire White Pantheon ignored the most important of warfare, which was to set the battlefield. They had to come in, claim a country, and then somehow maintain a level of legitimacy in the future. Great-War tactics of razing cities, of purges and land-cracking simply could not be done. Kassandora’s only victory was the demolition of the White Pantheon.
All of Kirinyaa could burn, and she would still win.
Fortia simply chose the wrong battlefield. There was nothing else to say about that. Kassandora had noticed it in the silent reaction to Melukal, as that city burned, the White Pantheon said nothing. As Epa rioted, it stayed silent. And it had stayed so absent and so silent that Wissel Ellenheim had decided to take matters into his own hands. If that was not a failure in leadership, then Kassandora did not know what to call it. Every soldier in her army knew of her, they all saw her, Kassandora was an omnipresent spectre in their lives.
“So we’re just going to what?” Iniri said. “Hole up and siege?”
“If Elassa moves on us, which is the best decision for her to do.” Kassandora pointed at the dot underlined CR on the map. “Because that would cut off the central and western armies, and the supplies for the eastern one would have to be re-routed through the civilian infrastructure across the coast.” Kassandora’s red eyes met Iniri’s and Kavaa’s. “If I see it, Fortia sees it. And if Fortia sees it, Elassa knows about it. So we do prepare for a long siege.”
“And then what?” Kavaa asked.
“Fer is already moving back here, Anassa can cover the distance in a few hours even if she’s on a frontline.” Kassandora replied flatly.
“So we’re the bait?” Kavaa asked and Kassandora raised an eyebrow. That was bad, if Kavaa were to start doubting now, if she started get moments of fear. She had to be rallied, or at least kept strong enough to stay here until Elassa forced Anassa’s barriers to be activated.
“I am betting my life on it.” Kassandora said. “So I will stay here.” She smiled at the two girls. The orchestra playing in Kassandora’s head let out a chorus of drums again, so another volley had been fired outside.
“Elassa is bringing a lot of Arcadia’s strength.” Iniri said. “I’m sure you have numbers of how many mages we’re facing.”
“Sokolowski’s front reports an estimate of forty to fifty thousand.” Kassandora answered, just as quickly and flatly as before. “Or rather, I’ve had reports of thirty formations of mages. Take a sixth away for men reporting the same one twice. They have somewhere between fifteen hundred to two thousand each, forty to fifty thousand seems like a safe bet, and it’s like Fortia to use nice round numbers.” Kassandora didn’t even know if Kavaa or Iniri were even listening, her finger trailed off to Zalewski’s front and Army East, here, we’ve had reports that mages now make up half the teams.” Then she moved to Ekkerson’s front and Army West. “Here, there’s been some bolstering of numbers but not as big, I think they’re scared of Olephia personally. In total, it’s a safe bet we’re facing some hundred-thousand mages, reserves are usually double, so it’s three-hundred-thousand altogether.”
Kassandora looked up to Kavaa and Iniri. They were both staring at her blank faced, eyes wide, their cheeks pale. “How do you stay so calm?” Iniri asked quietly. “When you talk about something like… this?”
The Goddess of War answered as honestly as she could. “I just find all my worries and fears, and then I ignore them.” That answer obviously wasn’t satisfying, but she had talked to them about this before. Kavaa raised her own question.
“And we plan to stall them somehow, right? At least get their numbers down?”
Kassandora retreated across her room to her desk, then pulled out two pictures. Each one of a plane, with four jets strapped to them, painted black. Their fronts were topped off with yellow, and a pair of hunting red eyes had been painted on behind the cockpit, as if to resemble two birds of prey. But these birds of prey were different than they had been a mere week ago.
Their beaks were open, and each one had a tongue of iron barrels, all mounted together and ready to spit lead at whoever came close. Kassandora brought the pictures back to Kavaa and Iniri. “Raptor One and Raptor Two have finished. We test them out now, if these work…” Kassandora could not even believe it. She remembered the great air-cavalry of the past, the winged horses and the demonic ones that left trails of fire in the sky. She remembered how they felled men, and then she remembered how the long pike and hedgehog tactics adapted to it.
But now, without the White Pantheon having dedicated weaponry to deal with aircraft that breached the sound barrier, how were they to adapt? Even mages, what could they do against a vehicle that didn’t have to get close to attack, and was already a mile away by the time they finished chanting a spell? Kassandora smiled. “We have secured twenty-six small engine aircraft from KAL, they’ll be ready to fly in two days. Elassa may not get tired, but her mages do. By the time they arrive here, you’ll see why I give my soldiers eight hours of sleep a day.”