By midday of the third day the defences were as ready for whatever they might face as I could make them. This however didn’t mean we simply sat around waiting for the bandits to show up, provided of course they ever did.

After one last inspection of the defences I temporarily divided the men now under my command into two forces. The first consisted of Sergeant Tucker's first squad and the second, everyone else. This of course didn’t include the six individuals I had tasked with keeping a lookout for the bandits, since all the actual scouts were as you can imagine still busy searching for the bandits.

For the rest of the day and well into the night I had the two forces engage in a series of mock battles with each other. Sergeant Tucker would attempt to defend the camp while I tried to take it. At first, I acted as if I was completely unaware that the camp was currently occupied and this allowed Tucker to launch a surprise attack upon us that managed to take out half our force before we could even begin to react to it and the rest followed shortly.

After the second time this happened, during which we managed to last a bit longer since he had in my mind launched his attack a bit prematurely while we were barely in range of his archers, I began approaching the camp more cautiously. The third attempt was also a failure but this time we managed to take out two of the enemy before we were defeated. We did even better the fourth time around as I managed to extract some of my men from the trap before we were all killed. For the fifth attempt, I split my force in two and had them approach the camp from slightly different directions.

Tucker could have responded to this situation in one of three ways, either divide his force into two and attack both my columns at the same time, concentrate his force on one of them and then deal with the other after he was done or split the difference somehow. I was unsure as to how he would respond but felt that whatever his response might be his limited numbers, even compared to mine would put him at a severe disadvantage. In any event, he took advantage of the fact that one of my columns was advancing at a slower rate than the other and hit it with two of his men while he and the other nine dealt with the faster one. The two were able to distract their target enough that they didn’t notice when the others after taking care of their target quickly enough moved onto them. They lost more men in that attack than the previous four together but nonetheless, they managed to emerge victorious.

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I managed to seize control of the camp on my sixth attempt but not without taking heavy losses in return. My next three attempts failed however and the final attempt just after dusk only succeeded because while everyone was equally tired by then I had the numerical advantage.

All in all, we had a productive day of it, we uncovered several deficiencies in our defence and worked out how best to remedy them. We also came up with several new strategies for dealing with the bandits and the men bonded over their shared experiences though of course a slight rivalry developed between Tucker's men and the rest of us that mightn’t prove all that helpful in the future.

The messenger that arrived that night before our last encounter brought news that while there hadn’t been any encounters with the bandit's distraction force there had been a possible sighting of their main force on the other side of the river that separated Lone Shadow Manor from its neighbour, Pine Cone Manor. It was unconfirmed and came from a passing merchant who was new to the area and thus not entirely trusted.

The next morning after replacing the sentries that had been on the lookout for approaching bandits all night I had the rest of the men stand down until midday. Nothing much happened during that time other than the arrival of a messenger from Captain Walker informing me that the sighting of the bandits the previous day had turned out to be a mercenary company making their way to a contract in Cherry Bottom Manor, four days travel away.

During the afternoon as a sort of team-building exercise, I had the men engage in a friendly game of Palbere. While that was happening shortly after two one of the sentries reported sighting a lone horseman approaching our position.