The more civilized areas of the Bestiral Kingdom were blissfully ignorant of what was transpiring at the very edge of their nation, and the Beastmen made perfectly sure to keep it that way. As Vaile had so eloquently put it, “The only way to avoid an immediate and overwhelming military response while the operation is going on is to systematically eliminate all forms of rapid communication between the affected and unaffected areas. In order for the destruction to be both total and unchallenged, any and all messages of any kind must be intercepted and eliminated, otherwise the Kingdom can and likely will send its military to undo our work and/or utterly annihilate us.”

Taking the words of the God of Gods to heart, the united Beastman Tribes had, before the attacks had even begun, initiated a series of raids that were designed to ‘systematically cut the lines of communication’ between the outlying frontier territories near the Karnarous Forest and the deeper parts of the Bestiral Kingdom. And now, as the pathetic Werean town burned and its people either died or were captured, the fruits of that effort were beginning to show. Had the preliminary operation not been undertaken, the villages and hamlets they had despoiled and then razed on the way to their current stop would have sounded the alarm and the town they now were ransacking would have had a great deal more defenders. In fact, they might not have even been able to reach this destination in the first place if their previous encounters with the Kingdom’s military were anything to go by.

As the nameless town burned and sacrifices were made to the Beast Gods, a single humanoid figure watched with unease as he realized that maybe, just maybe, he had quite possibly created quite the monster. With the Beastmen uniquely suited for hit-and-run tactics and guerilla warfare due to their animalistic appearance and capabilities, Vaile worried if they would merely stop their warpath at the final reaches of where the Karnarous Forest would willing end, or if they would decide that they could not risk another group attempting the same thing and continue to expand as though everyone and everything were an enemy.

As the flames rose high into the night and the smell of blood, bile, feces and reproductive fluids filled the air in and around that town, nobody really knew just how far the war reconquest would go, and no one knew what the final fate of those in the Bestiral Kingdom would be. The two conflicting views on what should be done with their foe were beginning to generate tiny fractures in the cohesion of the unified tribes, and no one was aware of what that would bring.

…

Two and a half weeks after the unnamed town on the edges of the kingdom was effectively razed to the ground and had its people either slaughtered or abducted, the other parts of the kingdom, those deeper in, began to feel the effects of the Beastman Tribes’ wrath. This was due to one of the most boneheaded things a nation could do in regard to internal policy, and that was to put all of one type of ‘egg’ in a single basket. The way the Bestiral Kingdom’s resource-management system operated was rather moronic. Instead of diversifying the areas in which they grew wheat and other foodstuffs, they instead continuously pushed the farms, pastures, and ranches to the edges of their nation, more specifically the edge that bordered the Karnarous Forest.

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While the land they occupied and had taken from the Beastmen was extremely fertile, thus allowing for practically any temperate crop or animal to be grown and raised anywhere in their nation, they had instead repeatedly forced farmers and livestock-handlers to move farther and farther away from the main bastion of their civilization. This was in an effort to ‘beautify and civilize’ the ‘untamed wilderness’, but it was also so that the higher-ups would not have to worry about the lower classes appearing within their cities and major towns.

This, over time, drastically increased the strain on the food supply chain, and made it even harder for lower and middle-class citizens to live in the deeper parts of the Kingdom. After all, when the prices of food and housing are much, much higher in one part of the nation than they are in another, the smart thing for the poor to do is to pick up and move out to the cheaper places.

This state of affairs was shacky at best, and when the tithes of food that were supposed to have arrived a week ago never showed up, the situation in the middle and inner parts of the Bestiral Kingdom began to degenerate rather quickly. On Earth, the common joke is that the French throw riots whenever the price of bread fluctuates, but at least they can afford not only the bread but other foods and drinks. In the Bestiral Kingdom, however, it only took a few days for the price of a single loaf of bread to start reaching ludicrous territories.

It is unlikely that Vaile or the Beastmen had anticipated this, but the fact of the matter was that they were not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. With the war progressing far more quickly than they had anticipated, some desired that the full might of the Tribes be used on the cities and towns further away from the rapidly expanding Karnarous Forest. Vaile, however, had a different idea. Rather than try and risk costly sieges undertaken by those who knew nothing of siege warfare, the better option, in his mind, was to allow the Bestiral Kingdom to implode and then take advantage of the riots and violence to mount conquests of each major settlement, one by one.

They would never be able to destroy the larger settlements with the forces they had if the gates were shut, but when the places they wished to target were in the middle of city-wide riots, the odds would be that the gates would be left open so as to allow the rich and well-off a chance to flee for their lives, or possibly allow the wrathful mob within to move outside. Although, the question remained, which place was the first to target?

There were only a few valid choices, and after much deliberation, they settled on one in particular. It was a place the Beastmen cursed with every breath, a residence of slaughter, torment and immeasurable suffering for their kind. It was a place commonly referred to as ‘The Pit’; a city of slavers, mad ‘scientists’ and torturers built into the remains of a strip-mine. With their target selected, the combined tribes moved together to take the domain of despair known to the Wereans as Eden’s Crater.