"Did that battle feel as one-sided as it looked?"

Valserys looked up from his maps to find Shifty at the mouth of his tent. The eldest of Cayden's inner circle and by far the most mature of any player Valserys had met, Shifty was the closest thing to a true comrade that Valserys had met amongst their kind. They weren't friends, they shared little in the way of interests or duties, nor did they often exchange words. Shifty was just dependable, firm, and without the sort of excentricities that dominated so many of his kind. He'd yet to personally irk Valserys, and that counted for quite a bit.

That could always change, however. Say by interrupting his planning session for idle gossip.

"That would depend on how it looked," Valserys observed. "I do take your meaning, and yes, it was decidedly unfair from where I stood. If only all battles in my career had been so lopsided."

"Well stick with Cayden and Silver once this is all over and..." Shifty trailed off with a frown. "Something I said?"

Valserys shook his head. "Nothing you intended to say. It is just not the first time I have heard some variation on that thought or idea today, and I must say I am growing tired of it."

"Of playing second fiddle?" When Valserys' expression turned to one of confusion, Shifty realized that neither the instrument nor the idiom were native to Babel. "Of being subordinate to someone."

"That in and of itself? No. I'm a military man, I've spent my life as a subordinate in some fashion or another."

Shifty nodded understandingly. "Ah, so not that you are taking orders, just who they are from."

"And that the orders are better than any I'd have dreamt up," Valserys confessed. "I'm out here because the 'bonus' I add to my troops is worth more than my advice in the strategy room. You don't feel the same, outclassed, when dealing with some of your peers?"

"Honestly? No. Silver is a monster, and Cayden feels like he is well on his way to becoming one. I don't have the same talent as them, let alone the same drive, Babel was just a means to an end for me, I never planned to win the game."

Shifty could tell he'd struck a nerve by the way Valserys set his jaw before answering. "I understand. If you'll excuse me, however-"

"No, man. Sorry. That was bad of me." Shifty held his hands out in a placating gesture, one that was ignored as Valserys returned to his maps. "Even if this place... I don't think that way about you, about any of you."

"That is generous," Valserys replied in a voice that suggested he considered it anything but.

"I get it. You're feeling upstaged because some kids come along and win battles that you don't think you could have. That isn't on you, though. I watched your men fight today, you fight like people because you are people. Maybe that is what is throwing you off. This whole floor event, it isn't structured like an actual military campaign. It is structured like a game, with rules that can be bent and broken. And if there is one thing Cayden and Silver are good at, its rules-lawyering."

"That I am flawed by design is not something that is endearing to my woes."

"You aren't," Shifty replied vehemently. "You still have all that real, practical military knowledge. You just have to find a way to leverage it within the rules you're bound by. That, or figure out a way to make the 'game' play by your more traditional rules."

"A cute turn of phrase but-" Valserys started to dismiss the idea out of hand but choked on his words.

Shifty just grinned. "Now I recognize that expression."

----------------------------------------

"I should have told him that they didn't stand a chance."

Shifty glanced in the man's direction, one eyebrow raised. "Say again?"

"Nothing. Just a belated realization." Valserys scowled. It was always this way for him, the clever responses never came to mind until the moment was long past. "Are they ready?"

"I think so." Shifty tilted his head as he focused on the audio from his AR glasses, then nodded. "Yeah. Let me transfer it over."

Shifty snapped his fingers and began to wave a gloved hand at empty air while Valserys waited awkwardly in front of a propped-up obsidian mirror. For several seconds he could see only his somewhat scuffed expression, the bright pink of his hair and gleam of his armor dimmed by the soot that still clung to him. He'd known that arson, like any fieldwork, was messy business, but that didn't stop him from grimacing at how out of sorts he looked.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The handheld rectangular mirror flickered, a line of color shooting across its width as it lay on its side. A second later the line expanded to reveal four live feeds, each labeled in the top corner of its respective rectangular box. The first was a static view of the warframe labeled Cayden. The second, labeled Michael, showed the same room from his first-person perspective, with Silver, Cayden, Celia, and Asch all surrounding the table, another mirror propped up high to give 'Cayden's' bird's eye view. The third was titled Bammer and showed the advancing warden column as seen from a hilltop to the east. The last, Shifty, showed Valserys his own reflection in a way that made him oddly self-conscious.

"They can hear me?"

"We can hear you." Cayden agreed.

"And see you." Celia chimed in with a note of concern. "You look like you've been through the wringer."

Valserys winced. "The ride was difficult, even if the battle itself was little more than a formality. Thank you for your concern, regardless."

"Well don't get too used to easy victories. If we can make an opening, we'll be sending you in again on the morning turn." Cayden said.

"Unless you know something we don't." Silver added. "I assume this isn't just a social call."

"You are correct, Lady Silver. I would not be so frivolous." Valserys agreed. "We hurt them badly today, badly enough that Temujin himself showed his face in order to try and sway me toward surrender."

"Please don't tell me you set up this call to tell me that you're switching sides," Cayden said flatly.

"You will not be free of my advice so easily," Valserys replied with a touch of a smile. "While we can hope for the best, I do not think the same trick will work twice. I asked to speak because I wanted to suggest an alternate tactic, one that may yet surprise him."

Cayden studied his image for several moments then said simply, "Go on."

Valserys gestured to Shifty who in turn picked up the mirror and walked it over to display a nearby map spread across Valserys' workspace. The map was a detailed copy of the War Frame display, lacking only in the three-dimensional aspects and the moment-to-moment update on troop positions and composition. In their place were a series of fairly crude red and blue markers, each representing a unit in either army. Red for the enemy, blue for friendly.

"In a traditional military engagement, an army the size of the Wardens would have a considerable number of scouts and outriders. These men serve numerous functions, from foraging to harassment to detection. Typically, they are composed of light infantry or more commonly, a cavalry force. Obviously, with the majority of their mounted forces destroyed, the Wardens cannot mount a substantive outrider force, which is why they are moving in this block formation."

"No easy weak points, no units we can attack and destroy on their own without provoking a pitched battle." Silver observed.

"Precisely." Valserys agreed. "They move at the speed of the slowest soldier, which as we guessed was the siege weaponry. And they're strong. We don't have a unit we can field that can survive a direct attack from the front, or likely even the units guarding the side of the column. A walking castle of men."

"We're with you so far," Cayden said.

"Within the rules as I understand them, only our cavalry can strike and then move again, either to attack an additional target or to retreat as we did today. In addition, the Wardens seem to have a once-per-turn ability to chase a retreating foe into an adjacent hex. We know this works on our turn, but it would be safest to assume that they can do the same on their turn."

"Okay." Silver agreed, her voice full of skepticism. "What of it? What are you suggesting."

Valserys reached down next to the map and took a handful of blue markers, dumping them haphazardly along the marching path of the warden army. He let them sit in a jumbled mess for barely a second before the obsession to make the map look clean got the better of them and he began to arrange the tokens into individual hexes.

"We choke them with targets." He explained. "As you discovered with your one-man 'ping' tactic' a single soldier can be designated as a unit in his own right. We put a single soldier 'unit' every kilometer, filling the space between here and Bastion with a line of essentially fictitious units."

"But then they'll just-" Cayden started, before realizing his error. "-send the cavalry that they don't have. If the whole army has to stop every time they run into a new unit, that will more or less stop them in their tracks. It'll take them weeks to get here. Huh."

"They do still have their light infantry, don't they?" Silver noted. "And there is the possibility that they have a mobile unit at the center of the column that they're keeping out of sight just in case."

"Unfortunately yes." Valserys conceded. "I suspect the strategy will work for a turn, maybe two, before he realizes what we are doing and we have to modify our deployment."

Valserys picked away the first two rows of tokens, then began to remove others from further back in the line, seemingly at random. For every three he removed, he replaced one with a larger marker, indicating a full unit of soldiers.

"Once he catches on, we put full units toward the rear of the formation. Far enough that the front of the column can't reach them, but the cavalry or light infantry can with their higher movement. This leaves him a choice. He can clear out less distance safely, or he can push deeper into our lines. If he does the latter, then he risks running face-first into a fully formed and entrenched unit, or leaving his skirmishers outside the column itself for the turn where they can be counterattacked."

Cayden did not speak for several moments as he studied the screen in front of him. "I like it. How did you come up with this?"

"With a touch of prompting," Valserys said with a grin that only Shifty could see. "It is a combination of human tactics and my own. A distinctly Elan variation on what you call, defense in depth."