NOVEL NEXT 225 – Hit Them when They’re Down
Alissa blocked the wild swing of the demon she was fighting with her shield, then pressed closer and pushed the demon back, which gave her enough room to make her next move. Her spear struck out like a viper and pierced straight through the demon’s throat. The action was smooth. No movement was wasted, and she casually kicked away the dying demon to take on the next one that stepped up in their stead.
It was already the evening, and the two armies had been fighting throughout the day without stopping. Since Sir DelVillar learned that the demons had not received their regular shipment of supplies for at least three days, he planned out a general assault, albeit one intended less to push the demons out and more to keep them stuck in a low intensity battle of attrition for at least a day or two.
The human side made sure to feed their soldiers well prior to the battle to ensure that they had enough energy to fight throughout the day. They also rotated their troops regularly so those at the back could take turns eating lunch and dinner while others fought at the front. While doing so, he also told the soldiers to go ahead and set up cooking fires at the back and heat up their food properly.
As luck would have it, a northerly wind blew intermittently throughout that day, and the breeze helped carry the smell of food being cooked over the battlefield and to the demon side as well. The food eaten by humans and demons did not differ that much, so the smell had the desired effect on the demons and reminded them all too keenly on their missing rations.
After all, while a shortage of rations could be hidden from the troops for a good while by a clever commander, it was harder to hide the absence of a regularly scheduled supply convoy. The demon rank and file might not know about their food supply situation, but they knew that the supply convoy had failed to show up for four days now already, which meant that there was less food than there should be. From there they could draw their own implications, be those better or worse than the actual situation.
Under those conditions, Sir DelVillar ordered a prolonged engagement, one that allowed for little to no rest for either side. The main difference, however, was how as the ones who initiated the tactic, the human side were well-fed and well-rested, prepared for exactly what they were about to do, while the demons were caught off-guard and unprepared.
Their food was starting to get rationed just the day before which meant that they had not eaten as well as they usually did, and many amongst them didn’t rest too well at night for the same reason, worried about the situation. Now that they were forced to fight against an unrelenting foe that refused to give way to them, those small cracks widened and threatened to throw off the coordination and morale of the demon army.
In fact, such a tactic could only be considered a basic one, the sort that needed the least amount of trickery or intelligence, but it was because such a tactic was so basic and simple that it was far more difficult to fight against. Clever tactics and stratagems often have many points of failure where if something did not happen as planned it would throw the outcome into jeopardy. Simpler tactics like these, however, had little to none of that.
Sir DelVillar had simply noticed that the demons were running low on food and decided to exploit the situation in the simplest manner possible, with a method that had great tolerance for mistakes. A simple war of attrition designed to tire out the demons and to capitalize on their momentary weakness, of an intensity that was enough to force the demons to fight seriously yet also allowed the human side to rotate their troops around to rest properly.
This was mostly maintained with the help of the larger number of fourth tier combat power that the human side had. Such an instance happened partly because many of those who sent reinforcements sent part of their elite, so while their numbers might be low, their prowess belied their quantity. In fact, Sir DelVillar was quite confident that after his troops arrived they could have pushed the demons back out of Fort Gurzil by force if need be.
Such an approach would be one that ended up hurting themselves, however, as the casualties from such an endeavor would be great. As such, the old knight sought ways to win with more
acceptable losses, and just by chance, the incident with the supply convoy happened. Needless to say the old knight jumped at the chance and made the arrangements for battle in record time.
Rather than have the fourth tiers within their ranks mostly on standby to guard against their peer on the enemy side, Sir DelVillar made use of the numerical advantage in high end combat power his side has to have a good ten to a dozen of the fourth tiers join the frontlines at a time, rotating in shifts with the others who were on guard behind them.
Their presence both kept the human side’s line stable and demoralized the demons as they had no counter to the combat prowess the fourth tiers displayed. Every time the demons tried to send out their own, the human side would have those waiting at the back intercept them, which allowed them to constantly push the demons back and gain the initiative over the battle.
Even as the sun set, the battle kept going. The human side’s army had been divided into eight equal detachments under Sir DelVillar’s orders. Three of the detachments would directly engage with the demons at a time, while another four would stand by behind them as backup. The last detachment would seize the chance to pull back, eat, and even catch a nap until their shift was over and another would take over while they returned to the battle.
In that way, the kingdom’s troops managed to maintain their stamina and condition – those who were on standby were mostly just standing there after all – while keeping the demons engaged in fighting all the while. Combined with how the demons were lacking in food, the effects, while each minor, added together to provide the human side with more advantages.
Even as day turned into night and darkness descended, all the human side did was to light up torches and keep up the fighting. From time to time they would also launch a blinding flare to keep the demons on their toes, while their own soldiers still took turns fighting, standing by, and resting. In that manner they ground up the demon soldiers throughout the day, into the night, and all the way into the next morning even.
Alissa’s party happened to be on shift again early the next day and went out to fight at the front after they had a quick breakfast. There she discovered that the demons had clearly weakened compared to the day before, their maneuvers more disorganized, their lines more chaotic. Some were even yelling back at their peers or superiors over disagreements.
Under such conditions, Alissa didn’t need to be told what to do. She hefted her spear and struck hard, catching the attention of many nearby demons as she butchered their compatriots in short order. She pierced them with her spear, crushed them with blows from the edges of her shield, and even hewed through some that happened to be standing close to each other, making for a bloody spectacle in the area.
All throughout the frontline, the rest of her party also did the same. Joshua made for what was likely the biggest spectacle out of what the whole party did, as he directly hurled a massive fireball the size of a house – something Alissa knew was for show as his typically compressed his fireballs to small orbs – and directly burnt a group of demons to charred corpses. As if that wasn’t enough, he kept lobbing more such fireballs from time to time.
Ethan also made quite a bit of a show where he was at, his blows directly sending his opponents – or their body parts – flying high into the air before they fell back down. Such a spectacle was far from necessary, and was in fact a rather inefficient way of fighting, but it did wonders when it came to demoralizing enemies.
After all, seeing someone silently and effectively kill some of your compatriots was less scary than seeing another who hurled around fireballs the size of a house or one who sent broken bodies flying all over the place.
Due to their efforts, the kingdom’s forces pushed the demons back towards Fort Gurzil and made noticeable headway throughout the day. It was a slow advance, but one that kept continuing as the overmatched demons had to keep falling back before the human side’s onslaught. On the first day, the demons mostly managed to hang on to the area they had been fighting over the past weeks.
On the second day, they were pushed back over a couple miles from that area, closer to Fort Gurzil, which further emboldened the humans they fought to attack even more aggressively and push them back even further.
By the third day, the demons had given up another four miles of territory, and were suffering heavy losses compared to the far lighter losses on the human side. There was clear disarray amongst the demon commanders, with some clearly wanting to do nothing more than to retreat back to the fort they captured while others wanted to keep up the fighting regardless.
That ended up not mattering in the end, as by the sixth day of continued fighting, the humans had pushed them all the way back to Fort Gurzil anyway, and the remaining demons were left with no choice but to hunker down and defend the fort even as the human forces besieged it.
It was not that the human side was not exhausted after six continuous days of fighting, but they were better supplied and had more chances to rest, which made them better off compared to the demons. While the demons had physical advantages over the humans, they were exhausted all the same, and unlike the humans had less effective means to rotate their forces or to recover from their fatigue.
Lack of food, rest, and morale combined together to cause the demons’ defeat in the ongoing battle, where their enemies saw a temporary weakness, latched onto it, and kept going until the small weakness turned into a large, fatal one.
As others built siege camps around Fort Gurzil, part of the human army rested. Many slept where they stood moments ago, others wandering off to look for some trees to lean to. They knew that they wouldn’t be able to sleep their fill yet, that they would be woken up to work once their shift arrived, but they took what they had and made the most of it regardless.
Alissa and her party were no exception, the eleven of them sprawled out underneath the shade of a large tree, their backs leaning against the tree’s thick trunk as they slept beneath it. None of them even bothered to get out of their armor, by this point already used to sleeping in it. They knew all too well that they would need every bit of sleep they could get at this point, since they would need to continue pressing the demons while they had the advantage.
While they slept, the siege camp’s construction went on, while yet another detachment pestered the demons in Fort Gurzil, making sure that the demons would not be able to drop their guard and relax. They had their enemy where they wanted them, and none of them were foolish enough to let such a prey get away.
