FFF-Tier System, SSS-Rank Wife

=====Eastern-most tip of the Howling Plains=====

"We've successfully managed to bait them out to the Baskar plain. But with the fortress looming just behind, we failed to deliver a crushing strike."

The report was short and concise.

Just like Barry liked it.

As a man of few words and many actions himself, he would much rather focus on pushing his cause along than listening to the extreme details that hardly ever made a difference.

Once again, they won. The imperial troops continued to bleed… even if today, the battle didn't bring the same effects as all the successes thus far.

'That damned fortress…' Barry's eyes locked on a single point on a simple map drawn on one of the very few pieces of parchment left in his domain.

This map alone was what gave him the guts to challenge the empire.

A map that he spent nearly all of his fortune and over ten years to create. A process that nearly led to the discovery of his plot and required a total of forty-three men laying down their lives.

'Curse whoever taught them to keep maps away from everyone's hands,' Barry's face tensed up. 'If not for all the delays, we would be reaching the walls of Plenaria's capital, rather than wasting time in this hell-hole!'

Barry's head was full of grief, regret and unwillingness.

By all means, out of all the scenarios that he prepared for, the situation they were in wasn't the best, wasn't the worst… but wasn't all that far from the bottom-tier scenarios.

'Even with all of our victories, we didn't get to take over this fortress before it received reinforcements,' Barry squeezed his hand into a fist while doing his best not to let his feelings show on his face. 'But not all is lost,' he thought as he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

He remained perfectly motionless for a short while before slowly exhaling the exhausted air from his lungs.

"Take the second, third and fifth group and start preparing to cross the forest to the north of the Baskar fortress," Barry opened his eyes and gave the orders to the messenger.

"But sir!" the soldier attempted to protest, only to turn silent when Barry raised his hand to stop him.

"I don't want you crossing the fortress. All I need you to do is to prepare to do so. Prepare in a way that will be obvious to the onlookers but will give us a chance to cross if we ever attempted to do so."

This couldn't be a mere act. Plenarians, for how much they relied on people summoned from other worlds like Barry, weren't stupid. And if they sensed it was all a ruse, then all this order would achieve would be a massive loss of material, manpower and time.

No.

The preparations had to be as honest and deliberate as they would be if crossing that infamous forest was indeed their plan.

'Who knows,' Barry smiled to his thoughts, 'if everything goes south, running north might remain as our only viable option.'

For him, crossing the northern forest was a desperate plan for if literally everything else went belly up. But for those pesky Plenarians?

If someone ever established a safe crossing through the northern forest, then the very idea of the Baskar fortress, the single most expensive construction project the empire ever completed, would turn completely meaningless.

Because this wasn't a tactical kind of fortress, aimed to establish a zone of control over an area, stopping the enemy from ever establishing a supply chain through it.

No.

Baskar fortress was a strategic type of defensive building, set up to completely block off passage through a natural, geographical chokepoint.

Sure, even if Barry managed to cut a path through the northern forest to let his army circumvent that bloodied ground, he still wouldn't be able to establish any supply chains.

Not with the fortress garrison only waiting to jump on the opportunity to raid the caravans and cut off any source of supply to Barry's army that managed to skip past the chokepoint.

Barry, however, had no plans of ever establishing a supply train to connect his domain with the current position of his army.

That's what a regular military would do. That's what a conqueror would do, so that they could actively take control of the lands they conquered rather than just pushing their troops further and further into the enemy territory.

Barry, however?

All he needed was for his men to get past this damned fortress and then sink into the rich, prosperous and heavily populated areas of the Plenarian interior!

Ten of his warriors would suffice to pacify a moderately sized village.

A hundred would be enough to paralyze a city.

And as things stood, Barry held command of nearly twenty thousand warriors and but a thousand soldiers, officers whose only job was to connect the groups they were responsible for to the greater whole of the revolutionary army.

"Understood, sir," the middle-aged man lowered his head, revealing a huge, bald spot on the back of his head with an ugly, uneven scar running straight through the spot's middle.

'If I recall correctly, he was one of the most decorated officers of the empire, wasn't he?' Barry thought, recalling what little he remembered about each of his men. 'It's quite interesting how he ended up being in command of those rebelling against the very empire that gave him his career.'

The man in question raised his head, struck his fist against his chest in a standard, imperial salute and then turned to leave the tent.

Just like Barry, he was a man of few words and a lot of action. And now that he received his orders, he was ready to immediately start putting them into action.

This was the second biggest strength of Barry's rebellion when compared to the imperial forces, after just how decentralized and independent his men were.

For the Imperial army to move, the Emperor's orders had to go through the Senate to gain approval, then have a whole crowd of priests spend a day and a night divining whether those orders were blessed by Jahel or not before those very same orders could be sent out to the actual military commanders.

Most of the orders would be lost in transit. Those that somehow made it to their recipients were often passed only in verbal form, leading to even further deformation of their original nature.

Then, the entire strategy of the imperial force would be based on but a fraction of the original orders, with even those that reached their intended recipients often corrupted by something as fleeting as human memory.

When compared to this old, tradition and politics-based system, Barry's forces moved all on their own.

His role was to give general orders on how they were to behave, what they were to achieve and when they should gather. Beyond that? All was in the hands of the officers that he attached to each group of local warriors, for they had infinitely better outlook at the situation than a general sitting on his ass days of travel away.

It was with those two advantages along with the great power that came from Barry's own blessing, that his rebellion managed to achieve greater progress within a month than any revolt ever before.

But now?

Now they faced the one trump card of the Plenaria empire, an unbreakable fortress.

A set of fortifications so grand, locals even coined a saying that 'for as long as Baskar Tower stands, Plenaria empire stands'.

Or, as Barry learned himself, it was a set of grand yet generally weak fortifications riddled with obvious weak points… all designed to bait an enemy into attacking the place, only for the true hidden weapon of it to solve the whole battle for the defenders.

Which is exactly why, if Barry wanted to win the war or, at the very least, force the empire to give up on all the territories beyond the reach of the Baskar fortress, he only had one job.

To prevent his own men from ever stepping anywhere near that cursed place!

That, however, left him with quite the problem, all related to an adage as old as civil wars.

'Military wins if it doesn't lose. Rebellions lose if they don't win.'

For his movement to succeed, he had to feed his men the stories of great victories, the tales of great slaughters and imperial defeats.

But for the empire to persist?

All they had to do was outlast the rebellion.

Which left Barry in quite the uncomfortable spot.

He couldn't directly advance, because his string of victories already brought him to the Baskar Tower's doorstep.

He couldn't retreat, because the very idea of doing so went against the revolutionary spirit of people sick and tired of the imperial oversight.

Which is exactly why he had no other choice but to bet everything on the northern forest — a place that allowed no human to pass, perfectly protecting the flank of the Baskar fortress.

Once again, however, Barry had an advantage, even if only an illusory one.

For the sake of weakening the spirit of the empire, he made sure to spread the rumors of his rebellion that went far beyond its actual scope.

In the ears of the commoners, Barry's uprising wasn't just an attempt to overthrow an oppressive empire with a list of its crimes much longer than the list of its achievements.

No.

Thanks to the rumors he actively spread with the help of his system, his uprising became a rebellion of heretic mages, people who sought power beyond the blessing of Jahel.

All for one purpose, perfectly mixed with the orders Barry just gave.

Barry took in a deep breath before taking another glance at the map before him.

His rebellion took years to prepare. Decades to organize. Thousands of people kidnapped from their worlds, lives and families to serve Plenaria's wicked purposes.

But now, by the hand of the successor of the first hero to be summoned to this world, it was going to fall.

Barry stood up and walked outside of his tent, only to be met with just a few more tents, one communal fireplace and then the openness of the plains that just three days ago saw the biggest slaughter of imperial forces in Plenaria's recorded history.

It was only at the very edge of his vision that the dense greenery of the northern forest left its mark, almost like a border no human was destined to cross.

And by all means, Barry had no intention of doing so.

He wasn't stupid to think he was somewhat special and could achieve what thousands of others before him failed to do.

But what he really wanted to do was of no significance.

'All that matters,' Barry smiled as his eyes locked on the distant line of treetops, 'is what those pesky imperials will think I want to do.'

=====End of Arc 1: Seeds upon fertile ground=====