Chapter 190: Chapter 173 – Hitting where it Hurts

"Whoever coined the old adage that an army marches on its stomach understated the importance of rations in a battlefield. An army without rations is nothing more than a free achievement for their opponent, unless they face a really stupid enemy." - Reinhardt Edelstein, Captain of the Free Lances mercenary company, circa 17 FP.

The first sign the soldiers in the fort had that something was going dreadfully wrong was when the warehouses holding their rations suddenly went up in flames. If they had not panicked at the fire, they would have found it strange that no warning had come from the sentries on that side of the wall, but alas none of the soldiers thought that far.

 

As everyone was distracted by the burning rations and frantically tried to douse it, four soldiers manning the opposite section of the wall were taken out by projectiles. Three by javelins or an arrow to the throat, and a fourth by a crossbow bolt to the head. In the commotion the fire caused, none of the other soldiers noticed their deaths.

 

Even as the four soldiers fell down, another salvo struck the soldiers atop the watch towers set at the corners of the small fort, two in each. Cal nodded with satisfaction as the soldiers fell without managing to give any warning, before she stored her crossbow back into her storage.

 

The javelins had of course been Elaina and Sidonie's handiwork, who had found the upward angle of the shot they had to take as no issue whatsoever. The arrow on the other hand, was Ying Xiao's. Apparently she had trained archery from Salicia during the times Cal was away, and was quite good at it to boot.

 

Leila was the one who had set the warehouses on fire. She had done it in a more discreet way, by transmuting small pockets of earth underneath the ration sacks into lava from as far as she could and allowing nature to take its course.

 

Cal was the one headed into the fort itself. With nobody alive atop the wall, she crouched, then leapt up, easily reaching the top of the three meter tall wall with an outstretched hand. With a firm grip at the top of the wall, she threw herself over, then snuck down from the walkways, headed towards what looked like the administrative building, which was fortunately placed on the opposite side from the warehouses, with the other two sides dominated by the gates and the barracks respectively.

 

She quietly dispatched of a few soldiers who had remained in the building instead of helping the ones frantically trying to douse the flames - all of them looked like pencil pushers rather than proper soldiers, probably children of minor nobles on a "cushy" position she thought - and swiftly rummaged through the building.

 

Instead of looking for specific information, Cal simply went with a brute force method. Anything she found got tossed into her storage, and by the time she was done, the only things left in the building were the corpses and the furniture, as she had taken most everything else that seemed to be of value.

 

As she went out, a small group of three soldiers happened to be approaching the building. They looked her way, and an alarmed surprise was visible on their features. Before they managed to shout or otherwise warn the others, three throwing daggers found their targets and silenced the two men and a woman who happened to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

 

A few moments later, as Cal silently climbed back up to the walls, she felt the daggers return to their sheaths as their enchantments activated. She finally heard shouts of warning, as other soldiers noticed the dead bodies that betrayed her presence, but by then she had leapt back out of the fort and into the wilderness again.

 

The party regrouped where they left Dan and Lumi, as none of them faced any trouble on their way back. Even with the dead bodies discovered, the raging fires Leila caused still occupied the attention of most of the soldiers in the fort.

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As the party ran through the wilderness, they headed further north-west, as if they were aiming for the rebel's main encampment. Along the way they slaughtered two smaller patrols on purpose, to further the impression that they were headed that way.

 

Instead, after they had a safe distance from any possible pursuit, Cal had sorted out and perused the notes she acquired from the fort. Most of them were useless to her, but some noted the direction on where the supplies were to be sent. It was amongst those notes that she found one noting a crate of luxury foodstuffs to be delivered to the archmage they were aiming for. They changed direction and headed straight east instead, this time straight towards the frontlines between the warring factions.

 

They arrived near the frontlines three days later, where both armies were at a standoff. They had entered a stalemate for a while now, and both sides were heavily reinforced with mercenaries from many different groups - probably why the border guards were so lax to mercenaries seeking entry - that created a chaotic mishmash of weapons and armor.

 

Where during her civil war days Cal would have just jumped in, slaughtered her way to her target, killed them, and walked back out, she had her nieces to consider this time around. She needed a situation that would allow her to go for their target while letting them temper themselves as well.

 

So Cal bided her time instead, and waited for an opportunity. Fortunately, with how they had burned the rations in the forward base along the way, the rebel army soon found themselves short on rations, and their commanders decided to force a decisive battle two days later.

 

As the thousands of soldiers on the frontlines clashed, Cal waited until the rebels had committed their reserves into the battle as well. She had long ago identified the archmage she came for. The man was within the command tent with the rebel faction's general, and at the moment they only had around a hundred soldiers and a similar number of mercenaries guarding them.

 

Because the two sides had fought each other for a long while now, both sides had long run out of their best assassins, and even then, with the archmage by the general's side, the chances of an assassination attempt succeeding was low at best. For most people, that is.

 

Celeysria Ambervale, the Blood Demon of Al-Shan, was not most people.

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