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Volume 3 Chapter 12-2: The Gates of Hell

 

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We ran through the trees.

Then we hid in the shade of the trees beside the road while pursuing their vanguard.

The information captured by 【Perception Expansion】 was processed by my temporarily enhanced brain so I could count their numbers quickly and ascertain their status. They had come with a force of 4,552 soldiers.

There weren’t too many more soldiers than I had estimated based on the goods from the Supply Base. Still, it was impressive how they were able to get this number of soldiers out like this. It wasn’t a number meant to conquer a village of 250 people.

「Even so, these guys are pretty mismatched. Only around 3000 of them are proper…」

The Imperial Army didn’t have much unity.

The main force was made of regular soldiers numbering 1500. Leaving aside the regulars, the rest were moving at different paces. The ones out of pace seemed to be the forces of the nobles who were traveling comfortably in carriages.

Then after that were around 1000 experienced farmer conscripts looking thin and walking in step. It looks like they had received some training by how they moved, but their true abilities were doubtful.

Finally, there were 500 rough looking characters. They were wearing different gear than the Imperial troops and were looking at a large bearded man instead of at the head of the army. I suspected they were a large scale mercenary group. Even so, they were tightly controlled appearing to be fairly skilled.

That was all of the ones who looked proper.

「The other 1500 are out of the question.」

In the end the other 1500 were people clearly not used to moving as a group. There were clearly untrained peasants, bandits, and small-scale mercenary bands.

They tentatively followed the soldiers’ orders, but each of them were more focused on each of their own leaders.

In summary, this was now an army that had multiple leaders inside of it.

They must have pushed themselves pretty hard to obtain enough people.

「This’ll be easy to take advantage of.」

Nothing was more fragile than a divided army. If we just poked them a bit, there were many groups that would move for their own sake rather than the forces as a whole.

「Everyone listen! Don’t aim for the soldiers wearing proper armor and weapons! Aim for the sloppy ones marching near the front!」

The tidy ones were clearly the regulars. We would put those off for later.

I wanted to utilize the mish-mash of motivations. ‘The army is using us like shields’ ‘the army abandoned us easily’. I wanted to emphasize those feelings. They should slowly accumulate then explode. If things went well they might even steal food from the supply as they retreated.

「Got it Cyril. Is this the same as our sniper practice?」

「That’s right. We’ll snipe while constantly using 【Perception Expansion】. Keep a distance of 200 meters from the targets, when they approach within 150 meters you will retreat. Repeat this until it becomes too hard to maintain your perception, then retreat completely. Never snipe if there’s no cover nearby.」

This would be our tactics for today. Shave off their fighting power while keeping risk as low as possible.

「Everyone are you ready!?」

「Yeah!」

They all readied their crossbows.

The snow had just melted so it was still very cold out. Their hands would grow numb with cold lowering their accuracy. This would obstruct their ability to snipe them.

However, the air around them was warmed.

「Everyone do your best!」

「Thanks Yukino, I’ll leave this to you.」

「Un, I can do it. I can’t use a bow, but I can still help.」

Yukino was the one who warmed up the air. I used magic to make sure the warm air wouldn’t escape the area while the feeling in my hands returned.

I had brought Kuu and Yukino to blow up their food supply, but this was also a great help.

In order to hide our locations we could not light any fires.

This cold weather made long operations out in the field painful. The cold would sap your strength and will the longer you dealt with it. However, with Yukino here we could remain warm even without lighting a fire and even drink hot liquids. This benefit was unexpectedly large.

「From now on you will make individual decisions about your shots. Now let’s begin.」

And with my words our attack began.

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