Chapter 1400 - 1315: Stirring Things Up

Chapter 1400: Chapter 1315: Stirring Things Up

The news that André had launched an offensive basically meant that the war, which had only quieted for a month, was once again restarting.

Only this time the battlefield was once again shifting from along the Nao’an River to the Roaring Corridor.

After half a year of repairing the dirt roads and pushing forward the ramparts, the timing was already ripe.

Even if it weren’t ripe, they had to move; the Saint’s Grandson had already sent four or five letters asking why he was still delaying the attack.

Though summer is long, the window for an offensive is very short; André had to attack, this was to serve the later grand strategy.

It was just that Horn wanted strategic results, didn’t care about casualties, only wanted Fat Cow Castle, whereas André was trying to clear the stage unscathed or with minimal losses.

Enduring the Pope’s urging—"You’re avoiding his edge?"—André stubbornly held out until the Norn people finished assembling their thirty thousand new troops.

In what used to be northern Norn, the region west of the Dragon Sleep Mountain Range, the Norn people were still fighting their old enemies, the Dwarves and the Centaurs.

Even so, they still squeezed out thirty thousand men to support the Roaring Corridor, completely severing the route for Dwarf and Centaur reinforcements.

Although the campaign had been initiated by André, and the early stage had seen no small victories, he was growing ever more cautious and careful.

The root cause was that he no longer quite understood the Royal Court army’s moves.

Logically, André was striking out with nearly eighty thousand men; that sounds like a lot, but spread across the vast Roaring Corridor, there weren’t that many on any given stretch.

The Holy Alliance Army’s advance routes were extremely fixed.

Don’t think that just because the Roaring Corridor is wide and sparsely populated, armies can just roam the wilderness like stray dogs.

They move like spiders, along crisscrossing roads spaced extremely far apart, so the risk of being encircled and annihilated is enormous.

So all the Royal Court army has to do is wait at the boundary between road-dense and road-sparse regions and conserve their strength.

They could even imitate the Holy Alliance, throw up some crude ramparts, which would cause serious trouble for the Holy Alliance Army.

At that point it would simply come down to whose maneuvering was faster and whose hard power was stronger.

For reasons unknown, Lakunio suddenly chose to march out of the fortress zone on the main front, engaging the Holy Alliance Army in the more disadvantageous mid-section of open wilderness.

What was even stranger was that part of the Royal Court army suddenly went south, seizing a few minor border towns in the Holy Alliance-controlled zone that were of no real importance.

From these small towns, if you strike south there’s still the Thorn Garden; strike east and you run into layered fortress clusters.

To put it simply, André opened a buffet restaurant, and Lakunio sat down and immediately wolfed five loaves of black bread and chugged a liter of cola.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Saving me money?

On the main front it looked like they were trading blows back and forth, but they weren’t leveraging the Royal Court’s numerical superiority at all.

The bulk of the troops were jammed in the rear: either the rear army had to slog across the wasteland on empty stomachs to reach the battlefield, or the front army blocked the rear and fought the Holy Alliance one-on-one in a macho brawl.

This decision was absurd to the point of abstraction; André was terrified it was some kind of trap, yet couldn’t see where the trap lay, living every day on edge.

Compared to what he’d seen of Lakunio before, this didn’t resemble Lakunio’s handiwork at all.

Yet previous reports clearly stated that Lakunio was the commanding general—so where had things gone wrong?

Meanwhile, in the Royal Court army’s grand camp around Fat Cow Castle.

In the summer heat, under the blazing sun, most of the vampire officers in garrison hid in cool cellars or palaces, unwilling to stay in their tents.

And the one who, as an officer, kept lingering under the black-cloth tents together with the short-coated vampire infantry was Lakunio.

As a newly turned vampire, his internal clock hadn’t fully shifted yet; he wasn’t particularly used to the routine of rising at sunset and sleeping at dawn.

He was even less able to bear the damp chill of the cellars: his body felt fine there, but his mind still rebelled.

At dusk, vampire infantry wrapped head to toe in thick clothes and wearing beaked masks were patrolling the camp.

Sitting at the tent flap, Lakunio had a bottle of wine at his side; he wasn’t using a cup, just tilting his head back and swigging straight from the bottle.

The setting sun behind him shed a blood-red glow—this was the last sunlight he could still feel.

The light on the back of his neck stung like tiny needles every so often, pricking his skin into fleeting little red dots.

Sitting in the dying light, Lakunio looked almost no different from before except for being a bit paler.

Compared to his previous decrepitude, he even seemed more vigorous now, and his aura of power was far greater than in the past.

Those attendants who used to be close to him now stood by in terror, not daring to approach casually.

After becoming a vampire, Lakunio had overhauled the clan troops and suppressed the servant army; through this period of purges he had completely taken control of the northern force.

Previously his position had been a castle in the air; after becoming a vampire, it was finally solid.

"The front line’s under pressure, and you’re enjoying yourself back here?" In front of a Lakunio with such high rank and heavy authority, the only one who could talk like this was Shanruan.

Although earlier Shanruan and the clan troop leaders had pinned the blame on Lakunio, they all knew in their hearts how things really were.

Serafe hadn’t blamed him, and Lakunio had basically reconciled with Shanruan.

"What, you want me at the front again, just to get dropped by a single shot like last time?"

Shanruan let out two dry laughs, but didn’t take the bait: "I came to you this time on behalf of those clan troops, to apologize and make peace."

"Peace? What peace?"

"It’s just the two of us here, no need to keep playing dumb, right?" Shanruan dragged over a chair and sat, "You deliberately sent all those clan troops from before to the front line because you were nursing a grudge against them, didn’t you?"

Others might not know what lay behind Lakunio’s abstract decisions, but how could Shanruan not?

Now, the ones fighting the Holy Alliance Army on the front line were basically the old clan legions that had taken part in the battle of the Fat Toad.

They’d been forced to march out of the rampart clusters and slug it out with the Holy Alliance logistical units; with the line retreating step by step, who could hold that?

"This is His Majesty’s order. If you don’t believe me, you can write to Skull Throne City to verify it."

"His Majesty’s order was for you to deal the enemy a heavy blow, to defend every inch of land, not for you to deliberately meet them head-on."

"If they can’t beat the Holy Alliance, that just means they’re trash. His Majesty said we must answer offense with offense."

Looking at Lakunio still pretending not to understand, Shanruan was genuinely helpless now.

Yes, the order had indeed come from Serafe, but how to implement it depended on you, Lakunio—did you really have to follow it so mechanically?

Yet he couldn’t openly oppose it; the moment he did, he’d have the big hat of "disobeying His Majesty’s orders" slapped on his head.

You have to understand, previously the coastal regions failed to dispatch troops in time to support Konyaz, leading to a defeat on the Flower Hill front, which had already enraged Serafe.

Back in the rear, a whole batch of agents from the Holy Alliance’s Falan and Leia had been rounded up, along with quite a few vampires who had "gone over" to the Empire.

Serafe even suspected that hidden small groups of the criminal race were buried within the army, and was in the middle of a harsh crackdown.

With heads rolling over there and conditions at their strictest, was he really going to rush forward just to lose his own?

Even as the beheading-happy Saint’s Grandson, he didn’t have that many heads left to cut.

"Anyway, the front can’t hold." Shanruan said angrily, "If Fat Cow Castle falls, we can just go together and slit our wrists before His Majesty Serafe!"

At that, Lakunio finally showed a flicker of emotion; he lifted his head. "How can it already be collapsing? I’ve been sending supplies and weapons up on time and in full."

"The Holy Alliance is being despicable; they’re using a special type of ammunition, and it’s completely wrecked our defensive plans..."

"What ammunition?"

"They call it something like ’Luminous Shell’?"