Chapter 412: 412 - Tamers War - Symbolic Walls (1/2)

Chapter 412: Chapter 412 – Tamers War – Symbolic Walls (1/2)

“And the other doubles?” Ren pressed, unwilling to give up completely. “Did they take all the leaders?”

“Arturo is relatively available,” Wei admitted, “but he doesn’t have as much direct contact with me. And his role is more… logistical.”

Ren felt a wave of frustration wash over him. He had been planning to offer his fusion abilities to the main commanders, but if they were already in active combat, the window of opportunity had closed.

“I wanted to activate everyone I could… the tamers under the royal family, as well as those under Liora and Luna’s families.”

He opened his backpack, rummaging through his belongings until he found what he was looking for.

“Besides,” he said, carefully removing a small sealed container and his dagger, “I have something that could be useful.”

Everyone in the room leaned forward with curiosity when Ren lifted the container, revealing what appeared to be golden mold and spores that glowed. The substance seemed to pulse with its own rhythm, like a tiny heartbeat made of light.

“What are those?” Luna asked, her study in magical material identification failing her again as it always did when faced with anything around Ren.

“Golden spores I found in the forest,” Ren explained, his voice taking on the careful tone of someone handling dangerous materials. “They’re dangerous if not handled correctly, so you shouldn’t touch them, but…”

He paused, organizing his thoughts to make it easy to understand.

“I think they could be used offensively against enemy forces. Especially if they can be dispersed in large quantities.”

Wei moved closer, his academic mind taking precedence over any other consideration. The prospect of studying something new overrode his usual caution.

“Have you identified their specific properties?”

“They feed on vital energy and mana,” Ren responded. “They also cancel each other out with anything with abyssal power… so Yino’s abyssals would be particularly vulnerable to them. And they reproduce quickly when they find the right conditions.”

♢♢♢♢

Kharzan observed the wall rising before him, a line of stone and wood that marked the new frontier his army had established during the past weeks.

It was modest by the standards of earth and wood elemental tamers, barely five meters high, but it represented something much more significant: the line of a new and better territory being born from Yano’s land.

The advance of the other half of his elite army toward the city hadn’t yet approached the abyss, though that might seem like a direct way to reach the bridge. Instead, he had chosen the ‘hypotenuse’, a diagonal that pointed straight toward the bridge from his wall, initially staying about 20 kilometers below the frontier with the Abyss Wall.

“My Lord,” General Valdris approached, pointing toward the horizon with the satisfaction of someone delivering good news, “the upper part of Yano’s Abyss Wall can already be seen…”

Kharzan followed the direction of the gesture and could distinguish in the distance the imposing structure that had been the object of competition between both kingdoms for decades.

The wall was enormous, his own was humiliated in comparison… a barrier that rose toward the sky, designed not only to contain abyssal incursions but also to provide a strategic observation point.

“What’s the current height?” Kharzan asked, though he already knew the approximate answer.

“Latest reports indicate they’ve exceeded 100 meters in their highest sections,” Valdris responded with admiration and envy that was common among military men comparing ‘defenses’. “Our wall is… just getting started.”

It was an unnecessary comparison, but it seemed that men tended to compare sizes subconsciously.

However, there was a truly absurd yet inevitable competition not only with the new wall but between Yino and Yano. Both cities constantly competed to have the highest wall, using their earth and wood control tamers in construction projects that had become symbols of national pride.

The height not only provided relative defensive advantages against some beasts, it also served to prevent the cities from being able to observe each other directly from ground level.

Which meant that most intelligence came from flying tamers who responded directly to the governments.

It was an advantage he could exploit. Aerial scouts were limited and valuable resources… they couldn’t be everywhere at the same time. And if Victor and his squadron were busy at the bridge…

“General, what’s your assessment of the abyss troops?”

Valdris consulted the maps he carried, tracing lines with his finger in the casual way of someone who had spent years studying troop movements.

“According to our intelligence, it will take them a long time to recover the forty thousand soldiers along the wall. The distribution across one thousand kilometers is problematic for them.”

“I assumed so.”

The city’s diameter would be almost 500 kilometers if they counted everything lightly inhabited, due to the relatively oval and elongated shape of the territory. But the abyss counter army extended for 1000 kilometers, providing space for advance posts that warned about incursions.

The abyssals usually came from much farther than simply the immediate edge of the territory, so defenses had to extend correspondingly. And despite the fact that large hordes happened in specific years, there were some very small skirmishes or wandering monsters from time to time, and even in the year when it was expected, the date wasn’t exact.

To prevent monsters from reaching the city, Goldcrest and Starweaver had controlled large armies two hundred kilometers from the city where they intercepted the waves. Starweaver had even put his main home in the line of fire as a “commitment to the people”.

Kharzan smiled thinking about the lapdog who had lost so much by worrying too much about his image before the people… Second-class people at that and an irresponsible useless King, no less.

Time was a strategic necessity for moving troops which were mostly located so far away…

“They have 20,000 soldiers in one of the posts 200 kilometers from the city reinforcing the Starweaver front. That leaves only between 30 and 20 soldiers per kilometer,” Valdris continued with growing enthusiasm.

“…With our jurisdiction of the other third of the bridge empty but looked, they’ve been filling it to ‘control us’ since Victor’s attack, but that only makes the defense more spread out… that new complex command network with various families meddling in wall control… makes their bureaucracy very slow…”

“…Slow enough to give us a significant temporary advantage,” Valdris smiled with the satisfaction of someone who had found the weakness in an enemy’s armor.

Kharzan studied the terrain stretching before them. If he could push and stretch his new frontier without stopping with the support of his entire army, he surely wouldn’t have significant problems.

And the bridge entrance had a two-kilometer section without a protective wall, only the military post that had surely already been mobilized to support current containment operations…

“Clear path if we march quickly,” he murmured to himself, the pieces of the strategic puzzle falling into place.

“My Lord?”

“Nothing, General. Just confirming that our timing is correct.”

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