We’d already managed to rebuild the mages’ tower that we’d destroyed in our attack. The keep had been largely leveled as well, and we were working on repairing it too, but it would need a little more time before it was restored. Fortunately, just having the mage’s tower back in operation meant that our defenses were solid. Magic was the best possible weapon to use when defending a fortress─especially since we had Charlotte on our side.
Having access to the airship would also make a huge difference if we were forced to defend the fort. I knew that our enemy would send a massive army to reclaim Fort Purledo, and if they tried to advance while grouped up together, bombarding them from above with explosive magic could thin their numbers. They almost certainly wouldn’t be able to return fire at the airship, either, meaning that all those losses would be one-sided.
The airship also gave us a morale advantage, in the sense that our enemy would never know when we might send it out to strike at them. The fear that would instill in their soldiers would have an effect on their will to fight. We might also be able to use it to destroy our enemy’s large catalyzers in the event of a siege, which would leave them without any means to bring down the fort’s walls. The accuracy of our aerial bombardments wasn’t super high, but since large catalyzers were, well, large, there was a decent chance we’d be able to target them. In short: if the enemy decided to come reclaim Fort Purledo, our airship would play a major role in our efforts to defend it.
Only a matter of days passed by before we received news that Seitz had begun to retreat from Missian. They hadn’t called back their entire army, but they had left with a substantial chunk of it. That message, fortunately, arrived with backup from Couran, in the form of both reinforcements and wind-aspected aqua magia.
Now that we knew that Seitz had indeed pulled their troops back, we could abandon all thoughts of advancing further into the duchy and direct our full focus on defending Purledo instead. We had the fuel we needed to send out the airship again, which gave me confidence that we’d be able to stop any attack that Seitz sent our way.
Seitz’s army march progressed faster than I’d anticipated, and when they arrived back in the duchy, almost all of their troops made their way to Kuat County to help with its defense. They numbered about one hundred thousand, in total, while we had fifty thousand troops to work with thanks to both Couran’s reinforcements and local soldiers from Purledo, the majority of whom had signed on to fight for the Missian army after we moved in. It seemed that the majority of them were fighting for a paycheck rather than loyalty to the duchy, and as long as we could keep the money flowing, they weren’t fussy about which lord in specific they were serving. The five thousand soldiers who’d surrendered to us in the previous invasion had, in the long term, ended up bolstering our numbers.
The enemy had two men to every one of ours. In a field battle that would have put us at a serious disadvantage, but when defending a fort, that ratio was a lot easier to work with. When you factored in our airship on top of all that, it started to feel like the odds of Fort Purledo falling were very low, even if Seitz did come at us in force.
The army of Seitz seemed to understand that as well. However long we waited, they showed no sign of attempting to invade Purledo County. Rather, they spent their time bolstering their own defenses to ensure they’d be ready if we chose to invade them. It was clear that they considered us a genuine, existential threat to the duchy. I wasn’t inclined to complain about that─the fewer battles, the better, in my book. And so, I settled in to wait, hoping that Seitz would keep holding its position, until another letter from Couran arrived.
The message’s contents were twofold. First, it informed us that Castle Lund had been reclaimed…and second, that Couran’s next objective was the conquest of Kuat County. We were to launch the first strike of that campaign.
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“So it’s Kuat County next, is it…?” Rietz muttered, his voice laden with irritation.
The moment I received Couran’s letter, I called everyone together for a meeting. I didn’t want to go on the attack at all, if I was being honest, but orders were orders.
This time around, our directive was only to begin the invasion into Kuat County. We hadn’t been instructed to take control of any castles or bring the whole county to heel─just to launch the first strike. Couran would be leading his own army on the warpath afterward, so we just had to kick things off and keep our enemy on their back foot as well as we could until he arrived. Taking hold of strategic positions and driving the enemy out of any they had was about the most I figured we’d accomplish.
“Castle Kuat lies at the center of the county, and protects its central city as well. If our long-term goal is to take Castle Kuat, then we’ll have to start by dealing with Fort Sokan, which is located near the border with Purledo,” Rietz explained.
“Fort Sokan isn’t very far from Fort Purledo. We could fly our airship right there and bring it down, easy,” said Rosell.
“True ’nuff,” Mireille agreed. “The Seitzans’ll be working double time to figure out how to deal with the airship, but honestly, it’s not the sort of weapon you can cope with by thinking your way around it. It’s on a whole other level.”
“It’s safe to assume that the enemy will have heard, at least to some extent, what happened to Fort Purledo,” said Thomas. “It’s possible that they’ll go out of their way to not engage us in a siege scenario, and will lure us into fighting them in the open instead.”
“Considering how badly they outnumber us, yeah, I could see that,” Mireille admitted.
“Sure, the airship wouldn’t be as big of a tide-turner out in the open as it would in a siege, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t still be effective!” said Rosell. “Knowing that they could get attacked from overhead at any moment will terrify our enemies, and wreak havoc on their morale. Then when we do launch our attack from the airship, it’ll scatter their formation. They might try to shoot it down with a large catalyzer, I guess, but we just have to take that out first if they do.”
“True though that may be, if Seitz is persistent in dragging us into field battles, we’ll risk running out of fuel for the airship and not having access to it when the time for a siege arrives. We received plenty of explosive aqua magia to last us for some time, but I could hardly say the same for our wind aqua magia reserves,” Thomas countered. Couran hadn’t had very much wind aqua magia in stock to begin with, so he hadn’t been able to send us a large quantity of it.