I’d come to expect Sahhi’s arrival in the morning with a new report from Aymer. Today I had a look through Aymer’s third letter updating me on the expedition’s progress. She’d already written to me about how they’d been taking the enemy strongholds and what Mont was up to, so I knew they were working in disguise and it was going well.
To be honest, at first I’d wondered why Aymer hadn’t just written everything out for me in chronological order in her first report, but apparently that was intentional—Aymer didn’t want to lay everything out in case one of her reports happened to get lost and end up in enemy hands. She said that she’d save the final, most detailed report for when she got back. I had to admit it was all very Aymer of her. I was glad we’d put her in charge.
Anyway, I was sitting in the village square with her third report in hand, and I wondered what she had in store for me this time.
“Hurry up, Dias! Read the report already!” cried Senai.
“Yeah! What’s in it? Hurry up and tell us!” added Ayhan.
The twins were sitting beside me, squeezed onto the same chair, and they were missing their favorite teacher. So for them, the reports were always something to look forward to because they were filled with surprises and—let’s be honest—pretty unbelievable. They’d shake with anticipation when a new report came in. Even Alna was here, peeking over my shoulder to read ahead.
“It’s important to stay up to date, right?” she said. “We might have to spring into action and prepare something depending on the report. Right now we’re training the heshirs in preparation for carrying everything the expeditionary party intends to bring back. We’ve put Carlitz in charge of things—that little dogkin is crazy enthusiastic about it and has already been to the wasteland a number of times to get things in place.”
“Great, got it,” I said, then turned my attention back to the report.
As per usual, the first page of the report was Aymer’s “General Report Summary,” laying out the overall details. From that, I could tell that the undercover operations were still going well. Actually, they’d gone too well. The insurgent forces had caught on, and they were sending their main force to deal with it. According to Sahhi’s scouting report, that main force was two thousand strong.
The expeditionary party had noticed some suspicious movement among local bandits and the unions working the ports, so the party decided to withdraw.
The plan was to get as much of their supplies to the beach as possible, then load them onto a ship with the help of the goblins. They’d depart for the wastelands—and then for home—once everybody was aboard. In order to buy time for loading supplies, the expeditionary party would send a small group to run a sabotage operation to keep the insurgents busy.
“Huh?” I uttered. “Huh?!”
I couldn’t help it. And once again, I was back to reading the lines multiple times just to try and make some sense of them. As far as I could tell, there were two thousand troops bearing down on a party of about twenty, and more trouble brewing elsewhere. How the heck were they going to keep two thousand troops busy?
My heart was about to jump out of my throat. I just wanted them to ditch all the supplies and run...but then I noticed Aymer had written one last thing on the very last line of her report summary.
Please relax. This is all within our expectations, and our strategy was prepared well ahead of time. Everybody will return home safe.
Okay, I knew Aymer was smart, so there wasn’t really much I could argue if she’d written that. Not that there was much of anything I could do even if I wanted to... I realized I’d just have to trust her and wait. I could also feel some pretty pointed gazes on me from Alna and the twins. They were expecting me to turn the page and read on, so that’s what I did.