Silence filled the room. They were probably trying to make sense of what I just said. The first to speak was our resident voice of reason, Frenssen. “Lord Werner, what did you just say?”
“We’re going to invade Triot,” I repeated. I could kill for some tea or coffee right now. Thinking about coffee beans was probably just me trying to escape reality. I mean, even if we had beans, I doubted I could roast them. In my past life, outside of cafes, I only ever drank instant or canned coffee. I had no clue how to make it myself.
As these silly thoughts went through my head, Sir Behnke turned to me with a resolute expression, probably thinking he needed to stop me. “That would be impossible.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I said we’d invade them, not that we’d take over,” I said, raising my hands to quell him. I knew that what I wanted to say was complicated, so I needed to explain properly. But the order was tricky. I decided to start by summarizing what we all knew to be true.
“First, even if Triot wasn’t as big as the Kingdom of Wein, it was still a proper kingdom. At the same time, I’m no leading aristocrat. I’m just some deputy. If we wanted to gain control of Triot, we’d need a hundred times the men. We wouldn’t be able to maintain the necessary supply lines either.”
Given the monsters roaming about, we might have needed more like a thousand times the men, rather than a hundred. In any case, we were severely lacking. Still, I never had my eyes set on conquest or occupation. I thought over my next words before speaking.
“Even if we did attack, no one would have any complaints, and that’s not just because the country has already fallen. We’re not trying to occupy the area, so chasing criminals is enough of an excuse.”
“Criminals?”
“At least on paper,” said Goecke with a wry smile. Maybe it was because he was a mercenary, but he picked up on things pretty quickly.
“I see. So that’s why you made those opening moves when we reached Anheim.”
“That wasn’t my only reason, but I suppose so.”
I executed the younger brother of the head of the Salters’ Guild on the spot, but I had only exiled his cronies to Triot. We just needed to say that we had continued our investigations and realized that there was a need to arrest them for a different matter. At least, that’s what we would say. It was also entirely plausible that we’d just run into some battles with monsters while we were searching their lands. Yup, made sense.
“Don’t forget our final goal—dragging out the Demon Commander and beating him to a pulp.”
“A Demon Commander?” asked Lord Eickstedt in surprise. I’d have to individually fill everyone in on things later. For now, I stuck to my original outline.
“But the terrain poses an issue for us. Anheim is a city built with the Triot border in mind, and there’s a river to the south.” I took out the map I had a specialist prepare and pointed to Anheim, which was situated on the river’s northern bank. “This would suffice if we were fighting a human army, since we’d be able to use the river to the south as a moat to defend ourselves. But the Demon army are much stronger than humans.”
“So you’re saying the river has nothing to offer us.”
“It’s not nothing, but we can’t expect much from it. Given how strong demons are, they can cross it easily.”
Seriously. Monsters had been crawling about in this world even before the return of the Demon Lord. The kingdom’s soldiers trained for battles against monsters, but during the Demon Stampede and Finoy the losses had been great. We couldn’t underestimate their strength.
“I see.”
“But what poses an even bigger issue is that the Demon army could choose to attack only from the opposite coast.”
Sir Behnke didn’t seem all too knowledgeable when it came to military affairs. Frenssen didn’t seem too acquainted with the ways of war either, so I decided to explain things step-by-step.
Even if we wanted to beat the Demon Commander, if the Demon army stayed on the opposite side of the river, any attempt we made to cross over to them would leave us open to attack. In other words, our enemies would be able to use this river—which was originally intended to protect the town—against us. Even if the knight brigade arrived as reinforcements and succeeded in crossing the river, it was possible that the Demon army would retreat before they could surround the Demon Commander and hide themselves somewhere in Triot.
“Our army won’t be able to chase them deep into Triot. That means we’re sitting ducks until the Demon army decides to attack, and that would only put us at an ever greater disadvantage. Not to mention that monsters could crawl out from damn near anywhere.”
“Indeed,” replied Sir Holzdeppe.
I had accidentally cursed, but neither Sir Holzdeppe nor any of the others seemed to mind. They were probably working hard to try to understand the situation.
“That’s why we need to lure our enemies to this side of the river and, ideally, the northern town wall. That would make it easier for reinforcements from the capital to surround them as well.”
“I understand all that, but I don’t quite get what invading Triot will accomplish,” said Lord Eickstedt. Hey, there seemed to be a bit of fire back in his eyes. Maybe fighting the Demon army had given him a sense of purpose, or perhaps it was just something he’d been wanting all along.
“Let’s consider the Demon army’s ecology. That might be a bit of a weird way of putting it, but let’s consider it. First, in general, they don’t fear humans.”
That didn’t seem to apply to Mazel, but he was more of an exception. In the game, monsters would sometimes run away from battles, but in real life, I’d rarely heard of any monsters fleeing. And now that the Demon Lord had returned, they’d come charging at us even if there were a hundred men as their enemies. My experience at Fort Werisa and with the refugee escort mission had taught me that well.
“Also, monsters generally never leave a specific area. They most likely have some sort of territory. The exception to that is when they’re led into battle by a Demon Commander.”
“Indeed.”
In the game, crossing a single river could mean an extreme change in the enemies that would spawn. Though in the game’s case, that was mostly just because that’s how the software had to run.
The reason I called this their “territory” was because I couldn’t think of a better way to put it. While this was still only a hypothesis, if monsters appeared in this world in place of natural disasters, then the monsters that normally appeared in an area were like small earthquakes. To put it another way, it was only human nature to build cities where there were few natural disasters. Or in this case, where there were weak monsters.