Gezarius looked with open curiosity at the structure as it came into view, clear upon the open plains.
Seen from above, the third fortress appeared as a large triangle. At its peak were what looked like watchtowers, and from certain angles one might see three sets of walls connecting them. In all the knowledge he could draw from Mangold’s and Pückler’s minds, Gezarius found nothing regarding fortresses of such shape.
But it wasn’t the building’s shape that worried Gezarius. It was the things spread around its vicinity. There were the corpses of wandering monsters, the remains of animal waste, and oddly shaped wooden stands. Together, they formed a ring around the fortress. It looked like they had been left behind after a ritual.
Of course, Gezarius was on edge. He was more than aware that Werner was a cunning opponent. Worried about what he might have in store, he had his men surround the fortress from afar. From the center of the fortress flew a flag Gezarius knew well, which he was beginning to wish he’d never encountered—the flag of House Zehrfeld. However, there were no movements from inside.
Gezarius waited for nightfall. The magic lamps had been a bitter experience for them, but it was still true that they had better nocturnal vision than humans. Even should their opponents have some sort of trickery at the ready, their poor vision would make it difficult for them to carry it out. By waiting for night and besieging the fortress from all sides, Gezarius sought to annihilate them before any could escape to the city of Anheim.
While he waited, the dull clanging of metal could be heard from inside the fort. It seemed to be a signal of some sort, but there was no other activity. Gezarius stayed cautious right until he launched his attack. He still hadn’t let go of the feeling that his opponents could make a move against them at any time.
The Demon army hid themselves until the sun set, but once they heard Gezarius signal from afar with a howl, they rushed the fortress from all sides. There was no response from within. The Demon army launched an all-out attack. Some hurdled the walls with powerful leaps, while others knocked the defenses down.
Those who leaped over the walls found themselves dislodging ropes that’d been hung in their path. Bags came crashing down to the ground with them, bursting open and filling the air with powder. Countless monsters began to scream both in the air and on the ground.
Those beating down the walls were unaffected by the powder bags, but once they succeeded in knocking the walls inward, more powder was knocked into the air. The watchtowers supported by the walls came crashing down, sending up huge clouds of dust and powder. It was late into the night, and the dust left them blinded. The monsters ran around, wracked by coughing as they choked on the dust.
So went the Demon army’s attack. They lunged at the silhouettes of humans in leather armor, striking at targets darting through the white dust. They bit into their enemies, ripping off their skin with their claws. Then, the monsters began to scream. Their fingers fell, severed, to the floor.
The battle was short, and once screams of agony began to fill the air, Gezarius let out a scream of anger that filled the whole fortress. “Stop!”
This demand from their commander left them confused and halted the frenzied Lycanthropes. Once they realized their situation, they stood with mouths agape. Some just sat on the floor.
“That bastard…!”
Not a single human had been injured. The third fortress was abandoned.
To use a term from Werner’s old world, it was the Empty Fort Strategy. Werner’s instructions to head west during the previous nocturnal battle and his men’s mention of a third fortress being their destination had been a trap to lead the Demon army here. Werner and his men had passed right by and headed for Anheim.
The triangle shape was a trick to make sure the Demons would notice moving targets the moment they entered the deliberately small space of the fort. The display around the fortress had little meaning, but the stench numbed their sense of smell, and the paths the soldiers trod as they set up the display had made an indecipherable mess of their tracks around the fortress.
Of course, flying the flag over the fortress had been another performance to convince their enemies that Werner was inside. This was the reason Werner had been so careful to make a show out of flying his flag even at the first fortress and had flown a different flag when they were constructing this sham of a building.
Then, when the monsters jumped into the fortress, goaded by anger and bitterness at their earlier defeat, they were blinded by powder that had no other effects. Its only quality was that it was easy to hurl into the air. Once again furious that they had met with such artifice, they ruthlessly lashed out at anything that moved around them.
Setting up scarecrows dressed in the leather armor the bandits had worn was another ploy to trick them into thinking the fort was occupied. Having been slept in night after night by their erstwhile owners, the armor would reek of humans to a Lycanthrope’s keen nose.
But Werner had laid another trap. He had requested the capital to manufacture iron threads thinner than those used in chainmail, and he stretched that thread throughout the fort. They weren’t as strong as the piano strings of his old world, but they were still metal. If a monster swung his arm full force into the wires and it caught his finger rather than a claw, it would slice right through it. Since the entire weight of some of the monsters had been suspended on the wires, some had even lost legs.
Their all-out attack under the cover of night had been another reason their command had failed them. Taking all these factors together, the battle had ended in a decisive loss, even if their casualties had been few.
And—while they had gone unnoticed and been of no effect—wooden cat toys had been set up throughout the fortress halls. Werner was just trying to tease Gezarius, but if the Demon had noticed, being treated like a cat would surely have thrown him into a fit of rage.
The Demon army was completely dumbfounded by the pointless casualties they suffered, but once the sun rose, they were able to search the inside of the fortress. That was when they discovered the source of the ringing coming from the abandoned fortress. It was a tool constructed from a thin pipe and a large water bucket. Once the bucket filled with water, a drop would fall into the pipe, creating a sound. Had Werner been present, he might have introduced it as a shishi-odoshi, a bamboo contraption found in Japanese gardens that served a similar function. It had been the basis for this idea.
Amid the investigation of the fort, one of the Werewolves called out. Letters were found carved into the flagpole. Gezarius followed the voice and beheld the simple message: “I’m off to have a meal in Anheim.”
It was the kind of idle chatter you might tell a friend, and it left Gezarius boiling with rage. He yelled so loud it had some of his men cowering in fear. “Just how much of a fool does that brat have to make of me before he is satisfied?!”
Gezarius ordered an immediate march on Anheim. The monsters, given no chance to recover from injury or exhaustion, headed directly south.