Chapter 1087: Loss and Victory

Anna descended the ladder into the underground headquarters and the atmosphere pressed in around her before anyone spoke.

They rose as one — officers, witches, the General Staff clerks — heads bowing, voices joining: Your Royal Highness, ma’am. Iron Axe was already on one knee when she reached the bottom rung, his voice steady and his jaw tight.

“I apologize for summoning you here. I failed to anticipate a night raid and failed to harden our position against it. The fault is mine.”

“Please.” She made a small gesture, the kind that closed the subject without dismissing it. “Tell me what happened. Is everyone—” A pause that she did not disguise. “How is everyone?”

She was still not used to this. Wendy bowing to her. Agatha inclining her head. These were her sisters in every way that mattered, and the ceremony between them felt like a foreign language she had agreed to learn out of necessity. She wore it the way she wore the queen’s seal: because Roland had asked her to, because someone had to, because the crown was not about the person inside it.

She would rather have been topside with the others during the attack. She knew that. Iron Axe knew that. The God’s Punishment Witches escorting her to the shelter had known it and said nothing.

“Your Highness.” Iron Axe rose slowly, something working behind his expression. “The battle did not go well.”

“Tell me.”

He glanced at Ferlin Eltek. The adjutant opened his notebook.

“Approximately two hundred killed. Seven hundred wounded.” Ferlin did not look up from the page. “These are preliminary figures from the field medics — gathered quickly. The true count will be higher. Miss Nana cannot treat that volume of casualties at once.”

Two hundred.

The number landed without softening. Two hundred was close to what the decisive battle against the Church had cost — that final grinding engagement after a whole campaign. This was the first engagement of the northern advance, one engagement among however many waited between here and the Taquila ruins, and they were starting here.

She had walked through the hospital station. The smell preceded the sound: blood-heavy air, and then beneath it the low persistent sound of men who were past crying and making other noises instead. Nana moved between them with the focused quiet of someone who had burned through every surplus emotion long ago and kept only what the work required. Severe abdominal wounds: she sealed the fatal bleeds, left the rest. Chest wounds: the same. Minor injuries she handed to the field medics with instructions, coltsfoot and sleeping fern, stitch it closed, and she was already moving. She could manage five or six complete treatments in a day. The soldiers who waited past nightfall were gambling on the medicine and on their own bodies, and no one had time to calculate the odds.

Anna had watched Nana’s back and thought: that is a different girl from the one who fainted at the sight of a cut finger. She had not said it aloud. It did not need saying.

“I’ll advise His Majesty to ask Countess Spear at Fallen Dragon Ridge to send her here,” Anna said. “She can work beside the field medics. Now — how did they penetrate the encampment? Walk me through it.”

“The fault lies with me,” Sylvie said from the far side of the table. Her voice was carefully flat. “The Devilbeast flights earlier — they were ranging me. Testing how far the Eye of Magic reaches based on our reactions, counting the threshold. I didn’t see it.”

“None of us saw it,” Agatha said, and the self-reproach in it was precise, surgical — the tone of someone holding themselves to an exact standard. “After the North Slope engagement the demons identified Sylvie’s presence. They used the Devilbeasts to establish her range, then massed their infantry outside it. The raid launched the moment we withdrew from Tower Station No. 1, when the encampment was at its most exposed.”

Ferlin looked up. “The General Staff’s view is that this outcome was structurally inevitable. If we had maintained discipline and ignored the Devilbeasts — not reacted to them — we might have concealed the limit of the Eye of Magic longer. But that was never a realistic option with thousands of soldiers and support workers observing the same protocols they were trained on. The enemy would have found the threshold eventually. Tower Station No. 1, or No. 2, or No. 3.”

Anna was quiet a moment. Something did not quite square. “The Spider Demons’ engagement range is two to three kilometers. They’re not fast. There should have been time between them entering Sylvie’s range and the attack commencing. And First Army has its own reconnaissance — the hydrogen balloons.” She caught Iron Axe’s expression. “I may be misunderstanding the operation. Tell me where I’m wrong.”

“You’re not wrong, Your Highness.” The commander-in-chief placed his fist to his chest — the old Sandpeople gesture, still intact after years of service. “We use three streams of intelligence: the Eye of Magic, Maggie and Lightning, and the army’s own scouts. The scouts are a supplement, a contingency. They’ve never been expected to be primary.”

He explained what the plains had done to ground reconnaissance. The Fertile Plains gave no cover — flat and open as a pan, the Devilbeasts hunting anything exposed from cloud height, dropping on scouts the way a hawk drops on a rabbit moving through stubble. Nothing on the ground could stay ahead of something in the sky. This meant the scouts’ effective range collapsed to nearly nothing useful, the moment the Devilbeasts were active. Which meant Sylvie was bearing the weight of all strategic intelligence. Which meant the moment the enemy understood Sylvie’s limits, they owned the information edge.

A phrase crossed the back of Anna’s mind. One of Roland’s phrases, one of the ones he said with a complicated expression she had learned to read as this matters more than I know how to explain right now.

Air supremacy.

He had others — Black Ribbon, Akiyama, names from somewhere she could not locate. She had never asked him to explain them fully. She had seen the weight behind his eyes when he said them and chosen to let him carry that weight a little longer.

She set it aside. “The Spider Demons appeared within the third defensive layer before we identified them. The darkness alone doesn’t account for it. Where were they beforehand?”

Ferlin closed his notebook around one finger. “The General Staff believes they were already there. Already in position. Waiting.”

“Underneath us.”

“That is the only explanation consistent with the timeline.”

Anna let that settle. She looked at Sylvie.

Sylvie said, quietly: “Penetrating solid ground costs me significantly more magic power and collapses my effective range. The Devilbeast overflights were tasking me upward. While I was covering the sky, I had nothing left for the subsurface.” She stopped. “The black zone — it may not have been cover for the Spider Demons on the surface. It may have been cover for the ones coming out of the ground. A distraction.”

The room absorbed this.

They were not, Anna thought, looking at an enemy that had gotten lucky. They were looking at an enemy that had studied them, built a counter to their specific capability, executed it with patience, and then — when it was over — had pulled back in good order.

Iron Axe’s discomfort made complete sense now.

What would Roland do, standing here?

He would start cataloguing what the enemy’s move revealed about their decision-making. He would ask what assumptions they had been wrong about. He would look for the constraint hiding inside the attack.

Before she could organize any of it, Edith Kant began to laugh.

Not loud. Not theatrical. Just genuine amusement, unhurried, as if she had been waiting for a long time to deliver a verdict and found the moment finally appropriate.

“Why do you all look like we lost?” she asked, glancing around the table. “Unless I walked into the wrong meeting — we won.”

Chapter 1087 - Loss and Victory

Translator: TransN Editor: TransN

…

When Anna descended to the underground headquarters, she immediately sensed the oppressive atmosphere in the room.

Everybody rose to their feet and bowed their heads as they saw her. “Your Royal Highness, ma’am!” they said in a chorus.

Iron Axe went down to his knee and said, “I’m sorry for having you come down here. I should have anticipated that the enemy would raid the encampment at night and take extra precautions accordingly. I sincerely apologize for my negligence.”

“Please don’t blame yourselves,” said Anna as she waved her hand. “I’m just concerned about the situation at the front like everybody else. I want to know what’s going on. Is everybody… OK?”

Anna was still not accustomed to the fact that she was now the queen. She felt particularly embarrassed when Wendy, Agatha, and the other witches bowed to her. She actually preferred to treat all the other witches as her sisters, although she had never specifically said that aloud.

When the campsite had been attacked, she had immediately been escorted by both the God’s Punishment Witches and her guards to the underground shelter. However, Anna would have rather fought with the others like she had done during the Months of Demons than being strictly protected.

Yet she knew as the queen, she had to accept some inevitable changes.

She just hoped that her presence could put everyone’s mind at ease.

Iron Axe, surprisingly, looked hesitant. After a moment of silence, he answered, “Your Highness, the battle didn’t go well.”

“Can you tell me more about it?”

“Certainly. We were actually just discussing it,” said Iron Axe, who cast a glance at Ferlin Eltek. The latter gave a nod of comprehension and opened his notebook.

“Based on the reports from the field medics, 200 killed and 700 wounded in First Army,” Morning Light replied heavily.

“However, these are just the initial rough estimates. We got those numbers in quite a hurry. The actual casualties will likely be higher, since Miss Nana… can’t treat so many people at once.”

200 deaths. This number almost equaled the number of casualties the decisive battle against the Church. However, that massive battle was the final battle of the war with the Church. This was the very first battle with the demons after they started advancing north. There was still a long way to go before First Army reached the Taquila ruins.

No wonder Iron Axe was disconcerted by the outcome of this battle.

Anna had seen the wounded soldiers who were covered in blood, lying on the ground in a line. The air in the hospital was saturated with the smell of blood and the sound of inarticulate groans. Nana definitely could not cure all of the wounded at once. For the maimed soldiers and those who suffered severe internal organ damage, she could only cure five to six people at most in one day. Therefore, in order to save more people, she had to apply her magic power to the ones most in need.

For example, Nana would only heal fatal wounds for the soldiers who were wounded in the chest or abdomen. For those who sustained minor injuries, she would instruct the field medics to stitch up their wounds after the soldiers drank Cleansing Water. As for those who had relatively severe injuries, she had to leave their wounds open before she treated them the next day. The soldiers would thus rely on the medicine made from sleeping ferns

and coltsfoot to reduce pain. As to whether they would survive the night or whether the liquid medicine would cause addiction, the field medics did not have time or effort to thoroughly think about these problems.

It was not easy to accurately apply magic power to a specific body part in such an intense environment. Anna was surprised at how much Nana had improved. Compared to the little school girl who used to faint at the sight of blood, Nana was now an experienced and professional military doctor.

“I’ll advise His Majesty to persuade Countess Spear from Fallen Dragon Ridge to send us reinforcements,” said Anna slowly. “She can help the field medics to save more people. By the way, how did the demons sneak in?”

“I guess… the enemy took advantage of the limits of my Magic Eye,” said Sylvie, who apparently looked very frustrated. “The Devilbeast scouts they sent earlier were probably trying to learn how far my Magic Eye can see, and I was completely unaware they were watching me…”

“We should have thought about that,” Agatha put in self-reprovingly. “After the battle at North Slope, the demons apparently noticed Sylvie’s presence. They used Devilbeasts to first test out how far her Eye of Magic can see based on our reactions to them. Then, their army gathered outside that range and raided us after night fell. They started attacking us the very moment we retreated from Tower Station No.1, when our encampment was the most unguarded.”

“That being said, this wasn’t anybody’s fault,” Morning Light comforted. “If we really wanted to deceive the enemy, we’d have had to ignore the Devilbeasts when they approached us. This would be against the protocols we received during our training. Even if we knew the enemy’s plan beforehand, it would be impossible maintain a scharade with thousands of soldiers and regular workers. In other words, the enemy would have learned the limits of the Magic Eye at somepoint anyways. Even if they didn’t ambush us at Tower Station No. 1, they would have done so at No. 2 or No. 3.”

“If I remember correctly, the shooting range of the Spider Demons is around two to three kilometers. Since they are fairly slow, it normally takes them quite a while to enter our firing range and be spotted by Sylvie. Is it just pure

luck that they weren’t spotted in the first place?” Anna asked in confusion. “I’m not really familiar with the operation. Correct me if I’m wrong. The First Army should have their own scouting team, shouldn’t they? For example, they can use hydrogen ballons at the encampment.”

“You’re always so attentive to details, Your Highness,” Iron Axe replied while placing his hand on his chest. “Generally speaking, the First Army gathers information in three ways: through Sylvie, through Maggie and Lightning, and by themselves. However, the army scouts are just supplementary and only for contingencies.”

After hearing the explanation from the commander-in-chief, Anna finally had a basic understanding of the intelligence system of the First Army. During the Graycastle unification war, this system had worked pretty well. Yet when they fought against the demons, they soon noticed some big flaws in this system.

Nothing running on the ground could compete against the Devilbeasts flying in the sky.

This meant there was a limit in how much information the army scouts could obtain. Once they went beyond that limit, their mission could be highly risky and even life-threatening, and dead people can’t bring back information. The Devilbeasts were able to hide in clouds, giving them an absolute advantage over scouts on the ground. As the Fertile Plains was flatter than a pancake, they could dive down anytime like a hawk snatching up a rabbit.

This disadvantage significantly restricted the amount of information the First Army could collect. In this situation, they could barely assist Sylvie. Meanwhile, the flying demons could prey on any soldiers sent out to scout while escaping the scrutiny of the Magic Eye. There was basically nothing the First Army could do about it.

A phrase suddenly flashed across Anna’s mind.

A phrase that Roland had a mixed feeling about every time he mentioned it.

That was “air supremacy”.

The party who had the command of the sky dominated the war.

Apart from “air supremacy”, there were also some other phrases beyond her understanding which Roland said from time to time, such as the Black Ribbon and Akiyama…

Anna shook her head, trying to put these thoughts behind her. She asked, “Based on your description, the Spider Demons should have reached the third layer of the defensive line by the time we saw them. Was it because of the poor lighting at night that we failed to notice them?”

“That’s one of the reasons, Your Highness,” Ferlin Eltek replied. “The General Staff believes… that those monsters were probably waiting for us there from the beginning.”

Anna blinked in mild surprise and asked, “Are you saying… that they were hiding right underneath us?”

“That’s right. This is the only explanation that makes sense as to why these giant creatures suddenly emerged within shooting range,” Ferlin confirmed in a grave tone. “I asked Miss Sylvie. She told me it costs her a lot of magic power to see through solid matter. When she does that, she can’t see very far. It seems the Devilbeasts were also diverting Miss Sylvie’s attention while testing out how far she can see. Once she focused solely on the sky, she would not have excess magic power to also monitor things underground.”

“So this is why the demons successfully raided the encampment?” Anna questioned herself in silence.

If both Sylvie and the demons were stationary, it would be a lot easier for Sylvie to notice the movement below. The blackness Sylvie had seen was probably not to cover the demons, but rather to distract Sylvie from the Spider Demons when they came out of hiding.

Now they knew they were dealing with a very difficult enemy. The demons had not only come up with a strategy that countered First Army’s operation

methods, but they were also extremely proficient in their use of magic power.

It was no wonder that a suffocating atmosphere had settled over First Army’s headquarters.

This was definitely not a good sign.

What would Roland do if he were here?

While Anna was trying to come up with some encouraging words, Edith suddenly burst into a fit of laughter.

“Why all the long faces like you just lost a battle? We just gained a major victory!” She said while chuckling. “Am I in the wrong meeting?”