Chapter 1088: Just a Beginning
Ferlin looked up from his notebook. “Lady Edith.” The quiet of his voice was deliberate. “We lost over two hundred people. What victory are you referring to?”
“A little over two hundred,” Edith said. The precision was not cruelty — it was the first step of an argument. “What did the demons lose? Fifty infiltrators, including a Senior Demon, responsible for every casualty inside the encampment. And on the defensive line? At least two thousand. Probably more — those are rough figures from what’s still burning. Miss Sylvie, does the Eye of Magic contradict that count?”
Sylvie hesitated. “No. That’s what I saw.”
Edith turned. “Agatha — in your experience commanding against demons during the Battle of Divine Will—”
“I wasn’t a commander.” Agatha’s brows drew together. “I was a Quest Society researcher. I fought them once, in the ruins—”
“I said commanding.” Edith leaned slightly forward, her voice narrowing to a point. “In a war. Not a skirmish.”
“Edith—” Iron Axe said.
“Why?” Anna’s voice cut through the room, not loud but final, and it redirected every head at the table. She looked at Edith with the same blue focus she gave to everything — simple, steady, hard to misread. “Why ask her that? As far as I know, your experience was the Northern Region. You haven’t commanded in a major war either.”
The question could have drawn blood coming from anyone else. From Anna it landed clean, without accusation, as factual as a measurement. The quality of her attention had a way of calming rooms — not because it was warm, but because it was exact.
The hardness in Edith’s eyes softened. She placed her hand over her chest. “You’re right. I have no experience. But someone in this room does.” She paused. “I knew the moment I saw her face.”
Her.
The room tracked the gesture to the far end of the table, where Phyllis sat with a cup of tea at her lips, attention directed somewhere well beyond the four walls, a faint curve at the corner of her mouth. A God’s Punishment Witch savoring a cup of tea was not something that happened — the transformation that had freed them from their original bodies had taken sensation with it, taste and smell and the small pleasures of the flesh reduced to biological function. Phyllis was four hundred years old and she was daydreaming with visible contentment.
She didn’t notice the silence until Wendy pushed her, gently, from behind.
“Oh—” Phyllis blinked, straightened, looked at the ring of watching faces. “Forgive me. I was occupied with something important and missed the discussion. Does Your Highness have a question for me?”
The silence stretched. Then someone — Ferlin, possibly — made a sound that was not quite a laugh and could not be taken back.
It broke. Everyone around the table laughed, some quietly and some not, and the weight that had accumulated over the past hour lifted by several measurable degrees. A four-hundred-year-old witch, survivor of the collapse of the Union, had just offered I was thinking about something important with a perfectly straight face and the conviction of someone who had never in her life been caught daydreaming.
“I don’t think I need to rephrase the question,” Anna said, mouth curving.
Phyllis coughed into her tea.
Edith waited for the room to settle. Then she stood.
“The demons suffered greater losses. They withdrew; we held. Tower Station No. 1 is intact. Where is the defeat?” She moved her eyes from face to face, unhurried, making sure the argument had time to land. “His Majesty once told me: a defeat is a failure to achieve a predetermined objective. The demons did not achieve their objective. I would go further — their commander made a serious mistake.”
That landed differently. The laughter was gone now; people leaned in.
“A mistake?” Ferlin said. “The operation was precise. Sophisticated. They identified the limits of the Eye of Magic, staged infiltrators underground, timed the assault to our most exposed moment—”
“Yes.” Edith’s tone did not change. “And then they sent fifty demons.”
She let it sit.
“Fifty demons for an encampment of this size. Ten demons assigned to the barracks. Ten to the trenches. Ten to the artillery. The command structure clearly believed ten was sufficient to overwhelm each target.” She spread her fingers on the table. “Ask yourself: what does that tell you about what they think of us?”
The room began to understand.
The demons’ magic — the precision of their control, the efficiency of their formation changes under fire — that was no surprise. Thousands of years of warfare against the Union had honed it. What was genuinely startling, what had unsettled everyone in the room without being named, was the other thing: their speed in adapting to firearms. There had been no contact between humans and demons before the Northbound Slope engagement. The Spider Demons had learned to go prone under machine gun fire in a single battle. That was not the behavior of a slow, mystical enemy — that was a civilized adversary with learning capacity.
And an adversary like that, with that kind of intelligence, had sent fifty soldiers and expected them to be enough.
“They underestimated us,” Anna said. Her voice was quiet. Something was moving behind her eyes — not anger, but the careful pressure of a conclusion being pressed into place. “If they had treated us as equal opponents—”
“They would have sent every demon straight at the barracks,” Edith said. “The Senior Demon leads. All fifty infiltrate the sleeping quarters. The Spider Demons on the defensive line do not disperse but converge their projectile strikes on a single point while the exterior army pins our artillery.” She paused. “How many would we have lost then? Five hundred? A thousand? More? We would have held Tower Station No. 1 eventually — yes. But at what cost.”
The chill that moved through the room was specific and anatomical.
The two hundred dead had been the result of fifty demons scattered across four objectives. If those fifty had concentrated on one, if the commander of the Western Front had valued the operation proportionally — had not assumed ten demons were worth ten times a man — the number on Ferlin’s page would not have read two hundred.
“We learned things from this operation that we could not have learned any other way,” Edith continued. “The barracks need to be underground. The roofs above sleeping positions must stop not just stone needles but machine gun fire and mortar blast. We know now that the demons can conceal themselves beneath the surface and that the Eye of Magic cannot simultaneously watch the sky and the ground.” Her gaze moved around the table. “Every one of those lessons would have cost us far more to learn if the demons’ commander had taken us seriously.” She paused. A single breath. “It’s just a beginning.”
Chapter 1088 - Just a Beginning
Translator: TransN Editor: TransN
“Lady Edith…” Ferlin reminded her in a hushed voice. “We just lost over 200 people. What major victory are you talking about?”
“Only… a little over 200,” the Pearl of the Northern Region interjected. “What about the demons? 50 of them sneaked in the campsite, including a Senior Demon. They should be responsible for all the casualties of the First Army. It appears that we suffered a great loss at the first glance, but there are at least 2,000 casualties among the enemy on the defensive line, not to mention that this is just a very rough estimate. There were also numerous demons blasted to pieces when they attempted to flee. It may take a few days for us to obtain the exact number. Am I right, Miss Sylvie?”
“Well…” Sylvie said hesitantly, “That’s what the Eye of Magic saw.”
“Ms. Agatha, I guess you’ve never been a commander in a war over the past 400 years, have you?” asked Edith as she turned to the Ice Witch.
Agatha’s brows were furrowed. She said, “During the Battle of Divine Will, it was mandatory for the witches in the Union to learn how to fight against demons. I used to be a researcher at the Quest Society and fought them once when exploring the ruins…”
“I’m talking about a war,” Edith snapped, leaning forward while gazing at Agatha compellingly.
“Edith— ” Iron Axe said, trying to put a pause on this awkward conversation.
“Why?” At that moment, Anna blurted out, jerking everyone back to the present. “Why do you ask her that? As far as I know, you were only a commander back in the Northern Region and shouldn’t have experienced a major war either.”
This was a particularly tricky question that would have easily fanned Edith’s fury had it been put by somebody else. However, Anna communicated it in such a gentle and dignified manner that no one felt the question threatening.
Perhaps, the innocent and serious look in the azure of her eyes naturally calmed everybody down.
The glint in Edith’s eyes faded away. The next moment she placed her hand on her chest and replied quietly, “You’re right. I didn’t have war experience, but someone else here did…” She broke off and then continued, “From her look, I instantly know we won this battle.”
Her?
The people in the room looked in the direction Edith pointed out and saw at the end of the long table, the representative of Taquila, Phyllis, sitting there in a daze, with a cup of tea in her hand, her lips curling up into a smile. Every now and then, she took a little sip of the tea as if savoring some tasty drink. This was not normal for the Taquila witches. As they had lost all the sensations, the pleasure of eating and drinking were denied them. Food was simply a basic life necessity to help them self-perpetuate.
Despite the fierce discussion, Phyllis was completely not paying attention to the meeting. Even though everyone was now staring at her, her mind seemed to still be somewhere else.
It was after Wendy pushed her in the back that she finally jerked herself out of the trance.
“Oh, so where were we?” The God’s Punishment Witch asked blankly on a cough. “I was thinking about something very important and wasn’t paying attention to your discussion. Well, does Your Highness have some questions for me?”
“…” There was an awkward silence.
It was surprising to see that an ancient witch, who had been living for 400 years, lie in the same fashion as mortals. Phyllis was clearly daydreaming,
but she unblushingly turned her lack of attention into a very poor lie that she was dwelling on some serious undertakings.
“Haha.”
Somebody sniggered, and then everybody laughed. The tension in the room was immediately relieved.
“Looks like I don’t need reiterate my question now,” Anna said while shaking her head in amusement.
Edith rose, surveyed the room, and said, “The demons suffered a greater loss. They fled but we stayed. There’s no damage whatsover to Tower Station No. 1, so where does the talk of defeat come from? His Majesty once said to me that a loss means a failure to accomplish a predetermined goal. Apparently, the demons didn’t get what they wanted. I would even like to say that the commander of the demons made a very serious mistake.”
“A mistake?” The people on the floor were all astounded at Edith’s conclusion. It did not seem to them that the ambush last night was a failure. It had been well planned out and successfully executed. The demons’ accurate control of their magic power might not necessarily look very impressive. After all, they had been constantly upgrading their magic skills over the past thousands of years through numerous wars. However, their quick and effective reaction to firearms definitely said something about their learning ability, for there had been completely no communication between human beings and demons until the outbreak of the war at the Northbound Slope.
Everyone started to realize that the demons were nothing like any of the enemy they had encountered before. Although the demons had once almost eradicated the human race from Fertile Plains and destroyed the witch empire, nobody had personally witnessed that dust-laden history. The past thus gradually faded into oblivion, leaving only a thin thread of memory that would easily snap and float off with time.
It was until the outbreak of this war that people finally caught a glimpse of the mysterious history and started to feel a little scared. Nevertheless, nobody had shared their fear.
They realized that the demons were far stronger than the demonic beasts on the Barbarian Land.
Apart from their magic power and enormous physical strength, the demons had developed a high level of civilization.
They even possessed knowledge unknown to human beings.
When mankind could no longer use excuses such as “the demons relied on the power and magic granted by Gods”, and when the notion that man was the smartest creature on the continent was challenged for the first time, the shock was absolutely ineffable.
Immediately, men started to question themselves and overlooked the potential problems among the demons. That was why everybody was curious when Edith said the demons had lost the battle.
“What’s their mistake then?” Anna asked instantly.
“They’re too arrogant, Your Highness,” Edith answered firmly. “They first stirred the encampment, then seized the artillery, and finally drove the army straight in. If they were facing a knightage or an old-school army, they would have won. However, the First Army isn’t any common army. The demons only saw the change in our weapons but overlooked our soldiers. This is their biggest mistake!”
Everybody straightened up to listen to her speech.
“They only dispatched around 50 demons throughout the whole operation. This indicates that it wasn’t easy for them to carry out their plan. They should have made the best use out of this plan, but what did they actually do? They sent the 50 demons to various places, including the barracks, the trenches and the artillery,” the Pearl of the Northern Region spoke eloquently. “The commander of the demons is definitely not a fool. It’s obvious that it believes ten demons would be more than sufficient to crush us. Isn’t it too presumptuous?”
Anna somewhat understood the implication behind Edith’s words. She clenched her fist and said slowly, “If they didn’t make this mistake… if they treated us as equal…”
“Then they would have never thought that only 50 demons would defeat us. Instead, they would kill as many soldiers as possible,” Edith cut in with a nod. “Suppose all the demons rushed to the barracks, including the Senior Demon, while their army waited at the rear, what would happen after the Spider Demons sneaked in?”
Anna felt a chill running down her spine.
The reason they had only lost 200 people was that the 50 demons had been scattered around the encampment. It had thus earned the reinforcements some time to fight back. If the demons had planned to massacre the entire barracks while sacrificing the Senior Demon at the very beginning, the First Army would have probably sustained a much greater loss.
“A loss of 500?, 1,000… or 2,000? Of course, we’ll eventually annihilate them and preserve Tower Station No. 1. However, it’ll be hard to say which party would win the battle then,” said Edith as she splayed her fingers. “Unfortunately, the demons are too arrogant to seize this opportunity. The first army, on the other hand, learned a lot from this operation. For example, they should now know that the barracks should be built underneath the ground; the roof should not only be able to block stone needles but also the strikes of the machine guns and mortars. If our enemy didn’t make such a mistake, it would have probably cost us a lot more to learn our lesson.” Edith paused for a second and then went on, “Anyway, fellows, it’s just a beginning.”