Chapter 781 The Other Side Of The Coin

"There finally here." Elizabeth smiled as she watched thousands of soldiers setting up camp around the city. She and Nikki were currently a ways off from where their camp used to be, watching from a hill as the soldiers streamed over from the horizon.

"Indeed." Nikki nodded with a wide smile. The mission had been far more troublesome than they had initially thought it would be. Of course, they had always understood they wouldn't be able to save everyone. However, needing to micromanage the other players had been a massive pain.

A pain they had to endure, since allowing them to run wild wouldn't have been good for the mission. With some nudging and taunting, they had managed to lead these unruly players by the nose and prevent them from causing any true trouble.

Currently, only Elizabeth and Nikki were left at Pediades.  The rest of Phoenix had left a few hours earlier with the recent batch of rescued citizens. Elizabeth and her vice guild leader remained to hand over the information they had. With that, they will finally be able to shift their focus to the fort Eldrian had thrown at them.

"Well, then... Let's go and great them." Stepping ahead, Elizabeth headed for what was the command tent. The army's reasoning behind their camp differed greatly from what Phoenix had focused on.

Whereas Phoenix wanted to hide their camp and have it easily defendable, and capable of caring for the survivors until they could make the trek to Vlisia, the army wanted to surround the city.

They were setting things up to facilitate in taking over the city. Establishing the camps far enough to give time to react to a sortie, but close enough to ensure a smooth siege. While the orcs weren't able to cover the walls in numbers, they certainly could dig in and make things difficult for the army.

The army also set their camps in a way that ensured they would catch any attempts at escape. With multiple smaller camps being erected to keep watch for this. Their actions were well tuned and organized, practiced even. The entire army surrounding the city in just a few hours. Which, considering the size of the city, was no small feat.

Nikki and Elizabeth were stopped and questioned over five times before finally making it to the commander's tent. Where they were announced and allowed to enter.

"Ah, you must be the representatives of the Chosen I have heard so much about." An old gentleman smiled, turning to greet the two ladies. Mumbling to what appeared to be his squire to give him a moment alone with the girls.

"It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance." Elizabeth said as soon as they were alone, curtsying, before introducing the two of them. "I'm Elizabeth, the guild leader for the Phoenix guild. And this is Nikki, my vice guild leader."

"I guess we've never officially met." The man mumbled, "It feels so strange. I feel like I already know you thanks to all the rumors surrounding you and your guild... I'm Duke Vicar." The centaur before them appeared like a normal man, with gray streaks occupying his hair.

Stopping the two before they could curtsy again, the Duke offered, "Let us leave the formalities for later. We're in the field and preparing for a city takeover. I would prefer if you could speak plainly and share as much as you can."

"Thank you." Elizabeth smiled. Having learned far more about the aspect of etiquette and appearances than Eldrian, who found it irritating at best. "Nikki, please layout the map."

Nodding, Nikki took out a massive map covering nearly two meters in size. They had custom made this over time through a combination of scouting, copying their system map, and Eldrian's information.

Seeing the map and all the details, with pages placed atop pages explaining the situation for each location of interest and even including zoomed in maps, Duke Vicar whistled in amazement. "This is truly impressive."

"Thank you. After confirming the army's date of arrival, we focused our last few days on gathering the information we had been lacking. Over the past few weeks, we had saved around ten thousand citizens..."

Elizabeth paused, considering the original number of citizens. This was not good news. And the following would be worse. "We believe there are still around fifty thousand alive in the city. The rest have all sadly died or been moved."

​ "I see..." The duke did not say much, but the two could clearly feel the atmosphere becoming somber. Taking a moment to allow the duke to accept that hundreds of thousands of lives had died terrible deaths or had been taken to live in even worse conditions, Elizabeth continued.

"We formed an agreement with the adventurers and most of them have retreated or joined your ranks by now."

The duke nodded. He had gotten reports on this already. These adventures hoped to claim significant achievements with their information and experience navigating the lost city.

"Sadly, the new Chosen have proven difficult to work with. Blinded by their experiences from the empire, they did not wish to work with us."

"I've heard about it. Sadly, the least cooperative Chosen ended up coming here in hopes of easy fortunes. It was our management of things that led to this. Hoping to secure more manpower through eliciting the greed of people seems to not be limited to only our kind."

Elizabeth nodded. If anything, she felt the Chosen were even more prone to greed since the danger was non-existent. "They are still in the city. While I doubt any of them would be aggressive to your men, their actions might cause trouble. It is even possible they might try to ditch their troubles on you."

The duke frowned. "Aren't you incapable of death?"

"We are, but there is still the cost of losing levels. Some might wish to escape the penalty and might even be willing to leave their troubles to you. I hope you can inform your men so they would have their guard up. There have been cases of this between guilds."

"Of course, it there is a massive difference between our kind doing something like this to each other, and to you. At least, in our case, death would not be permanent."

The duke did not reply, seemingly deep in thought. After a moment, he thought that introducing Elizabeth to the better side of the Chosen might help. Her tone seemed to damn all who were not in her guild.

"I know you must be extremely busy, however, if it wouldn't be much trouble. I would like for you to visit the guilds who joined with the army instead of rushing to Pediades. Not everyone is as terrible as those whose hearts are filled with greed."

"I-I'll think about it." Honestly, Elizabeth didn't want to bother. Naturally, she had asked Eldrian to keep her updated with how things went on his side. Since he was literally trying to conquer a fort with just a handful of friends.

In fact, the entire guild wanted to be kept up to date. However, for now, Eldrian decided to only share things in the leader's chat (FH).

And somehow, he had managed it.

Elizabeth wanted to go there and be a part of that. She was sure she would get more work handed to her, but that was fine. Ilmadia had already rushed over after Eldrian shared the recording of the duel. It was from Eldrian's POV, so it wasn't the best showcase of things, but it certainly was fascinating.

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