Chapter 128: Battle Lines

Chapter 128: Battle Lines

Despite the setbacks at Banath, the Lich’s forces moved on. A small portion of its men and some imported chirurgeons were left behind to tunnel and triage, digging out what soldiers could be saved and building new constructs to fight from pieces of the old ones along with the corpses of those defenders that they found.

It was grisly work, and the effort was largely wasted as most of everyone had been crushed to powder. Fortunately, its servants could work quite well with unmatched parts like its drudges were finding, but there were other silver linings, too.

With the pass closed, armies to the east entirely lost access to the entire region, granting it an exclusive domain that measured perhaps a fifth of the continent and further isolating the remaining pockets of resistance its forces had not yet ground to dust on the northern coasts. Its more specialized units had largely been spared destruction as well, so the Lich’s general adapted its tactics to current resource levels and moved on without missing a beat. If its enemies thought that this desperate gambit would save them, they would be sadly mistaken.

The Lich let it make the important decisions there. After all, despite the stunningly terrible victory they’d accomplished, it did not blame the entity that led its forces. It would have been a fool to do that. Not one soul in its entire collection had the awful piece of knowledge that the fortresses might collapse in a single moment. It was truly unforeseen.

Besides, the Lich was busy with other, more interesting toys at the moment. Not only did it have the Ghroshian rats to play with and study, but it also had the last tree of Eldameer wood, which Krulm’venor had brought back to its growing laboratory in Constantinal. In the former case, it continued to research the origins of strange amalgamation without much success, but the latter case, it found to be especially diverting.

In many ways, a forest spirit was literally its equal opposite, and the Lich found that to be an irresistible riddle. For the first time in its entire existence, its fire godling had not found some way to disappoint it. Though the elves or fae that he’d spotted had managed to elude both capture and death, that had not stopped Tenebroum’s rabid little army of metal goblins from burning down the entire forest or from repeating the scorched earth on the night that followed on the splendid saplings that had sprung up overnight.

In the end, they did that repeatedly until only one tree remained. Then, the little gibbering horde dug it up and brought it back to its thriving dead city. Despite the fact that no one had lived there in months, Constantinal was thriving. Every day, it produced dozens of new constructs for the Lich’s armies, and there was something about the industrial ballet in what used to be the city’s grand temple.

When there were no other matters that required its immediate support, it would often linger there and watch the slow ballet of hundreds of hands and arms as they moved each unfinished corpse from station to station in a process that was as efficient as it was pleasing. Right now, it had many more important things to do, the most important of which was to plant the seeds that the sapling produced and plant them in soil from the swamp that had been imported just for this purpose.

While the Lich focused on this, its war plans continued on without skipping a beat. In the short term, the Paragon did not try to conquer fortresses or hold territories. Instead, it merely sewed chaos. It sent small forces of fast-moving centipede cavalry in all directions, slaughtering resupply caravans and other, harder-hitting strike forces to destroy supply depots and communities that supported nearby garrisons.

This, of course, meant that its treacherous opponents had six to eight hours each day to do whatever they wanted. This forced its general to alter its plans, expanding them to create a very wide cordon on all sides of the city.

Attacking directly would be easier, but with so many of its forces eliminated so recently and direct reinforcements in the form of mages and Siddrimites only a few days to the south, that was a risky proposition. It wasn’t just the possibility that it could lose thousands of more constructs that stayed its hand. It was the idea defeat itself.

If such things became possible, then hope would rise further, and already it could feel what food had done to the morale of that nation. The mana had flowed so much more freely when they were frozen and starving. The Lich could easily foresee an outcome where the mages engineered its defeat, and the populace, driven by rising spirits, pushed it back and back again. It should easily be able to hold this line here, but if that fell, then it would have to fall all the way back to the tunnel it had bored through the Wyrmspires.

That would be completely unacceptable. Every square inch of land that the Lich had claimed would belong to it forever, and even as it surveyed the complicated battlefield, that resolve only strengthened. The snows would come soon. Then, not only would the men move slower, but the darkness would last longer.

Before the ground froze, though. There were preparations to be made. Tenebroum’s forces always claimed mines and caves near the zones of conflict where they could, but this time, given the sheer amount of ground they would have to cover, this was not going to be possible. It was going to build dozens of small lairs all throughout the region. Each would have to be close enough to each other to allow movement and close enough to the main trade roads to interdict traffic.

This would be impossible to do in a short period of time without magic, and even with magic, it was certain that everything it did was being watched. Neither Tenebroum nor its Paragon had any doubts that both the mages and the Gods themselves were spying on them. It was the only way to explain all the subtle counters that had occurred at every stage of this operation. From the dwarves locating its tunnel so quickly and the ambush in the woods to the collapse of the shields of Banath, something was helping the mortals, and that wouldn’t change until it was victorious or it had found to snuff out the gods.

Since, in most cases, the only way to accomplish the latter seemed to be to complete the former. In a battle of attrition, it seemed unlikely that a fragile foe like the humans could ever triumph over its deathless might, but with its most recent setback, Tenebroum was already beginning to face a shortage of some of its most valuable parts like skulls and martial souls. Steal or animal parts could compensate for one, and goblin souls could be used in place of the other, but even so, both choices would weaken the quality of the end product.

Its soldiers might last forever, but between its recent losses and the countermeasures that the humans were taking to secure the corpses of their dead where they could, the Lich could see a day years from now where it might have no way to create new servants. Such a fate was intolerable, of course. It had already dispatched drudges to the graveyards around the cities under its control, like Fallravea. There, centuries of dead waited for it, which made those places vast if finite resources.

Something would have to be done, but for the moment, the Lich was out of ideas. Trying to keep track of its arcane projects, its various servants, and the tactics and disposition of the various dungeons it would need to build to house its units during daylight hours was an overwhelming task. It was an infinite and ever-growing list, and the Lich would have been tempted to build a servant just to handle that for it if it had not already done so in the form of the Skoeticnomikos.