Overlord Tabitha didn’t realize right away what it was that the Rogue had done, but she was immediately certain that he was messing with her in some way.
It was only when she received the next message from Karl that she realized that the scoundrel had told the Beast Master to send all updates directly to her as the liaison to the Archbishop, to keep everyone updated on the battlefield situation.
“Did I do something in particular to you?” She asked, before relaying the message to the Archbishop and his team.
“Not at all. You were simply standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he only knows so many people who are here to pass on the status updates.” Niall replied with his most sincere smile.
The Archbishop and Nacht both chuckled as they realized what the Overlord had done, right before Niall excused himself from the room by simply vanishing. That didn’t stop anyone’s planning, as he was only there to provide intelligence confirmation anyhow, and they had already discussed the majority of what had happened while the Overlords were out with Monarch Karl’s team.
On the North Side of the city, Karl had his hands full with the constant new arrivals. Not just of Elites and soldiers to replace the ones who had been wounded in combat and brought into Lotus’ radius for healing, but also the constant arrival of the Giants’ allies. They were appearing from portals in the distance, in numbers that suggested they had cleared out the majority of the three nations.
Strangely, they had not brought many higher ranked monsters to this side, and were attempting to flood the city with weaker ones, instead of softening it first by defeating the most powerful Elites.
There must be more to their strategy that Karl wasn’t understanding, he was certain of it. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
[Hawk, remember how the Frost Giants were scouring the area in a search pattern before the First Advancement trial spawned. Do you think that they could be doing the same thing here today? Something is off with their tactics, and they aren’t sending their strongest, just loads of cannon fodder.
They can’t be expecting us to send all our strongest and tire them out before the real fight starts, there has to be a deeper motive.] Karl suggested.
[If there is, I don’t see it. They’re attacking in nice ordered lines, working together, but there are only a few of the strong Giants in the back guiding them. It doesn’t look like some fancy search pattern.] Hawk replied, uncertain whether he too was missing something about their attack.
It looked perfectly normal to him, but deeper motives were the Karl’s department, not his.
{The numbers are increasing too fast. We’re going to need Commander led teams on the next bus full of reinforcements.} Dana noted as her central defence point repelled another attack wave.
This time it was mostly Ogres, with some Hobgoblins, but they were beginning to get more Commander Rank Beasts in the mix, and the defenders couldn’t easily keep up, even with the High Priestesses blessing their weapons.
{Overlord, Please inform the Archbishop that the attackers have stepped up the assault by a Rank. We are now seeing many more Commanders among the assault groups.
The Command Officers on the North Side request higher Rank reinforcements.}
{Understood. We will send who we have. They are pulling Elites from the border via portal, but we don’t want to reduce our capability too far, in case this is a diversion for a major border assault.} Overlord Tabitha replied.
Karl relayed the message so that the teams fighting could have some hope. What they needed were more wide area defenders. The blessing of the Red Dragon Priestesses made a decent armour barrier over the troops, but it was a one and done sort of spell. They didn’t have the mana to keep refreshing it as everyone took damage, they could only get it active and hope for the best.
With hundreds of soldiers for every capable priestess, and a thousand or more for every High Priestess, they had to do the best that they could with what they had.
Karl looked down at the map in front of him, taking stock of where all of the enemy troops were, and briefly wondered where the Commanders who would normally be doing this went.
Were they with the reconnaissance planes that couldn’t send radio signals, or possibly stuck in town? Worse, had his attempt to rescue his trainees simply rendered them obsolete, so they went back to their offices?
{Monarch. We have an update for you. There are Commanders on their way to the North Side, but not as many as you might hope. The East and West walls are straining our higher Rank capacity.} Tabitha informed Karl.
He could sense the grim tone behind the message, even though it appeared as text. A glance at the stones for troops that were not part of his battlefront, the ones he had simply updated from Hawk’s messages and forwarded, showed Karl that things really were that bad. The western front had nearly six thousand Giants above Commander Rank facing it down, and that was taking most of the higher Ranked Elites in town to deal with.
Whereas on the Eastern Wall, they were besieged by an Ogre army, assisted by Frost Giants, and that would need every Commander led Ascended team that they could get.
{How is our artillery looking?} Karl asked.
{There are only forty units stationed in the city for point defence.} Tabitha replied simply.
{We will make do with whatever you can spare. If it comes down to it, I will activate a large area spell over the North Side to improve our odds.}
{Do what you have to. If they send a challenger over to contest your actions, deal with it however you see fit.}
That worked well enough for Karl.
[Hey Remi, how large can you make a Thunderstorm at Ascended Rank? We don’t need to kill everything, we need to make them think that we have a way for lower ranked mages to work together on one huge spell.] Karl suggested.
[I think that I can do that pretty well. If I make it high Ascended, that’s under five percent power output. I can spread that out large enough to almost make it look like a natural storm.] Remi agreed.
[Do it, but stay in your space when you do so that the enemy can’t trace it back to its source. I’ve noticed in the past that others have a hard time finding the source of spells from the space, unless they are visibly leaving from our location.]