Princess of Victory - Guardians of Forewood [1]

Chapter 18: Dubious Evidence (I)

Day 22of the Fourth Month, Year 1016

Dustor City, Grizzle Province

WITH the support of the reinforcement, they successfully pushed back the Lirsk army.

The tide of battle changed after the Northern Goldburg Army arrived. The wall of Dustor, as the capital of the province with greatest military prowess, was naturally not so easy to destroy, so it took quite a long time for the enemy to break them. During that time, their siege weapons killed many enemy soldiers at once. Also, Victoria killed the two Mudeorp, so the number of the enemy they had to worry about was cut down to half. With the arrival of the reinforcement, Forewood grasped victory in their hand. For this battle, at least.

So, for the time being, Lirsk should not attack anymore. Hopefully. Despite the little hope, the generals were still worried about Lirsk's own reinforcement coming soon, especially after they had occupied Tamworth City and got their resources. But Victoria believed they at least wouldn't be able to attack again this week. There was no news from the spies in Lirsk Kingdom.

Which was lucky, because the Crimson Corps assembly was in a standstill, too, for some reason. Victoria sent a letter for Alize in the capital to investigate what was going on with that. They should have started marching to Dustor by now, but her letters to the Lieutenant Nile, whom she asked to take the task, was unanswered. It started to make her worried.

But the thing that made her most worried now wasn't that. Over two hundred soldiers were either injured, ill because of poison, or went crazy because of poison as well. It was obvious that there was some other force inside the Dustor City that was playing to weaken Forewood.

So, that meant there was a traitor—or more—among them.

And many of the higher military officers were convinced that it was the young Major Devan Andres. Which made Victoria rather angry. She believed in her judgement a lot, like how the two siblings that was threatened to trick her before were actually good kids—in the end, she brought them to the capital with her to send them to school and it seemed like they were quite talented. So that was why she insisted to prove that Dev was not the traitor.

Regarding Calathea and the other Dustor's Blades members, she already gave them commands to keep watching over the trainees in the infirmary and those that had gone crazy and now locked in the dungeon. Victoria heard some of Blades' members in the military was also affected by the aggressivity incident, which was truly unfortunate. Thankfully there wasn't many, because Calathea had the tradition of calling her men early in the dawn for breakfast meetings. She heard this from one of Blades men that was assigned to report to her during the time that she was in the compound.

"I'd say, it was a blessing in disguise," the man, who was one of the middle-ranked soldiers, said while rubbing his chest. "We usually complain that Leader asks for meeting before dawn even broke, but it saved our lives."

Well, technically, only some people who suffered from aggression died because they fought each other. The rest of them were tied up and locked in the dungeon until they could solve the poison from the well.

That afternoon, after they pushed back the Lirsk troops, they had another strategy meeting, this time with the Northern Goldburg's troop leader. "The Cacao province finally replied to our request of aid army," General Adefine said. "Two hundred soldiers under Sir John Paulo, and another two hundred from Cacao Knighthood."

Knighthood was a formal organization under the nobility. Unlike the military and the city guards, who were under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense and the local government respectively, this organization was somewhat of a private army that a Duke or any other nobility with territory had.