TBATE Duality

Chapter 82

Jade Leywin POV

| 2 months later |

"So how's the situation in the Elshire forest?" Virion asked

"We've been able to repel all of the alacryan's attempts of taking Ilirea, thanks to Jade we can see the path that has been charted through the forest and we established several patrol teams to keep the area under surveillance 24/7 but there's something that concerns me" Art replied

"What is it?" Buhnd inquired

"For the last 2 months since they managed to create this path we had multiple skirmishes every day with alacryan troops Alea and I even encountered some divisions trying to march towards the city but in the last week we had zero contact with the alacryans" Art explained

"Shouldn't that be good news? Maybe their starting to run out of soldiers" Blaine voiced

"Unlikely, Alacrya can count on a much higher population than Dicathen so if it becomes a war of attrition we're the ones that will lose" I told him

"How can you be so sure? According to your intel Alacrya is comparable to Dicathen in size so our populations should be comparable" Alduin asked me

"For several reasons, first of all here in Dicathen we use barely half of our territory due to the beast glades occupying a quarter of the continent also a good half is composed of the great desert above Darv and the Elshire forest, while the dwarves and the elves had found ways to colonize those territories it's way less efficient than what the humans did in Sapin which is composed mostly by a fertile plain, why else do you think Sapin is the most populated region of Dicathen? Now in Alacrya they make full use of all their lands, they don't have deserts or forests to worry about and the Vritra clan eradicated any mana beast that could pose a threat to the general population so they can count on about twice the land we have, second Agrona sees Alacrya as his personal lab and the alacryans are his lab rats, the more he has the more experiments he can perform also with a higher population he can build a bigger army for his war against Epheotus so we can assume that he promoted reforms to boost the population, lastly Alacrya has a higher technological level than Dicathen and more often than not this leads to a higher population, all considered it's not too farfetched to assume that Alacrya has 4 maybe even 5 times our population and combined with the fact that their ration of mages to non-mages is 20 times ours they can count on a LOT more soldiers than us" I explained and everyone aside from Art just looked at me in disbelief

"So, you're saying that not only their elite soldiers are stronger than our Lances and by a significant margin too but we're also sorely outnumbered?!" Bunhd exclaimed

"Well, yeah"

"Why didn't you tell us before?" Blaine protested

"Ehm because I thought you all figured it out already? I mean it was pretty obvious we were outnumbered" I replied

"He's right, it was obvious looking at Agrona's past actions, while I didn't do the calculations needed for an estimation like Jade did I also knew we were at a disadvantage in terms of numbers" Art stated

"Besides there wasn't much we could do about it in the first place" I added

"You two are way too smart you know, *sigh* well at least I know for sure that Elenoir's and Dicathen's furures are secured, now let's return to the original topic, what in the world are the alacryans plotting? from the reports I received from Aya their activities at The Wall diminished greatly too, at first I thought it was because they wanted to focus on Elenoir but what Arthur just told us confuted my assumption, Buhnd any changes in alacryan activities in Darv?" Virion asked