Although they succeeded in taking down one of the enemy commanders and a few hundred mercenaries, Zaos could see that they paid a high price while they were escaping. It was hard to find one of his soldiers that wasn't wounded. Not to mention, he could only count 330 soldiers ahead of him.

"Shit…" Zaos clenched his teeth in annoyance.

As if things weren't bad enough, they were being chased by hundreds of archers on horses. Those same archers were chasing the unit while they were in a lined formation, and they were pretty away from each other. So, even if Zaos uses his Fire Swords, he won't take more than two or three of them at the same time.

"They sure came up with a way to counter my skills pretty fast…" Zaos thought. "I wished that he could have taken down the smart ones first instead of the one who had muscles for brains."

While that wasn't efficient, Zaos fired enhanced bolts toward them. They then killed several of those archers since they were really annoying. He had asked Halamar to make some extra bolts for the trip, but he was quickly running out of them.

"Captain, we can leave the archers to our archers," Cohnal said.

"No, we can't," Zaos said. "Those guys have more experience firing arrows while they are riding horses, so we will lose too many and kill too few."

Zaos wanted to kill the damn archers with his sword. Still, right behind the mercenaries' archers, he could see almost intact two armies and the enraged subordinates of Garrik. Fighting right now would be a really bad idea… fortunately, the enemy was so eager to kill Zaos that they were pursuing his unit while they were moving away from the villages on the path.

"I guess it is only natural that they wouldn't attack those when we can become a pain in the ass later," Zaos nodded to himself.

The villages could be conquered without any issue, so the mercenaries were using their heads… a bit too much from Zaos's perspective. Regardless, Zaos had planned to chip away the numbers in the enemy's army little by little while they moved back to the western base. However, thanks to the other commanders, that was no longer possible since they understood Zaos's strategy.

"Don't make that face, Captain," Cohnal said. "We killed one of their commanders and also took down around four thousand of their original twenty-five thousand. We lost almost two hundred men while doing that, but we practically killed twenty of them for each soldier we lost. At this rate…"

"At this rate, we will be decimated, and they still will have fifteen thousand mercenaries left," Zaos interrupted Cohnal. "It is not enough."

That was some simple math, but the logic was there and made Cohnal shut up. The original plan to burn the siege weapons and then decrease the enemies' numbers didn't even take place since the mercenaries didn't show up the siege weapons for some reason until now.

"I guess that is why I had that bad feeling…" Zaos muttered. "They never showed their siege towers, but they quickly showed it when they tried to take the Northern base. Is it because of the experience?"

While Zaos was pretty sure that those three had no connections to the war four years ago, it didn't mean that they couldn't learn from the mistakes of others. Zaos already could even imagine how they would protect the siege towers from his magic. They just had to hide some of them behind some hills.

  In the end, they managed to reach the western base without suffering any more losses. Despite their accomplishments, Zaos felt like they returned as losers. Brien summoned him, but before that, Zaos gave some potions to the mages and told them to heal their allies' wounds.

"You two should help on the preparations for the next battle," Zaos said to Cohnal and Melisse. "I will join you later."

"Yes, sir," Cohnal said.

Zaos hurried to talk with Brien because time wasn't something they had. Perhaps the enemies wouldn't attack that day since the sun was about to set, and they left their siege weapons behind, but Zaos would rather not wait for that.

"You seem rather exasperated," Brien said when Zaos opened the door. "Can you tell me what happened?" 

Zaos gave a brief summary to the Commander. Even though he looked impressed since five hundred men kept the mercenaries busy for almost three weeks, Zaos didn't share the same feeling. He was rather strict with himself, after all.

"Two commanders and four thousand men for 178 soldiers…" Brien said. "Normally, I would congratulate you for this, but it seems that you want to accomplish much more while sacrificing much less; hence, you are unsatisfied. In any case, you did a good job, you brought us enough time, and we have close to ten thousand soldiers ready to protect the base."

"The base, not the region, huh," Zaos said.

"You are young and talented, Zaos… but too idealistic," Brien said. "Tell me, how do you plan to win this battle without concentrating all of our forces in a single place?"

Zaos wished that he had a plan for that, but he didn't have. The western side of the country was a rather complicated area, after all. Usually, such a fortress would be built in a place where the terrain would be favorable for the defenders, but that wasn't the case in that region. So, they could only rely on the building to increase their chances. Fortunately, Brien didn't think that they would fight a lost battle, so things improved a little bit.

"What is the plan for the battle, sir?" Zaos asked. "I assume that you had plenty of time to devise one."

"Yes, thanks to your unit, I indeed had a lot of time," Brien said. "Still, before telling you the details of the plan, I would like to give you command of our 1400 recruits."