Of course, it didn’t go as Micky had planned. No, no, they did exactly what he expected of them. The problem was that he had a literal giant rock in his defenses. It looked like a mountain had just sprung up out of nowhere. It didn’t, it came sliding in. But Micky’s own counter defenses had stopped it.

Again, his scouts had failed him. Oh, they identified the approaching army alright. But the scouts had failed to recognize the glowy runes. It’s literal glowy runes. *Sigh* but apparently putting up a blanket between the slightly glowy runes and the scouts was enough that they weren’t able to see them in the dark of true night.

Again, as predicted they attacked at true night. He had given his soldiers a few hours rest before waking them at twilight. At least that worked as intended. His soldiers were rested and fed. They were still not quite fully restored from their last escapade of standing in the sun and baking. But they were better off than the enemy soldiers from what he could tell. This may just become a battle of attrition. Hmm, or maybe it should become a battle of attrition. Micky had ideas, dangerous.

Micky looked out from a tower in the middle of the camp. Normally a pretty bad idea, but they wouldn’t have any siege equipment and the mages were running defensive countermeasures to magic in this area. Unfortunately those countermeasures didn’t include space, because who would bother with such an esoteric element of spellcraft, am I right? Well, the enemy nation had set up a portal… in the middle of his camp. So apparently they would. Enemy soldiers were flooding through the portal like an open drain in a storm. It was madness, but at least it was controlled.

And then they blinked the portal closed. Only for it to open back up again a minute later somewhere else. Unfortunately or fortunately for them, it was two full humans up into the air, so they had to jump. That’s what happens when you open up a portal blind. Soldiers still poured out of it though. Only for it to close shortly later and then reopen somewhere else closer to ground level. That somewhere else happened to be partway into a latrine.

This was a clusterfuck, but he had to admit that the enemy was being inventive. And in the night, Micky was almost blind to it all. The best he could do was order people to head to the next portal location ahead of time and make sure that at least some were organized for the next ‘surprise’ assault. Micky wasn’t about to designate all his soldiers to the southwestern walls just yet. He was aware that there must be another contingent. This was why he was waiting with several other contingents to surprise them and cavalry to ride them down. In the night cavalry wasn’t the greatest idea. Except when it was, and it would destroy them. Hopefully it was the latter. Micky always had good luck with cavalry, and terrible luck with his scouts.

Micky decided it was about time to return fire. The enemy mages had already started off with a bang, obviously, so it was his turn. Though the only spell his mages weren’t able to counter was the giant rock now in his defenses. The several giant fireballs as big as his largest tent and the small localized serpentine floods carrying soldiers were all stopped outside the walls. Granting perfect targets for his soldiers.

Micky ordered return fire. The enemy was very close, they couldn’t miss. He also ordered soldiers back to positions. Yes the rock was a giant ramp, but it was a ramp to nowhere and just went up. They would then have to climb back down the rock to actually get anywhere, almost as bad as if it was a wall itself. All these tier ones wouldn’t be able to use it, and tier threes or higher, or just outright rankers, wouldn’t give a damn about some walls in the first place. The only part they would care about were the defensive enchantments that were, actually very useful.

So Micky ignored that as a target even though enemy soldiers were climbing up on it and around it like ants. Destroying it would just give them easy access. No, he needed to attack them further back were they were staging for the assault. So he marked the rock, before it hit the wall, well before to prevent margin of error from rearing its ugly head and obliterating the rock.

He also targeted the area were all the spells were coming from. This would be a mixed bag as they were evenly spread out so that instead of one giant glowy encampment, there were several noticeably glowy encampments that had blankets covering their enchantments. But he had a little bit of an ace in the hole on this one. Or rather, several heroic soldiers were dumb enough to jump through the portal into the enemies staging area for launching such attacks. So as they opened the portal it went tow ways, allowing Micky’s stupidly brave soldiers to launch a counter offensive. Good for him since it also marked the location. He figured he would give them half a chance and not launch directly on top of them.

Micky ordered wide area siege spells instead. Instead of a single meteor the size of a building several meteors of icy bolts the size of a cart were launched. One even launched as a single icy meteor before it broke to pieces. One of the largest siege spells he had ever seen and he had launched it. Didn’t he feel the pride to strut the size of his siege spell all over the place.

Until it fell flat and didn’t do anything because it landed outside of the target zone. *Sigh* Well maybe it did something, who knows? Maybe the command tent was right there?... At least the rest of the magic dispersion was landing in the appropriate direction. Now there were shouts and screams coming through the portal and mild panicked cheering from his own soldiers. He hoped they wouldn’t do anything stupid, like run around and end up in their own bombardment. Who was he kidding? That was almost guaranteed to be exactly what they were going to do.

Micky didn’t falter in his orders. He ordered another few as danger close, within a margin or safety… ha! As well as the continued bombardment of the enemy foothold. He even had this handy dandy portal into their camp to know how they were doing. And after correcting some minor deviations and updating their coordinates they fired again. He wasn’t about to stop now. And if they made a giant shield formation to protect themselves? Micky smiled, that would just make for an even bigger target. In a night fight the person that knew were the other person was won. At least from a magical bombardment point of view. The mages would be more than happy to take pot shots at a giant hastily made shield. And if they did dungeon up. He had a handy portal, at hand, ha! Just for such an occasion. Apparently the mages running it had fled or fainted since the portal hadn’t changed position recently. He would need to secure it and restart the procedures in order to obtain another beach head.

He was glad he didn’t have to face portal warfare. From what he heard that was atrocious. Portals everywhere and you had to activate them just right, it was like a maze or a puzzle. Sometimes you would need to launch a portal into the sky so you could make a bolder fall really fast before launching it, or undiscernible liquids. And then there were birds! Birds are evil! Birds don’t exist! (Seriously google it, Lol!)

Yes, portal warfare was atrocious. You didn’t know where you were half the time and the other half you couldn’t move to where you needed to go without capturing the enemy's specifically tuned portal because the enemy set up a distortion in the way… or glass. Which meant you had to backtrack all the way back to the beginning just to get across the threshold.

Yes, give Micky giant fireballs of death, and giant iceballs of death and endless death of soldiers beast monsters and… You know what? You could also give him a bed with a nice book to read, that’d be greeaaat