Another day meant that another group of hostile flora and fauna had to be put down, and while the war was getting easier and easier with each passing day, the fact remained that the enemy continued to hold on to their stubborn resistance far longer than had been expected. No one expected that this war would be over in merely a few months, but likewise, they had not expected that the war would be such a slog. They had been lucky up to this point, never having to deal with the hell that was jungle warfare.

The enemy knew this place like the back of their hand, and as a result an unending tide of bodies needed to be thrown at them to remove them from any area at all. Thankfully, if there was one thing that Darksol had in copious amounts, it was bodies that nobody really valued that could be thrown at any given threat until it went away. The more ‘elite’ undead would be saved for special occasions, such as when the remaining elves and plantoids under the Great Tree’s control engaged in the occasional boneheaded idiocy of seeking a pitched field battle.

Now more than ever, it was the endless waves of cheap and unremarkable chaff, such as Skeletons and Zombies, that were the bread and butter of Darksol’s forces, using their sheer numbers and ability to ignore pain to soak up every arrow fired at them and to tire out any fool who closed into melee range. A rain of ranged fire that would have reduced an entire army of mortals to nothing more than food for the worms and other carrion beasts became a waste of time, energy, and resources, forcing the archers to either waste their ammo on unworthy targets or simply abandon the battlefield altogether.

But, at the same time, it wasn’t like they could just ignore the masses of unliving troops. To do so would result in exceedingly high death tolls, and they were running out of bodies of their own that could make a difference in any meaningful way. And, to make matters even worse for them, the elves could not even rely on civilian mobs any longer. Kain’s intrusion into several pitched battles had resulted in the tales of his dreadful, horrifying, and sadistic massacres becoming so widely known that few, if any, civilians wanted to join as a sacrificial living shield.

The bulk of the remnant forces had been untrained, undisciplined civilian rabble, but now only the roughly 38% of that formerly massive force remained, all of them either being true soldiers or civilians who were already shitting themselves out of fear that the Abominable King would descend from the sky and ravage them unmercifully. Of the few that remained, most were still barely trained, with even the ‘true’ soldiers being the leftovers that had remained behind in their homelands as what were essentially ‘Weekend Warriors’, to use a rather derogatory term.

At best they were trained hunters or had some knowledge on how to swing a melee weapon with discipline, but this was a war, not a dojo or a hunting trip, and they were even less competent than anyone from a poorly funded ROTC unit. All they had in terms of knowledge and experience was, essentially, what they had picked up on their own or had been taught by their elders, but even that covered next to nothing in terms of strategy and tactics. They knew some of those things, but it was mostly knowledge geared around hunting animals that were far from sentient, and they had never actually been forced to fight another sentient being before.

Whether or not they actually could bring themselves to go for the kill was something none of the remainder knew, and they would gradually be driven to find their limits, one way or another. All of their hunting knowledge amounted to very little when the enemy had an unending and near-infinite force made up of beings that didn’t notice or care if you stuck an arrow between their eyes or hacked a limb off, and that fact, more than any other, was what got under their skin.

Of course, the plantoids were not having a fun time either. Their eldest had been the first to go, being reduced to scattered pieces as the Darksolian forces tore them apart with weapons both ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. Nowadays, the only way they could score many kills was by blending in with the ambient foliage and staying as still as possible until they could lash out and kill those nearby, but even that was suicidal. They may end up killing five, or maybe as many as ten Darksolian soldiers, but after that, they would be reduced to a dead, broken husk in but a few short seconds.

And, while this was going down, they were all told that everything was going according to the Great Tree’s carefully orchestrated plans. They were constantly told that they would win, that they would push the enemy out of Arcfira, that they would claim the whole world in no time at all. However, with each passing day, the number stacked against them only increased, and, as a result, the seeds of doubt that should have sprouted months ago finally began to germinate.

It had taken far too long, and no chance of victory seemed to be in the cards. As this understanding set in inside person after person, settlement after settlement, the embers of discontent started to cause a smoldering heat to grow rapidly. It would only take a few people speaking up to start the conflagration, and it would only take one final decisive pitched battle for that spark of rebellion that had, for so long, been kept buried to finally burn away the last vestiges of loyalty that anyone had towards the Great Tree.

The future of Arcfira would be gambled on a single battlefield, one that the forces loyal to the Great Tree had decided would be the place of the first of many crushing victories that would turn the tide and put them on the fast-track to world domination. Little did they know that their plans were already well-known, the ‘Fallen’ Tree having long since been able to secretly probe his brother’s mind without him knowing.

By the time the elves and plantoids that swore their allegiance to the Great Tree got to their positions, the ground had already been prepared and the stage had already been set. This would be a decisive, crushing victory, alright; just not for them.