“It is very rare that everything goes according to plan.” - Old mercenary saying.

“What is it that made you ask for me all of a sudden, Captain?” asked temporary Chairman Bernd Adenauer as he stepped into Reinhardt’s tent in the midst of the mercenary encampment north-west of the city proper. It was rare for Reinhardt to call for him to come over instead of delivering whatever message troubled him, so he realized that it must be something Reinhardt wanted to keep extra private for some reason.

Which most likely meant something troublesome but probably unverified, as Bernd knew that the mercenary would have approached him more openly otherwise. On one hand, he was glad that the mercenaries knew to keep such information a secret to prevent panic should they be overheard, while on the other hand, the fact that the mercenaries had such a superior intelligence network irked him, as one of Levain’s councilors.

Clearly he needed to urge the other councilors to fund their intelligence department more, once the current expedition ended.

“Greetings, temporary chairman,” said Reinhardt as he stood up from behind the large desk that occupied a good chunk of his tent, with a large map of Levain’s territory spread out over it and several figures placed on top of the map. “I apologize for taking some of your time when you must be busy, but we have a potential problem at hand.”

“I figured as much,” noted Bernd as he stepped closer to look at the map before Reinhardt. Unlike the usual map he used – which depicted Levain’s territory in quite a bit of detail – Bernd noticed that the map before Reinhardt was one that included their neighboring territories as well, and a disturbing amount of figures and tokens were placed on those territories. “What am I seeing here, captain?”

“Mobilization reports,” replied Reinhardt curtly. “Around a few days ago, one of my flying scouts reported from the border that there seemed to be a large-scale mobilization in our neighboring lands, so I gave them the order to take a closer look,” he explained to the councilman. “What you see here is what I’ve reassembled based on their reports this morning.”

Bernd studied the map in silence for a moment. Part of his mind envied the mercenaries for possessing a platoon of flying scouts, something few people have even considered since the avian therians were notorious isolationists, whereas wind mages capable of flight at a safe height would have issues maintaining such flight for long periods of time or distance.

The other part of his mind quickly caught on to what Reinhardt was seeing from the map. Both Anduille to their north and Podovniy to their east were mobilizing, and given how the majority of their troops were gathered, chances were high that should they march, their target would be Levain.

More than that, however, it was the scale of the mobilization that caught him off guard. Reinhardt had been kind enough to use the same sort of tokens and figures that Levain’s militia typically used to designate units on a map, so Bernd knew that he was looking at a potential mobilization of at least a hundred twenty to fifty thousand troops, not counting another twenty thousand that seemed to be positioned closer to Caroma’s northern border.

An amount that would be a serious threat to Levain, to say the least.

“What are the chances that these forces might have other targets? The Goblin tribes or Boroes, maybe?” asked Bernd even if he knew that his question was pretty much wishful thinking at best. “Maybe old Esvant had taken leave of his senses and wanted to try his luck with Sevras-Galastine?”

“I like your optimism, councilor, but I’m afraid none of those make for a logical choice. The most logical choice for these nations to attack after such a mobilization would be us, sadly,” replied Reinhardt with a slight chuckle and a shake of his head. “I believe you have realized that as well the moment you saw the way they mobilized their troops.”

“Yes, I know, I know. A man can dream sometimes, though…” replied the temporary chairman with an exaggerated sigh and an exasperated look on his face. “Aistrofuri damn it, why must they do this right when I’m the one who’s bloody in charge…”

“Shit happens, councilor,” replied Reinhardt as he offered Bernd a spare pipe, already filled with the blend of dried herbs he sometimes smoked. The clearly stressed councilman accepted the offer and lit it before he inhaled deeply of the smoke and exhaled, then repeated the process a few more times before he slowly calmed down. “All we can do is to deal with what we have in hand.”

“I assume you got something in mind then?” asked the councilor back after he sighed once more and slightly relaxed. “I know our militia has grown by leaps and bounds since you trained them, but this second batch are only halfway through their training, and besides, our foes outnumber us by quite a bit even with our reserves unless we were to conscript people.”

“Well, we have several contingencies in mind for this sort of scenario, though it will have to wait until we know for certain how many enemies we are dealing with and from where they are marching in,” replied Reinhardt. “Like I mentioned in the previous meeting, we’d need to get the civilians evacuated. I assume Levain can hold that many people, even under siege conditions, no?”

“We shared some of our supplies with the Caromans, but after the plentiful harvests of the past couple of years, we have enough food in the city to easily last us a good five years even if all the people in the vicinity were to gather there,” replied the councilor confidently. “Surely you didn’t plan just to hunker down and wait for our armies to return and relieve us, though?”

“Most definitely not,” replied Reinhardt. “If we were to do that, it’s the same as giving our enemies free reign to intercept the returning armies, allowing them to divide and conquer us,” he explained. “No, councilor, my plan is that if these armies do come marching in, then you should lead the defense of the city.”

“As for me and my troops, we’ll be out there, making life hell for the invaders.”