“One way to keep oneself secure during times of war is to make oneself so unpleasant and costly to attack that for most, it simply wouldn’t be worth their while to do so.” - Liang Shi-Zu, famed tactician from the Huan Confederacy.

“Leave the third division of the second corps behind,” commanded Marquis Viktor Esvant after he watched the debacle that unfolded before him when an overeager brigade from the same division had volunteered to assault the city of Aldenstadt – now turned into a fortress – and failed miserably. “Give them the order to surround the hill and besiege it, but not to do any direct assaults on the city itself. Standing guard order.”

“Understood, Your Grace,” replied Simeon from where he was seated astride his own mount near the Marquis. When the Podovniy army reached the hill where Aldenstadt was located, they had been surprised to see the city turn into a fortress despite only a year having passed since the failed Kolain offensive towards the same.

Both the General and the Marquis already had a thought to just skip around the city, but the volunteering brigade gave them an opportunity to test the defenses to see if it was just for show or not. Of course, when said brigade returned like a beaten dog with hundreds of casualties, they understood instantly that the city’s defenses were just as sturdy as they looked.

It was no as if the Podovniy army had no siege engines. In fact, they brought plenty, since their main goal was Levain city itself. The position of Aldenstadt at the top of a hill made using such siege engines difficult at best, and hazardous at worst, however. On top of that, even if they were to take down the city, it would cost them time, too much time in the minds of both the General and the Marquis.

On the other hand, it wasn’t as if they could just ignore the city. If they did so, then the defenders of Aldenstadt could have sallied out and struck their backlines after they passed through, which would cause problems of its own if left unattended. As such, the Marquis and the Duke had a short discussion with a few other officers of theirs and came to a compromise solution.

They would leave a division – roughly fourteen thousand men – of troops behind to besiege the city and make it difficult for those inside to interfere with the course of the war. Their troops were mostly there to keep those within the city confined there, and when the army returned after they had emerged victorious in Levain, it would be easy enough to conquer the smaller city as well.

It didn’t take much time to make the arrangements, since the army was camped around the hill that night anyway, and when the rest of the Podovniy army – minus the third division of the second corps – left to continue their journey the next day, the people left behind fortified the part of the camp that had been left for their use to seal the two roads that led out from Aldenstadt.

They formed what was pretty much a textbook encirclement, and while they had nowhere near enough people to assault the well-defended and fortified city, they had plenty to keep the city’s inhabitants from going out. The division naturally focused their defenses around the roads’ ends, since it was unlikely for a large number of people to descend the hill without using the roads.

Well, it was possible, but it would have been a costly and tedious affair, so it was unlikely to be done.

What none of the Podovniy troops expected was that there were already enemies waiting for them outside the city itself, and on the second day of the siege, when the main Podovniy army had gone far enough to no longer be a worry, Grünhildr began to make her – and by extension, the people with her – presence known to the besiegers.

To be precise, she started to do so the night before, but the results of her handiwork weren't discovered until the next morning.

The Podovniy division that besieged Aldenstadt had not only kept watch around their encampments at the end of the roads, but also sent out patrols to watch out and look for escapees who might brave the forests. Some of those patrols ranged pretty far and wide, and since they changed shifts halfway through the night, when Grünhildr struck nobody noticed the disappearance of nearly a third of the patrols until morning came.

It was difficult to not notice the bodies of the missing patrols, after all, as there was quite a crowd of wild animals gathered underneath them. Grünhildr had the bodies hanged from the trees, using their own entrails as the rope. Quite naturally, blood as well as other organs fell off the corpses as they were hung like that, which attracted the nearby carnivorous animals.

Some of the wild animals even jumped, latched on, and tore off the lower bodies of many of the corpses, and by the time the Podovniy soldiers from the encampments rushed over and shooed away the beasts, most of the corpses were no longer whole. The animals even ran off while carrying many parts they were in the midst of devouring, and it wasn’t as if the upper bodies of the corpses were spared damage either.

Birds had pecked out the eyes of most of them already, while an unfortunate few even had the rope of entrails that kept them aloft gnawed on by beasts that were capable of climbing the trees, which meant that there was little left of them to be found, other than bones that had already been gnawed by the animals.

It was a horrifying display, one that even made many of the Podovniy soldiers nauseated at its sight, which naturally led to a plummeting of their morale. They reinforced their nightly patrols to prevent such an incident from repeating itself, and even sent out troops to hunt for the perpetrators, since whoever did that must be outside the city with them.

All without knowing that it was what Grünhildr exactly wanted them to do. She might not have anywhere near enough people to fight off the invaders, but she had plenty to make their life hell.