“Rather than bravery, intelligence, strength, or the like, it is flexibility that should be heralded as the most important quality of a good commander. A commander who doesn’t know how to be flexible when the situation calls for it, dies.” - Liang Shi-Zu, famed tactician from the Huan Confederacy.

“So they’re no longer biting the bait, huh? Shame, but I guess you can’t expect all your enemies to be incompetent idiots,” said Grünhildr as she listened to the abbreviated reports from the group’s scouts. The enemy was no longer sending out easily isolated and ambushed search parties but switched to a methodical search with a large number of troops keeping within each other’s sight at all times instead.

She had hoped to be able to thin down the enemy numbers a bit more through ambushes like she did before, but two hundred and fifty would have to do, she guessed. The captives they took from those ambushes squealed pretty easily and Grünhildr’s men gained some insight into the enemy forces from them that way, before thanking those same captives by putting them to death swiftly and painlessly.

There was no room for mercy under their situation, much less for prisoners, so it was the best show of gratitude she could offer them.

“Have the scouts reduce their outings, also tell them to keep a greater distance from the enemies. Since they got that many people grouped together it should still be easy enough for the scouts to keep track of them from a distance, no reason to risk themselves by getting too close,” said Grünhildr. “We’ll let the traps we set up all over whittle them a bit for today.”

“Also call Sefan, Inge, and Rob over. I’ll be needing them to do some work tonight,” she added, naming three veteran home guards she remembered from her childhood. Those three in particular used to make a living as hunters in the region before they joined the guards. They were so good with slings that they were known to take down birds with an expertly slung rock.

That particular talent of theirs was what Grünhildr needed for what she had in mind.

Much like she expected, the Podovniy troops retreated – carrying a couple dozen people injured by the various traps the group had set up with them – near the evening, and this time, they stayed within or close to their encampment rather than actually patrol further away. It was not a bad precaution to take against Grünhildr’s people “disappearing” some of them, but it left them particularly vulnerable for what she had in mind that night.

Grünhildr led the three veteran guards towards an outcropping of the forest that was no more than a hundred meters or so away from the enemy encampment at the end of Aldenstadt’s eastern road. From what Grünhildr knew, that was supposedly where the enemy’s overall commander was staying, which made it even better.

“What do you think? Can you drop these deep inside that encampment from here?” she asked the veteran guards next to her as she handed each of them a small clay urn that had been sealed airtight with care. The three veterans weighed the urn in their hands, then took a look at the enemy encampment, which was quite a large one for a while, before they nodded and arranged amongst themselves who would aim where.

Moments later, the three walked out from the forest, relying on the darkness to hide them from sight, and placed the urns within the pouch of their sling before they began to spin it around over their heads. After several revolutions, the three veterans hurled the urns with a grunt, the added force from the sling carrying the clay urns – which were quite light, barely any heavier than the lead projectiles the slingers favored – at least three hundred meters, where they fell on different areas of the encampment.

The moment the urns struck the ground – or the face of an unfortunate Podovniy soldier, in one case – they shattered and disgorged their content, the liquid contained within quickly sublimated and spread through the surroundings.

A pungent, malodorous smell immediately spread through the surroundings, causing the Podovniy soldiers who were sleeping to suddenly wake up and gag from the stench. Some directly vomited where they lay or stood, while a few even fainted from the unexpected olfactory assault on their noses. Within moments, loud curses interspersed with the sounds of gagging and vomiting could be heard all over the Podovniy encampment.

In the meantime, Grünhildr had taken the three veteran guards with her back into the forest, together with the rest of her platoon that had come for the purpose of escorting them. They quickly vanished into the darkness of the forest, though a few of the platoon members couldn’t help but giggle at the situation they had put their enemies in.

Grünhildr herself mumbled some words of appreciation under her breath to Egil, the Company’s leader of their goblin contingent. While some of the goblins have also joined other platoons in the company, Egil sort of serves as a patriarch that all of them listened to. It was also under his directions that several of the goblins who knew alchemy worked on various concoctions commonly used in the north for the company’s usage.

What Grünhildr had the slingers throw into the enemy camp was no poison or the like, but was instead something the northern goblins used as beast repellents. The concoction drove away beasts by stinking up to high heavens, the smell they emanated often described as something like a mound of rotting carcasses that had been left to cure in the sun for years, somehow, and the smell was notorious for sticking to everything in a wide range and making everything stink for at least a week to come.

On one hand, it would thoroughly disgust her enemies, while on the other hand, her scouts should be able to identify some of the enemy just from their smell this way the next time they went into the forest.