Chapter 1373 — The Way the Siphoners Fight

Byron and Ashalena had no intention of wasting much time at the banquet, and Vanessa, being a Siren, had even less need for human delicacies. King Odris clearly understood this as well, so once everyone had eaten their fill, the three expeditionary commanders and the human king immediately made their way to the castle's military hall, where a sand table displaying the overall situation on the southern front was already waiting for them.

"This is Greta Fortress, where we currently stand—the largest military bastion on the northwestern frontier of the Highland Kingdom, and also the defensive strongpoint directly adjacent to the Ogrey Tribal Nation. Centered on it, the six surrounding castles and twelve highland mage towers all belong to Greta Fortress's defensive network. These installations are connected by underground tunnels, and to prevent those monsters from launching attacks from below, we have performed elemental solidification on the subterranean structures of the defense belt and set a great many traps."

King Odris introduced all this while pointing at the models and markers on the sand table, then traced an arc in front of Greta Fortress with his finger.

"This was originally part of the forest barrier. There were some outposts within the barrier as well, but they have all been destroyed now—the forest barrier was burned to nothing by fire, and a portion of the guardian ancient trees survived and have temporarily withdrawn to the hilly region to recover. Still, although the defensive line here has been breached, many of the fortifications and underground shelters should still be of use. The Aberrants may not need those 'dwellings,' but the commanders behind them do, so quite a few of these fortifications have been preserved."

"It looks like a very... solid defensive system," Byron observed for a while and had to concede that the Highland Kingdom's preparations against the wasteland's encroachment over the past several centuries had in fact been remarkably thorough. Those fortress clusters, underground fortifications, and forest barriers were not the sort of thing that could be built overnight. "Even now, the castles around Greta Fortress are still doing their job."

"Yes, without these castles, our northwestern border would have fallen long ago," King Odris nodded, then sighed. "But no matter how solid a fortress is, without a means to strike outward, it will sooner or later find itself under siege—just as you saw today. We still hold our ground here, but all we have ever managed to do is hold. Across the entire southern front, only the Sunvault has successfully pushed the enemy back."

"Now that the Winterhowl has arrived, the situation will be very different," Byron said with a touch of pride. "Our artillery support can cover the entire battlefield north of Greta Fortress, and the marines and the Draconid Expeditionary Force can secure a much wider area from both land and sky. Once we have thoroughly cleared the Aberrants here, we can commit fully to supporting the barrier wall project on the silver elves' side. It shouldn't take too long—the enemy's command center has already been dismantled by General Vanessa. Even if the enemy can immediately dispatch another dark priest from deep within the wasteland to take over the remaining forces in the northwest, a great many Aberrants will lose control in the process and revert to a 'wild' state..."

"Before that, I can split off a portion of my forces to support that 'advance base,'" Vanessa said. After studying the sand table for a long while, she had finally begun to adapt to this somewhat backward method of battlefield presentation and had roughly figured out what those terrain markers—legible only to land races—were meant to indicate. The tip of her tail pointed toward the eastern side of the entire battlefield, where the Sunvault had crashed and which had now become the silver elves' bridgehead for pushing into the wasteland. "General Byron's artillery can deal with most of the enemy, so Greta Fortress probably won't need much manpower. I'll take half my sisters and set out tomorrow morning. Riding these two days of strong air currents, we should reach the skies above this 'Sunvault Base' very quickly..."

"You're planning to drift over on the rain clouds?" Byron gave the Siren general a rather strange look. "Have you considered a normal way of traveling?"

"This is a normal way of traveling," Vanessa said, opening her eyes wide, finding Byron's remark rather odd. "You can't swim on land, so of course it's faster to turn into water vapor and drift over—and if we happen to arrive during a fierce battle at the front, the rainfall can double as a surprise attack."

This immediately touched upon matters of racial disposition and cultural custom. Byron usually struggled just to discuss a natural science assignment with Pea at home, so at a moment like this he certainly couldn't come up with any other words. He could only scratch his head vigorously, and after a long while managed to squeeze out a sentence: "Well, drifting over is fine too—just don't go giving the silver elves another 'look' when you make contact with them. Seriously, that expression of yours—ordinary folks really can't necessarily read it..."

"Ha, battlefield communications are all restored now, so we can just get in touch directly if anything comes up. We wouldn't have needed to keep posting emoticons in the clouds anyway—that was only because we had no other choice before," Vanessa waved a hand at once, but then couldn't resist adding, "Still, I really do think the signals I sent before were pretty simple and easy to understand..."

Byron and Odris simultaneously pondered for a moment and decided it was better not to continue discussing this sort of question with this deep-sea creature.

General Vanessa then observed the sand table before her for a good while longer, after which her gaze fell upon the full-continent map hanging on the wall beside them. After careful thought, she suddenly asked, "I have another question—is the interior of the Gondor Wasteland short on water everywhere? We once accidentally opened a passage leading deep into the wasteland and found that a vast area on the other side was an arid environment, and those dark priests needed a very large-scale water-drawing system to pump water up from deep underground..."

The "accident" she referred to was the occasion when Queen Petia had descended into the heart of the wasteland along a death beacon. The dark priests had reacted very quickly at the time—they swiftly blew up the passage and even badly wounded the Queen (which was one of the direct reasons Petia had dispatched an expeditionary force to Loren). But even with such a swift response, the Queen had still scouted a great deal of intelligence from the other side of the passage.

And one of the most important pieces of intelligence for the Sirens was the water scarcity deep within the wasteland.

"...We know very little about the deepest parts of the wasteland, but according to survey data sent back from the several advance bases we've pushed into the wasteland's interior, that place is indeed more arid than the outside of the Great Wall," King Odris said slowly after some thought. "Mainly, the great Gondor explosion of ages past completely destroyed the original surface water systems within the wasteland and disrupted the meteorological environment, and the Great Wall subsequently built further obstructed the exchange of moisture between the wasteland and the outside world. This caused the interior of the Gondor Wasteland to remain water-starved for several centuries. Although many gaps have now been opened in the Great Wall, and some marginal regions of the wasteland have begun to be affected by the external atmospheric environment and now see normal rain and snow, for such effects to spread deep into the wasteland will likely take many more years...