Chapter 459: Barbaric Brilliance
“Shouldn’t you be spending some time with your boyfriend?”
The Crown Princess of Central and her brother waltzed into the empty throne room of the Ivory Castle like they owned the place.
Well, technically, they did.
The floating islands might be Academy property, but the Academy itself fell directly under the protection of the Central Safe-Zone.
Still, at times like this, Thalia wished this girl wasn’t a real royal so she could strangle her without causing some kind of diplomatic crisis.
“My brother just destroyed all the bridges over the Great Divide,” Thalia glared at the Draken heiress. “So you’ll forgive me if I can’t find time for a romantic dalliance.”
“Notice she’s not denying the boyfriend part,” Willem quipped cheekily.
That prompted Thalia to shift her murderous gaze to the red-haired Prince, who offered an unbothered grin in response.
“I am denying the premise of the entire conversation. For now,” Thalia corrected, disguising the last part with a well-timed cough before her tone went stern again. “And if you two nitwits have nothing to contribute beyond adolescent teasing, I suggest you vanish from my sight before I reassign you both to manual work.”
Alice rolled her eyes before dropping onto a seat opposite her friend. “What’s the big deal, Lia? So he blew up the causeways, so what? Now he has pletely isolated himself.”
“He took all the supplies!” Thalia nearly shot up from her chair in frustration before calming herself back down. “You must see what he’s planning as well. He’s going to do everything in his power to ensure we don’t get our hands on a single crate from here on out. He wants to starve us out and force us to play on his terms. He has already set the pace of this war!”
Willem pointed at her casually. “And you were expecting him to just rush in blind, even after Ali assured you he wouldn’t.”
Thalia sighed, throwing a half-apologetic and half-vexed look at a smug Alice. “Fine. Okay. You were right, Ali. But it really made sense for him to charge in. His army outnumbers ours and his inner circle is full of monsters. He should have tried forcing us into a direct, head-on confrontation.”
That was how he was when they were kids.
Back then, their father used to make them play all kinds of strategy board games that ever existed. Day and night, the twins peted in everything from Xiangqi and Bagh Chal to Hnefatafl and Go.
The Golden Duke’s absolute favorite, however, was traditional Chess. Naturally, she had forced herself to love it too.
Not her twin, though. Samael hated it.
He hated all of them.
He lacked the patience needed to e up with deceptive plans or guess an opponent’s move ten turns in advance.
Whenever they played, his approach was always the same: a full-on, aggressive rush.
To hell with tactics and patterns.
He’d start sacrificing his own pieces without a second thought just to force chaotic trades that wouldn’t even benefit him, like throwing away his rook for her knight simply because it was in an ideal square and that frustrated him.
It never worked. He never won. Obviously. It was so stupid. Chess was a game of patterns, and you couldn’t bypass board logic by being stupid.
Thalia knew he had outgrown that reckless habit.
She had known that he had mastered the art of subterfuge ever since the last time they clashed and he outmaneuvered her. But now, it seemed, he had also honed his patience.
“He didn’t rush because he isn’t stupid,” Alice spoke what was already on Thalia’s mind. “And he knows you aren’t either.”
True.
Even before the war kicked off, Thalia knew her brother’s forces were going to be a lot stronger than hers. She needed an edge.
But even more than that, she needed home-field advantage.
So she made some detailed plans and figured out a few ways to counter the main threats of the enemy faction.
Though she would still have been pletely screwed if that seer girl had joined Samael’s side. Lily Elderwing. His ex-girlfriend.
Luckily for Thalia, that didn’t happen.
Because she was banking on her brother’s hubris and expecting him to rush in blindly, she spent the last twenty-four hours setting up traps and snares all throughout her territory.
Had Samael sent a vanguard charging across the causeways, they would have marched directly into concealed trenches and lethal choke points and hidden landmines.
Moreover, her planted assets would have used that manufactured chaos to further sabotage the enemy’s coordination.
Without someone foreseeing the future for him, her brother’s army would’ve been in great trouble.
Unluckily for Thalia, that also didn’t happen.
And now, he had forced her hand.
Now she would have to be the one to cross the river. She would have to march her troops into his territory, through whatever twisted traps he must’ve cooked up there.
“He turned our own caution against us,” Willem noted, leaning his back against a stone pillar in the throne room. “But what I still don’t get is why he destroyed all the causeways on the very first day. Why not leave them intact to use as bait for future skirmishes?”
He glanced toward his twin sister as he asked this. Thalia, too, found herself turning to look at the red-haired princess.
Alice stared back and forth between the two of them.
“I just said he’s not stupid,” she repeated, as if that statement alone should’ve answered such a foolish question. “He obviously realized there were spies in his ranks. Keeping the bridges intact meant he’d constantly have to worry about his own people leaking his unit movements to us. Every time he’d have sent a platoon to secure a drop, he’d have risked walking straight into an ambush. So he just eliminated that variable altogether.”
“Wait,” Willem interrupted, his brow furrowing. “There’s a flaw in that logic. From everything I’ve gathered, our naval forces should pletely dwarf theirs.”
“Yeah,” Thalia immediately nodded, picking up what the Central prince was trying to convey. “That means he has to now destroy the supply crates mid-air before they ever touch the water. But what if we manage to intercept even a single airborne supply crate? This entire battle of attrition backfires on him pletely. His ground forces can’t contest us in the water, so they won’t be able to pursue us. Then we will eat, and they will starve.”
“Except,” Alice shrugged, “that won’t happen because he holds overwhelming aerial superiority. I can list at least ten Cadets off the top of my head who can summon flying mounts or manipulate high-altitude winds. They will lock down the sky for him. We can fight all we want, but even if our fliers gain ground, his long-range fighters will just destroy the crates before we can get them. We can’t dogfight mid-air and safeguard a supply drop at the same time.”
”So you’re saying he’s so confident that his troops would not make even a single mistake that he’s willing to execute a tactic that would doom his starving army if it fails?” Willem whistled in disbelief. “That’s borderline psychopathic.”
“Hey, I would’ve done the exact same thing if my enemy held naval dominance!” Alice scowled at her brother. “Now he has stopped our foot soldiers from crossing over, and even if our amphibious units manage to swim across, they’d be isolated, outnumbered, and fighting out of their element. It’s actually very brilliant if you think about it.”
“No brilliance in it. It’s barbaric,” Thalia muttered. She was actually very jealous, but she’d sooner die than admit it out loud. She was also very impressed. And… maybe very proud. But then she frowned. “Hold on. You said you would have done the exact same thing in his position, yet you didn’t think to mention this yesterday? You could have warned us! We could have done something to stop them.”
“What?” Alice frowned back, mirroring her friend’s confusion. “Why would we have done that? This situation works in our favor.”
Willem blinked at his sister as though she had lost her goddamn mind. “Ali, I think you forgot we are trying to win this war. How on earth is this good for us?!”
Alice let out a tired breath like she was dealing with particularly slow children. “Information is a resource in warfare, Will. And right now, it’s a resource we have in abundance. We now know so much. We know that Lady Zynx and her Shadow aren’t assigned as Officers, and neither is that… uh, that moner guy. I can never remember his name.”
“Michael,” Thalia supplied, rolling her eyes.
“Michael,” Alice affirmed. “Those three are some of the enemy’s main heavy-hitters. Especially Alexia Von Zynx. That girl is unstoppable.”
“Oh, believe me, I know,” Willem muttered with an involuntary shudder.
The Crown Princess chuckled softly at her brother’s antics before continuing. “We can safely infer that Ray Warner, one of their premier aerial and ranged fighters, won’t be tied down to a single sector either. Sammy will also need to allocate his most powerful Casters along the riverbanks if he intends to maintain a total lockdown over the Great Divide’s airspace. I’m sure some of his batants will also be protecting the Ebony Crown at all times. And in case he expects us to force a crossing, he’ll be holding a few elite units on standby near the shores to intercept any amphibious landings.”
“…His forces are stretched thin,” Thalia breathed out the realization, gears turning in her head.
“Yes! Yes!” Alice nodded, excited to see her friends were on the same page. “To enforce a strict blockade over a river that long, he has to spread his frontline thin across the whole border. If we can draw the bulk of his mobile forces toward a decoy assault in the center, we can pierce his perimeter elsewhere.”
“We can get into a sector and seize it,” Willem’s eyes widened. “Then we can sandwich his coastal units from both front and behind his own line. He’ll be forced to break the blockade! Damn, Ali, you’re a genius!”
“I don’t know. Am I a genius, or are you two just dumb?”
“Both,” Thalia smiled without a shred of shame. “Now… which sector should we hit?”
“Leave that to me,” replied Alice, grinning back. “I have a plan.”
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