'Five horesmen, approaching fast,' Maple murmured inside his head. 'Scratch that. Two dismounted behind the switchback and now scaling the ridge.'
More scouts. Well, it has been some time since their advance party disappeared.
Since Konrad let no one escape, they couldn't warn the Green Mage or whoever led them.
They were blind, and his men captured twenty nomads alive.
And while they spoke a language he didn't understand, it wasn't an issue with all those mind readers around. He only had to send them back to the reserve camp for interrogation.
'About time their friends came to take a look,' he thought, his mind reeling.
The enemy wasn't stupid. They were cautious.
But knowing their secrets while keeping his was the one thing that could turn the tide.
Force them into making mistakes, have them over- or underestimate his forces—
And strike the iron while hot.
'Our prisoners are also on their way,' the dragoness added. Yeah, another mind reader—but at least he didn't have to ask questions. 'It'll take a while with all the loot and the wounded.'
Luckily, none of those wounded were theirs.
Well, they suffered a few lighter scratches, but nothing that his first wife had to handle herself.
And the loot? Now that was neat.
Two dozen sturdy horses survived the chaos, and their riders had recurve bows.
"This is excellent craftsmanship," Bor grunted, still holding one in his hands. "Much better than what our people could ever produce. If they're armed like this, they're no ordinary rabble."
"You keep the bows, then," Konrad said, then forwarded the dragon's report. "Take care of them."
In the meantime, he covered the battlefield with a simple illusion. Especially the chasm on the left side of the pass—the depths looked gruesome, filled with corpses.
He didn't need anything fancy. Only to distract the scouts without spooking them.
He took a good look at one of the nomads and their sturdy breed of horses and made an accurate but static copy. Then a few dozen more, posting them in front of the royal garrison.
"Let them think we retreated, and come closer," Konrad explained. "Then we'll take them out."
And with no reports arriving back, they'd send another group.
And another.
Boring as it seemed, he planned to repeat this until they ran out of patience or men.
'What if they have eyes in the skies like us, though?' Maple shattered his illusions.
Not that dragons were that common. But even his dragon had flying pets sharing her vision.
'Do you think he'd bother sending scouts if he did?' he asked. 'Or did you see anything?'
'Hmm, hard to tell,' the dragoness pondered. 'He doesn't need a big fancy beast to spy on us. A regular crow would do, and the corpses drew plenty of them here.'
That would have been a handy skill—and terrifying in his situation.
'Again, those horsemen—'
He trailed off, realising he was trying to convince himself, instead of facing reality.
'We don't know who leads those armies, only that they belong to this Maou guy,' Maple noted.
'That still counts,' Konrad thought, shaking his head. 'Let's focus on defeating these nomads first, and deal with the Demon Lord once he shows his face.'
When he got that far, he finally noticed the three horsemen approaching.
They paused for a moment, looking confused at his illusion, then continued in a light gallop.
'Do we have the other two surrounded yet?' he asked, waving the garrison to stay down.
'They're too far to capture, but I'm sure Bor could get a shot at both.'
That was good enough—except he was way too far to give his men direct orders.
Well, they knew what they had to do. And he did, too.
Stay low, wait until they come closer, then take them down before they figure out his illusions.
"Steady," he whispered, trying to estimate the distance. With all those captured recurve bows lying around, he was also tempted to pick one up. "Now, charge!"
It was a piece of cake.
A few tribesmen blocked their escape while the spearmen rushed them from the front.
By the time they emerged from the group of illusion-nomads, the real ones had nowhere left to go. One tried to lose an arrow, but Konrad had archers of his own.
Another attempted to escape, but with the chasm so close, his horse froze up in terror.
The third one surrendered without a hassle, and the dragoness also reported good news.
'Bor's done. The other two tried to run back to their mounts but never reached them.'
This meant that the nomadic army was still blind.
Not as fancy a victory as the previous one, but this was everything he needed right now.
"Good job," he nodded, dispelling his illusions. "If they want to play it safe, we should set up some ambushes along the serpentine. I don't want a single scout to report back."
"We should clean up this mess then, too," Bor noted as he returned.
He stared straight down into the chasm—a good hundred feet drop on the left.
It made Konrad nauseous even if he stood close to the edge.
"You think our men could scale these walls?" he asked, keeping a healthy distance.
"On ropes? Sure. When it's quiet," the man claimed. "It's no worse than the ventilation shafts of your salt mine. And no goblins would ambush us down there. Only some quality horse meat."
If the nausea wasn't enough, mentioning the dead animals made his head spin.
"That was—morbid," Konrad choked out, watching the crows getting their fill from them.
"Well," the tribesmen said with a shrug. "You said we're low on gruel. Those things won't get any more dead than they're now, and eating 'em's still better than cannibalism."
"Ugh." He had to swallow something down. But Bor was right.
In logistics alone, their situation was dire.
He couldn't afford to throw anything away.
If the nomads were nice enough to provide him with quality bows and horses—
He decided to grit his teeth and take advantage.
"D-do you think we should butcher the ones we captured, too?" he asked, feeling bad for the animals already. He never had a horse, per se, but he still couldn't think of them as food.
"What? No," Bor hollered, slamming him in the back.
He was still too close to the ledge for that, taking a shaky step back.
"These are fine animals. Fast, sturdy. Merchants love nomadic breeds," the tribesman explained. "Keep some for the messengers, sell the rest for silver. That'll pay for more food."
"Right. Of course." He felt much better already.
He couldn't help the dead animals, but the rest didn't have to meet the same fate.
'What a ruthless leader,' Maple chuckled, and he spotted her lurking in the clouds. 'Worried about horses, but cares little how their riders will end up.'
'Those horses didn't decide to invade Kasserlane,' he snapped back. 'The nomads—'
'You think they volunteered?' the dragoness laughed. Konrad never even thought about it.
To him, it was an enemy army he had to deal with, led by a fearsome Demon Lord.
But if he felt pity for their mounts, why not for the men he had to kill?
That single thought made this whole war much more complicated.