Chapter 387 – Stalemate in the South

Chapter 387 – Stalemate in the South
With the arrival of the tenth month of the Holy Calendar 1993, winter began to fall in most parts of the Kingdom of Aldo, which included the royal capital Jingyao.

“This rebellion must be quelled this year!”

In the camp of the kingdom’s army, Princess Catherine said so to the generals under her command with a grave expression.

None of the generals around her nodded heavily.

From the spring of 1990 until now, the rebellion had already lasted for almost three years, and the kingdom just couldn’t afford to wear it out.

It wasn’t far from the end of the year, and after winter, it would be more and more difficult to resupply food and grass, which meant that a decisive battle was just around the corner.

They had already agreed on a date of engagement with their opponents, the Jarls rebels.

“The rebels took the initiative and the kingdom agreed.

It’s not that the two sides are so chivalrous, but in the past year, the two sides have been undermining each other quite a lot, and they’ve used every tactic that can be used in a …… war, such as detours, sneak attacks, and feints.

The battle line fluctuates from south to north, the two sides are like a tug of war, trying their best to win over each other, but the tug of war is always back to the area of Fuzheer.

When both sides have been exhausted, each side bet on the last ounce of strength to fight a final battle is also natural.

Many of the generals of the kingdom’s army were initially apprehensive about the final battle, for in early fall, the Duke of Veblen – the largest lord in the kingdom’s eastern realm – finally stepped in and formally sent his troops to join Jarl’s rebel army.

This old fox, when Archduke Greedy Wolf started the rebellion, he didn’t stand up like the other lords and clearly support the royal family, but only sent an emissary to request for marriage with the royal family, and after the royal family agreed to do so, he backed out, and then made a speech like “Jarl’s occupies a certain degree of moral righteousness. –This was a slap in the face to His Majesty the King.

The problem was that he supported Gaius, but he just hid in his own territory and didn’t send a single soldier to support Gaius. The Duke of Veblen is an unpredictable and erratic man, and one would not be surprised if he showed his loyalty to the royal family one day.

However, he does have the capital to be capricious, the territory of the Veblen family is located in the great basin in the eastern border of the kingdom, surrounded by lofty mountains, easy to defend and difficult to attack. Once troops were posted in the dangerous place to defend it, the people outside would pay a considerable price to fight their way in.

At the beginning, Vibranium was trying to echo with Giles one north and one south, he sent his troops to attack the eastern part of the kingdom loyal to the royal territory, the result is that the army of the eastern kingdom may be good at defense but not good at attack, in front of the first fortress they encountered, obviously the troops occupy an absolute advantage but bumped their heads, and made quite a lot of jokes for no reason.

Because of the east basin of the mountainous terrain, into the difficult, out also trapped which, supply transportation is very difficult. The chagrin of the Duke of Veblen had to send troops to the south, and the rebel army of Giles merged.

This caused considerable pressure on the kingdom’s army, but fortunately, since this year, the equipment level of the kingdom’s army has increased substantially, which did not let the balance of the war tilt toward the rebel side. The improvement in equipment is due to the large-scale procurement by the Royal Government in the Northwest Bay. Since the establishment of the “Northwest Industry”, the weapons production in the Northwest Bay has skyrocketed. Because of the revolutionary breakthrough in iron smelting technology, the blast furnace iron factories built in Alda, Baldin, and Emden provided a constant supply of iron ingots for the large and small weapons workshops, where the craftsmen worked in shifts, and the sound of iron smelting was heard around the clock. Swords, lances, arrows, and armor were gathered from all the territories to the port of Flanders, and were loaded onto ships, accompanied by other purchasing materials from the Royal Government, such as food, canned goods, cloth, or clothing. Along with food, canned goods, cloth or clothing and other purchasing materials of the Royal Government, they were loaded onto the ships and transported to the ports under the direct control of the Southern Kingdom Government, and finally transported to the front line to arm one batch of new recruits after another, or to replace the worn out old equipment on the old soldiers.

Stimulated by the large number of orders, Alda-model workshops also appeared in other territories of the Northwest Gulf, and profit motivated the people to actively seek for any way to increase production.

Weapons suppliers from other places were very keen, but there was no way in the slightest that they could do anything about it, given the same quality, the weapons from the Northwest Gulf were always the cheapest, so the Royal Government always prioritized placing orders with the Northwest Industries.

Under such an onslaught, weapon producers from other places were forced to take the high-end route – abandoning the production of ordinary iron armor and focusing on the production of plate armor to be sold to knight lords and generals of all sizes.

Unlike ordinary iron armor which is mainly made of cooked iron and equipped to big head soldiers, plate armor is made of steel plate, and the time it takes is even more different, a workshop of 26 people can process close to 1,600 sets of armor in 5 months, but a full set of high-grade and high-quality plate armor covering the whole set needs half a year of time to be polished, and it’s very time-consuming from the beginning to the end, especially for the splicing of gloves and other small pieces, which needs to be polished separately by pure hands, and the requirement for error is also very high. The requirement for error is also very high, otherwise it is likely to cause mobility problems for the equipper.

With the general level of craftsmanship of the Northwest Bay craftsmen, they are not yet able to produce this kind of high-level goods whose surface is so smooth that it can shine out the shadow of a human being, and which can be called a work of art in all aspects, but they have achieved a real monopoly in the low-end defense equipment.

With the help of cheap but guaranteed quality and quantity of ordnance, the kingdom has built up a huge army, which is currently confronting the rebels in the south with more than 70,000 soldiers, of which nearly 50,000 can be used for frontline combat.

Catherine and her generals attach great importance to the protection of the bottom soldiers, the better the soldiers are protected, the higher their survival rate, veterans who have experienced life and death battles, their combat experience is invaluable.

The other generals were exasperated that such a powerful force should have been able to devastate the rebels, but the battle was not going so well.

Vibranium’s participation was not the main reason, what really gave them a headache was a mysterious army among the rebels, which was called the “Immortal Army” in the mouths of the captives.

Just like its name, every time this army appeared on the battlefield, it was always 6,000 men, no more and no less, no matter how many were lost in the last battle, when it appeared in the next battle, it was always 6,000 men, as if no one had died.

Of course, no one thought that they were really immortal or could come back from the dead, what made everyone wonder was how the other side managed to replenish them so quickly, because the soldiers of this army were so different – so powerful and undaunted by death, and by no means a substitute for a few days of training for ordinary soldiers who nibbled on black bread and seldom ate a few meals of meat.

What’s even more exaggerated is that according to the records on the battlefield, these guys behaved exceptionally brutally on the battlefield, and there were even soldiers who witnessed the horrifying sight of them tearing and gnawing the flesh and blood of the people they were fighting, which was simply a group of beasts that obeyed the command.

The good thing is that compared to this special unit, the other units of the rebel army is not so terrible, only the elite troops can wear iron armor, the general troops can only wear leather armor, as for the cannon fodder just pulled in, there is not even a decent piece of armor, compared to the kingdom’s army equipped with a large number of iron armor is far from it.

The so-called “undead army” can only be attributed to the “rebel wizards” that have been rumored in the barracks.

(End of chapter)