From Ctesiphon to Hadiseh was nearly three hundred kilometers, and it took the Sassanians nearly half a month to cover the distance.
Along the way, local Iqta nobles' armed forces and crusading religious militias often enlisted. The army, which had originally numbered sixty thousand, gained another five thousand men by the time it neared Hadiseh.
Ali Atabeg, riding a fine river horse, led several dozen personal guards as he gazed at the boundless marching column behind him, seeming to stretch alongside the Euphrates River to the very end of the world.
Thirty enormous war elephants marched at the very front of the column. These war beasts, fed with magical potions, had grown to an unprecedented height of six meters, while the huge iron towers on their backs resembled moving fortresses.
After Saladin's defeat, Bahram VI had personally dispatched people to purchase these young beasts from South Asia, fearing the Franks' threat. With careful attention from spellcasters, they had grown into such terrifying giants in just three years.
Besides iron towers capable of carrying archers and mahouts, their heads and forelegs were covered in iron armor, and each pair of tusks had been fitted with iron blades over two meters long.
Beyond that, their greatest improvement was their temperament.
Traditional war elephants could often serve only to intimidate the enemy in battle. They looked impressive but lacked substance, feared fire and pain, and could easily fall into a berserk state, ignoring their mahouts' commands and turning to charge their own formations. Such incidents were not uncommon.
But these magical elephants had now completely shed those flaws. They had become far more bloodthirsty, requiring vast quantities of meat at every meal, and in battle would enter a frenzied state where they felt no pain at all.
More importantly, the spellcasters who raised