"I think that when dealing with the Moon-Slayer tribes, we should chiefly tempt them with benefits," Duerte said.
Liszt neither confirmed nor denied it. "Explain your idea in detail."
"Your Highness, our knight orders have already swept through many Moon-Slayer tribes along the Great Whirlpool River, capturing nearly thirty thousand Moon-Slayer serfs. But as the number of serfs continues to grow, we have to assign large numbers of knights to supervise and guard them, which will seriously weaken the knight orders' organized combat strength."
The knight orders were built around knight squads. Against small tribes of one or two hundred people, a single knight squad could carry out the captures quite effectively.
The three or four half-baked ancient magicians in such small tribes were no match for the knights at all.
But against large tribes numbering over a thousand, one knight squad was nowhere near enough. It often took four or five knight squads working together to complete the captures. For even larger tribes numbering in the thousands, a full-strength knight order had to be dispatched, and even then they had to guard against counterattacks from the ancient magicians.
And as the campaign to capture Moon-Slayer tribes pushed deeper, even larger Moon-Slayer tribes began to appear. A single large tribe might contain over ten thousand people.
In tribes like these, quite a few ancient magicians had already reached the level of Grand Magicians. Even a volley of their spells was enough to make a knight order retreat three steps. If every knight order in the Flame Territory joined the slave-catching campaign, even the largest native Moon-Slayer tribes would be no obstacle. Unfortunately, there simply were not enough knight orders on Flame Island.
There were fewer than sixteen hundred Earth Knights here, and only around two thousand apprentice knights. They had