"How long will the fighting go on? How far will it go before it stops?"
Hearing the question in the king's tone, Black Wolf Toltec froze, then pondered for a long while.
If he followed His Highness's requirements, then once he captured Ancient Feathered Serpent City and seized an outlet to the sea for the Kingdom along the Eastern Sea coast, the objective could already be considered complete. But according to his own heart, of course he wanted to keep campaigning against the Totonac tribes until they truly could fight no farther!
This eastward campaign had begun unexpectedly, yet its later progress had been extremely smooth, and the results achieved were astonishing. The morale, weapons and equipment, organization and training, and familiarity with large-scale war of the Kingdom's legions all stood firmly above the Totonac tribes, who had known peace for many years. The Totonac tribes had been completely unprepared. Attacked by the Lake Legion, which, like them, was a vassal state under the suzerain Alliance, they had been stunned senseless at once. The coastal states reacted very slowly; before their military strength could be mobilized and united at all, they were defeated one by one, and a third of them were conquered, destroyed, or forced to surrender.
Under such circumstances, from an external strategic perspective, as the supreme commander of the legion, he absolutely had to take advantage of the moment while the coastal tribes were still stunned and continue advancing rapidly east! It was like a pack of wolves chasing a herd of deer—only by giving the enemy no chance to catch their breath and reorganize could they seize the most prey.
Likewise, from an internal strategic perspective, the core force of the Black Wolf Legion that had marched east consisted of only eight thousand Guachichil Legion soldiers,