Following its usual patrol route, the squad left the small town of Greenway behind and headed southwest. After about five kilometers, a mountain range came into view in the distance.
It was the largest mountain range in the southern part of the former Frank Kingdom, known as the Grixius Mountain Ranges.
Anyone continuing south from Greenway who did not want to pass through the valley southwest of town would have to detour several hundred kilometers east or west to get around the Grixius Mountain Ranges.
The mountains thus formed a clear dividing line between the northern and southern portions of the former Frank Kingdom's eastern territory.
Nearly a month earlier, attacks by the Marfa Coalition Army had forced the Lampari Kingdom's army to retreat all the way to the Grixius Mountain Ranges. There, they had held off the coalition's attacks with fortifications they had built in advance in Heavenly Dawn Valley, the only pass through the mountains.
There was no denying that the Lampari Kingdom's fortifications here were extraordinarily sturdy.
Over the past month, the Marfa Coalition Army had launched no fewer than fourteen attacks on the valley. Many had even been led by four Archmages commanding the coalition's strongest Mages, yet they had still failed to breach its defenses.
The Lampari Kingdom's counterattacks had also inflicted devastating losses on the Marfa Coalition Army. In less than a month of fighting, more than twenty thousand soldiers had been killed outright, over forty thousand had been seriously wounded, and countless others had suffered minor injuries.
But even that was not the worst of it. The real losses were the more than one hundred Advanced Mages killed by the Lampari Kingdom's counterattacks during those fourteen battles, along with two Great Mages.
With even the combined efforts of four Archmages proving useless, the