Lieutenant General Dalek had never fought a battle he was certain to win. To him, war was a venture into danger-a gamble.
Now, seated on a white horse, Dalek stared expressionlessly at Bolas Fortress in the distance. He was betting that the enemy would not pass up the opportunity he had left them.
Chris did not.
Under Lieutenant General Dalek's anxious scrutiny, soldiers soon emerged rank after rank from the trenches before the earthen walls. Carrying a motley array of ornate flags and marching in somewhat ragged formations, they moved aside the barbed wire blocking their path and headed toward the Third Infantry Regiment's camp.
Making camp for twenty thousand men was an enormous undertaking. Dalek had divided them into four groups, arranging them around the hills in a triangular pattern.
The Third Infantry Regiment's auxiliary troops and civilian laborers stood in untidy ranks, but under their officers' direction, they worked in an orderly fashion.
First, they quickly erected simple tents, then dug drainage ditches and set up sentry posts. Amid the chaos, the camp gradually took shape, like a temporary city rising from the wilderness.
Engineering was the Third Infantry Regiment's specialty. For that reason, it was also known as the Casro Regiment, a name signifying that its fortifications were as impregnable as the Kaslo Mountains.
Once completed, such a camp would become a mobile fortress, capable of withstanding repeated assaults by an enemy force five times its size in this age.
But Lieutenant General Dalek had no intention of finishing the camp. Or rather, building it was merely his bait.
"The enemy's finally come out. Quite a few of them, too..."
Lieutenant General Dalek did not rush to act. Instead, he waited patiently as the thousand-odd infantrymen in the distance continued advancing.
Dalek rubbed the runes on his