Dawn broke. At around six in the morning, the two thousand-odd players Chris had dispatched finally completed their fifty-kilometer forced march and arrived outside Tavitsky's West City Gate.
Along the way, they had lost more than two hundred people who strayed from the column and suffered over a hundred casualties.
Players getting lost was foreseeable. The AFK players followed the main force, and even if they headed in the wrong direction, the Intelligent Butlers controlling their characters could promptly detect the mistake and correct it.
Some of the players who were online, however, were overconfident. They followed the main force, but would stop along the way to rest their feet or do something else... like catch an owl hooting incessantly in a roadside tree, or some other nocturnal animal.
Even when the main force marched out of sight, they were in no hurry. The tracks were right there; surely they could catch up if they walked a little faster.
The result, however, was that more than two hundred people got lost.
By the time they reached Tavitsky, Ye Ao and the others inside the city had seized the West City Gate. After a night of fierce fighting, however, fewer than fifty of them remained. They could still hold the gate, but they were running out of ammunition and supplies.
The night's fighting had also left Minisian corpses piled up inside and outside the West City Gate. Soldiers of Minisia's Seventh Legion were refusing to attack it again, so the gateway remained securely defended.
Although the soldiers of Minisia's Seventh Legion were terrified of the players in the western gateway, they felt no fear toward the reinforcements arriving from afar. In fact, they were brimming with confidence.
Thanks to the warning sent by express rider from the Border Fortress the previous