Outside Tavitsky City, dirt flew and work chants thundered. Soldiers and laborers poured sweat as hoes and shovels swung back and forth, their metal flashing coldly in the sunlight.
Long stretches of the Moat were filled in, exposing wet sludge that was soon covered with cartloads of earth and stone and tamped down.
Winding trenches spread like ugly scars several hundred paces outside the walls. The excavated soil was piled along their outer edges to form crude breastworks.
The players had originally wanted straight trenches, but practical experience proved that impossible. The construction crews were simply too incompetent.
Farther away, thick smoke billowed from arson crews burning demolished houses and orchards. Charred beams and burning fruit trees gave off an acrid smell. Vast stretches of once-fertile land were forcibly cleared, becoming a blackened, open killing ground.
Anti-cavalry stakes were driven deep into the ground. Barbed wire, like vicious tangles of thorns, began spreading along the edges of the open ground and both sides of the designated passageways.
All of Tavitsky resembled a startled hedgehog, raising its spines in an unprecedented fashion.
Then, amid the din of this reshaping of the land, the dry autumn wind finally carried an ominous scent.
The Raitelians had arrived.
They did not approach Tavitsky City in vast, orderly formations like a moving wall of steel, as Major General Marlow had initially feared.
Instead, their invasion spread like a plague, silent yet swift and deadly.
First, smoke rose along the edges of Tavitsky Province's sprawling plains and hills.
"Thousand-man units," each built around heavily armored knights and supported by numerous light cavalry retainers and elite armored foot soldiers, crossed the provincial border from several directions like wolves scenting blood.
They moved swiftly, maintained strict discipline, and chose their targets carefully. Their raids struck directly at Minisian