"My lord, if you wanted all these Quilboar dead right now, or simply wanted to keep them from coming out and disrupting us, I could manage that. But you want to capture them without letting any of our people get hurt, and that makes things rather difficult. There are still plenty of Quilboar inside the cave. A great many of them charged out during that fight outside, and the hundred men you've given me really aren't enough.
"Granted, we'll be fighting inside the cave, where neither side can deploy all its troops, and comparing our weapons and armor with theirs is like comparing formal attire with underpants. But there are still too many Quilboar. Even if they stood still and let us hack away at them, the hundred of us would probably collapse from exhaustion before we finished... and Quilboar aren't wooden dummies!"
The officer of the City Lord's Household Guard was in a difficult position. Holding the passage actually wouldn't be hard. They were inside a cave, at its narrowest point, so having more troops wouldn't really help much; there simply wasn't room to deploy them. Splitting a hundred men between the two ends, with fifty at each, gave them just enough to fill their positions, but left them with no reserves.
If the Quilboar refused to surrender and fought to the bitter end, charging out in an endless stream with fearless disregard for their lives, and the hundred guards followed the City Lord's orders to avoid killing whenever possible, there was no telling whether they would have the stamina to hold out.
No one could guarantee that every attack in battle would kill in a single strike. Even elite High Elf Rangers like them, with their excellent archery, couldn't guarantee it. Their enemies weren't fools, and neither were