By morning, something unexpected happened on Baron's side that it made him hold back his army from entering into combat. Not that it was really needed there. Zhang Da Zhi and Commander Ke could handle the rest of Jie Zi Fang and Jiang Yan's army without Baron's help, but it would take a fair bit longer. Though this annoyed these two, they just saw it as a way to make sure that they had a higher chance of taking out one of the all-stars themselves. They set this as their target and returned to the battlefield with a new determination. The two of them felt that the war was nearly over, and with it, they would be able to get great rewards from winning this once they get out of the tournament simulation and the rewards were being distributed.
Baron, on the other hand, knew that there just wasn't something that was adding up, after all of the hype around the all-stars, was this all that they were capable of? Unlikely. Sure, Baron's allies were the ones that decided the place of the battle, the date, the location, and given ample time to prepare something worthy of an epic battle, but this just wasn't making sense in Baron's head. He had a gut feeling that there was something slightly more to the story than what he and the others were seeing.
The scouts that were sent out on the 18th day since the first battles started were no ordinary scouts, they contained some of Baron's best fighters and, quite frankly, overkill if anyone were to see what they were doing. However, all of this was necessary by Baron's orders and there were a total of 20 groups that would scout the surrounding areas. One was led by Baron himself, another with Guan Yu, Yue Fei, Chen Di, Meng Wu, a few under him, and some others that were trusted generals.
They all split up before the sun came up and were paired in groups of 5, each group going in each direction but slightly apart from each other. All of them searched for the first day without managing to find anything despite the military transport vehicles covering a lot of ground. On the second day, they continued their search outwards towards some of the other territories that were bordering them. However, they still continued to not find anything. Despite this, Baron ordered the search to go on regardless.
By the fifth day, one of the scout groups actually found something that was surprising, but not so much so that they needed to be alarmed immediately. It was an army of 100,000 soldiers plus vehicles and artillery that wouldn't be able to do much to the coalition of alliances that Baron was currently in. This group was spotted by one of the groups going north and they needed some information. So, they found the trickiest and craftiest strategist that was in their ranks to go infiltrate the army and ask around to see if anyone knew anything. This strategist was moderately famous for sneaking in like this and getting information out, so he was perfect for the job.
After half a day of poking around, he found out that there were a few more armies around the area, but none of the regular soldiers knew since, well why would they, they only needed to fight, not know about the plans. So, the five scouting groups in the north panned out even further and managed to find a few more each around 100k men each. A few more infiltrators were picked and after poking around for another day, one of them actually found the holy grail of intel. It turned out that the ones who were in charge of all of these armies were none other than one of the all-stars, Lun Hu. This was unexpected and they were only now finding out that Lun Hu had another couple of thousand soldiers under him? Not the best news to receive especially considering that they thought they were about to win, to say the least.
What was worse was that there were a couple of such lineups spotted in the west, southwest, and southeast directions. After a bit more investigations and some unsavory methods to extract intel from their enemies, they found out that they had been played all along and that the real armies of the all-stars of Lian Po were about to march on their battlefield. Baron issued an immediate retreat for all troops and to ride nonstop until they reached Zhang Da Zhi and commander Ke.
Unfortunately, along the way, a few of the military vehicles were found out and whole scouting groups were lost to enemies. This was not great due to 2 main reasons. One was that if they were tortured and they talked, which Baron had no doubt that they would do, Baron would be revealed to know about the plans and that might complicate matters for the worse. The second reason was that it was highly likely that they would move earlier than planned so as to not give Baron and his allies enough time to prepare a counterattack.
Baron and the other scouting teams rushed back to the battlefield that they were previously at to find out that Zhang Da Zhi and commander Ke had only finished off the last army earlier that day. There was absolutely no time to spare so Baron called for an immediate meeting between the three of them, urgency was a must, but the other two did not know about the situation yet so they took a bit longer than Baron had liked.
(BM) "Ke, Zhang Da Zhi, I have some very bad news to share. It turns out my gut feelings were correct and that there is more to this situation than we originally thought. There are a lot of armies out there that belong to the all-stars that they had been keeping a secret about. Once they march on us, I'm afraid that there will be nothing that we will be able to do to stop them."