Hiding in an underground base under a tree, which I think is a bad hiding place, didn't blind the team to what was happening on the surface.
Unlike the last time we had to face isolation, on this base we could read the reports that arrived at the base about the events in the kingdom, which at this moment are the preparations for the war the whole kingdom was taken by the news that a war was going to start soon.
During the weeks that we stayed in the base under the tree because of the absence of our fearless leader Raven, who is in the capital solving all the problems generated by the last mission. Being the leader and a team that has a high chance of stumbling into high class issues is really tough, while the rest of the team can spend that time coaching, they'll have to spend their time bureaucracy and protecting the team.
During that week I spent a good deal of my time reading the intelligence reports and I wasn't the only one, basically everyone at the base wanted to be kept informed by the news from the kingdom. Funny that in this world no one has invented a newspaper yet, but this intelligence report serves very well as a newspaper, without advertising or images which in my opinion is a good thing.
The movement of traders was nothing strange in Volkan's opinion, he told me that it was normal for traders in the realm to split into three types of reaction to war. The first is those who are leaving the realm, even though war is an event that can bring great wealth to merchants it doesn't change the dangers of being in a realm that has gone to war.
When the war begins, the trade routes in the realm will change depending on how the war is going, so many merchants from medium and small societies will choose to flee the realm during this period of preparation for war.
They prefer safety outside the borders of the warring realms, but that doesn't mean they won't try to profit from the war, Volkan is absolutely certain that traders who left the realm will position themselves on the routes around the realm to profit by buying and selling. merchandise in these regions.
The second type are those who have decided to stay, many of whom are making preparations for the next few months when the war starts. According to Volkan most of them must be hiding their goods to sell to the kingdom when their value goes up, the kingdom is buying a lot of materials and supplies of different types that will be used in war, but there will always be a shortage of goods during a war. war so they are trying to aggressively buy the goods coming into the kingdom.
Many merchants must be fined for lying to the kingdom when their secret warehouses are found, I found this line of work quite interesting. I wonder if this is a safe or risky job, they may be investigating merchants, but their job is not just to find the hidden and smuggled goods, it's to investigate possible enemies in disguise.
Destroying a kingdom's supply or reserves is feasible, but injecting defective or fake products can do as much damage as the shortage or even greater depending on when enemy traps detonate during the war.
Army quality control may be well trained, but there will always be someone smarter or having a good time. Sabotage is something that will always happen no matter how careful and vigilant you are.
The last type of merchants are the new ones and they come in all sizes, with war coming many people will flock to the realm in search of opportunity. The problem is that in me of all these new people in the realm the enemies of the realm are going to be in mine, no matter how obvious this move may be, the enemy realms and cultists will use this opportunity to inject their men into the realm.
Our kingdom must be trying to do the same in enemy kingdoms, I wonder how this kind of tactic will affect the first battle of the war.
Volkan had many opinions and insights into how merchants would act during the war, Mia joined the conversation several times. Even though everyone is busy with training and always needs a little fun and in an isolated base like this where there is basically no room to train properly, talking is one of the few things we can do.
It's how wrong it would be for us to simply talk about our lives and naturally we start to discuss the war, to be precise in the preparation phase for the first confrontation.
Mia and Milena had very different opinions on how the war would start, but both believe that the kingdom saw itself on the defensive rather than on the offensive. This consensus between the two came about because our kingdom is fighting this war 'alone', well at least the early part of it is obvious to all current participants that our side is only going to be outnumbered now.
The enemy's biggest problem at this point is who will be our ally and where will the attack, this is because any kingdom close to us will want to participate in the war as an ally. Our realm has a big advantage as even fighting two and a half realms as one of Kavenus realm's allies has no border with us, Mirue realm will only help by protecting the resource lines of Kavenus realm and Palarnos realm who will be the initial opponents of our kingdom.
Their attack looks like it will be done in a direct line and this is caused by choosing not to attack them outside the realm after the king of Kavenus declared war, if we tried to attack both realms at the same time there would be two main fronts and that would be bad for us because of the fact that we would have to spend twice as many soldiers as our enemies.
This seems strange to me when I saw Milena and Mia discussing what the ratio of warriors and mages should be in the kingdom's army, only after remembering how war works in this world did, I realize why having fewer fronts is so important. War is limited by the power and numbers it takes to cause disturbance in the environment, even though it has more soldiers than the two enemy kingdoms the kingdom cannot crush enemy kingdoms with the raw power of a giant formation.
With such a big limitation it shouldn't surprise me how large-scale confrontation follows different rules than I think is normal, the death count during a war would increase very quickly according to the intensity of the conflict, but here there are so many rules to prevent this making this war longer than I expected.
But this only applies to a battle with one front, which can be the current reality with the king's defensive strategy but when the war intensifies there will be many more fronts causing the volume of deaths to increase exponentially, but that's just will really begin when the kingdom's allies join the war.
I had a strange idea while listening to Mia and Volkan discussing this, it seems that the realm's allies are not so allies. It looks like our kingdom is being used to wear down enemy armies so that the 'allies' have an easier war later.
It's to my lack of surprise this was the true reality the kingdom's allies are not that friendly, they are more neutral than allies this happens because of the current situation in the kingdom.
We were founded by an elite who protected the next two generations after that the kingdom had a lack of figures of the same level as the founders of the kingdom, this is not a big surprise more because of the solid defenses left by the founders of the kingdom on the borders of the kingdom remained stable.
The current king has a much stronger kingdom than the last few generations, but it's still not as strong as the founders most have the potential, but that obviously alarms the neighbors. So, it's only natural that they want our kingdom to spend a lot of wealth and soldiers during this war, even if in the end we are victorious and the kingdom's territory increases it will take a long time for the kingdom to be a threat to other kingdoms in the region.
Because of this, your ally from our realm means helping a possible future threat, but it can also be seen as befriending a realm that could have a bright future.
This is a very difficult decision for the neighboring kingdoms to make because they can't all go back to one side because the temples have not allowed that whole part of the continent to start coming into conflict, which can bring excessive chaos to the continent.