After the crazy frontal assault, a bitter fight for the enemy trench starts almost immediately. The air is thick with dust and the smell of grime, oil and blood. Meisa can feel the tremor of explosions under her feet as terrible balls of fire rain down around no man's land, making it so that retreat is no longer an option, and the cries of the wounded echo in her ears. But amidst this chaos, she's surprisingly calm. She's been trained for this, after all. She's done this before.
Holding her spear, she runs towards the enemy, hitting them with both the base and the tip, stabbing and slashing the enemies. She's basically untouchable but, going with the men to the front is unavoidable, because if an elf in the enemy side also showed up, it can halt the advance of the army.
Her heart races as she leaps over a fallen tree trunk, narrowly dodging a hail of bullets propelled by an exploding rock. The whizzing sounds of death flying by her remind her of the dance of fireflies she used to chase as a child. The trench is a maze of sandbags and barbed wire, designed to slow down attackers, but Meisa's speed and agility are unmatched. She sprints through the tight spaces, her boots barely touching the muddy ground.
There it is, her enemy, an elf on their lonesome standing there, commanding his men. Wearing the same amount of clothes she has, but with a different colour scheme. His eyes lock onto hers, cold and calculating, yet she sees the fear flickering within them. Meisa doesn't hesitate, she charges towards him, her spear pointed straight at his heart. The enemy elf reacts swiftly, drawing a sword that seems to glow in the dim trench light.
Her spear was parried, and she immediately shifted her weight to avoid boiling water spat out of his mouth. As the men continue fighting around them Meisa, like a garden sprinkler, spits out water from her mouth as well, forcing her enemy to flash away. She's tempted to just drown the entire place, but she invested almost thirty thousand men in this charge.
The elf on the enemy side was not like the others she had faced. He was fast, with a grace that could only come from centuries of combat experience. Meisa felt the thrill of the challenge, the kind that could only be found in battles against her own kind. He feigned a retreat, and she knew better than to follow blindly into a potential trap. Instead, she waited for him to make the next move, her eyes never leaving his.
The men are busy fighting each other, their heads filled with the notion of nationalism, patriotism or are simply thinking of their families, but we all know what this war is about. Even now, more men are pouring into the area from the rear, and by the end of the month, Meisa would have almost 200,000 men under her, and a few dozen elves as her officers.
The Alrodene Army however, are weakened and battered. It's a small country in the first place, and with a population of 2 Million, what can it realistically do to resist? If they are defeated here, then their focus can be turned to the Asterisk.
Meisa's eyes narrowed, her focus solely on the elf before her. The chaos of the battle faded into the background as they circled each other, each waiting for the other to make a mistake. The enemy elf lunged forward, his sword a silver blur in the air. Meisa spun to the side, her spear whipping around to block the attack. The clang of metal on metal rang out, sending sparks flying.
'Tuah!' Meisa spits a few bullets from her mouth. The opponent raises a wall of water, before turning it into blades and hurling it towards her. She does a somersault to the side, the water cutting through the air with a sharp sound like a sword. The enemy elf's face twitches as he sees his attack miss.
He puts a hand on his mouth, a massive amount of water flowing out nearly turning the trench into a river, making the muddy landscape even worse.
"Are you insane?" Meisa couldn't help but blurt out as she shifted her weight to the left, hopping out of the flooded trench line.
Those poor souls who weren't able to jump out of the way fast enough were buried by the torrent of mud. The enemy elf looked at Meisa with a smirk, his eyes filled with malice. This was his turf, and he was playing by his rules.
Meisa tries fishing out her troops from the violent tide of mud, wood, viscera and what not but it seems to be impossible as they just fall into it again anyway. The world is just not fair, why are they dying so easily?
Without a doubt she decides to retreat immediately, leaving the front back to the rear. The tide of men that were continuing to run forward stop momentarily as they watch the streak of colourful cloth zoom bast them to the rear, then all chaos ensues as the front line turns and runs back, colliding with the men running forward, still unaware of what is going on.
This has caused a rift in between, as a few human officers start killing off the retreating mass, urging them forward, while some of those retreating men fight back, all the while the enemy hurls projectiles made of all sorts of materials on their backs.
Scores of men from the same side cut each other down, lacking an overwhelming sense of national unity or even morality. These degenerate officers who have stakes with Elven companies rally their men to fight on, while the men retreating who see the reality on the ground just want to survive, retreat to safety.
These men cut each other down, up until a large horn signalling retreat blares from back in their trenches, forcing the rabble to calm down in the span of half an hour, but at this point only a sparse of their numbers remain in no man's land.
These tired men who have regained their sanity, outside of seeing red or in their bloodlust at first ran towards the back rank, but as more and more of them hit the backs of the men in front of them the run slowed down to a visible march, then a walk, all the while the peppering of arrows and pebbles from the enemy trench subside, as they are busy fixing their own flooded trench, busy hauling off the bloated bodies of the drowned men.
These men look like monsters covered in grime and mud, their colour coded uniforms useless in identifying each other. Their soldiers slumped down in a walk of shame as they retreated into the trench.
Suddenly the terrifying sound of hooves on mud and the neighing of nearly a thousand horses ring through the area, and in a few moments the world was still, up until the unfortunate men at the edge of the trudging line scream in agony as their throats, heads, arms or whatever appendages they may have above their chests are pierced by long rapiers and swords aiming to reduce their numbers.
The slow walk resumes to a mad dash back into the trenches, the men overflowing as they don't have time to compress themselves, and with scores of other men going fuck all and running to desert into the forests and bogs, without a thought to their families back home who's lives sit under the sword of damocles hanging over their heads, courtesy of the royal family.
Meisa had to step in herself, redirecting a river into no man's land as a sort of moat, forcing the horses to back off, and stare at the disorganised retreating men.
As the trenches are cleaned up, Meisa sets up a tribune, executing a few dozen men to show the rest of the sorry blokes how their lives will be if they do fuck all.
"What a massive headache." Meisa clutches her forehead as she sits on her luxuriously padded bed, her room within the trench is like stepping into another world from the outside to the in.
She looks out the window in melancholy. How can these men die so easily? How are they so disorganised? Has no one thought of how to turn these men effective in battles? Are we just to throw them at each other like little pets?
She's in three layers of cloth for a comfortable nightgown, wrapped loosely around her lithe body. Deep in thought.