“One reason why intelligence is crucial is because when your enemy knows you’re coming, they would have the luxury of time to prepare a warm welcome for you.” - Liang Shi-Zu, famed strategist from the Huan Confederation.

“No, No, you want it about half as wide and twice as deep,” explained Arne to a group of volunteer militiamen who were digging holes in the middle of the main road that led to Levain from the east. Reinhardt’s group had also left the road behind them riddled with all sorts of pitfalls and other traps to further inconvenience the invaders as they passed.

All of which were noted down meticulously in a map of the region, of course. It would have been irresponsible not to do so for later cleanup work after all.

At the same time, they also caused slight damage to the compacted soil of the road in areas where they weren’t creating traps to give the illusion that some work had been done there as well. Without a close inspection, it was practically impossible to tell apart which area actually contained some traps and which didn't, which helped to camouflage the actual trapped zones.

Most of the work had been done by the militia, with members from the mercenary company providing directions and setting up some of the more meticulous parts. The road was mostly trapped with pitfalls, drops that were narrow and deep, the opening supported well enough that it was unlikely to budge unless someone stepped directly in its center.

The drop along was far enough that an average soldier would likely sprain their ankle unless they were very lucky, with worse injuries likely. Naturally, the mercenaries weren’t satisfied with just that. Some of the pits were left “plain”, but others had sharpened stakes in them. Sometimes they were placed at the bottom, pointing upwards, while others had the stakes inserted diagonally into the walls of the pit, pointed at a downwards angle to allow easy entry but complicating egress.

A few others even had a pool of flammables spiked with goblin kindling at the bottom of the pit, with a setup that would cause a flint to strike steel and ignite the whole thing explosively should someone step into the pit.

Other than that, nearly invisible tripwires were set up on the sides of the road, where triggering them would cause a bent, flexible wooden pole with multiple stakes tied to it to lash out over the road and strike whoever was unfortunate enough to be in the way. Any forests along the road by the trapped zones were similarly trapped with all sorts of nooses, pits, and tripwires, which would make them hell to traverse.

All of which was only possible because the mercenaries had detected the attack coming before the armies involved even left their nations.

When the Podovniy army reached the border between the two nations, Grünhildr – who went ahead of the rest of the force – had already reached Aldenstadt, with the reinforcements from Levain a mere day behind her. After some quick negotiations with Salicia’s older sister – who was the acting governor of Aldenstadt – and her own mother, they quickly came to an agreement.

Daleeni lent Grünhildr over a thousand men from the City’s guards along with some volunteers from the people and the militia, all of whom were locals who knew the region well. The city’s own defense would rely on the ten thousand militiamen – including the reinforcements – from Levain, as well as the walls that protected the place.

Reinhardt’s proposed plans had turned Aldenstadt into a veritable fortress, one that would be costly and painstaking to siege and take down with any sort of haste. It was one of the reasons he was confident that the enemy army would skip the fort and head straight to Levain instead. Due to Aldenstadt’s location at the top of a hill and the way only two roads connected the foot of the hill to the fort, the number of people that could assault it at any one time was greatly limited, and bringing siege engines towards the fort was difficult at best.

Of course, that was before one took into consideration how Daleeni ordered the roads that led up the hill to be trapped to hell and back once Grünhildr left and the reinforcement arrived.

Over in the north, Lars did the same to the “roads” that led south to Levain. Unlike the east, the north side didn’t have roads as large or well-maintained as the rest of the region. The often heavy rainfall made the roads of the region a muddy hell roughly half the time, while the hot and humid environment was not ideal for people to stay on the road for long either.

Perhaps the northerners from Anduille wouldn’t be too troubled by such conditions, since their homeland had a similar environment, but even so Lars doubted that too many of the soldiers had ever delved deeper into the lush jungles of the north. On the other hand, the mercenaries had trained quite a bit under such conditions, during the time they spent training and looking for contracts in Zephirous.

The lush jungles in Theodinaz were quite similar to the northern ones, after all.

If anything, the road’s poor condition during the rainy season – which was from the middle of autumn until around the middle of spring – made it far easier to conceal any traps the group created, though they had to take precautions not to let too much water seep into the traps that needed to stay dry. On the other hand, in some places they actually just left their pit traps uncovered, with the puddles of water making it impossible to notice the hole until some unfortunate sod stepped into it.

Lars himself was reminded of the time when he was fighting for his homeland against the mercenaries, before he joined them, and couldn’t help but shake his head at the irony of using the exact same tactics and skills he used to inflict damage to the company back then to do so against a different enemy in their employ now.

Such was life, however, and he definitely didn’t mind his employment with the mercenaries, where he was for once recognized and valued instead of just dismissed due to his birth.