For days, the atmosphere within Delong Castle had been incredibly tense.
News of the Northern Alliance Army's defeat had already arrived, and the commander-in-chief was missing.
The defeated soldiers who managed to escape to Delong Castle didn't even arrive in squads. A group of three was considered a large number; they mostly trickled in one by one, having cast aside their helmets and armor, disheveled and filthy, no different from starving refugees.
Of the hundred-thousand-strong Alliance Army, only a few hundred deserters had made it to Delong Castle.
This struck the castle's Lord, Count Medellin, as absurd. 'Even if it were a hundred thousand pigs,' he thought, 'they wouldn't have been slaughtered down to so few in just two weeks.'
The only reasonable explanation was that many of them had no intention of returning to Delong Castle to regroup.
They weren't fighting anymore. They were going home.
