Chapter 122: The Longest 15 Minutes (7)
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The war had finally started.
The Demon Lord army put Valefor’s moving fortress at the front. The human army’s formation fell powerlessly once the massive fortress moved and charged towards them. Their morale was already at rock-bottom anyway. The first battle ended in the Crescent Alliance’s complete victory.
If the enemy didn’t have that many knight brigades, then this entire war would have probably been decided by this first battle alone, Barbatos commented.
I was told that the drafted soldiers in the human army didn’t fight properly. If the situation seemed even slightly bad for them, they would almost always flee.
A single unit fleeing doesn’t result in a single unit leaving the battle. As fleeing soldiers retreat, they often crash into the allies that were positioned behind them. The morale of the rest of the troops decreases exponentially as they watch their allies, who should be fighting at the front, running away. There are even soldiers that use the chaos to become deserters……. This results in at least 3 units becoming neutralized.
I learned about the hollowness of the term ‘tactical retreat’ after I fell into this world. If you aren’t as skilled as trained knights or the soldiers defending the Black Mountains, then a tactical retreat was impossible. The simple act of retreating could easily break the formation of your allies.
Trying to reorganize and realign units that have gotten tangled up will most likely take a few days. There’s no way that enemy forces would sit and wait patiently for those few days. There’s no future for an army that retreats.
This calamity had apparently happened in multiple areas throughout the human army. There were most likely more humans that died at the hands of human commanders who were in charge of taking out retreating soldiers than at the hands of monsters. The leading officers of the human army have probably realized the impact of losing the speeches was far greater than they had expected.