To my relief, the pause near the barricade let Gresch actually calm down enough to notice my ssage.
'Retreat? Burn? Oh, this voice—Your Majesty, are you speaking with yourself? I—damn it, there's no ti for this, is there? I heard an explosion—did it start a fire?'
'Yes, it did! Now get out already! I'm leading my forces outside.'
'Let these cursed heathens be damned… They are denying our victory even now! Very well…'
I exhaled and led my forces outside. With a telepathic call to the officers, I and Bloodimina easily gathered everybody, even those who were spread over the keep to serve as scouts, and went out in the nearest window.
We had to fight through more dragons out there before we could take shelter in one of the captured buildings. From here, the thick columns of smoke coming from the castle's keep were clear as day. The fire, which spread rapidly over oil, was visible through the windows and was only minutes away from licking the keep's roof.
So were the hundreds of soldiers fleeing it. Although the main part of the Naregan army was securing the rest of the castle—they couldn't all fit inside the keep even if they tried—there were still many people inside.
However, I couldn't see Gresch bright general's helt plumage anywhere.
'General Gresch makes sure that his soldiers don't panic and retreat in an organized manner despite the fire!' his Agent, Mindtalker, replied to my ssage. 'Our retreat is slower because fire is cutting off so of the stairways—soldiers had to beat it down before we could cross!'
I frowned.
Agent Bee Mindtalker didn't retreat with the rest of us—she was alone and safe in Gresch's pocket until now, while outside was full of insect predators. But now I was worried.
'My girl, do you need an extraction team?'
'What? But Father, my human will be so worried without . You want him not to panic, right? I will be alright!'
As if words like these could calm anyone down!
Of course, it made no sense to worry about the fate of a single Agent… I should've been more worried about Gresch. But no, I definitely cared about my daughters more than about any humans!
It really would be risky to send more people after Agent Mindtalker at this point. They would not only be attacked by creatures inside, but also by all the smoke.
I realized I could only wait.
Outside of the keep, the Naregan soldiers found so buckets and began pulling water from the castle's wells to stop the fire from spreading to other buildings. Rats, dragons and bugs ran away from the burning keep in droves.
Sothing rumbled inside the keep—a support beam must've fallen. The last defenders of the castle were surely now trapped inside and dood to die from heat and smoke.
Then…
"Finally!" I exclaid, seeing Gresch's head outside the door. This ant that Mindtalker was safe, too. "Yes… Now I can finally say that we won this battle, everyone!"
It didn't feel like much of a victory, but it was.
***
After we counted our losses, about 5 thousand human soldiers and a thousand bee soldiers died in this fight—incredibly small losses, all things considered. However, many more suffered minor injuries and will be unable to fight for days and weeks. They were going to travel all the way back to Naregan Kingdom to recover.
The clean-up was much longer and arduous than the fight itself, even after the fire in the keep was extinguished.
Not only were there thousands of corpses to bury, we also captured a lot of prisoners. Many of them were just female servants that pleaded for rcy at the sight of a Naregan soldier.
Gresch believed they would make good slaves to bring to the Naregan kingdom as trophies. I wondered if I should speak up against slavery, then decided that it wasn't worth the headache at the mont and told him it wasn't against my teachings—as long as he rembered that almost all of these people carried at least one disease on them.
At first, Gresch wanted to just kill all the sick ones—I heard it clearly in his thoughts—but then changed his mind. Gresch still took the captured servants as slaves and even gave them dical aid. Perhaps Gresch was taking an example from Farini's more humanitarian values.
The captured soldiers were all killed, though.
I also told my girls to not even try eating any of the humans and beasts we killed, and instead let humans throw them all into a pit.
"I bet that any at from this place will just make you sick. In fact, we should move our camps elsewhere. And so should humans. We don't need this fortress to deal with the approaching Vardish reinforcents, and I feel like illness might kill many people if we stay here," I told Bloodimina.
After the battle ended, Gresch's soldiers shot enough dragons from their bows to scare them away from us, and the smoke scared away a lot of other creatures, so we had so peace of mind. But this only gave an opportunity to look closer at the beasts' stats.
Almost all of them had the maxed-out immunity gene. Of course—how else could they live in a place like this? But even this wouldn't save them, or us, from falling sick from one of the evolved viruses.
"I fully agree, Father. This place does not look any better from up close than it did from outside," Bloodimina replied. "I will give our soldiers and Gresch their new orders."
Humans weren't thrilled to sleep in tents again when there were empty buildings right nearby. But they obeyed.
We spent two more days near Castle Soneraht just letting everybody rest and recover, and I was concerned to find out that there were many outbreaks of disease in our army after this fight.
The Physicians and the human doctors did everything they could, but many of these illnesses were the kinds that we've never seen before.
And in this state, we had to et the Vardish reinforcents so I could finally leave the fighting to other people and go ho!
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