His friends were stupidly brave… but Billy couldn't complain since they grew to be like that under his watch. The group joined the guild masters who looked equally troubled, but they hadn't given up yet. At the very least, they won't go down without a good fight. They didn't say anything. After fighting for so long, they were too tired, and they would rather save their energy for the next minutes of the fight.
The enemies also knew that the last group remaining won't go down easy, so they began an encirclement. Even if they fail at killing Billy as fast as possible, the mountain of corpses around him will make things difficult for him. However, they suddenly stopped and didn't finish their encirclement for whatever reason after some point. Billy frowned at that, and then he noticed that some of the enemies were looking at the walls. When he looked toward id as well, he noticed that the enemy soldiers were no longer there. Not to mention, things got noisy in the northern gate again.
"What is going on…" Marie said.
"It must be… reinforcements," Gerald replied. "Our reinforcements have arrived! Don't give up yet! We can win this!"
It was impossible to say if Gerald was right, but at least his words recovered some of the morale of the weakened soldiers around him. He charged toward the enemies, and the survivors followed him. Without much of other choices, Billy and the others followed them. They had to capitalize that chance, even if it was stupid to leave the gate unprotected.
The enemies also reached the same conclusion. It was the only explanation as to why their allies had disappeared from the walls. Thanks to that, they took a while to respond to the attack and paid dearly for it. Without their usual formation, they failed in stopping the charge and became easy prey for Billy and his allies.
Since they were too close to him, Billy changed his tactics a bit. Instead of the lightning bolts, he summoned the Fire Tornado and while that cost tons of mana, he recovered enough as his spell burned to a crisp the enemies' soldiers and melted their armor and weapons. The fire tornado circulated around his group and then decimated the enemy's encirclement even more. They finally realized that they had lost and began to run away at that point in time.
At first, the survivors blinked several times without realizing what was going on, but then they saw the guild masters dashing and cutting down those soldiers. Now that they had a chance, they had to decimate them in order to make sure that the beast tamers would stay weakened for many years to come. To prevent further wars, but the guild masters were thinking about something else… That was the preparations for their counterattack.
Unfortunately, few people had the strength left to chase five times more soldiers than them. So, around two thousand enemy soldiers still managed to escape. Billy and his friends sighed in relief… Many sacrifices had been made, but they won.
"Hey, look at that," Lilly said while pointing toward the north.
They saw an unknown army fast approaching when they looked in that direction. They didn't seem like a hidden unit prepared from Jean. They were carrying a green banner that had a pine tree on it, but Jean's soldiers didn't carry any banners. However, they knew that they weren't enemies because some individuals were leading those soldiers. They were Drew, Camilla, Nikola, Lucy, Leo, and even Edward armed with a war hammer was with them. They all looked a bit beaten down, and their weapons were red with blood, so they probably helped the guys in the northern gate.
"It seems that we arrived just in time… that is what I would like to say, but…" Edward said while looking around and seeing thousands of corpses.
Edward seemed more than a little troubled by the fact that his daughter saw such a thing for days. Still, she welcomed him with a smile. It was hard to respect her independence and want for her a better life than that. Even though she fought to protect her people and many other innocent lives.
"What happened, dad, mom?" Billy asked.
"We went to help Rosalie and Aura and then joined their battle. Once we defeated the enemies on the borders, we came to help," Drew replied.
"There is no way we would sit still and wait while you were fighting," Camilla added. "Samuel and Samara are at home with mother, even though they begged to come as well."
A battlefield wasn't a place for children, so that was the right call. Regardless, they explained that the guys in the Northern gate fought well, but the survivors had to retreat due to wounds that they sustained. Even though the archers did an amazing job keeping the enemies at bay for quite a while, eventually, they ran out of arrows. They fired those nonstop for an entire day, after all. Billy's friends' students probably sustained some heavy losses, but the enemy was running away thanks to their bravery.
In any case, Riormi soldiers came to join the fight, but they just helped in tending the wounded since they arrived late. As for Billy's friends, they were too exhausted, so once they relaxed a little, they went to sleep. They had won the war, but the cost had been high. Thanks to that, the mood was quite heavy in the guild when he arrived there and saw Edward, Jean, Aura, Rosalie and almost all of the influential people of those three states.
The war started with a bit more than twelve thousand against thirty thousand.. On their side, they lost nine thousand and about half of the survivors were too injured to keep on living the life of a soldier or of an Adventurer. As for the enemies, they lost almost twenty-five thousand soldiers, but there was no point in celebrating even more deaths…
