by Pirateaba
Their shells are as tough as any leather armor and the Antinium fight and move together like a professional unit. Our army was only able to achieve victory by using our superior vantage point and numerous area of attack spells to decimate their formations. Our elite soldiers carved through many of the Antinium, and it appears the lack of magic and any high-level warriors is their only weakness.
The Antinium have no mages, and their ranged weapons are primitive bows and crude stone arrows. Nevertheless, their numbers and efficiency more than make up for this gap. It seems even the “Worker” class can use a bow to fire arrows, so their ranks of archers are capable to matching even our best divisions in terms of sheer output of missiles.
Be warned however: our warriors found themselves under attack from behind our lines at multiple points, and our group of mages found themselves under attack as the Antinium burrowed out of a tunnel. I recommend posting sentries to watch for these surprise attacks, and to fight on hard stone or in marshland if at all possible.”
The most troubling advantage the Antinium had over both Drakes and Gnoll species was their ability to tunnel. Entrenched positions with vulnerable elements such as command headquarters or areas with high concentrations of [Mages] or [Archers] would find themselves under attack by teams of burrowing Soldiers and Workers who would inflict as much damage as possible and then retreat.
These surprise attacks led to a diversification of valuable soldiers, and a standing policy among Drake armies to never have more than one Level 30+ soldier stationed in a squad at one time. This policy is still enforced within all Drake standing armies to this day.
However, even with their mages hidden and protected, there were never enough with levels high enough to turn the tide of battles. The Antinium gladly sacrificed thousands of their Soldiers and Workers to kill even one high-level individual. Slowly, the mercenary armies retreated, forced to abandon their client cities as their forces were gradually worn down.
Sserys made several overtures during this time to local cities, sending requests for their soldiers to join with his to repel the Antinium’s advance, but he was rebuffed and eventually led his soldiers far to the east as cities fell around him. Thanks to his slowing of the Antinium’s advance, several cities evacuated all their civilians and soldiers, but in terms of the overall map of the war, the Antinium were barely slowed as they continued to rampage across Izril.
One month after the start of the First Antinium War, the Antinium paused. It is believed they spent a week replenishing their lost troops and reinforcing their armies, and perhaps, digging and constructing more Hives. No army dared to launch an assault, and the few places where the Antinium had been stopped remained locked in semi-constant combat.
The Black Tide of the Antinium began to march once more, sweeping east, south and north with such ferocious speed that any hope of mobilizing a response force was lost. In an instant, the Antinium had captured nearly thirty percent of the southern half of Issiysil and seemed to be poised to sweep across the rest. However, they met their first obstacle as they encircled and began sieging the Walled City, Zeres.
The Antinium had successfully bypassed four of the Walls built by the Blighted Kingdom in Rhir, but they found the superior construction of the Walled Cities a different challenge*. A huge army began to lay siege to Zeres, but after a week of day-and-night warfare, the Antinium found themselves rebuffed with extreme casualties on their sides and virtually no losses by the defenders.
*The famed Walled Cities bear an entirely different type of fortification than smaller Drake cities. Their origin dates past recorded history, and the magic that allows the three-hundred foot walls to stand hardens the stone and even allows it to repair itself given time. No army has ever taken a Walled City by siege, although several coups and betrayals from within have seen the famed cities fall over the millennia.
The living ladders the Antinium used were far too short to reach the battlements of the Walled City, and the defending archers and mages could rain down fire with impunity, as the Antinium found that it was impossible for their arrows to reach the defenders from their superior vantage point.
One of the Lords of the Wall in Zeres jubilantly recorded the Antinium’s failure in his personal diary:
“They cannot break our walls, nor destroy the fortifications underneath! Their sappers may be strong, but these foul insects lack the magic to destroy the enchantments protecting the Walled Cities. We are safe, so long as they find no way to climb our walls or build a siege tower large enough.”
Indeed, the ground around the Walled Cities was impenetrable by conventional tools or equipment due to the magical enchantments radiating out from the walls. This frustrated the Antinium, and several watchers from the walls observed the Workers digging at the ground until their limbs broke and their digits were bloody and raw.
Zeres stood, and the Antinium were unable to abandon it lest the army fall upon their backs. This, along with the sieges of several other Walled Cites occupied a large part of the Antinium’s army, slowing their advance.
If there was a disadvantage to this situation, it was that while the Antinium took heavy losses in their initial assaults, they quickly retreated out of range and maintained a passive siege, hoping to wear down the Walled Cities’ supplies.
This would take years, given the massive stockpiles each Walled City maintains and their ability to grow produce and even herd animals within their massive confines. But so long as the Antinium maintained their siege the armies of each Walled City were forced to remain behind their walls, leaving the smaller city-states to fend for themselves.
The Antinium legions might have swept across the entire southern half of the continent unchecked, were it not for two groups which threw back their armies in unprecedented defeats.
While the city-states slowly evacuated and fell to the Antinium, another force entered the swamplands and grassy plains belonging to the Gnoll tribes, burning and killing everything in their path. However, the Gnolls of Issiysil built no cities like the Drakes, and unlike their scaly rivals, their opposition to the Antinium was far more successful.
The Gnoll tribes of the plains and swamps reacted to the Antinium threat swifter than any of the factitious Drake city-states, and over a hundred tribes sent their warriors to form a massive army – the same kind that successfully repelled even the greatest vanguards during the wars between Gnolls and Drakes of previous centuries.
In their first major engagement with a vast force of nearly eighty thousand Antinium, an army of twenty thousand Gnolls managed to route the entire force in a bloody battle that lasted only a day. It is suspected that this army was not comprised of normal Gnoll [Hunters] and [Warriors], but rather of elites chosen out of every tribe.
Casualties were high on both sides, but the Antinium army was nearly completely destroyed and a much larger force of over a hundred thousand Gnolls assembled over the course of the next week. This main army, supplemented by several ‘hunting packs’ of tens of thousands of Gnolls, successfully fought off every Antinium advance into Gnoll territory.
The Gnollish resistance likely had much to do with the Antinium’s inability to overwhelm any one front later on in the war. They continued to fight the Gnoll Tribes in increasingly costly battles to both sides, but never penetrated further than fifty miles into the Gnoll heartlands at any time. Nevertheless, the Gnolls never sent any armies out to attack the Antinium in retaliation, preferring instead to guard their scattered tribes and holdings.
Given time, it is possible the Antinium could have taken the Drake settlements and encircled the Gnolls with overwhelming numbers, but their advance east was stopped at the Shivering Falls Pass by the first coalition army formed during the war.
General Sserys had pulled back the Liscorian army far east, looking to rally the cities. Initially he found no help, as the cities distrusted the mercenary nature of his army and feared betrayal. But as it became clear the Drakes would perish alone, more and more soldiers and
high-ranking officials began to engage in private communication with Sserys in direct defiance of their city’s governing bodies.
As the sieges of the Walled Cities began, the Black Tide separated and sent a massive force towards the Shivering Falls Pass, one of the strategic locations separating the eastern and western part of the continent. This vanguard army numbered over a hundred thousand, and every city in its path evacuated, fleeing towards the Walled Cities which found themselves swamped by refugees.
Only one [General] refused to retreat. Sserys believed that the loss of Shivering Falls Pass would allow the Antinium to establish a foothold which would be impossible to shift. He instead called every [Commander] leading an army of over a thousand soldiers in the area to join him to defend the pass. The reputation of the Liscorian Army and Sserys’s own high level persuaded countless mercenary groups and smaller armies to accept his gamble and join with his forces which engaged with the Antinium in the center of the pass.
Sserys spoke briefly to his soldiers as his smaller force prepared to repel the Antinium advancing down the pass. He spoke to his army minutes before the armies clashed:
“There is no time for speeches, no time for mighty oaths or solemn vows. Here is the enemy. Here we stand. I will not take a single step backwards. Who will guard my tail?”
General Sserys’ coalition army met the Antinium in the center of the pass, fighting in the narrow confines of the rocky canyon while the Drake [General] led his soldiers from the front.
He personally led fifteen charges against the Antinium. True to his word, General Sserys refused to retreat. Instead, he set up forward lines in the center of the Antinium formations, pushing their numbers back rather than allowing them to regroup.
His overall strategy consisted of forming heavy ranks of soldiers with defensive classes with [Tacticians] and [Strategists] assigned along each column, using their active abilities to reinforce their position. Archers dueled with Antinium at range and mages blasted the clustered Antinium, who had no way to return that kind of destructive power.
Forewarned by previous battles, Sserys actively collapsed tunnels that appeared behind his lines, but his success was also due to his relentless advance; the Antinium never had time to dig underneath his forces as they overran their formations, much as the Antinium had done so effectively in previous engagements.
Using kill-teams of high-level warriors, Sserys sent them in to devastate Antinium lines and retreat with few or no casualties while lower-level warriors pushed the Antinium further and further back. While each Antinium Soldier was stronger than the average freshly recruited [Soldier], Drakes and Gnolls above Level 20 were able to slay countless Antinium before being forced to retreat.
After nearly two days of continuous fighting, the larger Antinium force retreated with less than a quarter of its original numbers. General Sserys’ forces took very few casualties by comparison; the extensive quantity of healing potions, [Healers], and skills of [Commander] classes combined with rotation of wounded soldiers saved thousands of lives on the battlefield.
This victory was the first major defeat of any Antinium army on the continent. News instantly spread to every city-state and with it, both Drake and Gnoll populaces experienced a surge of morale. The Antinium could be defeated. They could be stopped.
The defeat at Shivering Falls was not a significant one for the Antinium hives in terms of either soldiers or strategic importance, but the loss did surprise the Queens commanding the war. Even in Rhir, Antinium had seldom suffered defeat until their departure, and this decisive loss must have alarmed the Great Queen.
Although several additional armies could have joined up to engage Sserys’ army a second time, the Great Queen declined to do so. Instead, she sent additional armies north to assault Liscor while the rest withdrew to maintain their sieges and hold over claimed territory.
This proved to be an error, as Sserys’ victorious army began attracting support and new recruits on an unprecedented scale. The [General] rallied the east, reaching out towards the two Walled Cities not directly in line of the Antinium’s advance for support. Desperate for a leader capable of defeating the Antinium, they sent all the arms and soldiers they could muster.
Sserys’ communications with the leaders of both cities is largely of a diplomatic nature; his reassurances to both leaders are mainly personal and it is likely he avoided any references to his overall strategy save one exchange. Initial requests from both cities were for Sserys to act defensively and hold off the Antinium advance, rather than move to attack as he wished.
Faced with mounting pressure both from correspondence and from officials sent from the Walled Cities, Sserys sent a curt response by mage letter that reads as follows:
We will not retreat.
Victory can only be won by meeting the Antinium face on. Cowardice will only doom us faster. We will assault them and rally our kind or die fighting. This is our only chance.
Do not try to dissuade me from this course again. Drakes do not run.
–General Sserys of Liscor
The next day the First Coalition Army of Liscor launched a full-scale counterattack on the Antinium forces laying siege to the Walled Cities.
S02 – The Antinium Wars (Pt.2)
The First Antinium War had raged for over four months after the initial assault and resistance of the Drake armies when the Antinium began to realize that the continent would not so easily be taken.
The Black Tide had swept across Issiysil much as they had done on Rhir, but unlike the Blighted Kingdom, the Drake and Gnoll species had no great enemy in the Demon King to fight against. And in the face of the Antinium’s invasion, in time the warring Gnoll Tribes and Drake cities put aside their longtime rivalries to unite against a common enemy.
The eventual alliance of cities and tribes that formed under General Sserys’ command took months to come together, all while the Antinium were conquering unchecked. Had the alliance come together at the start of the Antinium Wars, or even after a few months, the Antinium war machine might never have been allowed to grow as large as it did.
Sserys eventually managed to unify every standing Drake city and forge a tenuous agreement with the collective Gnoll Tribes—essentially a non-aggression pact that allowed the Drakes and Gnolls to focus solely on the Antinium. Thus, Sserys was named High General and given command of the entire war against the Antinium.
It must be said that despite his high level and strategic expertise, even Sserys and the best [Strategists] on the continent were hard-pressed to even slow the Antinium. The Queens reacted with such speed and decisiveness that catching their armies off-guard was difficult, and without issues of morale or lapses in communication, the Antinium possessed fewer weaknesses to exploit than conventional armies.
Yet, if the Black Tide was relentless, there were still bastions which even the endless numbers of Antinium Soldiers could not wear down.
The Gnoll Tribes, Walled Cities, and Sserys’s army were the indomitable pillars that could not be broken down however many times the Antinium attacked. But cities burned and floods of weary Drakes and Gnolls fled eastward, another target for the Antinium to exploit.
General Sserys could not abandon the civilians to roving Antinium war bands, and so the Drakes were forced to fight defensively. One small mercy seemed to be the limit to the number of armies the Antinium could field at once; with the few Queens in each Hive, they were unable to scatter their armies and perform the simultaneous lightning-strikes as had been so devastating in Rhir.
However, the Drake forces were clearly at a disadvantage, and meanwhile the Antinium were continually pushing north, towards the last bastion between Drake and Human lands – Liscor. Sserys was aware of this danger and directed ever more armies north to hold off the Antinium while he attempted to evacuate the lowlands, but his armies were slowly being fought back by the Black Tide.
Two events of note changed the balance of power during the First Antinium War. While [Strategists] and
[Tacticians] have continually argued the implications of each engagement, from a historical perspective the Antinium were always winning. But the emergence of a second leader who would prove vital during the war and the famous Accord at Liscor both helped tip the scales back towards the defender’s side.
The city-state of Geir lay directly in the line of the Black Tide, but had thus far escaped any major conflicts with the Antinium. However, after one of Sserys’ armies suffered a major defeat, the Antinium suddenly advanced on the city, striking within hours of their last battle with the speed that had so dismayed Drake [Strategists].
The few [Scouts] monitoring the Antinium front reported seeing the Antinium swarming the walls, heedless of the defensive spells exacting a toll on their army. Like many other settlements, the defenders mobilized too slowly to push back the Antinium and their gates were dragged open within the first hour of fighting. After that, all visual reports ceased as the scouts were forced to retreat as more Antinium pushed the frontlines forward yet again.
Communications ceased as the Antinium armies continued onwards, and it was assumed the city was overwhelmed. However, two days after the attack, a lone Human Courier – Mihaela Godfrey – broke through Antinium lines from within and delivered a message to General Sserys. It came from a young Drake [Lieutenant] stationed within the city and reads as follows:
“To anyone who may read this,
My name is Zel Shivertail. I am a Level 15 [Lieutenant] in command of Geir’s remaining forces, as I believe all higher-ranking officers are now dead…
We have been attacked by a vast Antinium army which overwhelmed our walls. The attack happened with such suddenness that most of our warriors were lost within the first few moments. I managed to rally what few soldiers, guardsmen and civilians I could and retreated into the keep.