Jungle Warfare Is Hell (4)
Before we advanced into the East after crushing the Eastern First Expeditionary Force inside the Great Rainforest, I was reviewing reports on our current unit status and remaining ammunition when Lumina brought me a cup of coffee.
"Have some coffee while you work, Lord Isaac."
"Ah, thanks. By the way — how are the prisoners?"
"They've all lost the will to fight and are behaving themselves. Still, as a precaution, we've put restraints on every last one of them, and the orcs and our elves are rotating in pairs for round-the-clock watch."
"And their commander?"
"We've isolated him separately to keep the prisoners from rallying around him. Whether it's because he spilled every Eastern secret he knew, he just sits there like a man whose soul has left his body. No resistance at all."
"A good sign. We've got no idea how many more battles are still ahead of us — the last thing I need is prisoners nursing escape plans and giving me extra headaches."
Nearly every character in this romance-fantasy world harbored some baseless, boundless affection for Eleanor — but there were exceptions. Some figures existed purely to oppose her for the sake of the plot, and others were pure extras with no feelings about her whatsoever. Ruben belonged to the latter category.
His attempt to reclaim Eleanor hadn't been driven by personal desire. He'd simply been following the will of his liege, Archduke Edmund of the East, who wanted her brought back. Ruben was a married man with a wife and children — a man with a perfectly ordinary family.
In a world full of husbands who fell so hard for Eleanor they'd gladly hand over the roof beams of their own homes, simply remaining faithful to one's family without being bewitched by her already put him in the top one percent.
He wasn't just a man who knew how to fight, either. As one of the East's high-ranking core figures, he carried a wealth of useful intelligence, and he would remain valuable in any number of ways going forward. Keeping him alive was the smarter play for now.
I was still turning that over when Lumina spoke again.
"Incidentally, Lord Isaac — have you ever fought in the Great Rainforest before? Combat here has a reputation for defeating even the Northern Slayers and the central Rose Knights."
I let out a short laugh.
"I've lived my whole life in the West. How would I have? I just exploited a weakness. The Eastern army prides itself on knowing jungle warfare better than anyone — but what they do isn't real jungle warfare at all."
"What do you mean?"
"The Eastern army developed and perfected methods for living as much like they would on open ground as possible inside the jungle. That's what they're good at — not actual jungle combat. If those people were genuine specialists in jungle warfare, they never would have built bases that large inside the rainforest."
Lumina tilted her head.
"I'm not sure I follow. You aren't assuming I understand that environment better because I'm an elf, are you? Back in the First Age, when the World Tree still stood, perhaps — but our people have lived out on the plains in cities for a very long time now. Forest living and forest combat aren't exactly our strong suits anymore."
I gave her the short version.
How a jungle that looked so lush and abundant was, in truth, a living hell — and why, once jungle warfare broke out there, both attacker and defender were doomed to die in droves.
The jungle itself is a green hell that rejects human life. Oppressive heat. Humidity so thick you can barely breathe. Daily squalls that replenish that moisture without a single day of rest.
Poisonous plants beyond counting, venomous insects, mosquitoes, and every other kind of lethally toxic creature. Appalling soil, and mud pits that appear on a whim and swallow men whole.
Trees and undergrowth kill your sight lines even at high noon. Your sense of direction vanishes. An enemy can stand ten meters away and neither of you will know it — so you live in a state of extreme tension twenty-four hours a day.
Food rots in minutes. Drink from a puddle on the trail and microbes, viruses, and toxins throw a banquet in your gut. Just walking means hacking through vines and climbing over fallen timber, and the physical toll is staggering.
Even a modern army bristling with the latest weapons steps into an inescapable hell the moment it enters jungle warfare. In a world whose military standards lag so far behind, attempting jungle combat is simply a death sentence.
In the South, the Great Rainforest ran thin and long enough that you could simply ignore it. But in the East, where the rainforest sprawled across a vast portion of the territory, they had no choice — like it or not, they had to push through that green hell and claim it.
And because the jungle itself repels human presence, any attempt to settle it required somehow maintaining an environment as close to open ground as possible. That necessity drove the East to develop magic that could create livable conditions inside the jungle.
Over long years of steady jungle reclamation, the Eastern army had also clashed with monsters often enough to specialize, in its own way, in combat within the rainforest — which was how they earned their reputation as invincible inside the Great Rainforest.
But even this supposedly invincible jungle force had a fatal flaw. Their strength came from maintaining conditions as close to open ground as possible inside the jungle, and from combat techniques built on that foundation — not from any racial adaptation to the jungle itself.
They built bases inside the rainforest, raised protective barriers over them, and ventilated the interiors to lower humidity and temperature. In other words, they maintained large-scale garrison facilities inside the jungle — something that would never exist in true jungle warfare.
What makes jungle combat a genuine living hell is this: you die simply by existing in the environment, you can't tell whether the enemy is five meters away or ten, there are no fixed positions so you never know what to strike, and you fight an endless stream of enemies that keep appearing from nowhere.
The Eastern army had, in effect, eliminated the very conditions that turn jungle warfare into hell.
If the enemy gathers at a base inside the jungle, you simply hit that base.
Outfits like the Slayers or the Rose Knights had no way of knowing where those bases were, and no techniques suited to operating inside the Great Rainforest — so of course they were left fully exposed to the jungle's hell and couldn't win.
But our Western army, with modern weapons developed through dwarven engineering, could simply bombard the bases from outside the jungle and be done with it.
If this had been real jungle warfare — with no bases left to bomb — even something like the Cheonmu would have been hard to put to proper use.
But that problem had its own solution: hand AK rifles to the tiger and leopard beastmen, whose very natures were optimized for the jungle, and the rest became considerably more manageable.
As I finished explaining why our victory had been inevitable, Lumina sat with her mouth slightly open, then managed a short reply.
"That's genuinely impressive. I never imagined you'd thought it through that far. For someone who isn't even from the East, you know their situation remarkably well…"
Well, I did live a past life… was something I couldn't exactly say.
"If you're going to lead a lot of people, you need to understand more than just your own territory."
"I see. I may need to revise my internal assessment of you somewhat, Lord Isaac. Setting aside how sincerely you've looked after us and how genuinely you treat us as equals to humans — on a more personal level, I'd been thinking any number of things…"
"…… What exactly have I been in that head of yours all this time?"
"That's a secret."
Lumina winked playfully, gathered up the documents, and left my command tent.
Since when did she know how to tease people?
The next day, we decided to reverse-engineer the railway that the South and East had, over long years, barely managed to carve along the outermost edge of the jungle — and use it for our advance.
"Ammunition count: all clear!"
"Weapons status: all clear!"
"No absentees!"
"Prisoner headcount confirmed!"
We had finished every preparation and were just beginning to load supplies onto the train when Abella, leader of the Avians, flew in with a reconnaissance report.
"Lord Isaac — I've confirmed a large Eastern force entering the Great Rainforest."
"Numbers?"
"Couldn't get an exact count, but at a low estimate, over ten thousand."
"They're getting serious. Every Eastern garrison inside the Great Rainforest has already been bombed flat — there's nothing left. Do they not know that?"
"They don't seem to be heading that way at all, so they probably know. Instead, they've spread out near the railway and aren't moving."
"Near the railway? All right. Good work, Abella. That's useful information."
I ruffled her hair, and Abella fluttered her wings with a pleased expression. Once the head-patting was done, she circled around me and asked,
"But Lord Isaac — am I just stuck doing scout duty forever? It's boring. Barkan and Shaila get to fight as much as they want. Why do we only ever get recon? Don't you trust us?"
"Hmm?"
Apparently Abella and the Avians weren't happy about being used purely for reconnaissance. I soothed the pouting girl with her wings held stiffly upright.
"Of course you have roles beyond scouting. It just isn't time yet. You can't move through the jungle as nimbly as the tiger or leopard beastmen, can you? Even on the night of the bombardment, moving stealthily was hard — that's why I had you speak with the owls that live in the jungle and have them watch the bases."
"Well, that's true, but…"
"Trust me, Abella. You and the Avians will get your turn in the fighting. I need you to hold out a little longer for this fight against the Eastern army. The plan's already locked in — changing it now would be difficult."
"Tch… Fine, Lord Isaac. But you'd better keep that promise!"
"Of course."
Abella grumbled as she spread her wings and flew off again.
After that, I summoned Barkan, leader of the tiger beastmen, and Shaila, leader of the leopard beastmen, and issued my orders.
"Barkan. Shaila. The East's next force has been deployed and is lying in ambush near the railway."
"Hoh. Their garrisons are gone, so now they mean to hit the train we'll use to push into the East?"
"But how do they even know when we'll advance? Are they just going to sit there forever?"
"If we don't advance and the front settles into a stalemate, they'll start guerrilla operations again. They've calculated that we'll come to occupy the East precisely to prevent that. This time there's no garrison left to bomb, so supporting you with the Cheonmu from our side is awkward… I'm sorry, but you're going to have to do the hard work yourselves."
"Same as last time — deliberately draw them into small-scale engagements?"
"So we herd them somewhere again?"
I shook my head at both questions.
"No. This time you don't even need to go looking for a fight. The fact that they have no garrison to gather in means that, from their perspective, the 'cozy jungle warfare' they've always known no longer exists. Let the Eastern army exhaust itself and wither away inside that jungle. Show them what real jungle warfare actually is — hell."