This was the first and most important step in my plan. After doing this, I exited the fort, went to another, and did the same.

The entire circular region was filled with fifty forts. After doing all this, I found out that five hours had already passed. And with this, Sara and her armies cleared the second layer and were fighting at the third one.

My fallen gods were in the middle of taking down the walls at the first layer. Even with their large number, they weren’t destroying these walls as fast as I expected.

This told me how important these walls were to the grand scheme of my enemy. However this didn’t stop me either. I left them to take down the walls at the first layer, and headed alone to the second.

I checked the towers and forts fast before creating another thousand fallen gods. I asked them to do the same before taking a long look at the brutal fight happening at the upper layer.

The Hescos seemed to get easily crushed by my forces. This might be right if the Hescos ran short of their forces. However I knew this wasn’t truly the case.

They decided to go with this plan, and so they didn’t send much reinforcements to these layers.

If they didn’t send any reinforcement at all then things would be apparently fishy. So they just sent a few, not enough to keep the layers under their control.

I was sure the forces they sent were the disposable and unimportant forces. They’d weary down my forces, and at the same time the Hescos wouldn’t lose too much by their deaths.

I bitterly smiled. The ones leading this army this time were indeed quite crafty and hard to deal with. Each move of theirs was well planned, and that made me envy their talents.

If I got a chance, then I’d prefer to turn them around and force them to work out for me. If that happened, then I’d end up with capable and frightening generals on my side.

Seeing the Hescos follow through with the plan I just read made me feel more confident in winning this. The more they depended on this plan the better the end would be for me.

After that I went to each tunnel, left inside tons of warriors and stat crystals before finally wrapping everything about the second layer.

By the time I was done, Sara and her forces didn’t disappoint me. They already took two layers and went towards the upper one.

It wasn’t just thanks to Hescos ‘ faking weakness, nor thanks to Sara’s haste and brutality, but I took slightly longer than before to visit all the tunnels here.

Each layer was built over the one lower than it, taking a much wider space the more layers were built. I estimated that with each increase in layers, at least one mile was added to the total radius of each layer.

That extra mile added at least five more tunnels to each layer. And so I took one more hour to clear these extra tunnels.

Seeing Sara and her forces going for the fifth layer made me smile wryly. If things kept going down this path then the gap between me and Sara’s forces would keep increasing.

It’d be ok as long as they didn’t get near the top layers here. If they did, then I’d be far away from them to help.

Slow down after fifty more layers I sent this in warning without answering any of her subsequent questions.

She felt weird about such an order. And she got all the right to feel so. I didn’t explain anything about the grand scheme of the Hescos, and in her eyes she was doing great against the enemy.

Going by logic, one should press hard against the enemy when the enemy showed weakness. And right now the Hescos looked as if they were standing on one leg apart from the doors of death.

But this was all a trap. I didn’t care about taking layers, but it’d grow risky the moment Sara and her forces got near the top.

In my estimates, the Hescos would start moving once Sara and her forces got into the last fifth group of layers near the top. The moment she reached there, the enemy would flood the lower layers, sending a hellish amount of armies down there, taking all my forces by surprise.

I needed to fill all the tunnels first with warriors as an ambush. Then I had to move out.

My movement at the tunnel wasn’t my entire plan. In fact it was just a small part of it.

So letting Sara go all the way to the top like that wasn’t going to work. In fact, her actions would backfire badly at me and at everyone else.

She tried to ask many questions, and all the answer she got was to just do as I said and wait.

I didn’t stop in my tracks while talking with her. First I descended to the first layer and examined the situation there. After all these hours, the one thousand fallen gods I left there destroyed the walls at last.

I didn’t say anything and just took them back, went to the third layer and deployed them again. I left them to destroy the walls while I went inside the tunnels and did the same thing again.

After doing this for three days straight without rest, my forces already controlled more than sixty layers, with a similar number of layers standing between them and the top.

At this point, I was still doing my business at forty something layers. I sent a warning message to Sara, asking her to start slowing down.

I ignored her complaints, and even didn’t read much of her long messages speaking about the advantages we had and the mistake of letting the Hescos off the hook at this time.

In her eyes, it was a golden chance to bring Hescos down. And in my eyes, it was a deadly trap that I wanted to avoid at all costs.