“It should be time for us to initiate the next part of the plan,” Roughscream said as he was in the same communications room along with Cinderclaw and a few of the other generals.
“What’s the rush? If you are so hasty, why don’t you personally escort yourself to fight the humans yourself as you once did?” Skydigger said with a smirk on his face. He knows that Roughscream was not able to do anything because Cinderclaw specifically says no generals are supposed to enter the battlefield as of yet. He might be of the same rank as the rest but everyone knew the hidden powers Cinderclaw possessed.
Roughscream quietly cursed Skydigger for making such a snarky remark but understood that he did it because of the grudge he held for using his personal weapon as an experimental tool for fun. Even he would be unhappy if he lost the bet and had to lend his signature weapon to some other rat so they could ‘play’ with it. But ultimately, a bet is a bet and it was done as a form of humiliation since they have almost everything in the world and nothing was as shameful as passing their personal weapons to another rat.
“Enough,” Cinderclaw said to quell down the anger within the room. It was as tense as it could have ever been since the Pandarens were making strides in their assault. And yet, despite the situation they were currently facing, the Demon Rat Generals understood how to play with human emotions ever since they brought the humans to their knees once. The Demon Rats might once be slaves to two human scholars but they were also masters of thousands of human slaves. But having a master alone was sickening to them and most if not all had vowed not to be enslaved. (Especially the top brass themselves.)
“We will initiate the next phase of the plan. Give a howling siren to the undercity and for those who have yet to evacuate would be their own undoing.” Cinderclaw said and everyone within the room obeyed his orders to the dot. As much as a few of them did not like his commands especially when they could endanger their species, they knew that the Demon Rats had always made sacrifices for the overall good of their society …or that was what they were inculcated to them by the Scholars themselves.
It’s true that now the monsters were able to think and fend for themselves but it would be hard to change their mindset overnight especially when it could have been ingrained into their genes to think like that. Regardless, the order had been sent out and the Undercity had made necessary preparations to proceed to the next plan with a few last minute adjustments.
In the meantime, the battlefield between the humans and the Demon Rats was going strong as the last batch of kamikaze Demon Rats conscripts began to run out of the third layer defences to handle the Pandarens on the field while the defenders were using what they had left to hold back the cultivators from taking over the Third Layer.
There was some fighting on the walls themselves but the Demon Rats were still able to hold their ground against the small number of cultivators who had reached the top of the wall through their qing gong. But to the unsuspecting Pandarens, everything all felt the same and it was nothing they could not handle as most of them had already fought the conscripts before. It was just another desperate attempt to stall for them against the Pandarens and the cultivators believed they would be winning over the wall soon especially when more of the customers are coming in to assist with the attack.
However, that was what General Cinderclaw wanted all this time.
The accumulation of Pandarens and the extra reinforcements that were coming into the fray. He wanted as many humans as possible on the battleground so that when he initiated the next phase, it would injure them greatly. While he did understand from Roughscream that they were coming back again and again to fight the Demon Rats to their death but as the Club General had pointed out, there would definitely be a limit to their powers and he was a firm believer in that theory. All they had to do was punish them sufficiently until they did not wish to return to the battlefield.
And even though what they were going to do would be accelerating the deaths of many other Demon Rats, the Generals know their Achilles heel in this current situation. The Northern Capital might be vastly connected to the Undercity but the major way up and down is usually through the giant elevator that was at the northern tip of the capital. Even if they were to utilise all the passages to fight the Pandarens, they could already foresee their fight at a disadvantage.
Their reinforcements are fixed because of the giant elevator and even if they were to retreat to the undercity, the humans would take the chance to create a base on the surface, gathering their troops and trying to push through via the Giant Elevator. This would take weeks, months and possibly even years.
It was initially not a problem since they had sufficient food stock at the moment and the Demon Rats were consistently expanding. But now they were in a different predicament. The East and West invasion had been halted, even pushed back by the humans and the collaborations of other entities which the Demon Rat assumed were the inhabitants of the East and West that they were fighting against, (they were so wrong…it’s all Jin’s.). Thus, the Demon Rats would be pushed to a three way fight if they let things be but if they could take the fight to them, that would be a different issue.
“Proceed to the next phase in five minutes. Get the mages ready to destroy the entire ground leading to the Outer Walls. I want the humans to feel despair falling through the cracks.” Cinderclaw ordered once more, with a decisive tone, to make the rest who were having second thoughts of the operations enact it.
