Quoted By:
>Recruitment Numbers: 165
While October’s recruitment numbers at first looked so dismal as to be disheartening, to make you question the merits of staying so long in a place where no stories of your exploits would ever escape into the sun, your expansion of Vitelian recruitment turned out to be fortuitous. When the flow of volunteers from everywhere else had slowed to a trickle, a sudden completely unpredicted appearance occurred. Almost half a company of former Royal Army troops showed up, experienced border and mountain troops who had plenty of experienced soldiers. Disillusioned with national service, they had followed the rumors of the Black Knight, and had steadily discovered another cause that they could put more faith- and trust of force- within.
It was a fortuitous windfall. The light infantrymen could be integrated into the battered 2nd Company with little effort while not diluting the skill of the unit, and the remaining recruitment was enough to shuffle about troops to restock 4th Company’s numbers as well as filling out the Anti-Tank Company. You were still alarmingly dry on reserves, but at the very least, any units assigned to the frontline would be entering any fights to come at full strength again. 5th Company was also recovering from its mauling, and though Dulechamp said that he believed the company was ready for battle once more, <span class="mu-i">it was clearly not as skilled as it once was in its specialty</span>, and would need at least another battle or two under its belt to not be an imitation of what it once was.
If only 3rd Battalion might be ready sooner, you’d have fewer woes. Yet there was no way to speed up that project. It was already going as fast as humanly possible.
Much as it would have been the best advantage to be able to utilize your new equipment in this battle, the tunnels to where the vast enemy operation was taking place would not admit even your new <span class="mu-i">Z. Stijder</span> tanks, nor trucks or converted casemates or even motorcycles. The coming battle would be entirely on foot. The proper debut of the Aurora Legion’s newly futuristic composition would have to wait for the battles afterwards.
As for the operation itself, extensive reconnaissance had revealed multiple paths upwards from the Gallery, as well as from the initial Outpost raids that 6th Company had undertaken. Rather than having to charge through a single general direction, therefore, you had the option of approaching and assaulting from multiple directions. The distances involved were not small, but the number of troops up in the Ceiling were by absolute necessity not large. It would be doubtful that they were much more numerous than being equal to the Legion’s numbers, though the fighting taking place in tunnels would mean that by nature there would be channelization, and mere weight of unit mass was not going to be enough to win a fight by itself. Even so, the number of approaches meant that you could utilize superior numbers in maneuver at all.
