Alderamin on the Sky

The Sinack have been subdued, but the Imperial Army finds that it's been caught in a trap! A huge army from the Aldera nation has crossed the supposedly-impassable northern mountains, and threatens to overwhelm the exhausted Imperial forces. Ikta's only way out is to force a peace treaty with the Sinack and ask for their help, which means going to their defeated leader and abasing himself. Will she respond to his pleas, after the Imperials burned her village and killed her people? How far is he willing to go earn her forgiveness?

The Imperial Army is pushed back, and Ikta is forced to use every trick at his disposal to keep his numerically inferior force from being overwhelmed. The Alderamin army has 12,000 troops, and his unit has only a little over 600. When he's forced to make a tough call to sacrifice his own men and save the Sinack, Suya confronts him angrily. She wants to know why he was willing to sacrifice his own men for the people he was fighting yesterday, and she says he owes her an answer.

The Imperial army is continuing its retreat from the numerically superior Aldera forces at the base of the Alafatra mountain range. They've set fire to the forest to buy themselves more time, but after a few days the fire is beginning to burn out. To buy the time they need to finish the retreat, Ikta is forced to maintain a proactive mobile defense and keep the flames burning. But the enemy general is breaking all the rules, and Ikta can't figure out his game. By the time Ikta realizes what's happened, it's too late, and the enemy is battering down his walls with a new weapon and sending their cavalry straight through the flames!

Ikta suffers a serious setback at the hands of the unsleeping, shining officer from the Kioka republic. His lines have been broken and the retreat is in disarray. To salvage an increasingly desperate situation, he leads a small, handpicked force to lure Jean into a trap. But Jean's proven himself for than a match for Ikta already, and the Alderan military outnumbers his own forces by over a dozen times. How can he handle such overwhelming numbers when his opponent has shown to be his equal?