The Fourth Coalition War against the Ardennes Dual Empire is off to a terrific start as the Battle for Fort Jatey has ended with 800 coalition deaths and zero Ardennes Casualties.

It was supposed to be a small-scale battle on the fringe. 5,000 soldiers dedicated to capturing a fort manned by maybe 300 ardennes to cover our supply lines as we push north into Central Apea.

The operation featured a brigade of peldaks, and coalition forces from Arcadia, the Reichenhorn, Manauas, Capsaia, Ventala, and Druiijen. Cirathan Standard is only widely spoken by the first four.

The language barrier forced the coalition to split our forces into independent units with their own objectives. Because Fort Jatey sat atop a plateau, surrounded by sparse trees, shrubs, and outcroppings of rocks. The plan was for our allies to attack on all sides and, once they opened a breach, the peldaks would swiftly move in and take care of the rest.

Each group had their own camp, artillery pieces, and area of operation, with orders to attack their section of the fort at daybreak.

The Capsaia and Druiijen forces, who hate each other nearly as much as they hate Ardennes, mixed their paths and stumbled upon each other. Either one side wanted to ambush the other, or they started arguing about deployment zones, or maybe troopers just snuck off to get drunk and thought they were discovered. For some reason they started shooting.

The peldaks assumed the Ardennes forces marched out for a surprise attack, so we swung around and, in the thick smog, couldn’t tell that the grimy-uniformed troopers were our allies. So we fired on them. They fired back, other allied troops came in, and suddenly 800 soldiers died and another thousand were wounded.

We pulled back and Ardennes kept their fort.