The trap was set.

Aella held the bow and arrow in her hand steadily. She knew these forests better than anyone else because of her time fighting the Macedonians, and now she lay in wait in the thick underbrush as the night hid her slim figure in its darkness.

“General Aella,” Stavros, her advisor, had said to her earlier in the day. “Everything is ready now. The men have been briefed, and your spies have returned confirming the news you had received last week. There will be an attack tonight, and we will be ready.”

Aella had simply nodded at that. As a woman, life in the Greek military had never been easy for her. In fact, under normal circumstances, Aella would have not even been allowed to hold this high of a position in the military because of her gender.

Born as the only child and daughter of a decorated General from Athens, Aella’s mother had died in childbirth, and because of that her father had gotten very attached to her, and she to him, and so he had let her tag along during his campaigns against the Macedonians. Aella had literally grown up in army camps, watching soldiers train for battle and experiencing the terrible conditions that they suffered in their camps. And though Aella, as a woman, was never expected to learn about warfare, she had been allowed to sit in during her father’s many war councils and quickly developed an interest in war. And as time went by, and Aella grew older, she had begun to take a more active part amongst her father’s men, helping out with chores and even participating in their drills and training exercises.

All of this proved to turn out useful, when on her eighteenth birthday, Aella had learnt that her father had been killed in battle by the Macedonians. Soon after, the remnants of her father’s army was surrounded at their camp, and faced certain doom. Having grown up with these men always around her, Aella had their trust and quickly took up her father’s place, rallying the men and turning the tables on the five hundred man strong Macedonian army with only a hundred men left. Her soldiers praised her as a hero, and soon after Aella was officially commissioned as a General of Athens, the first woman to ever do so.

When the Romans came two years later, led by the great old General Marcellus Cassius and his young cousin, General Augustus Gaius, everyone was afraid. The Romans deftly crushed the Macedonians with their legions, and quickly set upon the rest of the Greek city states.

Aella had been a part of the Greek armies that went out to fight them. And fight them they did. They battled intensely, even pushing the Romans back with a brilliant counterattack into Roman territories that forced the Romans to redirect their armies.

For a whole year, Aella fought the Romans fiercely, and even rejoiced with the other Greek generals when they heard news of the old General Marcellus being sent home in shame because of what the Romans perceived as his failure against the Greeks. Not long after, however, Aella too was sent home, as the war effort was deemed not as important as before now that it seemed that they were winning, and because Aella had already fought for the Athenian armies for three years, and it was time to go home now. They even thanked her for her brave service and bestowed upon her many distinctions. But none of that mattered to Aella. She was disgusted by what they’d done, because she knew the real reason they wanted to send her home.

It was because she was a woman. After sending her home, the General they’d replaced her with was a man, young and fresh without experience like Aella had. But in their eyes, he was still a better choice just because he was a man and she was taking his place.

Having been sent home, Aella hadn’t been able to truly settle down. She’d started seeing some men every now and then, but never got too attached to anyone. All she had known was war, she grew up watching her dad wage a war and that was all she knew how to do. And so she waited restlessly in Athens, doing her best to live a city life, all the while keeping up with news of the war when she came back home at night.

And the news was never good.

It seemed that the moment General Marcellus was sent home and General Augustus took charge of the invading force, the Romans suddenly grew ten times as mightier, pushing the Greek armies back into the jungle of Macedonia, where they’ve engaged in guerrilla warfare for the past half a year. General Augustus quickly gained a reputation for not taking any prisoners, exterminating very Greek settlement his army would pass by. They say that this was hi vengeance against the Greeks for shaming his cousin and mentor, General Marcellus, and the Greek armies were even calling him Augustus the Wrathful now.

But it was not that fool Augustus who had turned the tide of the war. If it had been entirely up to him, he’d have thrown away all of his legions in his aggressive advances against the Greek armies. The real driving force behind the Roman army’s sudden rally against the Greeks was the two men Augustus had put in charge of his armies following General Marcellus’s departure. These two masked figures would always appear at the head of Augustus’s legions, and at their command, the Romans have never lost a single battle since. These masked men have faced the might of the Greek armies, faced the greatest of the Greek generals in battle, and even been outnumbered three to one by the Greeks before, but have somehow always managed to come out on top, absolutely outmaneuvering even the most experienced Greek generals and totally crushing their armies.

And to make things worse, the morale of the Greek soldiers have begun to falter. They spread rumors about these cloaked figures that have won the Romans their battles, saying that General Augustus had summoned the help of demons to aid in his war, and this was why no man could ever match their military brilliance. They have begun to call the one in the white mask the “White Demon”, and the one in the red the “Red Demon”.

Finally, after these White and Red Demons absolutely smashed the Greek Armies, routing them into the jungles of Macedonia, a messenger arrived at Aella’s doorstep.

“Nobody knows the jungles of Macedonia as you do,” he had said. “You grew up watching your father fight battles there. Please, if you will accept, come to our aid again and be stationed at the Northern Front to battle against the Romans in the jungles of Macedonia.”

Aella didn’t even have to think about it. She packed up and left Athens on the same day, meeting with a retinue of men that would serve her during the war outside of the city. There was fifty cavalry soldiers to act as her protection in battle, her advisor, Stavrus, and a personal physician to attend to her beck and call named Bemus.

The journey lasted two months, and she discovered on her first day that morale was poor in the camp. The White Demon has apparently been leading unorthodox strikes of both psychological and physical nature against the Greek armies encamped in the jungle for the past six months. And the worst part is that they believe that the Romans are just scouting for now, and that’s why they haven’t made a committed strike, because they don’t know these jungles. When they finally discover where all of the Greek armies are camped in the forest, they will move in with their legions, felling the Greeks with one swift strike.

And so, Aella’s first order of business as General of this army was obviously to take care of this problematic “White Demon”.

After weeks of slandering their General Augustus with the rumors that Aella had heard from her men about him, her spies finally reported back to her that her provocation finally worked after she began to call him “Augustus the Perverse”, because of a particularly nasty rumor she heard about the Roman General’s sexual preferences for younger men.

It seemed that Augustus has finally had enough of her mockery, and according to her spies, had ordered the “White Demon” to raid her camp to get rid of her. But what they didn’t know, was that this was what Aella wanted. Her spies confirmed the exact date of the planned ambush, and she had prepared her men for a deadly counter attack against the White Demon.