Friday's comic!

[skybreak]

Topologically similar

Wasn't Zola a prisoner of Terebithia/Grandmama last time we saw her?
So either:
This attack was put into motion before Zola went to Paris, or
It is being run by a different instance of Lucrezia, and/or
Zola escaped from Terebithia

Comments

[jbwoodford]

I think they alluded to it, though: it has more to do with the organizational structure of the Wulfenbach empire than the opposition's capabilities. In Gil's absence, there's no one to manage the defenses, and the various individual polities are being defeated in detail.

[madfilkentist]

In a single day, the Polar Lords reached the Carpathian foothills, taking multiple major cities along the way. That goes far beyond mere military superiority. It's something so powerful that the defending forces might as well not have been there.

[jbwoodford]

A million troops is a lot, though.

OTOH, I suspect that the Foglios may not have realized the *really* impressive thing about that. Google Maps says that the distance from Saint Petersburg to the Carpathian Mountains is a little under 1800 km. At a guess, the Polar Lords (given the name) are centered somewhere north of Saint Petersburg, in Finland or Scandinavia. The logistics of moving that many troops that fast--even if they're essentially air-dropping independent battalions on Riga, Minsk, Vilnius, etc.--is somewhere beyond impressive, and the characters don't even ask how they're deploying so quickly.

[turbobeholder]

Maybe two days, but yes, it's fast.
However, Lucrezia's involvement is suspected exactly because the "defending" forces don't perform half as well as expected from them.
If true, they are just running on a carpet laid out in advance, so don't need to send time and effort on major battles, or even on securing the "conquered" places. Maybe crush some oddball groups that successfully resisted takeover and try to fight rather than hide and wait for Wulfenbach. There cannot be many of those, and since they must have been targeted by intelligence and saboteurs beforehand, this part can be made a lot easier than it should be, too.