Chương 128: 128： The Myth of a One-Hour Annihilation

Soren expressionlessly withdrew his longsword. With a casual flick of his wrist, he spun a perfect sword-flower, shaking the viscous green blood from the blade. Stripped of its support, Garrosh's massive body—the terrifying Commander of the Bloodaxe Battalion who had arrogantly terrorized the Misty Swamp for years—crashed heavily into the dirt right at the tips of Soren's blood-splattered deerskin boots. An absolute one-shot kill. No suspense. No drawn-out struggle.

It was as clean and effortless as slaughtering a chicken. This scene caused the eyes of the surviving Orcs in the rear—who had still been desperately clinging to a final sliver of hope—to practically bulge out of their skulls. The invincible Battalion Commander they worshipped as a god of war... had just been casually erased by a human wielding a standard, mass-produced military longsword!

"Haaah..." Standing off to the side, Battle Monk Renn couldn't help but let out a long, heavy exhale of stale air. He didn't study the sword, but even utilizing the trained eyes of an [Unarmed Master], the sheer, venomous decisiveness and flawless lethality of that single strike made the veteran close-quarters brawler feel a profound tingling in his scalp.

"Immaculate, fatal technique. With swordsmanship like that, the Lord could waltz into the Imperial Court and be worshipped as the Grand Ancestor by those so-called 'Master Swordsmen'." Archery Captain Ein stood on a nearby boulder, softly clicking his tongue in pure admiration. With the sudden, shocking death of their supreme commander, the remaining few dozen Orcs completely and utterly broke. These once-arrogant, bloodthirsty invaders bent their knees, groveling in the mud and blood.

A towering Orc who appeared to be an adjutant raised his hands high above his head. Trembling violently, he pleaded for his life in broken, heavily accented Human speech:"We... we yield! By the Ancient Laws of War, we surrender! We can be taken as prisoners! You can ransom us for massive supplies from Bloodfang Fortress..." The whimpering, pathetic cries for mercy echoed across the empty, wind-swept plateau.

The 1st-Line Elites of Greywater Village, clad in their heavy Blackiron plate, stared down with utterly apathetic, cold eyes. They didn't lower their massive armor-piercing halberds just because the enemy had surrendered. Instead, sixty-three pairs of eyes turned in perfect unison, waiting for Soren's absolute command. Accept the surrender? Trade them for logistical supplies? In the eyes of any other Kingdom's generals, this might have been a highly lucrative, rational transaction.

But as Soren's gaze swept over these groveling beasts, his mind instantly flashed back to the horrific atrocities he had witnessed in the Misty Swamp villages just two months ago. Human infants roasted alive over spitfires. Civilian women brutalized, violated, and tossed like garbage into the acidic mud.

"My army has absolutely no need for a pack of prisoners who have feasted on human flesh." Soren turned his back on the stunned, desperately hopeful Orcs.

"Execute the final military order."

"Leave not a single one alive." In a single breath, he passed the ultimate death sentence on the entire Battalion!

"YES, MY LORD!" Gary roared, his voice cracking with bloodthirsty zeal. The Orcs, who had relaxed just a fraction of a second ago believing their surrender was accepted, felt their pupils violently shrink. Some desperately lunged for their dropped axes; others tried to scramble up from the mud to fight for their lives. But it was far too late. Sixty-three two-and-a-half-meter armor-piercing halberds, carrying the howling force of a steel tempest, were brought down without a shred of mercy. SQUELCH! CRACK!

The heavy halberd blades ruthlessly severed the necks of the begging beasts. The final, agonizing scream on the high ground was violently cut short. The only sound remaining on the peak was the blood-red banner of the Crimson Moon Knights snapping aggressively in the freezing mountain wind. Soren stood at the very edge of the plateau.

Not far away, his Silver-tier Mage, Victor, had already stepped up with elegant, unhurried strides, using low-level detection magic to sweep the corpses for any Orcs attempting to play dead. Spymaster Meyer jogged up, his face radiating absolute, unadulterated worship.

"My Lord. Calculating from the exact moment Luger unleashed that first rain of trebuchet fire, to the complete termination of the battlefield..."

"Total time elapsed: less than one hour." Less than one hour. A five-hundred-man heavy Bloodaxe Battalion—a force more than capable of sweeping a thousand-man human legion on an open plain, commanded by an elite vanguard general... Occupying what they believed to be an impregnable, god-given fortress high ground... Utterly annihilated. Not a single living soul escaped to deliver a warning. The Battle of Eagle Beak Ridge was officially concluded. Meanwhile, at the secure base camp miles below Eagle Beak Ridge.

At the entrance to Throat Valley, two miles back, the nine hundred heavy infantrymen of Ironwood Fortress were still rigidly locked in their phalanxes, their palms slick with nervous sweat as they prepared for a bloody, grinding battle. And standing atop an observation mound overgrown with thorny iron-ferns... The old-guard General Galahad and the new-blood Noble General Gabriel stood completely paralyzed in the freezing wind. The dense fog had dispersed.

The violent, beastly roars and the chaotic sounds of battle from the high ground had fallen completely, terrifyingly silent. Even the pure-white warhorse beneath Gabriel, which had previously been nervously pacing and snorting, seemed to sense an overwhelmingly terrifying aura of slaughter. It lowered its head, standing completely still. Up on the lip of Eagle Beak Ridge, sitting at a towering seventy-degree incline... Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

The arrogantly fluttering [Twin Bloodaxe Banner] had been violently cleaved from its pole by an unseen hand. Like a piece of bloody, discarded trash, it plummeted into the bottomless abyss below.

"It's... it's over?" Amidst the collective sound of sharp, disbelieving gasps, Gabriel felt as though his own voice was floating completely outside of his body. Less than an hour. Even if you were assigned to slaughter five hundred pigs trapped in a pen, swinging the knife that many times would leave you drenched in sweat! Yet Soren, leading a measly force of just over a hundred men, had launched an uphill assault—a tactical maneuver universally known to demand a catastrophic toll in blood.

And in that absurdly brief window of time, he had achieved a complete, flawless, absolute annihilation! What kind of god-like, mythical miracle was this?! Gabriel felt a jolt of sheer, freezing terror shoot straight up his spine, exploding through the crown of his head! The innate, aristocratic arrogance and superiority he had carried his entire life as a Royal Capital Noble was entirely, violently pulverized into dust by Soren's absolute mastery of the art of war.

"Galahad... have you thought about it? Have you truly analyzed what we just saw?" Gabriel abruptly snapped his head around, pointing a trembling finger at the distant, silent peak.

"This isn't just about him having superior weapons!"

"Even if he possesses heavy siege trebuchets, even if his heavy infantry wear impenetrable Blackiron plate... gear is just dead metal!" At this moment, Gabriel looked like a fanatical zealot who had just witnessed ultimate truth. He broke down the reality, biting off every single word:"What is truly terrifying is the soul of Soren's command! It is the incomprehensible, monstrous tactical discipline of his army!"

"Those soldiers... from maintaining absolute silence in stealth, to free-climbing a sheer cliff, to launching a coordinated decapitation strike... they executed it like a flawless, silent machine!"

"If that were our prized Royal Knights facing a suicidal, cornered charge from elite Orcs, men would have broken rank out of sheer terror!"

"But the soldiers Soren brought? Their formation didn't even ripple with a microsecond of panic!" In his overwhelming agitation, Gabriel grabbed the heavy cape of the veteran general standing beside him. His eyes bulged like brass bells as he mercilessly, ruthlessly questioned him:"Old General! Weren't you just swearing up and down that an assault with such a massive troop disparity was impossible?!"

"Didn't you genuinely believe that scaling a seventy-degree cliff required us to use our heavy infantry to build a literal wall of human corpses? To use human flesh to absorb their rolling boulders, and grind away for eight agonizing hours just to whittle them down?!" Faced with Gabriel's rapid-fire, machine-gun interrogation... Galahad, the veteran who had stubbornly clung to traditional, rigid phalanx doctrine his entire life, was left completely, utterly speechless.

The old general, accustomed to fighting slow, grinding, meat-grinder battles of attrition against the Orcs, felt the corner of his mouth violently twitch. He slowly turned his head. He looked back toward the valley entrance, where his nine hundred heavily armored subordinates were still standing like idiots in the mud, tower shields raised, fully prepared to march to their bloody deaths. Then, he raised his head again, looking up at the high ground where the banner of the Crimson Moon Knights now proudly flew.

Eight hours? Galahad offered a bitter, self-deprecating shake of his head. He was forced to tragically, painfully admit the truth: If he had led those nine hundred heavy infantry to assault that peak... Facing five hundred fully equipped Bloodaxe elites holding an absolute geographical choke point, even if he fought for a full day and night, leaving a mountain of human corpses stacked at the base of the trail, he might not have even breached the summit. Yet Soren? He used a single hour.

Deploying a chained tactical trap that completely broke Galahad's comprehension of warfare, he swallowed that impenetrable fortress whole, without suffering a single casualty.

"Say no more, Gabriel." Galahad slowly reached up and removed his heavy, refined-steel helmet, as if physically stripping away the stubborn arrogance of the old-guard generals. His eyes were incredibly complex as he gazed toward Eagle Beak Ridge. Finally, this iron-willed general—the man whose word was absolute law in Ironwood Fortress—let out a long, heavy sigh of pure submission:"Facing a commander who plays with the rules of war in the palm of his hand like a god..."

"Against such a peerless, once-in-a-generation mastermind of war..." Galahad lowered his head in total, unreserved reverence.

"I yield. I utterly yield." Meanwhile. Advancing rapidly from the southwest to reinforce Lone Cliff, a Blackstone Orc Infantry Battalion was currently slogging through a stretch of terrain choked with dead, rotting ferns. A full two hundred fully-armed Blackiron Orcs. Standing over two meters tall, with waists as thick as tree trunks. As they executed their forced march, their massive double-bladed battleaxes continuously slammed against their iron shoulder guards, emitting a chaotic, rhythmic CLANG! CLANG!

This infantry detachment, commanded by Centurion Urgar, was notorious throughout the Orc Alliance for its brutal, unrestrained savagery.

"Faster! Push the pace!" Urgar roughly wiped the acidic mud from his face, violently kicking a rotting log out of his path on the slope. His mismatched eyes—one grey, one crimson—burned with the greedy, insatiable desire to plunder military glory. Within the marching column, a heavily panting Orc veteran couldn't help but voice his concern:"Commander, to push this marching speed, we've completely outrun our Warg Cavalry scouts!

They're scattered miles away, and our own infantry formation has stretched out over a hundred paces..."