Chương 129: 129：Flawless Calculation

"Shut your mouth, coward!" Urgar roared, violently backhanding the veteran across his fang-filled face. The sheer force sent the older Orc stumbling, crashing heavily face-first into a mud pit.

"Those Bloodaxe idiots managing to bait the human coalition's main force at Lone Cliff is a god-given opportunity!" Urgar snarled.

"The Great Warchief is closing the net! Whoever gets there late won't even get a mouthful of warm human meat!" Urgar violently pointed his battleaxe toward a narrow, fog-shrouded pass dead ahead.

"Once we cross this nameless gorge, the Lone Cliff high ground is right there! Stow your heavy tower shields! Full speed into the gorge! Charge!" The nameless gorge looming before them was so profoundly deep it looked as though an ancient Troll had cleaved the earth in half with a single axe strike. Perpetually starved of sunlight, the near-vertical cliff faces were choked with slick, rotting moss and hyper-resilient, steel-like iron-vines.

The valley floor was suffocatingly narrow, barely allowing three or four men to walk abreast. This was Throat Valley. Meanwhile, perched over sixty feet high on a suffocatingly narrow, shadowed ledge overlooking the valley entrance... Kyle lay flat behind a jagged rock, forcefully suppressing his breathing. As a man who had crawled his way up from a lowly slave to become the Logistics Quartermaster of Greywater Village, he felt his heart hammering so violently it threatened to crack his ribs.

Directly behind him, perfectly concealed beneath layers of woven camouflage netting, lay fifty-one heavy pikemen of the Phalanx clad in Blackiron half-plate, alongside a dozen green-skinned goblins whose eyes darted with malicious excitement. Cold sweat slicked Kyle's palms. Not far away, the heavy, rhythmic thud of massive boots and the tidal-wave clatter of Blackiron armor scales were rapidly approaching!

"They actually came..." Kyle ground his molars together. Deep within his soul, a profound, god-like reverence erupted for his Lord, Soren, who was dictating this battle from miles away. Before they had marched, when Soren ordered them to lay an ambush here in Throat Valley, every single officer thought it was a suicidal fever dream. Orcs were notorious for their rigid, heavy-shield formations.

Why would they completely abandon their defensive arrays, forgo sending out a single scout, and plunge headfirst into a textbook ambush choke-point? But Lord Soren had simply swept a cold, dismissive gaze over them and declared:"Desperate to rescue their 'baited' allies and claim the glory of closing the encirclement, the enemy commander will absolutely issue a death order, forcing his heavy infantry into an all-out, blind sprint." And now, reality proved him right.

As a fully loaded, two-hundred-man battalion of Blackiron Orcs blindly poured into the suffocating gorge—their formations stretched thin, without a single tower shield raised in defense—Soren's tactical foresight was proven so terrifyingly precise it bordered on omniscience! Thud... Thud... Thud... Crammed into the narrow valley floor, the two hundred Orcs looked like a massive, writhing black serpent.

Exhausted from their grueling forced march, the beasts hunched forward, their fang-filled maws hanging wide open as they gasped violently for air. Not a single one of them bothered to look up at the gloomy, overhanging cliffs.

"All targets have entered the primary kill-zone," a Goblin squad leader hissed into Kyle's ear, his voice rough as sandpaper. Kyle violently drew the short sword at his waist, slashing it down in a vicious, absolute arc.

"EXECUTE!" CLACK-CLACK-CLACK! A dense, terrifying chorus of mechanical springs detonated. Concealed at the absolute high ground within a dozen camouflaged crevices, thirty elite Goblin engineers didn't hesitate for a microsecond. They ruthlessly pulled the triggers on their [Goblin Repeating Crossbows]! SHREEEEK! Nearly a hundred precision-polished steel bolts, heavily amplified by the sixty-foot drop, unleashed an ear-piercing shriek as they plummeted straight toward the valley floor!

"AMBUSH! ARROWS! RAISE SHIELDS!" Centurion Urgar's hyper-evolved, primal instincts finally kicked in. He threw his head back, unleashing a desperate, blood-curdling warning. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! The majority of the descending bolts slammed brutally against the Orcs' thick Blackiron chestplates and helmets. Amidst a shower of brilliant sparks, they ricocheted off. At the end of the day, light hand-crossbows lacked the pure kinetic mass to punch clean through fully-plated heavy infantry. However!

Within a saturated, carpet-bombing fire-net, statistical lethality guarantees a blind spot! SQUELCH! SQUELCH! Because the exhausted Orcs were panting so violently with their mouths hanging open, the joint-articulation of their Blackiron gorgets had naturally shifted, exposing a sliver of flesh. Several impossibly vicious bolts threaded the needle perfectly. They slipped right through the narrow gaps in three Orcs' neck armor, burying themselves deep into their soft, vulnerable tracheas!

Thick, viscous green blood erupted from their necks like geysers. These immensely powerful beasts couldn't even force out a scream. Desperately clawing at their throats, their knees crashed heavily into the acidic mud as they violently convulsed. Greywater Village's Throat Valley Ambush had officially begun. But this... this was merely the appetizer.

"KILL-ZONE ONE!" Kyle violently threw off his woven camouflage mat. Leaning half his body over the sheer cliff, veins throbbing like thick worms on his neck, he unleashed a heaven-shaking roar: The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"IGNITE!" The Goblin engineers instantly snatched up burning torches. They hurled bundles of rags soaked in accelerant straight down into the gorge like Molotov cocktails. To the Blackiron Orcs scrambling below, these tiny, descending flames looked utterly pathetic. Until... those flames touched the seemingly ordinary, light-brown mud beneath their massive boots. In this absolute narrowest stretch of the valley, the Goblin Engineering Battalion had manually excavated a continuous, two-hundred-foot-long trench!

After layering it with a paper-thin disguise of dry dirt, they had flooded the pit with dozens of vats of hyper-volatile [Alchemical Fire-Oil]! KABOOOOM! The moment the ignition source kissed the rapidly evaporating fumes of the fire-oil, a catastrophic chemical reaction detonated. A wall of fire over a dozen feet high erupted with an apocalyptic, ear-shattering roar. In less than a single second, the blaze flashed from the front of the gorge all the way to the rear!

Like a violently thrashing dragon of pure flame, it instantly swallowed the hundred-plus elite Orcs trapped in the dead center of the marching column!

"HOLD FORMATION! DAMN IT! THIS FIRE ISN'T RIGHT!" Agonizing, inhuman screams instantly transformed the serene gorge into a literal hellscape. [Alchemical Fire-Oil] was absolutely nothing like normal fire—its adhesion properties were monstrous. The burning liquid splattered and clung desperately to the Orcs' Blackiron armor.

Not only was it impervious to the wet mud, but under the thousand-degree thermal onslaught, the heavy armor they worshipped as their ultimate defense was forcefully transmuted into a searing, skin-tight iron maiden! The nauseating stench of roasting meat and burning fur choked the air. The Orcs trapped in the epicenter of the firestorm completely snapped. Driven mad by the apocalyptic pain, their monstrous physical strength devolved into blind, indiscriminate slaughter.

Several Orcs, their eyeballs literally popping from the sheer heat, wildly swung their massive battleaxes in the flames. Unable to even touch the humans on the cliffs above, their panicked swings cleaved perfectly into their own brothers, chopping companions in half amidst a cacophony of despairing shrieks. But before these beasts could even attempt to claw their way out of this blazing purgatory... Up on the high ground, Kyle's second decree of the Reaper descended.

"RELEASE THE STONES!" Concealed behind massive trees at the crest of the cliff, the taut ropes securing dozens of heavy-duty winch-pulleys were violently severed in perfect unison! CREAAAK! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Meticulously pre-staged by the Goblin Engineering Battalion, mountains of massive timber logs and perfectly rounded granite boulders had been piled on the precipice.

Freed from their restraints, this avalanche of sheer kinetic destruction cascaded down the vertical cliff face, slamming mercilessly into the gorge below! CRACK! SQUELCH! Thrashing around like headless flies in the sea of fire, the Blackiron Orcs had absolutely zero room to evade. A granite boulder the size of a millstone plummeted directly toward an Orc. The beast desperately raised both heavily armored arms to block it. The sheer impact instantly snapped both his forearms backward into a sickening 'V' shape!

A microsecond later, the boulder bulldozed right over his skull. His Blackiron helmet, along with his entire head, detonated into a fine, bloody mist. Massive timber logs swept horizontally through the gorge like apocalyptic brooms, violently snapping the lumbar spines of three or four Orcs at once. Dragging their paralyzed lower halves through the burning, acidic mud, they unleashed bone-chilling, harrowing wails. A catastrophic double-layered strike!

Hellfire roasting their flesh, kinetic avalanches pulverizing their bones! Within the span of a mere hundred breaths, this two-hundred-man vanguard of elite shock troops suffered over seventy absolute casualties. Dozens more had their legs completely shattered, hopelessly trapped in the inferno, waiting to slowly roast to death. But at the end of the day, Blackiron Orcs possessed a biological combat prowess that terrified the continent.

Even plunged into this apocalyptic death-trap, the veterans holding the rear lines—who hadn't been directly swallowed by the flames—desperately bared their fangs for a ferocious counterattack.

"STEADY! RAISE TOWER SHIELDS! PRESS YOUR BACKS AGAINST THE CLIFF WALLS! FIND THE BLIND SPOTS!" Urgar roared.

"ADJUTANTS! TAKE A SQUAD! SCALE THAT CLIFF AND TEAR THOSE HUMAN INSECTS TO SHREDS!" Centurion Urgar, his exposed skin already bubbling with gruesome, fist-sized burn blisters, violently drew his massive double-bladed battleaxe. With his left arm, he hoisted a heavy iron tower shield directly over his head. CLANG! A jagged piece of shrapnel weighing over a hundred pounds slammed directly into his shield.

The catastrophic kinetic transfer instantly tore the webbing of his thumb wide open, spraying a jet of green blood. The sheer downward force drove his heavy boots three inches deep into the solid mud! Yet, relying on pure, unadulterated, monstrous strength... he actually held his ground! Immediately following his command. Two towering Orc adjutants, their muscles bulging to the point of tearing their armor straps, slung their heavy axes across their backs.

Driven by an explosive, terrifying vitality, they didn't use a single rope or climbing spike. Relying purely on barbaric grip strength, they plunged their bare hands straight into the jagged rocks and hyper-toxic iron-vines, violently scaling the vertical cliff face!