Chương 130: 130：From Cowardly Farmers to an Invincible Army

Sshk! Sshk! Razor-sharp iron-vines sliced their palms to the bone. Blood painted their climbing path, but the adrenaline-fueled brutes didn't even flinch. In less than a few dozen breaths, one of the towering Orc adjutants had already closed the distance to a lower-level Goblin firing nest!

"Die! Little green rats!" Hanging from the sheer cliff face by one hand, the Orc adjutant violently drew the massive battleaxe from his back. Twisting his waist, he unleashed a devastating horizontal cleave straight into the crevice! CRASH! The colossal axe didn't just obliterate the reinforced wooden barricade. It caught a slow-moving Goblin dead-center, cleanly bisecting him! Guts and a geyser of blood sprayed violently into the air.

This terrifying display of brute-force counterattacking caused a momentary ripple of panic across the defensive line. But the adjutant's maniacal laughter lasted exactly two seconds.

"Focus fire! Upper-left, twelve o'clock!" a Goblin squad leader shrieked. A dozen [Goblin Repeating Crossbows] swiveled. A suffocating swarm of steel bolts rained down, completely blanketing the Orc's exposed ribs and face! No matter how monstrously dense his bones were... THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! The terrifyingly ferocious adjutant was instantly pinned to the cliff face like a macabre hedgehog. Four or five bolts were buried to the fletchings squarely in his eye sockets. He unleashed one final, unwilling roar.

His fingers gave out. The two-hundred-pound behemoth plummeted backward, crashing heavily into the roaring inferno at the bottom of the gorge, kicking up a massive shower of sparks. With that desperate vertical charge shattered, the avalanche of boulders finally ceased, and the raging alchemical fire began to slightly recede. But of the two-hundred-man vanguard of Blackiron heavy infantry... Less than sixty were still standing.

The narrow valley floor was paved with charred corpses and the agonizing groans of heavily wounded beasts missing limbs.

"Commander! The formation is gone! If we don't run now, we're all going to die in this gorge!" The surviving Orcs had their spirits utterly broken. Their eyes, once filled with bloodlust, now swam with uncontrollable, primal terror. To hell with closing the encirclement. To hell with military law! The remnants of the once-proud battalion completely collapsed.

Trampling over the burning corpses of their own brothers, they stumbled and sprinted madly toward the only section of the gorge untouched by the flames: the northern exit. And this was exactly the final link in Soren's immaculate, lethal equation.

"Finally... it's our turn." Up on the vantage point, the pungent stench of roasting flesh and blood filled Kyle's nose. He stood up sharply. Utilizing his [Brute Force] talent, he effortlessly hoisted the massive, iron-studded tower shield off his back.

"Phalanx Infantry! Form up! Seal the exit!" Accompanied by his crisp, booming command, fifty-one pikemen clad in Blackiron half-plate didn't hesitate. Hooking onto pre-rigged climbing ropes, they rappelled down the cliff face with fluid, breathtaking precision, landing squarely in the narrow chokepoint of the gorge's exit. These were second-line reservists. They hadn't consumed the Troll Serum. But right now?

Forged by relentless military drills and utterly emboldened by the miraculous, one-sided slaughter they had just witnessed, these fifty-one men had eyes burning like molten iron! There was not a single, microscopic trace of fear among them.

"Shield Wall to the front! Pikes drop! Macedonian Phalanx, set!" Kyle roared, stepping directly into the dead center of the formation. BOOM! Fifty-one men instantly locked into three ranks! The first rank dropped into a low crouch. THUD! The massive, iron-studded tower shields strapped to their left arms were slammed brutally into the mud, the edges interlocking flawlessly with the men beside them to form an airtight wall of steel! The second and third ranks staggered their footing by a half-step.

Moving as a single organism, fifty-one men leveled their massive, three-meter-long Blackiron pikes! A lethal forest of steel spearheads projected outward through the gaps and over the rims of the frontline shields!

"Slaughter them! Smash this damned human formation into dust!" Centurion Urgar, leading the final forty surviving Orcs—looking like charred, soot-covered demons—unleashed the desperate, suicidal roar of a cornered beast. They had zero formation. Relying purely on a chaotic, frenzied, berserker sprint, they threw themselves headlong at the heavily fortified Macedonian Phalanx! The moment of impact! BANG!

The two Orcs at the absolute front of the charge hadn't even brought their axes down halfway through their swing arcs. What met them? From the front, from the flanks, from high and from low—over a dozen three-meter Blackiron pikes thrusting outward simultaneously! SQUELCH! SQUELCH! The razor-sharp, armor-piercing spearheads effortlessly punched right through the remnants of the Orcs' scale armor—which had been superheated and turned brittle by the alchemical fire.

The cold steel buried itself deeply into their chests, spleens, thighs, and throats!

"Retract! Reset!" Kyle barked the freezing command from the rear. The instant the pikes were violently yanked back, massive sprays of arterial blood erupted into the air. The two vanguard Orc elites slumped bonelessly against the front of the shields, twitching twice before expiring completely! But the Orcs behind them had gone utterly mad. Relying on their sheer, monstrous bulk, they trampled over the corpses of their brothers, throwing their entire two-hundred-pound bodies directly against the shield wall. CRASH!

The terrifying, concussive impact caused half the frontline pikemen to feel as though their left arms had been struck by a sledgehammer. The metallic taste of blood rose in their throats! This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. In a one-on-one duel, that kind of monstrous kinetic force would have instantly pulverized a human's arm bones. But this...

this was exactly where the terrifying, geometric superiority of the modified Macedonian Phalanx came into play!

"BRACE FOR IMPACT!" Kyle, channeling his [Brute Force] talent, violently slammed his shoulder into the back of the pikeman in front of him. The kinetic shockwave was instantly dispersed and grounded through the formation. The second rank used their shields and shoulders to brace the first rank; the third rank braced the second! This human bulwark, forged from the flesh and bone of fifty-one ordinary men, swayed violently—but they forcibly swallowed the kinetic impact of dozens of charging Orcs!

Not only did they refuse to yield a single inch, but they threw their heads back and unleashed an exhilarating, defiant roar!

"THRUST!" The second tier of the pike-forest surged out from the blind spots of the shields. SQUELCH! Another chorus of agonizing shrieks tore through the gorge. The Orcs plastered against the shield wall were instantly punctured by three or four pikes at point-blank range, turning them into bloody sieves. Intestines spilled onto the mud. It was mechanical repetition. It was a cold, ruthless harvest. Less than half an hour later.

The massive, towering frame of Centurion Urgar finally, unwillingly collapsed to its knees, barely three feet from the front of the phalanx. Dead-center in his chest, three Blackiron pikes were buried all the way to the hilt, utterly annihilating his heart. Urgar's single remaining eye stared blankly at the young, sweat-drenched human face partially visible behind the tower shield. Even as the life faded from his eyes, he couldn't comprehend it. Why?

Why was the human defensive line—which used to shatter like glass on the open plains—suddenly an impenetrable, despair-inducing wall of death? Finally, the exit of Throat Valley fell dead silent. The only sounds remaining were the sickening, viscous noise of pikes being forcefully extracted from flesh, and the mournful howl of the wind sweeping through the rocky gorge. Two hundred Blackiron Orc elites. Complete and total annihilation. Not a single beast had managed to take a single step past the valley exit.

The wind blew quietly over the carnage. Kyle viciously kicked aside the mangled Orc corpse blocking his path. Resting his weight on his longsword, he stood in the center of the long, narrow gorge that had been transformed into a literal slaughterhouse. Though his armor was splattered head-to-toe with viscous green blood, his eyes were incredibly, brilliantly clear! He turned his head, looking back at the massive trench still emitting trails of black smoke, and the valley floor paved with charred, severed limbs.

"This is what he meant by 'Besiege the stronghold, slaughter the reinforcements'..." Staring at the miraculous, utterly inconceivable scope of this victory, Kyle muttered to himself. The epiphany struck him with crystal clarity. Why had this battle been a completely one-sided massacre? Because of the initiative! From the very first second to the absolute last, the tempo of the battlefield had been gripped tightly in their hands.

Under traditional tactical doctrine, when humans faced Orcs, they either hunkered down behind fortress walls to be slowly bled dry, or they arrayed on the open plains and flipped a coin with their lives. But Soren's approach? He used the absolute, un-abandonable strategic high ground of Lone Cliff as the ultimate bait, forcing the Orc Alliance to attempt a rescue.

"He forced these notoriously rigid, heavy-infantry Orcs to completely abandon their most relied-upon dense shield walls and slow advances..."

"He forced them to leave behind their auxiliary troops, to march without a supply train, and to sprint blindly through the treacherous, toxic fog of the swamp!" In that frantic, desperate rush, the enemy's weaknesses were magnified to infinity. The beasts became utterly blind in their haste. Like puppets on strings, they danced right into the kill-zone, stepping precisely into the pre-arranged overlapping fire of falling rocks and alchemical oil. And finally, all it took was sealing the single exit.

Leveraging the terrain and the Macedonian Phalanx, it was nothing more than locking the door to beat the trapped dogs.

"To serve under a Lord like Soren..." Kyle tilted his head back, gazing up at the fog-shrouded sky.

"It is the absolute glory of our era!" But Kyle wasn't the only one undergoing a profound metamorphosis.

"Commander..." spoke a soldier standing in the very first rank of the Macedonian Phalanx. His name was Toy. He was one of the original stragglers who had waged guerrilla warfare alongside Mage Victor. He still remembered it vividly. Just three months ago, outside his ruined village... a single, low-tier Orc straggler had literally torn his younger brother in half with one hand. That trauma had buried an insurmountable, suffocating terror deep within the young farmer's soul. But looking at himself now...

He looked down at his own hands, splattered with the thick, pungent blood of his enemies. He looked at the corpses of the Blackstone infantry littering the mud—behemoths whose physical frames were a full two sizes larger than his own. These were elite Orcs. Monsters who used to suppress human infantry simply by virtue of their massive silhouettes, beasts who could shatter a human skull with a casual punch. Yet, against his pike formation, they had been rendered completely, utterly powerless.

He realized then that the agonizing, despairing shrieks of these dying monsters sounded no different than the bleating of lambs headed for the slaughter.