Chương 137: 137：Breaking the Checkmate

The surface of the mercury spun wildly, forming a violent vortex.

"It's a combat dispatch! An incoming transmission from Lone Cliff!" Grand Duke Valentine's hand, resting heavily on the hilt of his sword, suddenly froze. In two long strides, he closed the distance to the magical array, his eyes locking onto the boiling mercury. Behind him, every high-ranking officer in the command hall held their breath.

In their minds, this could only mean one thing: the nine-hundred-strong regular army from Ironwood Fortress had launched their uphill assault against Eaglebeak Ridge and suffered catastrophic, unbearable casualties. Either that, or their defensive lines were on the verge of total collapse. The commanders' fists clenched instinctively, their palms slick with cold sweat. The liquid silver rippled violently before finally coalescing into a face. It was the administrator of Lone Cliff, the merchant Thomas.

But to everyone's absolute shock, Thomas's face wasn't twisted in tearful despair, nor did he look like a man staring death in the face. Instead, his fleshy face was flushed bright red. His eyes bulged like copper bells, and he looked almost delirious—as if he were sleepwalking through a state of pure, adrenaline-fueled ecstasy.

"Duke... Your Grace!" Thomas's voice echoed through the arcane array, trembling violently.

"It's... it's over." Grand Duke Valentine's heart plummeted. He closed his eyes in profound grief. It's over? Just as he had feared. A nine-hundred-man uphill charge was nothing more than moths diving into a flame. Lone Cliff had fallen. But the very next second...

"A miracle! A miracle touched by the God of War himself!" Thomas practically screamed into the array.

"Just moments ago, the Commander of the 1st Vanguard Battalion of the Crimson Moon Knights, Lord Soren, led his forces and shattered the defenses of Eaglebeak Ridge!"

"Your Grace! The five hundred orcs of the Bloodaxe Battalion... they've been utterly annihilated! Not a single greenskin made it off the plateau alive!"

"The Bloodaxe Captain, Garrosh, had his throat slit by Lord Soren in single combat! His severed head is already mounted on a pike as an offering to the battle standard!"

"The heights of Eaglebeak Ridge belong to humanity!"

"What did you just say?!" Grand Duke Valentine, a man whose composure was normally as unshakable as a mountain, physically jolted. Behind him, the command baton slipped from old General Marr's grasp, clattering loudly against the stone floor. Every single officer in the room—men who had just been bitterly debating how to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives to fill the swamp with corpses—was struck entirely speechless. Their minds went completely blank.

"Thomas! Do you have any idea what the penalty is for falsifying military intelligence?!" the Chief Intelligence Officer roared, his voice cracking.

"I... I wouldn't dare! Even if I had the courage of a hundred lions, I would never dare play such a joke on the Grand Duke!" On the other end of the projection, Thomas frantically wiped the sweat from his brow, swallowing hard.

"I saw it with my own two eyes! Lord Soren's soldiers are carrying literal mountains of black iron armor and battleaxes down the cliffs as we speak! The sheer amount of orc blood has dyed the entire mountain green!" Grand Duke Valentine was in a state of sheer disbelief. That young man named Soren... had actually managed to uproot a fortified high-ground position that the Empire's own regular army considered a nightmare to assault?

The tactical instincts of a master commander forced his brain into overdrive, desperately trying to construct a logical explanation for a miracle that shattered all common sense.

"No... it couldn't have been taken easily. I've studied the topography of Lone Cliff. It is a natural chokepoint where a single man can hold off ten thousand." The Grand Duke stared into the mercury array, his eyes reddening with profound, solemn respect.

"That mad lad, Soren... He must have taken everything. He took the entire foundation of the Greywater Village he built—all seven hundred and thirty-six souls, including the women, the children, the elderly—and threw them all into the meat grinder. He used their lives to pave a path up that precipice, didn't he?" In his mind's eye, the Grand Duke could already picture the harrowing, tragic epic. Hundreds of humans clad in ragged clothes, using their very flesh and blood as meat shields on a narrow mountain path.

They marched upward through a hail of plunging boulders and giant axes, drowning the enemy in their own corpses until the orcs were utterly exhausted. And only then did the final few dozen elites manage a desperate, bloody push to the summit. The surrounding generals nodded in grim, respectful agreement. A suicidal wave of human attrition was the only tactical explanation for how Soren managed to conquer a high-ground position defended by five hundred elite orcs in such a short amount of time.

"The boy is truly ruthless... to actually throw away months of his own blood, sweat, and tears, using them as nothing more than cannon fodder to fill the trenches..." General Marr's eyes grew misty, deeply moved by the sheer, devastating resolve of a commander willing to burn his boats and break his cauldrons. Yet, as this room full of the Empire's top military minds painted a glorious, tragic picture of heroic sacrifice... Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

Thomas, on the other end of the projection, looked utterly bewildered. He reached up, awkwardly scratching his head, and stuttered out a clarification:"My Lords... I... I believe you may have misunderstood."

"Misunderstood what?" the Grand Duke demanded, his voice thick with gravity. Thomas trembled as he delivered his report.

"Lord Soren did bring his forces to support us... but he didn't throw everything he had at the mountain."

"In fact, the total number of infantry and archers Lord Soren committed to the frontal assault on Lone Cliff..." Thomas swallowed hard.

"Was just over a hundred men."

"A hundred or so elite infantrymen and longbowmen with discipline rivaling the Royal Guard, a few catapults operated by some goblins, and a single Silver-tier mage."

"Lord Soren launched the assault using an absolute, massive disadvantage in numbers!" As if suddenly recalling the brutal, one-sided slaughter he had witnessed from the base of the mountain, Thomas shivered violently. He summarized the reality of the battle:"His men... barely took any casualties. They are practically unscathed! He didn't even let the nine hundred regular infantry from Ironwood Fortress lift a finger to help! He shattered the high ground all by himself!" Dead silence reclaimed the command hall.

The only sound was the rapid, ragged breathing of the veteran generals. A force at an absolute one-to-five numerical disadvantage! Facing an enemy fully clad in heavy black iron armor! An enemy entrenched in an impregnable, natural chokepoint! To fight under a hellish convergence of every conceivable tactical disadvantage... And to wipe out five hundred Black Iron elites! In less than an hour! The moment those words fell, Grand Duke Valentine sucked in a sharp, freezing breath.

The world seemed to spin violently around him. His entire military worldview, built over decades of war, was experiencing a complete and utter cognitive collapse!

"Impossible! That battle is mathematically and physically impossible!" The Chief Intelligence Officer practically shrieked, yanking at his own hair in maddening frustration.

"Did he unleash a forbidden super-tier spell to warp the topography?! Or did he strap angel wings to his infantry's backs and fly them up the cliffs?!"

"A hundred men charging uphill... how the hell did they breach an orc-fortified defensive line?!" The fundamental laws of warfare these generals had lived by were being ground into dust before their very eyes. Every tactical manual they had studied, every ironclad rule regarding the bloody attrition of siege warfare... in the face of Thomas's factual report, it was all reduced to laughable wastepaper! Grand Duke Valentine forcefully suppressed the stormy tempest raging in his chest.

He didn't need to know the exact step-by-step details right now. All he knew was that this young man, Soren, had just carved out a brand-new art of war—one operating so far beyond the Duke's own boundaries of knowledge that even an old fox like him couldn't fathom it. Suddenly, a booming laugh shattered the tense atmosphere. It was a brazen, cathartic roar of laughter.

Grand Duke Valentine whipped around and mercilessly kicked away the white marker flags at the edge of the sandbox—the flags that had, just moments ago, represented the inevitable sacrifice of tens of thousands of his men.

"One hundred crushing five hundred! A frontal assault from the low ground!" The Grand Duke stared at Eaglebeak Ridge on the map, his eyes burning.

"To shatter the enemy's formation and break a guaranteed checkmate... this is nothing short of a divine stroke of genius!" He crossed his arms over his chest, his chin held high in undeniable triumph.

"Warchief Blackstone's counter-encircling army has just lost their bait! The checkmate that was suffocating the entire Misty Swamp has been completely revived by a single man's move!" The Grand Duke turned back to face Thomas in the mercury projection. Valentine, a man who rightfully considered himself one of the greatest living generals of the era, suddenly found himself possessed by an insatiable, overwhelming interest in this young warlord named Soren.

For a military genius of this caliber to be relegated to playing the chief of some godforsaken, backwater village... it would be an absolute tragedy for the entire human race!

"Thomas, you have done exceptionally well. You delivered a crucial piece of intelligence." The Grand Duke's tone then shifted, becoming incomparably solemn as he issued a direct, absolute decree.

"Establish contact with Soren immediately."

"Tell him that once the current battlelines stabilize, I—Grand Duke Valentine, Supreme Commander of the Borderlands of the Holy Halycon Empire—""—officially extend to him my utmost, sincere invitation."

"Invite him to travel to the border where the Misty Swamp meets the Empire. To Megalith Fortress, the sovereign seat of House Valentine."

"Tell him that I will personally lead the generals of my armies to welcome him. We will roll out the red carpet and prepare a grand banquet in his honor." The Grand Duke's eyes blazed with anticipation.

"I intend to personally meet with the greatest rising tactical genius of this era!"