Chương 201: 201：Slaughtering the Lizardmen

Behind the two commanders, a breathtaking scene silently unfolded within the deadly waters. Two hundred and fifty-one pikemen of Greywater Village waded out of the chest-deep, toxic sludge without making a single sound. Thick vine ropes were secured around their waists, tethering them together. This was the result of Darion utilizing his [Swimming Mastery] talent to chart a hidden, underwater reef path through this absolute death zone.

As for the lethal, waterborne parasites, they were entirely repelled by the potent herbal paste Kyle had concocted.

"Move! Pull each other up! Watch your gear—no metal clinking! Check your weapons!" Darion ordered, flashing a series of sharp tactical hand signals. The freezing winter rain lashed against the soldiers' faces. Tempered by day after day of hellish, draconian training, these men had been utterly reborn. Two hundred and fifty-one men crested the bank.

They unclipped their tethers and shook off the toxic muck in perfect, terrifying synchronization, displaying a level of modern military discipline that would make any observer's scalp tingle. The two commanders swiftly led the detachment toward the edge of the wetlands. Before long, a steep, razor-straight, and suffocatingly narrow ravine loomed before them. Fang Gorge.

It was a claustrophobic passage of compacted earth, flanked on both sides by sheer cliff faces towering dozens of meters high, choked with slick, rotting moss. The actual pathway was so incredibly narrow it could barely accommodate a dozen men standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Under normal circumstances, no large army would ever dare march through such an easily blockaded death trap. But this was the absolute, fundamental reason Soren had deployed this detachment to set an ambush here!

"To cover Zagar's decapitation strike, Warchief Blackstone hasn't just drafted elites to protect the inspection delegation. He has orchestrated a massive feint, mobilizing tens of thousands of troops to march directly upon the borders of the Holy Halycon Empire."

"However, the Misty Swamp simply does not possess the vast, solid plains required for an army of tens of thousands to deploy in a pitched formation."

"Therefore, this overwhelming, ravenous Orc horde will be physically forced by the swamp's geography to fracture! They will pour like water into every single dirt trail and narrow ravine that can barely support a march!"

"I need you to act as an invisible blade. You will plunge directly into the Warchief's marching routes and deliver a catastrophic, head-on blow!" Darion inhaled a deep lungful of the freezing, damp air. His right hand violently drew the short sword at his waist. Without a word of hesitation, the two hundred and fifty-one soldiers rapidly fanned out across the absolute narrowest choke point of the gorge.

"Macedonian Phalanx—Form Ranks!"

"HAH!" The low, thunderous battle cry echoed ominously through the ravine. The soldiers instantly locked into a five-rank-deep infantry phalanx, packed so incredibly tight that not a single sliver of light could pass through. The first rank dropped to a half-kneel, their left hands driving their studded iron bucklers seamlessly into the mud to form a solid wall of iron. An instant later... CLACK! CLACK! CLACK!

Two hundred and fifty black iron pikes, each a staggering three meters long, plummeted forward with a deafening crash! The pikes of the first three ranks leveled out, resting perfectly over the shoulders of the men in front of them, projecting forward to create a dense, interlocking thicket of razor-sharp steel! The fourth and fifth ranks angled their pikes forty-five degrees into the sky, primed to instantly step into any gaps or deflect incoming parabolic projectiles.

The microsecond the phalanx locked into place, every single soldier suppressed their breathing.

"They're here," whispered Darion. Possessing preternatural hearing, he crouched low, pressing his ear flush against the weeping rock face. A dense, rhythmic pitter-patter vibrated through the earth, accompanied by the sickening, wet slither of scales dragging across mud. It was a sound completely alien to the heavy, thudding march of Orcish iron-shod boots. Minutes later, the heavy curtain of freezing fog was violently torn apart.

Spilling into the gorge was an Orcish flank detachment numbering roughly eight hundred strong. However, the sight of this particular unit caused Kyle, positioned in the absolute center of the phalanx, to narrow his eyes. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Son of a bitch," Kyle muttered.

"No wonder they had the gall to march through Fang Gorge with all this flooded muck. It's a Lizardman Infantry Battalion. You don't see many of these freaks in the Orcish Alliance." Taking the vanguard was a swarm of Lizardmen, their bodies fully encased in slate-gray, hardened scales. They had vertical, reptilian pupils, dragging thick, muscular tails through the mud as they wielded venom-laced, twin-pronged bone spears and weighted beast-nets woven tight enough to strangle a horned horse.

Plodding through the center of their formation were over a dozen colossal Swamp Basilisks, heavily laden with logistical supplies, traversing the treacherous sludge as if it were paved stone. As a cold-blooded, amphibious species, force-marching through a half-flooded gorge didn't fatigue them in the slightest; instead, they looked entirely in their element.

"Move it! Pick up the pace, you starving, weak-legged runts!" A Lizardman Commander, perched atop the broadest Swamp Basilisk, impatiently cracked a barbed, jagged whip through the humid air.

"Warchief Blackstone's ironclad mandate is to rendezvous outside Boulder Fortress within three days! If we're late, the Warchief will personally flay us and stretch our hides over his war drums!" The Commander's reptilian face was slathered in sheer arrogance. He was absolutely certain that in a slick, treacherous ravine linked directly to the lethal Black-Rot Vine Basin, it would be physically impossible to encounter humans—frail creatures who couldn't even step over a mud puddle without getting stuck.

The Lizardman detachment's formation was completely strung out. Soldiers waded in twos and threes, idly hissing and chatting. Their vigilance was practically nonexistent. The prey had stepped perfectly into the kill zone. As the vanguard splashed through the muddy water, closing the distance to less than thirty meters from the Macedonian Phalanx, the dense fog completely obscured the pitch-black wall of iron waiting silently in the sludge.

"Steady..." Darion whispered from the rear of the formation, his composure absolute as he waited for the microsecond of maximum lethality. Twenty paces. Ten paces. A Lizardman scout in the lead, hissing a complaint about the cold, casually raised his head. His vertical pupils instantly dilated as his gaze collided with the dense, bristling forest of black iron spear points emerging from the mist!

"Hiss— Hu-humans—!" The scout's eyes bulged in pure terror, a shrill, inhuman screech barely escaping his throat.

"ADVANCE! THRUST!" Darion's face twisted into a mask of pure iron, his thunderous roar detonating through the gorge like a cannon blast. BOOM! The entire two-hundred-and-fifty-man Macedonian Phalanx stepped forward. Moving with draconian precision, the perfectly synchronized, thudding shockwave of their iron-shod boots pulverized the mud as the phalanx surged forward like an unstoppable meat-grinder!

The three-meter-long black iron pikes possessed an apocalyptic momentum, plunging straight into the completely unguarded ranks of the Lizardman vanguard! SQUELCH! SQUELCH! SQUELCH! A sickening, dense chorus of rending flesh and shattered bone echoed simultaneously through the ravine. Scales? Against the armor-piercing bodkin-tips of the pikes forged under the rigorous supervision of the Hobgoblin, Luger, the Lizardmen's vaunted, rock-hard amphibious scales were rendered as fragile as parchment.

Dozens of the vanguard Lizardmen didn't even have the time to raise their bone spears. In a fraction of a second, their chests, throats, and abdomens were brutally impaled by three or four overlapping pikes simultaneously.

"HSSAAARRGH!" Bloodcurdling shrieks entirely drowned out the rolling thunder. The first rank of Lizardmen impaled on the steel tips hadn't even drawn their last breath before the frontline soldiers unleashed a collective roar. Executing a flawlessly drilled military maneuver, they violently twisted the hafts of their heavy pikes in perfect unison! SQUELCH-CRACK! The razor-sharp black iron blades violently churned and pulverized the internal organs of the impaled beasts.

With a brutal yank, the soldiers withdrew their weapons, dragging out massive, geyser-like sprays of foul, dark-green blood and mangled entrails.

"CONTINUE THRUSTING! DO NOT HALT!" Kyle, fueled by his [Brute Force] talent, personally anchored the center of the first rank. His heavy pike lashed out like a striking viper. With a single, devastating thrust, he impaled a Lizardman attempting to leap over the shield wall mid-air, pinning the thrashing beast violently against the sheer rock face!

The Lizardman detachment, previously arrogant and utterly unrestrained in their aquatic element, was instantaneously shattered psychologically when forced into the meat-grinder of a rigidly structured legion phalanx. The pikes were simply too long! When the Lizardmen furiously hurled their venom-laced javelins, they clattered uselessly off the overlapping studded iron bucklers.

When they desperately attempted to close the gap to engage in brutal, close-quarters combat with their fangs and bone blades, they were systematically riddled with countless bloody holes while still a full meter away from the human frontline! The claustrophobic geography of Fang Gorge completely neutralized their highly-vaunted reptilian agility. Unable to spread out and flank, they were mercilessly bottlenecked within a death-tunnel barely wide enough for a dozen men.

They were forced to endure the agonizing, methodical steamroller of the Macedonian Phalanx's frontal assault. In a mere thirty meters of advance... The muddy floor was already carpeted with over a hundred mangled, punctured Lizardman corpses. The rushing water at the bottom of the gorge was dyed a thick, sickening hue of dark green. Absolute panic spread like a plague through the hundreds of congested Lizardmen bottlenecked in the rear.

"Fall back! Stop pushing forward! It's a heavily armored human legion at the front!" The vanguard survivors scrambled backward in sheer terror, shoving into their own comrades. Meanwhile, the troops in the middle and rear, completely blind to the slaughter ahead, were still being whipped forward by their Commander's furious orders. The two opposing tides violently collided in the muck. Slipping, tripping, and trampling over one another, the chaos was compounded by the colossal Swamp Basilisks.

Terrified by the smell of blood and screams, the beasts went berserk, whipping their massive tails wildly and crushing dozens of their own handlers into the mud. The Lizardman formation suffered a catastrophic, total collapse. Meanwhile, on the side of the phalanx, the soldiers of Greywater Village were seeing red. For many of these recruits, this was their very first taste of live combat.

The intoxicating, absolute power of effortlessly skewering the monstrous enemy sent their blood boiling to their skulls, their adrenaline red-lining.

"Captains! Sir! They're routing! Their lines are broken!" roared a young, fresh-faced soldier, his hands white-knuckling the haft of his dripping pike.

"Let us advance! Let's pin them to the walls and butcher every last one of them in this ditch!" Kyle's massive, burly chest heaved violently. He reached up, swiping a smear of foul Lizardman blood from his cheek and licking it from his thumb. As a warrior whose soul craved pure, unadulterated violence, he saw that the enemy was teetering on the absolute brink of a rout.

If the phalanx maintained its unshakeable wall and simply steamrolled forward—no matter how slowly—it was an absolute certainty they could exterminate all eight hundred of these beasts. The fruit of total victory was agonizingly tempting. Devouring an eight-hundred-strong Orcish Alliance battalion with zero casualties... it was a monumental combat record they could boast about for the rest of their lives. However, at this infinitely tempting, blood-soaked juncture...