Chương 206: 206：The Cost of the Silvermoon Kingdom

Galahad abruptly drew his broad-bladed longsword, the steel slicing through the gloomy, overcast light. He slammed a mailed fist against his breastplate, swearing a thunderous oath to the heavens.

"Today, I, Galahad, swear this oath! Even if I have to bury my old bones in the Wailing Valley, I will absolutely annihilate this four-hundred-strong Black Iron Orc battalion! I will take their skulls to honor the fallen souls of Ironwood Fortress!" Witnessing the old commander's tragic, unyielding resolve, Gabriel was deeply shaken. The young general vaulted from his horse and drew his own knightly longsword. The two blades clashed in a resonating chime of steel.

"For the glory of the Silvermoon Kingdom! To wash away the shame of Ironwood Fortress! I, Gabriel, shall ride with you unto life or death. We do not rest until they are destroyed!" Just as the two men cemented their pact, an agile scout outrider broke through the reeds, sprinting toward them in a state of frantic, breathless panic.

"Generals! The Orcs are here! They're less than two miles away!" Galahad's face hardened into a mask of pure killing intent. Gripping his longsword, he pushed aside the dense reeds. BOOM... BOOM... BOOM... The muffled, rhythmic thud of hundreds of heavy boots churning through water echoed from the mouth of the gorge. It was a standard, four-hundred-strong battalion of Black Iron Orc infantry.

Having abandoned their heavily fortified outposts to redeploy southward, they were currently marching in a loose, relaxed formation. Averaging over two meters in height and entirely encased in thick, full-plate black iron armor, these towering monstrosities moved like walking mountains, radiating a suffocating aura of barbaric slaughter.

"Draw your blades! Raise your pikes! ON YOUR FEET!" Relying on his vast experience as an orthodox veteran, Galahad waited until the Orc vanguard reached the absolute center of the flooded basin before ruthlessly issuing the order to ambush. A shrill war horn tore through the clouds! Nine hundred shield-bearing pikemen, who had been submerged waist-deep in the freezing reed marsh, erupted from the water with a deafening, unified roar! The maneuver achieved total surprise.

Believing themselves to be in an absolutely secure rear zone, the Orcs were entirely unprepared for a massive human army to literally rise from the depths. The Orc formation stuttered in brief, stunned disbelief.

"CHARGE!" Leading from the absolute front, Galahad erupted with astonishing kinetic power. Splashing through the muddy waters, the old general spearheaded the assault himself! Riding the momentum of the surprise attack, the frontline human pikemen violently thrust their dense wall of spears forward. In an instant, dozens of vanguard Orcs were impaled through their abdomens and throats. Fountains of dark green blood sprayed wildly across the reed marsh. However.

While Galahad was an undisputed veteran of the battlefield, his entire tactical foundation was rooted in the Silvermoon Kingdom's most orthodox, traditional doctrines of knightly positional warfare. He had absolutely no concept of Soren's flawless methods: exploiting extreme elevation drops, weaponizing venom-spike traps, or constructing an inescapable, three-dimensional crossfire net.

His strategy was painfully rudimentary: deploying nine hundred men in a massive, linear formation to execute a straightforward, flat-terrain frontal assault. The fatal flaw of this tactic—a total lack of layered covering fire or area-of-effect suppression—became devastatingly apparent the exact microsecond the initial shock of the ambush faded. When confronting Black Iron Orcs, whose raw physical attributes exceeded a human's by three or four times, an ordinary shield-and-pike phalanx had to crush them instantly.

If it failed, the enemy's terrifying, brute-force counterattack would erupt like a volcano.

"ROAR! Despicable human scum! TEAR THEM APART!" Deep within the enemy ranks, an Orc Commander wielding a massive double-bladed broadaxe, his face covered in tribal black tattoos, unleashed a bloodcurdling howl, forcibly steadying their chaotic lines.

"Form up! Counter-charge!" Witnessing their kin fall, the Orcs didn't rout. Instead, the overwhelming scent of fresh blood violently triggered their primal, berserker ferocity. One Black Iron Orc, despite having a pike impaled straight through his chest, refused to take a single step back. Unleashing a beastly roar, he completely ignored the razor-sharp steel slicing into his palms and seized the three-meter wooden haft of the very weapon piercing his body! SNAP!

Under the terrified, wide-eyed gazes of the frontline human soldiers, the hulking Orc literally snapped the thick ash-wood haft of the pike in two with sheer brute force! Capitalizing on the shock, the Orcs in the rear drew their colossal black iron battleaxes and heavy flails—weapons weighing dozens of pounds. Howling madly, they threw themselves headlong into the human shield wall in a suicidal counter-charge! This novel is published on a different platform.

Support the original author by finding the official source. CRASH! CRASH! CRASH! Empowered by their monstrous physical strength, the Orcs brought their heavy battleaxes crashing down upon the iron-banded oak bucklers. The sheer, apocalyptic kinetic force of the blows instantly inverted the momentum of the entire battlefield. Wood splintered and exploded, kicking up a thick, choking cloud of sawdust!

"ARGH! MY ARM!" Countless sturdy shields were completely pulverized on the very first strike, caving in and crushing the men holding them. The catastrophic kinetic recoil instantly shattered the forearms of hundreds of frontline human soldiers. Stripped of their shield wall, the human infantry was rendered entirely defenseless against the ensuing storm of heavy axe cleaves. Blood geysered into the freezing rain. Limbs were severed, and heads rolled through the churning mud.

In a mere ten minutes of close-quarters combat, Ironwood Fortress's proudest, most elite infantry defensive line was violently pushed to the brink of collapse, suffering unprecedented, catastrophic casualties! This was the brutal, agonizing reality of traditional human armies clashing with the Orcish horde. Devoid of lethal traps, lacking multi-layered suppressive fire, and relying entirely on a sheer collision of flesh and steel—humans could only endure a one-sided, merciless butchery.

"HOLD THE LINE! DO NOT RETREAT! Flanks, contract to the center! Pikemen, step up and plug the gaps!" Galahad roared, his vocal cords tearing until they practically bled. Watching the left flank of his phalanx violently buckle and threaten to tear wide open, a profound, agonizing sense of shame pierced the old general's heart.

"DIE, YOU FILTH!" Refusing to retreat to the safety of the rear command line, Galahad furiously shoved aside his personal bodyguards. Gripping his longsword, he threw himself directly into the absolute bloodiest, most critical breach in the vanguard. The veteran general's swordsmanship was ruthless, venomous, and entirely devoid of aristocratic flair. It was a pure, unadulterated killing art forged in the crucible of countless mountains of corpses. CLANG! A deafening shockwave of colliding steel erupted.

Galahad brought his blade up horizontally, violently anchoring a catastrophic overhead cleave from an Orc Thousand-Man Commander. Despite the immaculate quality of his heavy plate armor, the terrifying, multi-ton kinetic downward force instantly split the webbing of his hands. Hot blood flooded his gauntlets. Completely unable to physically support the sheer weight of the blow, his knees buckled, crashing heavily into the muddy marsh.

Yet, flawlessly weaponizing his own collapsing momentum, Galahad's left hand flashed to his waist. Drawing a concealed dagger in a reverse grip, he drove it viciously upward! SQUELCH! The blade cleanly bypassed the armor, sinking deep into the Thousand-Man Commander's exposed lower jaw! Ripping his longsword free, Galahad executed a brutal backhand sweep. The Orc's massive head was severed cleanly, tumbling heavily into the bloody waters.

"THE COMMANDER HAS NOT FLED! FIGHT TO THE DEATH!" Covered head-to-toe in foul blood and fighting with the ferocity of a madman, Galahad's suicidal bravery ignited a final, desperate surge of blood-lust in his routing men! Using the very mountains of their fallen brothers' corpses as barricades, the shattered human defensive line was forcibly, agonizingly knit back together. Observing this from the rear, the Black Iron Orc Commander's eyes widened. A highly cunning, predatory tactical calculation formed in his mind.

He knew perfectly well that while his warriors' monstrous strength gave them the absolute edge in close-quarters suppression, the humans possessed more than double their numbers. If they allowed themselves to get bogged down in a brutal, muddy war of attrition, even a victory would leave his four hundred core elites completely decimated. His gaze rapidly swept the battlefield, locking dead onto a relatively narrow, dry extraction path located directly at the rear of the gorge.

"Sound the horns! Vanguard rotates to rearguard! Main force, maintain defensive posture and execute a tactical withdrawal through the gorge!" The Orc Commander barked his decisive mandate.

"We will lure these human runts into the choke point and crush them to death in the bottleneck!" Displaying a surprisingly high caliber of tactical literacy, the frontline Orcs immediately hoisted their heavy raw-iron tower shields, executing a highly organized, methodical retreat.

"Damn it! They're using the terrain to stretch our lines! The absolute second we hit that bottleneck, our numerical superiority will be completely neutralized!" Galahad gasped, his body covered in bleeding wounds. He desperately wanted to force a pursuit, but it was physically impossible. Bogged down by the knee-deep mud and their heavy armor, his infantry simply could not catch the Orcs, who were retreating in lighter combat gear! Just at this agonizing, hair-trigger juncture—"General Galahad! Leave them to me!"

A majestic, fiercely arrogant war cry detonated from the elevated ridge on the right flank of the reed marsh! A hundred Kingdom Light Cavalrymen, clad in brilliant silver-white armor, crested the ridge. Accompanied by the earth-shattering neighs of their warhorses, they descended from the high ground like a hurricane sweeping away dead leaves, slicing diagonally into the battlefield to execute a brutal flank!

Leading the charge, the aristocratic general Gabriel displayed an absolutely extraordinary mastery of cavalry tactics and environmental adaptation. Knowing perfectly well that warhorses would sink straight into the flooded marshland, Gabriel had meticulously prepared. Before they even marched, he had strapped wide, circular wooden planks to the hooves of every single horse, drastically increasing their surface area!

"Spur them over the reeds! Watch the bogs!" Commanded by Gabriel, this highly mobile, hundred-man cavalry unit completely bypassed the brutal infantry meat-grinder. Refusing to launch a suicidal frontal charge against the Orc tower shields, they instead carved an impossibly wide, sweeping arc across the surface of the mire! Relying entirely on their breakneck speed, the cavalry beat the retreating Orc main force to the extraction point by mere dozens of seconds!

They forcefully severed the Orcs' escape route, drawing a brilliant silver line straight across the mouth of the gorge!

"Raise crossbows! Level your aim! Lethal distance!" CLACK-CLACK-CLACK! A hundred light cavalry crossbows, drawn from the flanks of their saddles, were leveled in perfect synchronization. Seizing the exact, fleeting microsecond of tactical vulnerability provided by Gabriel's maneuver, a hundred crossbow bolts were unleashed directly into the completely exposed, unshielded backs of the retreating Orc formation!

Dozens of Orc infantrymen, retreating too quickly and leaving their rear blind spots entirely unprotected, had their chests and spines effortlessly punctured by the volley. Howling in agony, they collapsed into the mud one after another.

"BASTARDS!" His escape route completely severed, the Orc Commander gnashed his teeth so hard his gums bled. Hoisting his colossal double-bladed broadaxe, he violently spun around, his bloodshot eyes glaring murderously at the young, silver-armored general who had just single-handedly shattered his flawless withdrawal.

"A mere hundred fragile light cavalry?! I'll trample you into bloody paste with a single charge! Warriors! Smash these horse-riding runts into the dirt!" The Orc Commander spearheaded the assault. Radiating a violently berserk, unparalleled aura of slaughter, he led his personal guard of dozens of the absolute finest Black Iron elites, launching a furious, head-on counter-charge directly at Gabriel!

However, the aristocratic Gabriel did not secure his position as the second-in-command of Ironwood Fortress through his noble bloodline. He had claimed that seat through sheer, blindingly exceptional personal combat prowess.

"You think you're worthy of claiming my steed as your trophy?"