Chương 21: 21：No Honor, Only Death

In the clearing before the mud granary, the clanking of grinding iron plates rang out in a continuous cacophony. Seventy orcs clad in heavy black steel armor unfastened their buckles and impatiently yanked off their helmets, revealing fleshy, grayish-green heads. Campfires crackled and popped, fed by dripping grease. His hands trembling, Thorn used a wooden ladle to scoop strong liquor from a waist-high barrel, pouring it into the skull bowls thrust at him by the orcs.

Liquor splashed onto the muddy ground, releasing a pungent, malty stench. The human slaves scurried like worker ants. Wading through the mud, they carried chunks of half-roasted two-headed crocodile meat to the mob of orcs. The sounds of chewing and gulping mixed with the crude curses unique to the Blackstone Highlands.

"Good brew! I can't believe that fat pig Kash was hiding a stash like this!" an orc roared. He tore a huge strip of meat from the bone and tipped a bowl of alcohol down his throat. In roughly a quarter of an hour, three massive wooden barrels were entirely drained. The seventy orcs slumped haphazardly against the wooden palisades, belching loudly. The shift began at the fringes. The first to fall was the Decurion who had chugged three massive bowls in a row. He pressed a hand against his knee, trying to stand.

Suddenly, his massive frame swayed. He stumbled two steps forward as if dead drunk, before his head plunged face-first into a brazier of burning coals. There was no struggle. No scream. Plumes of acrid blue smoke rose from searing flesh. Immediately after, like falling dominoes...

"My hand..." Another orc dropped his meaty bone, staring blankly as his thick fingers spasmed unnaturally. Before he could finish, his eyes rolled back. His enormous body violently convulsed before collapsing with a heavy thud. White foam mixed with liquor bubbled from the corners of his mouth. Thud! Thud! The dull, heavy sounds of bodies hitting the dirt echoed in quick succession.

Seventy muscle-bound monsters dissolved into puddles of limp flesh on the muddy ground, collapsing before they could even touch their weapons. The toxin of the Death-Sleep Mushroom had stopped their hearts. Sitting atop a high wooden post, the High Shaman abruptly stood up. He shoved aside the wooden platter of meat in front of him. Drops of black sludge dripped from his raven-feathered robes, hitting the ground with a corrosive hiss.

On his face—wrinkled like dead tree bark—the sickly green glow within his eye sockets flared wildly. He didn't even glance at the foaming soldiers on the ground. Instead, he snapped his head around, his deadly gaze locking directly onto Soren, who stood quietly in the shadows.

"This isn't miasma poisoning... What did you put in the brew?!" An ear-piercing shriek tore from the Shaman's withered throat. His right hand clamped tightly around his staff, fashioned from the spine of a demonic beast. At the tip of the bone staff, a mass of corrosive green mana gathered frantically, filling the air with the sharp, pungent scent of ozone. He didn't need proof. The instincts of a High Shaman told him that something was terribly wrong with this supposed subordinate of Kash. Soren didn't reply.

There was no need for trash talk, nor was there room for even half a syllable of delay. His opponent was a spellcaster capable of unleashing lethal toxins from afar. Soren's right boot shattered a wooden floorboard. Harnessing the explosive recoil from beneath his foot, combined with the terrifying burst of power granted by his [Son of Titan] lineage... The five-pace gap was swallowed in an instant. The tip of the Shaman's staff had barely risen an inch.

Soren's fine steel longsword transformed into a cold, lethal flash of silver. It was a strike devoid of any flashy flourishes—[Military Swordsmanship]. Pure, ruthless, and deadly. The blade swept diagonally. It sheared through raven feathers, cleanly severed withered muscle tissue, and wedged directly into the gaps of the cervical vertebrae. With a muffled CRACK...... the Shaman's head, its eye sockets still blazing with shocked and furious green light, went spinning into the air.

Dark gold blood geysered from the headless stump. The berserk, uncontrolled mana detonated at the tip of the bone staff, while the Shaman's headless corpse slammed heavily into the dirt pit below. Soren flicked the beads of blood from his blade and sheathed his sword. He unlatched his stifling, enclosed black iron helmet and tossed it casually into the muddy water. Then, he looked at the bewildered slaves standing around him.

"What are you standing around for? Do it!" Kyle was the first to react. The ruthless survivor, who had clawed his way through swamp muck and mire, snatched up a short spear and charged the nearest orc. The beast wasn't completely dead yet, its chest still rose and fell with faint breaths. Kyle drove his knee hard into the orc's shoulder, pinning it down.

Gripping the short spear in a reverse hold, he threw his entire body weight behind the thrust, driving the spear tip with surgical precision straight through the eye socket. With a sickening crunch of fracturing bone, the blade scrambled the orc's brains. Blood gushed out, splattering Kyle's face. This raised the curtain on the massacre. The forty-three human soldiers erupted with terrifying efficiency.

They snatched up anything on the ground that held an edge—short spears, battle axes, even the daggers dropped by the orcs. Squelch! Squelch! Blades sheared through flesh and punctured internal organs. The soldiers worked in groups of four or five, pinning down convulsing limbs. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. Ein drew a skinning knife and cleanly sliced the carotid arteries of several orcs that were still breathing.

Seventy robust, hulking figures were rapidly reduced to a floor of corpses. Soren grabbed Thorn, stopping him from stripping an orc's inner armor. His gaze drifted past the mud granary toward the outside of the camp, locking onto two supply wagons still guarded by a heavy detachment.

"Stop."

"Pick up all seventy heavy repeating crossbows from the ground and detach their bolt boxes! Ein, check the wind direction!" Ignoring the long, heavy halberds—weapons far too unwieldy for them to swing—the soldiers worked together to haul the black-oiled, crank-operated heavy repeating crossbows out from the pile of corpses. The frantic clicking and ratcheting of interlocking gears filled the clearing. In the thick fog at the far end of the logging camp...

Thirty fully-armed black steel heavy-armored orcs stood like silent iron towers. Twenty scrawny goblins clung to the leathery backs of Kodo beasts, their long ears twitching with unease. The unnatural silence echoing from the camp's inner clearing had already alarmed this escort guard. A goblin scout on the outer perimeter leaped off its Kodo beast, unhooked a poison-lacquered horn from its waist, and raised it to its lips. Swish! A shrill, piercing wail tore through the dense fog.

Before the goblin's lips could even touch the horn, a fletched arrow drove straight through its throat. The massive kinetic force threw its body backward through the air, pinning it dead onto the breastplate of an orc standing behind it. Soren stood at the highest point of the mud wall, gripping the elven artifact: the [Windwhisper Bow]. Along the bow's chassis, wind runes pulsed with a faint, flowing blue light.

"Loose!" The command was given. A phalanx of forty-three heavy crossbows, manned by Kyle, Ein, and the rest, had already taken position at the camp gates. They pulled the triggers. A hyper-dense cluster of thick, steel crossbow bolts poured out like a torrential rainstorm. The elite orc squad suffered catastrophic damage in an instant. Bolts slammed into black steel plate armor, blooming into hundreds of blinding sparks.

Unarmored and exposed, the twenty goblins caught in the first wave of saturation fire were mowed down like wheat beneath a scythe, shrieking as they were pinned into piles of mangled meat. But the real, brutal fight had only just begun.

"Enemy attack!!" The leading heavy-armored orc wiped the goblin blood from his face, peering through the fog to clearly make out the faces of the humans at the camp gates. Thirty heavily armored orcs immediately fell into an inverted triangle formation. Hefting their heavy, armor-piercing halberds, they braced against the baptism of crossbow bolts and launched a death charge at the formation a hundred meters away. Black steel war-boots trampled the muddy water. The distance shrank with every passing second.

Bolts struck their angled shoulder plates, leaving nothing but white scratch marks before ricocheting away.

"Hold the line! Crank the mechanisms! Aim low, sweep their legs!" Kyle roared, the veins bulging on his neck as he furiously cranked his crossbow's winch. Fifty meters. Thirty meters. The three vanguard orcs had already raised their halberds high. If these heavy-armored beasts broke into the human phalanx, the men—armed only with crossbows—would be butchered into pieces in under a minute. Thrum! The air rippled once again with a bizarre distortion. Atop the mud wall, Soren activated [Eagle Eye Perception].

The world drained of color in his pupils, shifting into a slow-flowing palette of grayscale. The frantic tail-swishing of the Kodo beasts, the falling droplets of water from the sky, the mud kicked up by the orcs' war-boots—everything slowed down to frame-by-frame motion. Within Soren's field of vision, fatal red dots began to surface one after another across the supposedly impenetrable black steel full-plate armor. The hinges of the gorgets. The narrow viewing slits of the helmet eye-sockets.

The finger-wide gaps between the iron plates at the knee joints. Soren's left hand drew the bowstring back like a full moon, while three fingers of his right hand simultaneously nocked three arrows. Swish! Swish! Swish! The first arrow arced downward, threading the needle perfectly into the top viewing slit of a charging orc's helmet. The arrowhead penetrated the eyeball, blowing out a spray of brain matter from the back of the skull. The two-meter-tall behemoth instantly lost control.

Its knees smashed into the mud, plowing up a wake of yellow dirt as momentum dragged it to a sliding halt right at Kyle's feet. The second arrow cleaved through the thick fog, burying itself sideways into the armpit chainmail gap of a halberd-wielding orc, directly severing his heart. The third arrow impaled the weak tendon of another orc's ankle. The beast lost its balance, but before it could even hit the ground, the next human volley caught it.

Eight heavy crossbow bolts punched through its faceplate simultaneously.

"Left flank! Three targets! Nock your arrows!" Soren roared the command. His hands didn't tremble in the slightest. Arrows laden with wind runes flew out one after another. With every twang of the bowstring, a heavy-armored corpse crashed to the earth. The orcs attempting to use the fog to flank from the wings were pinned by arrows through the throat the second they broke formation.

The battle had completely devolved into a brutal tactical grind: the heavy repeating crossbows laid down suppression fire to deny the Black Steel Orcs any rapid advance, while Soren picked them off, executing them one by one.