Chương 213: 213：The Warchief's Wrath

"A five-to-one conversion rate?!" Upon hearing that ratio, Master Artisan Luger's knees gave out, and he collapsed flat on his backside. He understood better than anyone exactly what that meant! If the Orc Alliance tried to forge Black Steel from Black Iron using their primitive furnaces and crude techniques, the sheer metallurgical waste would be staggering. They could melt down ten—even fifteen—suits of Black Iron armor and still not successfully yield a single set of Black Steel! But now... five-to-one!

Such a horrifyingly efficient conversion rate meant one thing: Greywater Village now possessed the capability to mass-produce elite armor!

"We've struck gold... Boss, we're gonna be absolutely invincible!" Luger scrambled up from the floor, his face flushed with a manic, feverish urgency.

"Nobody's sleeping! Not a single one of those little goblin runts is getting a wink of sleep tonight!" Luger yelled, already backing toward the door.

"I'm firing up the forge right now! I'll reforge those two hundred orc sets to fit our human brothers first!"

"There's no rush, let the men catch their breath—" Before Soren could even finish his sentence, the hobgoblin had already bolted into the night, sprinting toward the volcano crater like a bat out of hell. Watching Luger's frantic departure, Soren didn't try to stop him. Instead, a knowing smile graced his lips. Tonight, his army's equipment would undergo a fundamental, qualitative leap. However, in an era where cold steel and destructive magic coexisted, heavy armor wasn't enough.

Armor only guaranteed survival; it didn't guarantee victory. Soren stepped out of his cabin, making his way toward the northern defensive perimeter—the area with the steepest elevation drop in the entire village. The torrential rain had finally ceased. Cold, pale moonlight spilled over the muddy killing fields, illuminating the dense thickets of anti-cavalry cheval de frise and the treacherous expanse of [Hidden Poison-Spike Pitfalls].

Atop a raised vantage point positioned just behind the barricades, six massive, mechanical behemoths rested on reinforced wooden platforms. Having just been scrubbed clean of the battlefield's mud, their steel mechanisms gleamed with a deadly, cold light under the moon. These were the crown jewels of their campaign spoils. Two heavy ballistas ruthlessly pried from the battlements of Bloodhorn Keep, and four more that Ilya had dismantled from the backs of the Earth Drakes in Broken Spine Canyon.

Soren strolled among the six heavy weapons, running his hand over the thick, taut bowstrings and the complex, fine-steel winding winches. Until now, Greywater Village had relied heavily on its treacherous terrain and concealed magical arrays to funnel and destroy conventional infantry. But as a former modern special forces commander, an underlying paranoia had always gnawed at the back of Soren's mind: Anti-air defense.

On the tactical sandbox of his mind, his strategic vision was never strictly limited to the two-dimensional ground plane.

"High-tier human Mages can temporarily levitate. The Holy Halycon Empire boasts their world-renowned Royal Griffon Knights," Soren muttered to himself.

"And the Orc Alliance breeds Wyverns—the absolute apex predators of aerial reconnaissance." He tilted his head, gazing up at the cloudy night sky.

"If our concealment arrays were ever breached, our only countermeasure would be Ein's longbowmen firing volley arrows. But against a heavily armored, high-altitude magical beast dive-bombing our positions? They wouldn't even scratch the paint. Greywater Village would be reduced to a sitting duck." But now, with the installation of these six heavy ballistas...

"These beauties don't just boast a terrifying effective range of over five hundred meters. Fired horizontally, a single bolt could skewer ten armored Black Iron orcs in a straight line. But their true value lies in this..." Soren gripped an iron elevation lever on the side of a mount and cranked it backward. Clack-clack-clack-clack! A complex sequence of internal gears ground together.

The horizontally leveled ballista slowly but steadily angled upward, its massive, spear-sized bolt eventually locking securely into place, aiming at the sky at a steep, seventy-degree trajectory! Their mechanical bases were incredibly well-engineered, allowing for a seamless, 360-degree horizontal rotation. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Effectively, Soren had just established six heavy anti-air batteries, capable of projecting overwhelming, armor-piercing firepower anywhere in the sky above Greywater Village. It perfectly plugged the fatal, gaping hole in the territory's defenses that had plagued his army since its inception! From this day forward, if any flying beast or covert aerial scout dared to cross the Misty Swamp into his airspace, Greywater Village would no longer be forced onto the defensive.

Long before the enemy even realized they had been spotted, they would be blown out of the sky by six arm-thick bolts of solid steel!

"The sky is no longer our blind spot," Soren whispered into the night wind. Bloodfang Fortress. This colossal stronghold was constructed from tens of thousands of tons of jagged rock. Its towering exterior walls were densely nailed with bleached human skulls. Typically, this citadel was a boiling cauldron of roaring orcs and surging battlelust, but this dawn, an oppressive, suffocating silence hung over it. It was as quiet as a grave. Screeeech...

The massive, fine-iron gates were pulled open by groaning winch chains. Standing outside the threshold, shivering in the torrential, freezing rain, was a heavily damaged plume of black smoke. Its form flickered and wavered, on the verge of complete dissipation. It was none other than Zagar, the terrifying Shadow Priest of the Blood Province. What little remained of his previous arrogance from the march had been thoroughly crushed.

Right through the center of his soul-wrapped shadow body, a ghastly, fist-sized hole remained. It was the devastating entry-and-exit wound left by Soren's [Specialized Silver-Coated Arrow]. The inherently purifying essence of the pure silver stubbornly clung to the deepest recesses of the spectral wound. It emitted a constant, agonizing sizzle around the edges of the hole. With every pulse of holy corrosion, the century-old High Priest couldn't stop a pathetic whimper of pure agony from escaping his ethereal lips.

The tragic spectacle trailing behind Zagar was enough to make the fortress guards suck in a collective breath of cold air. Of the majestic, terrifying escort of eight [Sons of Titan] that had marched out encased in impenetrable rock armor, only a pitiful five had returned. These four-meter-tall juggernauts possessed none of their former suffocating, oppressive aura. Their heavy earthen armor had been entirely shattered and stripped away.

Their bulging, sinewy muscles were pincushioned with thick, snapped-off heavy ballista bolts. Dark green blood mixed with the muddy rainwater, leaving a gruesome, dragged-out trail across the flagstones with every staggering step they took.

"By the Great Beast God... is that Lord Zagar?! How could his Titan escort have suffered such catastrophic losses?!" The elite Black Steel orc guards at the gate exchanged horrified glances, their grips trembling so badly they nearly dropped their heavy battleaxes. Zagar ignored the horrified stares of his subordinates.

Dragging his dissolving, ruined form, he pulled the tattered remnants of his black robes tighter around himself, stumbling step by agonizing step toward the central Blackstone Hall deep within the fortress. The fiercely burning braziers lining the corridors—which usually filled him with pride—now only magnified the biting humiliation of his utterly shattered ego. Inside the Blackstone Hall, the atmosphere was as heavy as the calm before a devastating typhoon.

Standing rigidly before a sprawling, detailed tactical sandbox of the province was Warchief Blackstone. The seasoned orc commander—a man who commanded legions of over a hundred thousand troops and possessed an incredibly far-reaching strategic vision—wore an expression of pure, unadulterated thunder.

Merely half an hour ago, an urgent dispatch had arrived from the frontline outposts: The vanguard army of ten thousand elites—the very force he had deployed as a massive diversion to cover Zagar's covert decapitation strike—had marched straight into a series of lethal cascading ambushes. They had suffered over two thousand casualties!

Now, watching the Shadow Priest drift pathetically into the hall and collapse to his knees, backed by the groans of the five dying Sons of Titan outside the doors, a violent twitch seized the corner of Warchief Blackstone's eye.

"Speak," the Warchief commanded, his voice a low, rumbling growl. Zagar prostrated his ethereal form flat against the cold stone floor. The two flickers of ghastly blue soul-fire that served as his eyes had dimmed to mere embers. The normally prideful Priest didn't even attempt to weave an excuse. In the face of such an absolute, crushing defeat, any justification would only sound pathetic.

"I have failed you, Warchief." Zagar's spectral voice rasped.

"Bloodhorn Keep has fallen. The entire garrison of five hundred orc elites... slaughtered to the last man."

"The Provincial Oracle embedded within the inspection delegation, and even the Governor's blood-nephew, Young Master Mogg... all of them were decapitated by human forces within the Soulsever Gorge." He pressed his head harder against the floorstones.

"I lost three Sons of Titan and suffered catastrophic damage to my own soul. The operation to assassinate Grand Duke Valentine... has completely aborted. This catastrophe is the sole result of my arrogance and my underestimation of the enemy. I am prepared to bear full responsibility." CRACK! Warchief Blackstone slammed both fists down onto the heavy tactical sandbox. The reinforced hardwood completely detonated, blasting a shower of splinters into the air.

Though the Warchief had already harbored dark premonitions upon seeing Zagar's state, hearing the actual casualty figures—and the catastrophic list of VIPs slain—caused the bitter disappointment and rage in his chest to violently erupt like an active volcano.

"Five hundred fully armed orc elites! A Provincial Oracle! And the direct bloodline relative of the Governor!" Warchief Blackstone roared, spinning around to lock his furious, bloodshot eyes onto the Shadow Priest. His aura was so violently volatile that the very air in the hall began to warp and distort.

"Zagar! I fought tooth and nail against the elders! I marched forty thousand of our brothers to the frontlines to eat mud and freeze in the wind, entirely to create a smokescreen for your strike team!"

"And what did you do?! Hiding in a heavily fortified stronghold, you let yourselves be brutally butchered without putting up a fight! You didn't even manage to protect the damned spectators!" Faced with a blunder worthy of a thousand executions, Zagar offered no defense. He knew the ancient laws of the Orc Alliance. A defeated commander could only wash away his shame in blood.

"Your grace has been boundless, Warchief. I cannot repay it in this life. I offer my death as penance for my crimes." Trembling, Zagar slowly raised his shadow-woven right hand. From the center of his spectral palm, a vicious, jagged bone spike dripping with highly corrosive dark mana slowly materialized, aiming directly at his own spiritual core.