Chương 237: 237：The Exiled King of the Steppes

"Halt! Who goes there?!" The sharp, grating sound of metal scraping against metal echoed as several heads popped over the wooden gate. Rusty spears pointed downward shakily. Torches flickered in the howling blizzard, illuminating the fierce, hyper-vigilant faces of the Barbarian sentries guarding the wall. Soren didn't reach for the hilt of his sword. Instead, he spread his hands, palms open, signaling he meant no harm.

Raising his head, his resonant, deeply confident voice pierced straight through the shrieking gale:"Open the gates! Tell your Chieftain, Talon!"

"Soren, Lord of Greywater Village and Vice Commander of the Crimson Moon Knights, has come to visit your camp!" That name struck like a thunderbolt across the night sky of the Broken Blade Mountains. The previously taut, utterly hostile atmosphere on the wall instantly evaporated into a dead silence. The Barbarian sentries' deeply sunken eyes bulged. The hands gripping their spears violently trembled.

On this brutal, entirely unforgiving northern border, these Barbarian men—ostracized and despised by the mainstream human armies—held the absolute highest respect for only one kind of person: fierce generals who butchered Orcs with real steel on the bloody battlefield! And who was Soren?

He was the peerless God of Slaughter who had laid an inescapable trap in the Soulsever Gorge, burying the Blood Province's high-level inspection delegation and cleanly severing the head of the Governor's blood-nephew, Young Master Mogg, with a single strike! His earth-shattering combat record had long since spread through the mouths of bards and scouts across the entire human defensive line, entirely elevating him to an insurmountable, legendary figure in the hearts of all soldiers fighting the Orcs!

"Is... is that Lord Soren? The one who completely annihilated two thousand elite Orcs?!" A Barbarian decurion, his face heavily covered in tribal tattoos, gasped out loud. He violently tossed his rusty spear aside. His rugged face filled with absolute, burning reverence as he roared toward the interior of the camp at the top of his lungs:"Open the gates! Pull them open now! The true hero who butchers those green-skinned beasts is here! Hurry up and report to Chieftain Talon!" CREAAAK.

With a heavy groan, the dilapidated, frost-caked wooden gates were strenuously pushed open by several burly men. Soren took the lead, stepping into the pass camp. The moment he entered, his brows knitted together in an imperceptible frown. Under the dim light of the braziers, he finally witnessed the true, tragic state of this Steppe Barbarian unit with his own eyes. The reality was ten times more wretched than Meyer had described in his intelligence report! There were no windproof stone or brick barracks.

Only a few crude, pathetic tents cobbled together from tattered animal hides and dead branches. The freezing wind poured entirely unobstructed into the camp, whipping at the soldiers shivering around the fire pits so fiercely they could barely keep their eyes open. Soren scanned his surroundings. These Barbarian warriors possessed exceptionally broad skeletal frames, generally standing over 1. 9 meters tall. Placed in a modern military context, they were the absolute, top-tier raw material for heavy infantry.

But now? Every single one of them was emaciated and sickly pale. Their cheekbones jutted out sharply, their eye sockets deeply sunken. Prolonged starvation and agonizing conditions had caused their supposedly bulging, powerful muscles to severely atrophy. A few wounded soldiers lay on piles of straw without even a simple cotton coat to fend off the cold, forced to huddle tightly together just to survive.

The cloth strips binding their wounds had long since turned a dark, rotting blackish-red, radiating a thick, pungent stench of blood.

"Renn, look at their eyes," Soren whispered softly. Renn swept his gaze across the camp, his heart experiencing a profound, heavy shock. Even though they were starving to the point of disfigurement and trembling violently from the cold, when these Barbarian warriors looked at Soren, there wasn't a single trace of pathetic begging or subservience. Instead, they radiated a raw, primitive wildness and a profound, bone-deep respect for the strong. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere.

Support the author by seeking out the original.

"Confirmed. This is exactly the unit we're looking for," Soren calculated coldly in his mind.

"An unyielding will to fight, trapped in an utterly desperate situation. The feasibility of absolute absorption is exceptionally high!" Respectfully guided by the decurion, Soren arrived at the sole stone building in the center of the camp. Pushing open the clunky, rotting wooden door, the acrid scent of burning pine branches mixed with the pungent smell of cheap, dry tobacco assaulted his nose. The interior was incredibly spartan.

Aside from a rotting wooden table missing a leg and a fire pit struggling to stay lit, there was absolutely nothing else. Sitting cross-legged by the fire pit was an exceptionally, monstrously burly man. He wore his hair in the rough, thick braids characteristic of the steppes. His face was crisscrossed with several gruesome battle scars, and he had a heavily patched grey wolf pelt draped over his broad shoulders. Even just sitting there quietly, he radiated the suffocating presence of a dormant, apex predator.

Pure, unadulterated wildness. This was the Chieftain of the Steppe Barbarians, Talon. Seeing Soren enter, Talon abruptly stood up. He didn't mimic the hypocritical, elegant chest-salutes of the southern nobles. Instead, with immense, solemn gravity, he slammed his massive right fist heavily against his left pectoral, producing a deep, muffled thud of flesh against bone.

"A warrior of the Steppes pays his utmost respect to the hero who slaughtered the Governor's nephew!" Talon's voice was as coarse and grating as gravel. His bloodshot eyes locked onto Soren, openly displaying his absolute reverence for a general fighting the Orcs:"Lord Soren! Your legendary name cannot be buried even by the blizzards of the Broken Blade Mountains! For you to step foot into my miserable camp is the greatest honor these men of the Steppes could ever ask for!"

Watching the man's fiercely honest and uncompromising demeanor, the cold, harsh lines on Soren's face instantly softened. He didn't put on the arrogant airs of a Lord or a Vice Commander. Instead, he casually unfastened his cape, took massive strides toward the fire pit, and unceremoniously plopped down onto a rotting, mud-stained wooden stump.

"Chieftain Talon, let's skip the pleasantries." Soren extended his hands over the meager flames to warm them. Looking up, he offered a hearty, thoroughly unrestrained smile—the kind shared purely between true brothers-in-arms:"We are all warriors who roll in the mud and lick blood off the edge of a blade! You and I are exactly the same; our hands are soaked in the blood of those green-skinned beasts. Between brothers, there is no need for suffocating formalities."

This highly approachable, completely ego-free attitude instantly struck a chord deep within Talon. Talon had initially worried that this world-renowned VIP would act like those high-and-mighty nobles of the Ironpeak Duchy, ordering them around like dogs. Soren's words instantly established an incredibly positive first impression during their initial meeting.

"Good! I like that!" Talon let out a booming laugh. He grabbed a battered leather waterskin from his side, popped the cork, and handed it directly to Soren.

"This camp is dirt poor. We don't have fine wine, only cheap mare's milk liquor cut with melted snow! Don't let it insult your palate, My Lord!" Soren took the waterskin, tilted his head back, and took a massive, aggressive gulp. The spicy, extremely crude liquid burned a path down his throat. Not only did he not frown, but he let out a hearty shout: "Now that's got a kick!" A few gulps of liquor later, the atmosphere within the stone room thoroughly thawed.

Bathed in the firelight, Soren's approachable demeanor effortlessly guided the conversation. Through a few exchanges, he gradually coaxed out Talon's deeply tragic past.

"Brother Soren, forgive the pathetic sight." Talon touched the scar on his face, his expression flashing with a profound mix of loneliness and absolute unwillingness to accept defeat. Staring blankly into the flames, he slowly unspooled the deeply buried humiliation in his heart. As it turned out, Talon was once the eldest son of the largest tribal chieftain on the great northern steppes. By all rights, he should have been the undisputed King of the Steppes.

However, after the old chieftain died suddenly, a brutal power struggle erupted within the tribe. His own uncle colluded with other tribes to launch a treacherous ambush. Talon was entirely ostracized and narrowly escaped with his life. Unwilling to let the fiercely loyal warriors who followed him bleed meaninglessly in an internal civil war, and desperate to prove that he was the true leader of the Steppes—and more importantly, to protect the shared domain of humanity—Talon made a profoundly tragic decision.

"I led the three thousand warriors willing to follow me, left the steppes, and threw ourselves into this absolute blood-grinder of a frontline." Talon clenched his hands into fists so tightly his veins bulged. His words were thick with a reckless, burn-the-boats resolve:"My men and I have used our sheer, naked flesh and blood to forcibly block the charges of the Orc heavy infantry in the Broken Blade Mountains, time and time again!"

He pointed toward the howling blizzard outside the door, his eyes reddening:"We swore an absolute blood-oath to the Eternal Sky! If we don't slaughter these green-skinned beasts, if we don't reclaim the supreme glory that belongs to the men of the Steppes, we will absolutely never return home alive!" Listening to this, Soren sighed inwardly. These were soldiers possessing vibrant personalities and deeply tragic fates.

They held the purest, most unadulterated combat faith, yet were being ruthlessly pulverized by the utterly merciless reality of politics.

"Brother Soren," Talon suddenly raised his head, his wild eyes brimming with heavy expectation. He was immensely curious about Soren's sudden visit:"For a titan like yourself to brave the blizzard deep into the night just to visit this desolate, backwater pass... what exactly brings you here?" Talon swallowed hard, asking tentatively:"Did the high command of the Holy Halycon Empire or the Royal Capital finally recognize the strategic value of our defense? Did they send you to deliver winter rations and supplies?

Or perhaps... you bring brilliant tactical guidance to help us repel the Orcs?" Faced with Talon's fiercely hopeful expression, the warm smile on Soren's face gradually vanished. He didn't follow Talon's desperate assumptions to weave a web of false hope. He knew with absolute certainty that to truly subjugate a fiercely proud warrior like Talon, he had to use the most brutal, agonizing reality to utterly shatter his illusions.