Chương 272: 272：Wrath of the Warchief

Although a stubborn minority continued to mutter in the shadows, questioning the exaggerated details of the report, the article had undeniably shattered the suffocating, demoralizing gloom of the grueling stalemate between humanity and the Orcs. Countless commoners, who had been merely clinging to survival in the bitter, freezing winds, found their faces rekindled with the radiant light of hope.

For the hot-blooded youths, the wandering masters, and the seasoned veterans who refused to stoop to being lapdogs for corrupt nobles... this gazette was no longer just a piece of paper. It was a beacon, pointing the way to a true battlefield.

"Go! To the North! To the Misty Swamp!"

"To Greywater Village! To pledge our lives to Lord Soren—the only commander who actually treats us like human beings!" On the snow-choked imperial highways, rickety, weather-beaten wagons and lone travelers carrying crude weapons began to gather. Braving the howling northern winds, their numbers swelled continuously into a relentless stream.

Turning their backs entirely on the prosperous yet rotting Royal Capital, they marched without a shred of hesitation toward the Misty Swamp—a hellscape riddled with lethal dangers, yet overflowing with true, unadulterated glory. They were embarking on a pilgrimage to follow a living legend....... Meanwhile. Bloodfang Fortress. This colossal, brooding structure sat in absolute silence amidst a landscape of eternal ice and snow.

The bitter winter wind lashed against its impossibly wide stone battlements, emitting a series of harrowing, mournful shrieks. Deep within the fortress lay the central command hall of Warchief Blackstone. Suspended from massive stone pillars were crude iron braziers. Inside them burned pine logs heavily drenched in monster fat, roasting the cavernous hall—large enough to comfortably hold hundreds of warriors—into a sweltering, oppressive heat.

The air was perpetually thick with the coppery, nauseating stench of fresh blood that simply refused to dissipate. BANG! The heavy oak doors were violently kicked open. A towering behemoth of a man, his body rippling with impossibly dense, rock-hard muscle, strode aggressively into the hall. He was clad in heavy plate armor littered with the jagged scars of countless battles. It was the high-ranking Orc Alliance general who had elected to remain at the fortress to assist the Warchief—the Ironblood High Overlord.

At this moment, the face of this notoriously brutal Overlord was violently contorted with a toxic mix of unrestrained fury and the dark, seething humiliation of defeat. Clutched tightly in his massive, clawed fingers were a few crumpled sheets of parchment. It was the latest edition of the human gazette, intercepted and brought back by Orc scouts deeply embedded within the human defensive lines at the cost of their own lives!

"Warchief!" The Ironblood High Overlord marched to the center of the hall and violently slammed the gazette containing Lucia's exclusive interview onto the surface of the long war table.

"Look at this! These pathetic, weakling humans are using their soft, spineless words to broadcast our absolute humiliation to the entire continent!" At the far end of the long table sat a majestic, towering figure upon a throne draped in the skin of a Two-headed Demonic Crocodile. Warchief Blackstone. Unlike the volatile Overlord, the Warchief exhibited no outward rage. Even his breathing remained perfectly rhythmic and undisturbed. The Warchief slowly extended a massive hand and picked up the human gazette.

Although the text was written in Human Common, as a supreme sovereign commanding a vast empire, Blackstone was intimately fluent in the languages of his enemies. His piercing, predatory eyes locked onto the parchment, his gaze sweeping coldly over the highly charged, impassioned writing. At first, his expression remained entirely impassive.

That was, until his eyes firmly locked onto the detailed description of "Mogg attempting to surrender right before his death, entirely selling out the coordinates of Shadow Priest Zagar." Rrrrrip! The parchment in his grip was violently crushed, deep creases wrinkling the text as his monstrous grip tightened.

"So that is how it happened..." Warchief Blackstone slowly leaned back into his throne. No wonder Shadow Priest Zagar—a man who wields enigmatic arcane power and acts with absolute, flawless precision—walked straight into a perfect ambush during his top-secret assassination mission against the Grand Duke of the Holy Halycon Empire! No wonder Zagar suffered catastrophic damage to his soul core, and his elite unit of Sons of Titan were slaughtered, forcing him to flee back to the capital like a beaten dog!

"Fool! A worthless piece of trash who only knows how to ruin things!" The Warchief cursed under his breath, his tone dripping with profound disgust and cold, unfeeling murderous intent. He had long harbored a deep dissatisfaction for Mogg, a spoiled second-generation noble who only knew how to throw his family's weight around. Now, that dissatisfaction ignited into volcanic wrath.

"His cowardice in the face of death didn't just shame every true Orc warrior; it leaked the absolute core military secrets of the Alliance straight to the enemy!" More importantly, Warchief Blackstone's razor-sharp political instincts immediately recognized the true threat. This gazette wasn't just a battle report; it was a venomous, devastating psychological weapon deployed by that human, Soren, designed specifically to fracture the highest echelons of the Orc Alliance! You could be reading stolen content.

Head to the original site for the genuine story. In his mind, he instantly modeled the apocalyptic political fallout that was about to erupt once this article circulated back home:"Once that cold, paranoid fanatic Zagar reads this gazette, he will absolutely conclude that the Blood Province intentionally sold him out to the humans!"

"Those ancient, unfathomable monsters sitting in the Spire of Shadows will never swallow this insult. An irreparable, bloody rift will form between them and the Blood Province. They might even begin assassinating each other in the shadows!"

"Soren... you aren't just slaughtering my men on the battlefield. You are actively tearing the internal unity of my Alliance to shreds. What a vicious, brilliantly toxic strike to the heart!" The Warchief casually tossed the crumpled gazette into the blazing brazier in front of him. As he watched it turn to ash, his majestic face hardened into absolute, freezing cruelty. The situation he faced was now exceedingly dire. Losing a few thousand soldiers on the front lines was a secondary concern.

The far more pressing issue was the suffocatingly slow pace of the Orc army's advance through the Misty Swamp warzone over the past few months! The Supreme Command of the Orc Alliance, and even the Grand Shamans sitting safely in their temples in the rear, were already crushing him beneath a mountain of political pressure. They hungered to see the Misty Swamp rapidly flattened. They demanded the Orc vanguard march directly to the absolute heart of the human defensive line.

"I need a victory. An unquestionable, absolute victory. I need a bloodbath so horrific it silences this entire continent and shuts the mouths of the High Command." Warchief Blackstone stood up. As his colossal frame rose, an aura of suffocating, physical oppression instantly filled every corner of the massive hall.

"Pass my command!" The Warchief's voice struck the Ironblood High Overlord's ears like a physical blow:"Abandon all probing attacks on Ironwood Fortress and the Crimson Moon main camp! Retract all main frontlines!"

"I will personally command an unprecedented, absolute encirclement! Target: Greywater Village! Target: Soren!" The Warchief strode over to the massive tactical sandbox. With a violent sweep of his massive arm, he knocked over every single flag representing the human fortresses. Then, he grabbed a blood-red skull token and slammed it viciously into the terrain representing Greywater Village.

"In addition to the three thousand elite veterans of the [Bloodbone Legion] who are already in position..." The Warchief's face burned with apocalyptic battle-lust:"I will personally mobilize my direct command! Over thirty thousand absolute elites!" Hearing this staggering number, the Ironblood High Overlord's eyes bulged from his skull. For a moment, he actually wondered if he had misheard.

But the Warchief's subsequent military deployment made him realize with absolute, horrifying clarity that the sovereign was entirely serious!

"Of these thirty thousand, not a single one will be a standard Black Iron Greenskin!" The Warchief rapidly tapped the staging areas on the sandbox:"Mobilize ten thousand [Minotaur Warriors] to act as the vanguard center! Have them bring their ancestral totem pillars! I will use their earth-shattering death charge to completely flatten Greywater Village's outer trenches into dust!"

"Mobilize ten thousand [Centaur Warriors] and deploy them to the flanks of the swamp! Utilize their hyper-mobility and mounted archery to entirely seal off every single potential escape route Soren might take! Any human who attempts to flee will be turned into a pincushion!"

"Finally, mobilize ten thousand [Boar-kin Heavy Infantry] and place them at the absolute front of the line!" The Warchief delivered a cold, mocking sneer:"That Soren is quite fond of his crossbows and arrow formations, isn't he? The Boar-kin possess naturally thick, armor-like hides. Combined with their fearless, unyielding defense, let's see if those puny human bolts can pierce a literal wall of Boar-kin flesh!" This obscenely luxurious, borderline overkill deployment left the cavernous hall dead silent.

You could have heard a pin drop. Minotaurs! Centaurs! Boar-kin! Any one of these three races represented the absolute apex of the Orc military machine. Their individual physical stats exponentially dwarfed those of standard Orcs. These were the absolute trump cards, units typically reserved only for apocalyptic, continental wars of annihilation between empires!

"Warchief! Are... are you insane?!" The Ironblood High Overlord finally couldn't hold back his shock, shouting his objection:"To deal with a measly Greywater Village—a force of barely two thousand men—you are deploying thirty thousand apex elites AND the three thousand Bloodbone Legion veterans?!"

"This is a catastrophic waste of military resources! You are using a mountain-shattering hammer to crush a singular bug!" The Overlord forcefully pounded his heavy chest plate:"What do Soren's previous consecutive victories actually amount to?! He merely relied on that filthy swamp terrain! He used toxic miasma, mud pits, and cowardly, underhanded traps to execute irregular guerrilla warfare!"

"Humans are cowards! As long as we force them out of the mud and onto an open, frontal battlefield, I wouldn't need thirty thousand! Give me just five thousand Wolf Cavalry, and in a matter of minutes, I will shatter his pathetic formations to bloody dust!"