Chương 311: 311：How to Break a Centaur's Spirit

"Faster! Move those hooves! That lucky bastard Urgar has probably already smashed through the gates of that ramshackle wooden village! I bet he's already rolling around on the bellies of their human women!" Chieftain Heka roared, wildly swinging his spiked flail to spur the massive horde behind him. However, just as Heka was driving the army to accelerate...

"Report! Chieftain! Up ahead... there's a situation up ahead!" An outer perimeter scout, his face painted with sheer panic, came galloping frantically out of the blizzard. His hooves stumbled in the thick muck, nearly sending him crashing face-first into the mud right before Heka.

"What the hell are you panicking for?! Did you spot the routing human dogs from Greywater Village?" Heka scowled with deep displeasure, roughly yanking his reins to halt his mount.

"No! It's not humans! It's our people!" the scout cried out, his voice trembling violently. He pointed a shaking finger back toward the dense fog.

"It's the vanguard... under Centurion Urgar..." Following the scout's trembling finger, a gargantuan, stumbling silhouette slowly emerged from the depths of the miasma. As the figure drew closer and its features finally became clear, the arrogant, bloodthirsty grin instantly vanished from Heka's face. It was an absolutely gruesome, horrifying sight. The Centaur vanguard warrior, named Gor, was completely caked in foul-smelling, black mud and jagged shards of ice.

Brutally embedded into his equine back were three thick arrow shafts that had been violently snapped off. Fresh blood continuously dripped from the mangled wounds, staining the snow crimson. Due to sprinting desperately for his life across the freezing, hardened mud for so long, his thick hooves were completely worn away, exposing the gleaming white bone beneath! Thud! Gor could no longer support himself.

Driven by the sheer, crushing weight of his exhaustion, his massive body collapsed heavily into the slush right before Heka's hooves.

"Gor?! How the hell did you end up looking like this?! Where is Urgar? Shouldn't your five hundred elites have already slaughtered your way into the village?!" Heka's heart violently skipped a beat. A profound, creeping sense of dread surged into his chest. He vaulted off his horse, grabbed Gor by his freezing, waterlogged mane, and violently hoisted the warrior half off the ground.

"Dead... they're dead... they're all dead!" At this moment, Gor possessed nothing but the abject, mind-shattering terror of a beast whose spirit had been completely broken. His massive frame shivered uncontrollably, his teeth chattering so violently it echoed in the cold air. He let out a harrowing, grief-stricken wail that sent a chill down the spines of every single Centaur present.

"Chieftain! Centurion Urgar had his heart blown out! Our five hundred brothers... we didn't even touch the enemy's defensive lines, and we were butchered!" BOOM! Those words struck the frontline of the ten-thousand-strong horde like a physical thunderbolt. Five hundred elites, slaughtered in a one-sided massacre?!

"Bullshit!" Heka roared in apocalyptic fury. He drove a brutal punch squarely into Gor's face, smashing his lips and sending blood spraying.

"You are the absolute apex warriors of the Centaur race! Facing a pathetic mob of border humans cowering behind their wooden stakes, how in the hell could you all be wiped out?!"

"It's true! They are monsters! They aren't humans at all!" Completely disregarding the agonizing pain in his face, Gor desperately grabbed onto Heka's breastplate. As if reliving the apocalyptic nightmare, he shrieked, his words barely coherent:"They wear metallic armor! Our heavy bows—the arrows we pride ourselves on—hit them, and they couldn't even leave a single dent! The arrowheads just shattered into dust!"

"What they hold in their hands aren't normal bows! They are heavy crossbows equipped with mechanical winches! They don't need raw arm strength to draw them! And their range... it outranges us entirely!" Gor pointed frantically at the broken shafts embedded in his own back, his voice tearing.

"These massive bolts... they rained down so densely you couldn't even see the sky! They were so fast! Lord Urgar didn't even have time to scream a full order before he was pinned dead to the earth!"

"And the woods on the flanks... those humans riding massive wolves! They wielded three-shot repeating hand crossbows and completely sealed our retreat route!"

"My legs were tripped by the corpses of my brothers! I crashed into a deep, foul pit of acidic mud. I had to stuff that rotting muck up my own nose just to play dead and miraculously escape their slaughter!" Gor's agonized wails echoed across the freezing wasteland. His words infused a profound, suffocating dread into the hearts of the entire army. A deathly, absolute silence fell over the horde.

The massive Centaur formation—which just moments ago had been roaring to the heavens, drowning in rabid fantasies of pillaging the village—instantly went dead quiet. Listening to the horrifying details of this catastrophic defeat, a uniform layer of cold sweat rapidly seeped down the spines of ten thousand warriors. One hundred humans... didn't form up behind shields to defend, but actually marched straight into a rain of arrows, holding mechanical crossbows, to steamroll them?!

This tactical doctrine completely shattered all conventional military logic. In an instant, it utterly pulverized the deeply ingrained arrogance of the Centaurs. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. A suffocating, oppressive atmosphere rapidly spread through what was supposed to be an exceptionally ferocious, bloodthirsty army. Heka slowly released his grip, letting Gor slump limply back into the mud.

His heavy, ragged breathing sent thick plumes of white vapor violently puffing into the freezing air. The violently tempered Chieftain's brain—previously drowning in sheer arrogance and blind greed—had finally received a lethal jolt. He was instantly, brutally awoken to reality.

"I should have known... I fucking should have known!" Heka ground his teeth together. Consumed by a toxic mix of fury and intense retroactive dread, his face twitched violently. He finally understood! He finally understood why the supremely revered Warchief Blackstone was willing to risk total starvation, refusing to issue them a single supply wagon, just to hand down an absolute death order forcing an entire Centaur tribe to lay siege to a pathetic village of two thousand! That man named Soren...

the Greywater Village forces he commanded were absolutely not some standard Silvermoon Kingdom border garrison! They were a terrifying, apex military force equipped with weaponry that vastly outstripped the current era—an army wealthy enough to equip their frontline infantry with full-coverage heavy plate armor!

"Chieftain!" Vice-Chieftain Luke stepped forward, his hooves moving with deliberate slowness. The usually cautious, middle-aged Centaur currently wore an incredibly grim, ugly expression.

"Gor's intelligence is far too dangerous. We must immediately discard any underestimation of this enemy!" Luke said in a low voice, rationally and methodically analyzing the critical crisis before them.

"The terrain ahead is a narrow, gentle slope flanked entirely by toxic mud! This topography is an absolute nightmare for our race!"

"If we rely on our speed to launch a densely packed mass charge like Urgar did, we will become nothing but live targets for those mechanical heavy crossbows! If those one hundred heavily armored monsters simply blockade the chokepoint, it won't matter how many of us charge—every single one will be gunned down!" Heka's face turned a deep, ashen blue. Gripping his spiked flail so tightly his knuckles cracked, he glared at Luke, a low, incredibly unwilling growl rumbling from his throat.

"Then what do you suggest?! Turn the entire army around and run like cowards?! Do you think Warchief Blackstone's execution squads will spare our lives?!"

"No. Not only can we not retreat, we are going to smash them into the mud!" Luke's face twisted with sheer cruelty. He extended his thick, muscular arm and slashed it violently through the air.

"No matter how terrifying their heavy crossbows are, no matter how impenetrable their armor is—that is only one hundred frontline elites! Their second-line troops standing in the rear absolutely cannot possess the same exorbitant, luxurious defense! And furthermore... we have ten thousand troops!" Facing the direction of Greywater Village, Luke proposed a cold, utterly ruthless war of attrition.

"Abandon the direct frontal charge! Once the main army arrives at the slope, we will form up just outside the maximum effective range of their crossbows! Leveraging the sheer, gargantuan mass of our ten thousand troops, we will unleash an unyielding, full-coverage volley bombardment directly onto Greywater Village's positions!"

"Ten thousand warriors! Even if every man only fires a single arrow, that is ten thousand heavy arrows raining down from the sky at once! Under a barrage of that magnitude, even the Heavy Knights of the Holy Halycon Empire would be physically pulverized into a pile of mangled meat!"

"Let alone those pathetic second-line regulars cowering in their trenches! As long as we use an impossibly dense rain of arrows to bleed their defensive lines dry, we can then launch the final charge. This wooden village will inevitably be reduced to absolute ash and ruin!" What a chilling, merciless tactical shift! Weaponizing their horrifying numerical advantage to execute an absolute, saturation-level artillery bombardment! Hearing this, Heka no longer hesitated.

His face contorted back into a mask of tyrannical savagery.

"Good! We do it your way! Relay my orders! The entire army is to string their bows to the absolute maximum! No one is permitted to charge without my command! Take every single arrow we brought with us... and smash them directly onto the heads of those humans!" Accompanied by this major tactical realignment, the massive Centaur horde marched forward once again. Only this time, the previous arrogance and boisterous clamor had vanished entirely.

Replacing it was a grim, suffocating aura of slaughter—the aura of an army marching into a life-or-death battle for their very survival. Half an hour later. Beneath the gloom of the overcast sky, the blizzard seemed to sense the apocalyptic slaughter that was about to unfold, slowly dying down to a faint drift. The ten-thousand-strong Centaur main force finally rolled into the gentle northern slope zone directly fronting the Greywater Village defensive line.

As the massive army halted at the base of the slope, Heka and his ten thousand warriors lifted their heads. Peering through the lingering snowflakes, they locked their eyes onto the Greywater Village positions in the distance... And the sight that flooded their vision sent a profound, mind-shattering terror crashing into the souls of every single Centaur present!