Chương 345: 345：The Black Executioner's Greatscythe

Soren's words acted like a shot of adrenaline, instantly igniting everyone's enthusiasm for looting the battlefield.

"Hell yeah! The loot!" Buck's eyes lit up, eagerly rubbing his massive hands together. Soren chuckled, sweeping his pitch-black cloak aside. Leading Ilya, Ein, Buck, and his core commanders, he strode up the wide wooden steps and violently pushed open the heavily carved, ornate doors of the Royal Pavilion. A wave of warm air, thick with the scent of high-grade pine resin and rich fruit wine, washed over their faces. It was a completely different world from the freezing, blizzard-swept hellscape outside.

The interior of the Royal Pavilion was absurdly massive, spacious, and dripping with obscene luxury. Thick, plush carpets covered the floor, and the pavilion walls were draped with the pelts of incredibly rare magical beasts and intricate gold and silver ornaments. But among all these vulgar displays of wealth, what truly caught Soren's eye were the heavy, iron-bound chests resting in the deepest part of the pavilion.

"Pry them open," Soren commanded. A few burly frontline elites immediately stepped forward, using the heavy blades of their halberds to violently snap the locks. CRACK! As the heavy lids were flipped back, a massive, suffocating surge of magical energy immediately spilled out. The sheer density of the mana physically warped the lighting inside the pavilion, painting the room in a rich, dazzling spectrum of colors.

"These... these are Mana Crystals!" Ilya gasped in pure shock. She rushed forward and picked up a fist-sized crystal that was literally burning with a crimson, fluid light. She could physically feel the surging elemental power within.

"So many pure Mana Crystals! And they span across multiple elements—Wind, Fire, Earth!"

"They must be the casting catalysts prepared for the Shamans outside," Soren instantly deduced. The pavilion hadn't managed to sustain those eight overlapping magical wards—wards capable of shrugging off even heavy ballista fire and isolating the freezing blizzard of the Misty Swamp—purely on the innate mana pools of a few dozen Shamans. These Mana Crystals were the raw, burning fuel for that defensive array.

"Perfect. Scholar Horace and Victor have been tearing their hair out over a lack of raw mana to reverse-engineer those five [Meteor Swarm] forbidden spell scrolls!" Soren nodded with profound satisfaction. With this massive haul of Mana Crystals, the R&D timeline for Greywater Village's magical arrays would be slashed by months! Aside from the Mana Crystals, they cracked open another chest to reveal exquisitely carved wooden totems.

These totems were only the size of a human palm, yet they were painted with deeply mysterious Shamanic runes drawn in beast blood. Just holding one made their heartbeats involuntarily accelerate. Soren picked one up, his mind immediately flashing back to the image of the Minotaurs sprinting through the acidic muck while hauling solid wooden pillars weighing hundreds of pounds.

"My Lord, these are [Amplification Totems] blessed by Minotaur Shamans." As a veteran hunter who had spent years clashing with Orcs, Ein instantly recognized the items. He quickly explained, "The only reason Minotaurs can abandon heavy armor and rely purely on their flesh to haul massive solid-wood totems into a devastating charge isn't just their innate monstrous strength. It's because these totems grant them powerful spell buffs: [Weight Reduction], [Bloodlust], and [Stamina Surge]."

"Excellent loot!" Soren's spirits soared. These magical assets held terrifying strategic value. If he could hand these over to Silver Mage Victor to fully crack the underlying rune logic... If they could permanently enchant their [Dark Silver Armor] with [Weight Reduction], or directly apply [Stamina Surge] to the heavy infantry phalanxes? Greywater Village's frontline elites would instantly transform into an unstoppable juggernaut capable of crushing absolutely any terrestrial enemy!

After cataloging the magical supplies, Soren turned and walked back out of the Royal Pavilion, arriving beside the colossal corpse of Warchief Blackstone. Only now did Soren notice the violently exaggerated, lethal weapon gripped tightly in the dead Warchief's massive right hand. It was a massive, long-handled war scythe. Soren bent down, wrapped his hand around the haft, and yanked upward. A massive, unexpected resistance immediately fought back.

Even with his [Faint Blood of the Titan], Soren felt his wrist violently dip under the sheer, absurd weight. Heavy! Soren was genuinely shocked. This scythe weighed at least three hundred pounds! If a standard human elite infantryman tried to pick this up, let alone swing it in combat, they wouldn't even be able to lift it off the ice. He carefully inspected his new prize. It was a masterpiece-tier weapon known as the [Black Executioner's Greatscythe].

The entire scythe was forged from ultra-rare black-gold, an alloy several times denser than standard steel. It possessed zero luster, actively absorbing all surrounding light like a black hole. Dense, aggressive [Armor-Piercing Runes] were meticulously etched along the absolute razor-edge of the blade, pulsing with a sinister, crimson glow. The craftsmanship was absolutely flawless, clearly the stolen masterwork of some Dwarven Grandmaster smith, hoarded by Warchief Blackstone as his personal primary weapon.

With this scythe in hand, if I ever run into enemy heavy knights or thick-plated magical beasts like the Ironclad Earth Dragons... a single, full-force horizontal sweep will cleave both rider and mount perfectly in half. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Soren casually spun the massive scythe, the heavy blade violently tearing through the air with a deafening sonic shriek. Extremely satisfied, he claimed it.

He had always been forced to rely on a refined steel longsword as a sidearm; now, he finally possessed a devastating, heavy-class melee weapon that perfectly scaled with his monstrous strength. Just as Soren was admiring his new greatscythe, Buck's euphoric voice boomed from inside the Royal Pavilion.

"My Lord! We're rich!" Buck and a few soldiers were hauling massive crates out of the rear compartments of the pavilion. There were entire, sealed barrels of [Emerald Fruit Wine] imported straight from the Elven forests. There were perfectly preserved cuts of [Snowflake Beef], and even several heavy crates packed to the brim with incredibly rare magical beast jerky used to rapidly restore stamina.

But the most obscenely exaggerated haul was hidden directly beneath the Warchief's lavish bed—three massive, reinforced iron chests packed to the brim with solid gold bars, pure silver coins minted by the human kingdoms, and an absolute mountain of priceless jewelry! These were obviously the spoils Warchief Blackstone had violently plundered from the fallen human territories, hoarded here as his own private treasury. Soren's mind raced, rapidly crunching the numbers.

This massive, unexpected windfall of sheer wealth would form an unbreakable financial foundation for Greywater Village. Handed over to Fina Hawthorne, his Chief Financial Officer, this hoard would guarantee that whether they were purchasing bulk external supplies or funding the massive educational expenses of their academies, Greywater Village would not face a single coin shortage for a very long time. Meanwhile, the troops sweeping the outer perimeter of the battlefield were steadily returning.

The three hundred soldiers tirelessly scoured every inch of the vast, muddy expanse.

"My Lord, we've secured mountains of solid-wood totem poles!" A few Centaur youths were straining heavily to drag the massive, thick wooden trunks back to the staging area. They were beaming with pride, fully convinced they had secured top-tier loot. But after stepping forward and inspecting them, Soren simply shook his head.

"These are just standard ironwood and oak logs. There are no Shamanic runes carved into them," Soren explained. The weapons wielded by the standard Minotaur grunts were nothing more than thick tree trunks brutally ripped straight out of the local forests. Aside from being incredibly dense and good for smashing things, they held absolutely zero magical value.

"Still, haul them back. Give them to Quartermaster Kyle to chop up for firewood, or hand them over to the Goblin engineers to reinforce the load-bearing pillars of our underground anti-air bunkers. They're decent building materials." Aside from the logs, the troops had stripped a mountain of ragged light armor from the Minotaurs that had drowned in the muck. These armors were mostly stitched together from highly inferior beast hides and reeked of a nauseating, sour stench.

Not only was their defensive rating laughably pathetic, but their massive size made them completely unwearable for humans. Looking at this pile of absolute garbage dumped in the snow, Soren chuckled at his men.

"These are completely useless to us. Rip the metal buckles off and toss them into the smelters to be recast. As for the hides? Throw them into the kennels as bedding for the direwolves."

"The soldiers of Greywater Village have long since surpassed the era of wearing absolute rags like this." He was right. To Greywater Village—an army fully equipped with insulated [Padded Cotton Armor] and ultra-tough [Dark Silver Armor]—these primitive Orc armors, which used to be a nightmare for standard human regular forces to deal with, were now nothing more than literal trash. The howling blizzard finally died down, and a faint glow began to bleach the eastern sky.

The weak, early morning light pierced through the dense, toxic miasma of the Misty Swamp, casting its rays over the Royal Pavilion that now belonged exclusively to Greywater Village.

"Leave fifty men here to finish cataloging the supplies and harness the Kodo beasts! The rest of you—grab our glory, grab our loot..." Gripping the [Black Executioner's Greatscythe], Soren vaulted flawlessly onto the broad, towering back of the lead Kodo beast. He cast his gaze south, looking toward the distant defensive lines of Greywater Village, and issued the ultimate command of victory:"We're going home!" The blizzard had completely ceased.

Before the defensive lines of Greywater Village, beside the deep, muddy trenches and shattered barricades, the brutal, blood-soaked scars of yesterday's slaughter were still starkly visible. Yet, in this moment, there was absolutely zero grim or tragic atmosphere hanging over Greywater Village. Instead, a heaven-shaking, apocalyptic celebration—born of long-suppressed hope—was violently erupting!

"The Lord has returned! Lord Soren is victorious!" As the Goblin sentries stationed on the high watchtowers unleashed shrill, piercing shrieks of pure joy, an ocean of overwhelming emotion detonated across the entirety of Greywater Village. Massive crowds of fully rested first- and second-line soldiers, alongside all the women, children, and elderly who had spent the entire night huddled in terror down in the underground anti-air bunkers, violently threw open the heavy wooden blast doors.

Like a surging tide, they poured out, rushing madly toward the entrance of the defensive lines to welcome their king.