Chương 359: 359:Unimaginable Counter-Kill

"Soren, my friend... forgive my cowardice," Alaric whispered bitterly, his right hand gripping the hilt of his sword so tightly his knuckles turned white. He was bound by ironclad military orders, but more than that, he was the heir to the Valentine family. He could not disobey his father. He could not betray the geopolitical interests of the Empire. He could only stand paralyzed inside this warm, impregnable command post, listening to the howling blizzard that seemed to carry the phantom screams of the dying.

His heart was consumed by the suffocating, agonizing impotence of a noble Knight forced to watch a true hero march to his death.

"You must... you absolutely must hold on until that teleportation scroll ignites..." Just as Alaric was drowning in a sea of self-reproach, agonizingly massaging his temples... BANG! With an earth-shattering crash, the heavy doors of the command post were violently kicked open from the outside! Alaric's already frayed nerves violently ignited. He spun around, a furious reprimand on the tip of his tongue. But the man who had burst in was the adjutant of the Royal Griffon Knights.

This high-ranking Imperial officer, normally a paragon of immaculate military discipline, looked like he had just crawled out of a nightmare. His helmet was literally on backward. His silver plate armor was caked in thick snow. Having sprinted so frantically, his boots slipped on the floor, sending him violently crashing into the wooden base of the strategic sandbox, completely abandoning all aristocratic poise. But the adjutant didn't even register the agonizing pain in his shattered knees.

He violently snapped his head up. His fist was absolutely white-knuckled around a parchment battle report that had just been translated by the Supreme Command's magical array. He unleashed a shrill, cracking roar:"Commander! I-It's over! The Misty Swamp... the Battle of Greywater Village has completely concluded!" Alaric's heart violently seized. He didn't even realize his own voice was shaking as he demanded,"Concluded?! Already?! The Greywater Village defense line was broken?!

Are Soren's people entirely wiped out?!" Alaric violently snatched his cape from the table.

"Quick! Order those fifty standby Griffon Knights into the air immediately! Take the teleportation scrolls! We have to fish him out!"

"No! NO!" The adjutant shook his head frantically. He swallowed a massive gulp of dry air, hoisted the battle report high above his head with both hands, and screamed with every last ounce of strength in his lungs:"The Greywater Village defense line was NEVER broken! It was Lord Soren! He actively abandoned passive defense and led his troops into a full-scale counter-offensive!"

"Right outside the barricades! The Greywater forces met the charge of the ten-thousand-strong Centaur vanguard head-on and utterly, completely shattered them!"

"They achieved the total, localized annihilation of exactly three thousand elite Centaur sharpshooters! They forced the remaining thousands of elders and youths to unconditionally drop their weapons and surrender!"

"And immediately after! Lord Soren personally led a highly mobile strike force of a mere three hundred men! Under the cover of last night's blizzard, they penetrated the swamp and forced the ten-thousand-strong heavy-axe Minotaur army into an apocalyptic camp-collapse! Right now, ten thousand Minotaurs are violently stripping off their armor and fleeing in absolute terror through the mud!" BOOM!

Those screaming declarations acted like a physical sledgehammer, violently crushing every single ounce of Alaric's cognitive reasoning. All color drained from Alaric's face. The deep, agonizing guilt and worry that had just dominated his handsome features instantly morphed into an expression of absolute, stupefied absurdity. What? A counter-offensive? The total annihilation of three thousand ultra-mobile Centaurs? Routing a ten-thousand-strong Minotaur army capable of flattening fortress walls?!

"Are... are you fucking insane?! What kind of absolute bullshit are you spewing?!" Alaric violently grabbed the adjutant by his collar, physically hoisting the man completely off the ground. The deeply ingrained arrogance of a prodigious Imperial General caused his brain to instinctively, violently reject intelligence this fundamentally illogical:"Greywater Village consists of a mere two thousand untrained refugees! They can't even form a proper, standard pike phalanx!"

"What the hell did they use to run down Centaurs?! What did they use to terrify an army of ten thousand enraged Minotaurs into routing?! Are you reading me a goddamn mythological bedtime story from some cheap Knight's novel?!" Facing his commander's hysterical roaring, the adjutant didn't flinch. Instead, his eyes burned with pure, unadulterated awe.

Allowing himself to dangle from Alaric's grip, he tore his vocal cords raw to scream the final, world-shattering blow written on the parchment:"This is the official magical battle report personally verified and authorized by Grand Duke Valentine!"

"Commander! The Centaur Chieftain, Heka, was violently executed by a storm of arrows on the front lines!" Gasping heavily, the adjutant bit down on every single syllable as if his life depended on it: "And last night... Commander Soren infiltrated the absolute core of the enemy camp ENTIRELY ALONE! Right under the noses of a hundred heavy-armor Royal Guards, and facing eight overlapping layers of high-tier Shamanic wards..." Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"ONE ARROW! He used exactly ONE ARROW!"

"He completely bypassed every defense and violently blew a hole straight through the heart of the Orc Supreme Commander! Warchief Blackstone was executed on the spot!"

"The campaign is officially over! Greywater Village achieved an apocalyptic victory with ZERO CASUALTIES!" When the phrases "Executed the Supreme Commander with one arrow" and "ZERO CASUALTIES" violently detonated and echoed endlessly across the massive command post... The hall plunged into an agonizing, suffocating silence. The only sound left in the universe was the sudden, sharp pop of a burning log in the hearth.

This renowned Imperial General—a man who wouldn't even flinch when staring down a lethal, blood-soaked battlefield—was utterly, completely paralyzed. His rigidly straight spine seemed to violently lose all its bones. He stumbled backward, his hands desperately grabbing the outer rim of the sandbox just to keep from collapsing onto the floor. Alaric had completely lost his mind. His breathing grew violently ragged, greedily sucking in mouthfuls of cold air as a grotesque, wheezing sound escaped his throat.

His eyes were glued dead onto the tiny red flag on the sandbox representing Greywater Village.

"Two thousand men counter-slaughtering a thirty-thousand-strong elite core...?"

"A single arrow phasing through layered magical wards to snipe the Supreme Commander...?"

"Zero casualties...?" These few concepts took every single classic campaign Alaric had studied since childhood at the Holy Halycon Royal Military Academy, every single ironclad law of warfare deemed absolute truth, and his fiercely proud tactical simulation capabilities... and violently, mercilessly ripped them to shreds! His entire cognitive reality had collapsed! In traditional military doctrine, when humanity fought the Orcs, they absolutely had to rely on towering, impregnable walls.

They had to field three to five times the enemy's numbers, using oceans of human lives to plug the meat grinder. To counter Centaurs, you had to deploy heavily shielded infantry phalanxes. To counter magical wards, you had to mobilize massive Mage Corps for agonizingly prolonged magical bombardments. These were absolute, ironclad laws of war! But Soren? He completely wiped his ass with those laws!

With less than a tenth of the enemy's numbers, he actively scattered his troops to execute hyper-mobile guerrilla flanking maneuvers! He completely bypassed all the restrictive rules of magical engagement to flawlessly execute an apex decapitation strike! An unprecedented, marrow-freezing terror shot straight up from the soles of Alaric's feet directly into his skull. His spine erupted in goosebumps. He was terrified. Yes.

This fiercely proud general, the supreme commander of the Empire's apex ace legion, felt a visceral, abyssal fear toward Soren's reality-breaking, logic-defying capabilities!

"A monster! What kind of apocalyptic monster army has he bred in that mudhole?!" Alaric looked down at the Misty Swamp topography map, sucking in a deep breath to forcefully suppress his wildly hammering heart. But the deeper he analyzed it, the more violently his soul trembled with absolute dread. He thought back to the exact moment Soren took command of Greywater Village. How long ago was that? Merely a few months!

A few months ago, it was nothing but a pathetic gathering of starving refugees and broken stragglers who couldn't even hold a wooden stick straight! Alaric broke out in a cold sweat.

"The evolutionary growth rate of this army, and the terrifying speed at which they are iterating their military technology... it has reached an absolutely chilling echelon!"

"The stronger the enemy they face, the more violently they adapt under the crushing pressure of a death trap, erupting with even more apocalyptic destructive power!"

"This logic-defying, monstrous developmental speed is completely, utterly out of control!" Alaric paced frantically around the sandbox. The contents of the classified missive from his father, Grand Duke Valentine, violently resurfaced in his mind.

"Use teleportation scrolls to fish him out? Bestow the Empire's 'grace' upon him to domesticate him?" Alaric suddenly let out a sharp, hysterical bark of mocking laughter.

"Father, oh Father... your shrewd, calculating political schemes are nothing but a pathetic, laughable joke in the face of Soren's absolute power!"

"Why the hell would an apex predator that has already grown apocalyptic fangs ever bow its head to accept your pathetic, begging collar?!" The adjutant had finally managed to scramble up from the floor. Watching his normally stoic commander spiral into this manic state, panic gripped his heart.

"Commander..." Mustering his courage, the adjutant stepped forward and offered a violently trembling warning:"Lord Soren may have crushed the Orcs, but at the end of the day, he is still a general of the Silvermoon Kingdom. Furthermore, he is completely untethered from their Capital's control, displaying terrifying ambitions of absolute independence."

"Greywater Village is located entirely too close to our Empire's border defense lines!"

"If he is capable of using a mere two thousand men to completely annihilate thirty thousand Orc elites and execute their supreme leader... what happens if, one day, that monstrous army turns its heavy crossbows toward us...?"