Chương 371: 371：Forging the Impregnable Greywater Town

"Yes! Tear down every single wooden structure and replace them all! That is the absolute only way to fundamentally elevate the defensive capabilities of our main base." Soren stood up straight. He turned sideways and forcefully pushed open the wooden window of the command post. The freezing wind, thick with biting snow, whipped against his face. Outside the window, the sight of thousands of joyful, intensely focused faces hard at work met his eyes.

He looked down at the absolute foundation he had forged with his own two hands. He turned back to his generals, and every single syllable he spoke violently shook the hearts of everyone in the room:"Starting from the implementation of these blueprints... from the very day the first stone wall stands firm in this acidic mud..."

"Greywater Village will violently shed the pathetic title of a dilapidated border settlement."

"We will officially advance to Greywater Town!"

"It will become the absolute, impregnable rear bastion for the powerful army under my command! A fortress destined to annihilate every single invading enemy across the entirety of the Misty Swamp!" After the tone for this monumental, macro-strategic blueprint was firmly set inside the wooden cabin, Soren didn't rest for a single microsecond. BRRR-OOOOOM!

Accompanied by the resonant, earth-shaking blast of the military bugle, dozens of torches were violently ignited in the newly cleared central square of Greywater Village, completely banishing the dim gloom of the winter morning. Three hundred and sixty-one raw recruits stood in the freezing wind. Their formation was still slightly sloppy, their faces taut with nerves, yet their eyes burned with an irrepressible, fanatical excitement.

The vast majority of these men were broken stragglers and vagrant soldiers who had survived thousands of miles of hellish peril, drawn like moths to a flame by Soren's soaring prestige. The rest were hardened farmers whose homes had been reduced to ash in the fires of war. During the apocalyptic meat-grinder defense just days prior, the Recruit Commander, Knight Felix, had strictly, ruthlessly executed Soren's orders: absolutely no weapons were issued to the rookies.

They were forbidden from stepping onto the front lines. Instead, armed with nothing but heavy wheelbarrows and woven backbaskets, they were shoved deep into the underground anti-air bunkers. There, they relentlessly hauled crates of heavy bolts, and desperately dragged the heavily wounded—men trailing their own intestines—back from the blood-soaked fringes of the barricades. But even from the rear, they had witnessed it.

They had personally witnessed the absolute, logic-defying miracle of a zero-casualty slaughter against three thousand elite Centaurs! Now, as Soren—flanked by Talon, Buck, and his core generals—strode aggressively onto the elevated command platform, every single one of those three hundred and sixty-one recruits dropped to one knee in perfect unison, their faces etched with absolute, fanatical worship.

"On your feet!" Felix slammed his hand against the hilt of his knight's sword, unleashing a booming, thunderous roar. The three hundred and sixty-one men instantly shot up, straightening their spines like ramrods. Soren's piercing gaze swept over these men. Though they were visibly exhausted, the unyielding, ironclad military soul of Greywater had already taken root in their bones. He offered a slow, satisfied nod. He raised his right hand and crisply snapped his fingers.

"Luger! Pop the crates!"

"ROAR! As you command, my Lord!" Hobgoblin Factory Director Luger, who had been waiting eagerly on the sidelines, cracked a massive, toothy grin. With a violent thrust of his thick leg, he brutally kicked open the lids of dozens of heavy wooden crates stacked perfectly before the platform. CRASH! CLATTER! The exact millisecond those heavy lids flipped open, a synchronized chorus of sharp gasps violently erupted across the entire square! Reflecting the blazing orange firelight...

three hundred and sixty-one sets of heavy armor pulsating with a dark, lethal luster, alongside rows of ferociously engineered, ultra-heavy ranged weapons, were laid bare for all to see! This was the absolute masterpiece of Greywater Village's military-industrial complex running non-stop day and night: the [Dark Silver Half-Plate Armor]! Paired perfectly with the extravagantly lethal, captured rebel armaments: the [Heavy Repeating Crossbows]!

Across the Erythian Continent, within the mainline regular armies of human kingdoms, standard light infantry were lucky to wear hardened leather. Only the frontline heavy infantry were permitted to wear iron. And only the absolute apex, tier-one elites—like Alaric's Heavy Swordsmen of the Royal Griffon Knights, the frontline Vanguard of the Crimson Moon Knights, or the supreme shock troops of the Ironpeak Duchy—possessed the qualifications to don heavy steel plate armor.

A soldier clad in heavy plate was universally recognized as the absolute pinnacle of any nation's military might! Yet right here, right now... this composite armor, forged from a high-temperature alloy of mithril and black-steel—boasting defensive properties that utterly blew standard mithril or full steel plate out of the water—was casually piled up in front of raw recruits!

"Your performance down in those underground bunkers has absolutely proven your courage and your loyalty," Soren's voice boomed across the square, carrying unquestionable authority.

"From this day forward, you are no longer logistical coolies relegated to hauling arrows!"

"Talon! Darion!"

"Here, my Lord!" The two towering, burly commanders of the Macedonian Phalanx aggressively stepped out of formation, slamming their right fists over their hearts. Soren pointed directly at the trembling recruits, roaring his decree:"I am officially integrating every single one of these three hundred and sixty-one brothers directly into the second-line formation of your Macedonian Phalanx!"

"Issue the Dark Silver Armor! Issue the Heavy Repeating Crossbows! Issue the three-meter refined steel pikes!"

"From the exact second they strap this armor to their flesh, they are officially recognized as the true, frontline combat troops of Greywater Town!" The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"VICTORY! TEN THOUSAND VICTORIES TO THE LORD!" The recruits completely lost control over their boiling adrenaline. Some of these hardened survivors actually broke down, hot tears streaming freely down their faces. With violently trembling hands, they accepted the impossibly heavy [Dark Silver Armor] from the Goblin engineers, meticulously strapping it over the thick, insulated [Padded Cotton Armor] produced by Greywater Village.

The moment that cold, lethal metal hugged their frames, and their hands clamped around the grips of the [Heavy Repeating Crossbows], the aura of these three hundred and sixty-one ragged vagrants violently mutated. An oppressive, bloodthirsty aura of absolute slaughter instantly radiated from their ranks! With this massive integration, the Macedonian Phalanx commanded by Talon and Darion officially shattered the staggering one-thousand-three-hundred-man threshold!

However, staring down at this rapidly expanding, hyper-motivated army, Soren's heart wasn't entirely consumed by the euphoria of military expansion. He turned around, descending the command platform and stepping back into the wooden command post. The brief surge of excitement over the troop increase vanished the second he sat back down before the massive military map of the Misty Swamp.

"It's not enough... it's still far, far too few."

"I just issued an order to establish an interlocking, crossfire defensive network spanning dozens of miles. I just decreed the comprehensive upgrade of Greywater Village into a bona fide Greywater Town, complete with towering stone walls, armored pillboxes, and an underground anti-air citadel."

"If I want to physically support a fortress cluster of that astronomical scale... if I want to solidly garrison every single one of those outposts we are about to rip back from the Orcs in the central and southern Misty Swamp..."

"If I take the paltry two or three thousand troops currently in my hand and scatter them across that massive defensive grid, they will be stretched impossibly thin! They won't offer a single ounce of substantive defense!"

"Our defensive footprint has just expanded tenfold, yet my troop count only went up by three hundred. If I do not instantly execute a massive, explosive expansion of my population and military base, my defensive lines will absolutely suffer a fatal vacuum period!" But where the hell were the recruits supposed to come from? Soren turned his head, looking at his Chief Financial Officer, Fina Hawthorne, who had just stepped into the room.

"Fina. Look at the perimeter of the Misty Swamp. How many human refugee tribes or wandering settlements are left for us to absorb?" Hearing this question, the aristocratic lady flipped open a thick, heavily bound population ledger. She let out a helpless, bitter sigh.

"My Lord, you are asking me to find living souls in an apocalyptic dead zone."

"The Misty Swamp is vast, yes. Staggeringly so. But over the past few decades, the Orc Alliance's occupation of this region has been utterly, ruthlessly destructive." Fina pointed out the window toward the distant, jagged mountains still cloaked in a sickly, pale-green mist.

"The absolute core issue is the hyper-lethal environment. Toxic miasma. Highly acidic, flesh-melting mud. Unseen swarms of venomous insects."

"An environment this hostile means that across this sprawling territory, there are essentially zero human natives left who can naturally reproduce and survive!"

"The absolute last few pockets of desperate survivors clinging to life out there have already been systematically located and absorbed into Greywater Village over these past few months. I have scoured the ledgers, my Lord. There are absolutely no new targets on the map." Hearing this brutal reality check, Soren sank into a brief, heavy silence. No population base meant zero troop replenishment.

No troop replenishment meant his grand, impregnable blueprint for Greywater Town was nothing more than a pathetic, unreachable fantasy. Right at that moment, a specific, bloody memory from two and a half months ago violently flashed through Soren's mind. It was a scene from when he had completely turned the Orcs' Bloodfang Arena upside down. In that hellish slaughterhouse, Soren had personally shattered the iron chains of a group of human slaves who had been treated as literal livestock and toys by the Orcs.

Back then, while calming the panicked, traumatized slaves, Soren had extracted a highly critical piece of intelligence. They spoke of microscopic, utterly isolated human villages hidden deep within subterranean karst caves or buried in the absolute densest, most inaccessible corners of the Misty Swamp!

"Meyer!" Soren abruptly snapped his head up, roaring for his intelligence chief.

"Here, my Lord!" The spymaster instantly stepped out of the shadows.

"I have a few exact geographical coordinates locked in my head." Relying on his terrifyingly precise memory, Soren snatched a quill and rapidly sketched a series of highly concealed vectors onto a blank piece of parchment.

"These are the old coordinates of native human villages mentioned by the slaves I freed from the arena." Soren's expression was dead serious.

"I have no idea if these villages survived the massive mobilization and apocalyptic encirclement executed by Warchief Blackstone's horde. I have no idea if the people inside are even still drawing breath."

"But even if there is only a microscopic fraction of a hope! I want you to deploy the Goblin scout battalions to these exact coordinates immediately! Execute a full-scale sweep!"

"If they are still alive, I don't care what methods you have to use. I don't care if you have to physically haul them back on wheelbarrows! You will bring every single one of them back to Greywater Town to be integrated!" Meyer received the map with both hands, nodding heavily, his eyes blazing with resolve.

"As you command, my Lord! These hidden villages have survived by evading the Orcs for years. Anyone still breathing in those caves is an absolute survivor with monstrous vitality! They are perfect seeds for our army! I will execute the deployment immediately!"