Chương 53: 53：Birth of the Warg Cavalry

Dead silence reigned in the great hall. Every orc general held their breath, waiting for the Warchief's final verdict. Warchief Blackstone remained silent for a long time. Eventually, cold logic managed to suppress the burning fury of his humiliation. He spoke slowly, "Very well. We will proceed with your strategy."

"Zagar, I grant you access to our highest-tier resources. Take eight Sons of Titan with you."

"Go. I want the human commander's head brought back to me on a sharpened pike!" Receiving his approval, Zagar's spectral form pulsed violently in the air as a sinister chuckle echoed from him.

"You shall witness a magnificent feast of death, my Warchief." With those words, the purplish-black spectral entity instantly transformed into a wisp of dark smoke, dissipating into the air of the Bloodfang Fortress. The night wind swept through the stilted wooden cabin, carrying a low, mournful howl. On the desk, the wick of an animal-fat lamp popped, sending up a small spark. Soren leaned back in his wooden chair. Spread out before him was the map of the Misty Swamp he had hand-drawn himself.

"Five days," Soren muttered to himself. Over the past five days, the watchtowers on the outskirts of Greywater Village had maintained non-stop shift rotations. Gary and Meyer had been leading the scouts on continuous patrols. Soren had rigged tripwires along every choke point and inevitable path. He had been on high alert. Uprooting Shatterbone Pass and completely annihilating the enemy's supply convoy was tantamount to carving a chunk of flesh right out of Warchief Blackstone's body.

Given the violent and bloodthirsty nature of the orcs, they should have blown their deafening war horns long ago, dispatching a massive army to trample Greywater Village flat. Yet, the depths of the mire remained dead silent. Aside from the occasional burp of a toxic gas bubble, there wasn't even a shadow of an orc scout to be seen. What Soren didn't know, however, was that Warchief Blackstone was no fool.

Sending a hundred-strong wolf cavalry unit against a human commander who was a master of night raids, traps, and poison would be a foolish piecemeal tactic—nothing more than sending them to their deaths. Conversely, if he mobilized a massive army of tens of thousands for a forceful assault, just the logistics wagons sinking into the mud and the non-combat casualties caused by the poisonous miasma would be enough to cripple a hundred-thousand-strong orc host.

Adding to this complex web of factors was an even more critical detail: the most dangerous figure in the enemy camp, the Shadow Priest Zagar, had already quietly departed the Misty Swamp. For the sake of the Orc Alliance's grand strategy, he had taken the remaining Sons of Titan and other elites to execute a series of decapitation strikes against the high-ranking officials of the human Silvermoon Kingdom and the Holy Halycon Empire.

This convergence of circumstances granted Soren and his Greywater Village a rare, precious window of time to develop. Clang! Clang! Clang! The rhythmic ringing of hammers striking iron pierced through the thick morning fog, echoing near the geothermal pools on the right side of the village. During this invaluable window of peace, Greywater Village's rate of development could only be described as miraculous. Soren pushed open the door of his cabin and climbed down the rope ladder.

The first thing that caught his eye was the endless expanse of grayish-black mud on the village's periphery. The acidic marshlands, which just five days ago reeked of rot and decay, had now been plowed into hundreds of perfectly straight, intersecting agricultural ridges. The high-yielding [Swamp Tubers] had only been buried in the muck for a few days, yet incredibly, a continuous carpet of dark-purple sprouts was already poking through the soil along the furrows.

The large-scale land reclamation and planting phase was completely finished. Soren didn't linger by the fields. Instead, he headed straight for the [Blacksmith Forge], which was currently shrouded in billowing white smoke. A wave of blistering heat washed over him. Subterranean flames from the dormant volcanic crater were being drawn up through a blast furnace made of firebricks. A massive, three-meter-tall heavy bellows groaned and squeaked as it worked.

"Gah! Step harder! Haven't you eaten, you lazy sacks of bones?!" Old goblin Cook was bare-chested, his scrawny back coated in white salt stains from evaporated sweat. He cracked a leather whip, roaring at the top of his cracked, raspy voice. Four prime-aged goblins were running frantically inside the wooden wheel of the bellows, paddling like hamsters on a wheel. The furnace temperature was terrifyingly high, causing the very air around it to distort and shimmer.

Kyle stood there shirtless, his pecs dotted with red burn marks from flying embers. Gripping a massive pair of iron tongs, he let out a primal roar and forcefully yanked a glowing white slab of metal out of the roaring, orange-red hearth. It had originally been a crude, captured orc breastplate, but the intense heat had melted it down into a raw iron billet.

"Quench it!" Kyle bellowed. Hiss! The glowing red iron billet was forcefully plunged into the nearby cold water trough, sending a massive plume of white steam shooting into the air.

"My Lord!" Seeing Soren approach, Kyle dropped his tongs and strode over, a fanatical grin blossoming on his soot- and sweat-streaked face.

"It's done!" Kyle kicked a piece of loose gravel out of the way and pointed to a row of wooden racks behind the forge.

"These goblins are absolute geniuses when it comes to smithing! For the past five days, we've been running the furnaces day and night. We melted down all those bulky pieces of orc black iron, skimmed off the impurities, and reforged them to fit human proportions—tapering the waists and binding the plates!" Soren followed Kyle's finger. Hanging neatly on the wooden racks were sixty-four sets of black iron heavy armor, gleaming with a cold, dark luster.

The armor was incredibly smooth; the gorgets, breastplates, vambraces, and faulds fit together seamlessly. The helmets, personally designed by old Cook, were full-face visors. They featured only a narrow, horizontal slit for vision and crude breathing holes around the nose. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Armor up. Let me see the results," Soren ordered succinctly. Ein, who had been waiting to the side, immediately snapped his fingers. Sixty-four elite soldiers, who had been resting nearby, stood up in perfect unison. Moving with rapid precision, they grabbed their respective pieces and began donning the armor. Clack, clack. The sound of leather straps buckling and iron plates locking together merged into a loud chorus of metallic friction. In no time, the sixty-four men stood ramrod straight before Soren.

They slammed the butts of their 2. 5-meter armor-piercing halberds heavily onto the stone floor. Boom! The ground trembled. If ordinary soldiers were to don this seventy-plus pounds of heavy iron, they would be drenched in sweat after walking a mere hundred paces, let alone fight a battle. But a sharp gleam flashed in Soren's eyes. These sixty-four men had all ingested the [Basic Troll Serum]. The serum had mutated them, granting them a higher resting body temperature and incredibly resilient muscles.

Even now, bearing the weight of heavy black iron, the rise and fall of their chests was steady, completely unbothered. Their most fatal flaw—a lack of adequate defense—had been completely rectified. Now, they possessed the cold, ruthless killing techniques of special forces, the superhuman stamina from the Troll Serum, and this invulnerable black iron heavy armor. Soren rapidly calculated their combat effectiveness in his mind.

If they were thrown into a head-on encounter on a conventional battlefield—even abandoning all stealth tactics and engaging purely in brutal, close-quarters melee—these sixty-four men could withstand the battleaxes of greenskin orcs and fight to a standstill against the Blackstone Warband's equivalent Black Iron Heavy Infantry. And if they utilized night combat and blind-spot ambushes, the combat prowess of this unit would far exceed anything they had achieved before!

Soren mentally ran through a rough power comparison. The heavy knights of the Crimson Moon Knights, when mounted, were capable of fighting on par with Black Steel Orcs. Unmounted, they could match Black Iron Orcs. This was entirely because the heavy knights of the Crimson Moon Knights possessed exceptional plate armor, which surpassed the orcs' own Black Steel-grade armor. However, there were less than five hundred of these heavy knights in the entire Crimson Moon Knights.

Furthermore, their standard heavy infantry stood no chance against Black Iron Orcs. As for other nations, the most elite heavy infantry of the Holy Halycon Empire could match the Crimson Moon's heavy knights, thereby allowing them to tie with Black Steel-grade orcs. This was because the Holy Halycon Empire boasted even superior armor. But all of those comparisons were based strictly on frontal engagements.

When factoring in Soren's tactical command and the flawless execution of these sixty-four men, their true combat power already surpassed that of Black Steel-grade orcs, the heavy knights of the Crimson Moon Knights, and the heavy swordsmen of the Holy Halycon Empire.

"That's not all, My Lord." Kyle flashed a wide grin, wiping the sweat from his face.

"Our haul from Shatterbone Pass was incredibly lucrative. Combined with the loot we've stockpiled in the past, even after forging these sixty-four sets of heavy armor, we still had plenty of material left over." Kyle turned and dragged out a slightly simpler, yet equally sturdy piece of protective gear. It was a black iron half-plate. It only protected the vitals of the chest and back, lacking the heavy pauldrons and faulds. Beside it lay a lightweight black iron spear.

"We forged over eighty sets of these relatively simple half-plates and weapons." Just as Kyle finished his report... Snarl! Roar! From the direction of the acidic mud flats outside the village came the snarls of a large pack of beasts, mingled with the heavy, coarse shouting of men. It was the rest of Greywater Village's human populace—everyone outside of the sixty-four core elites. A total of over three hundred people, among whom were over eighty able-bodied, prime-aged men.

These eighty-odd men consisted of original Greywater villagers as well as exiled prisoners. Although malnutrition previously meant their stamina couldn't meet the standards of the elite soldiers, five days of being fed hearty meals of fine flour and thick meat stew had finally brought some color back to their pale faces. They were currently wearing the black iron half-plates Kyle had just distributed. Every two men were desperately hauling on the restraints of a Warg larger than a calf.

Greywater Village had captured nearly a hundred of these giant Wargs.

"Hold the reins tight! Don't let the beast drag you!" one man yelled, using the blunt end of a long pole to heavily strike the bridge of a Warg's snout. The Warg flinched in pain and let out a reluctant, rumbling growl from its throat, but ultimately submitted as it was hitched to a heavy reclamation plow equipped with sharp blades. Watching this scene from afar with his Eagle Eye, Soren knew that these eighty men had completely transformed. They had been organized into Greywater Village's secondary combat force.

By day, they acted as farmers, forcefully driving these near-hundred Wargs to undertake the backbreaking labor of tilling the fields and turning over the acidic mud. But once the daily labor was done, Kyle hadn't given them a moment's rest. In the evenings, when the mud flats began to dry, these eighty men were forced to ride bareback on the wolves. They had been thrown off countless times. If they were bitten, they simply slapped on some herbal ointment and got right back on.

They were adapting to taming and riding these lethal beasts using a brutal, unimaginably harsh method. The moment the territory came under attack, these eighty men would unhitch the wooden plows, leap onto their wolves, and instantly become the most ferocious guerrilla cavalry.