Chương 82: 82：Bypassing the Defenses

"Boss! This... this is the best gear the human regular army has to offer!" Standing beside Gul, a deputy wearing a feathered helm extended his trembling, misshapen claws. He gently stroked the smooth belly of the bow, an audible gulp echoing from his throat. Gul said nothing. His lone eye remained fixed on the pile of weapons for two solid seconds. Then, an uncontrollable surge of ecstasy washed over him.

"Bows! Longbows! Hahaha!" Gul violently snatched up a military longbow. Relying entirely on his monstrous brute strength, he drew the incredibly stiff bowstring back into a full moon! Thrum! Gul casually nocked an armor-piercing arrow. Without even bothering to aim, he simply let it fly. Swish! The arrow tore through the air, a blur of motion spanning sixty paces in the blink of an eye. Thwack! It buried itself dead center into the chest of a human captive who was busy turning a roasting spit nearby.

But the sheer kinetic energy didn't stop there. The standard-issue armor-piercing shaft violently punched straight through the captive's back and embedded itself completely into the bowl-thick wooden pillar behind him, its tail feathers vibrating furiously! The human captive didn't even have time to scream. Vomiting a geyser of blood, he crumpled into the bloody mud with a heavy thud. A dead silence blanketed the camp for two seconds.

Immediately after, an earth-shattering roar of beasts erupted across the Drybone Heights, threatening to pierce the clouds.

"Fuck yeah! That's the stuff!" Gul raised the longbow high above his head, roaring at the sky. His deputy spiraled into an absolute frenzy. He snatched up a handful of standard arrows, waving them wildly as he shrieked through a toothless grin:"With this shipment! With these long-range meat grinders!"

"Great Boss! I don't give a shit if it's Warchief Blackstone's old, half-dead Blackstone Warband, or those Silvermoon Kingdom trashes hiding behind their tower shields down below!"

"Or even those so-called Royal Griffon Knights we just shat all over!"

"As long as they dare step half a foot into this Misty Swamp, they're nothing but sitting ducks serving themselves up on a platter!"

"From now on, in these lands, the only ones above us are the gods. Below them, the Drybone Heights calls the shots!" All the rogue orcs descended into a manic celebration, stuffing foul-smelling raw meat into their jaws while scrambling over the crates to grab the pristine longbows. The sudden, inflating rush of overnight wealth made these deserters—who had originally fled to escape the punishments of the Blackstone camp—completely lose their minds.

However, while the rogue orcs drowned in their arrogant revelry, Gul harbored a cunning deeply at odds with his brutish exterior. The reason he was able to gather over two hundred men and survive as a bandit warlord in this treacherous zone wasn't just because he could fight. It was because he possessed an intuition more treacherous than a fox's.

"Have you laughed enough?" Gul violently kicked over his deputy, who was still dancing wildly on the dirt. The laughter abruptly ceased.

"We just snatched a massive shipment of their munitions. Do you really think those gold-plated knight lords are just going to hide at home and cry about it?" Gul leaned down, grabbing the deputy by his feathered collar, pulling his scarred, meaty face uncomfortably close.

"A Grand Commander like Alaric, if only to save his own face, will absolutely send troops to bite at us like mad dogs tomorrow morning!" Gul straightened up, wiping the splattered mud onto his thigh. He turned to face his subordinates who were clutching their new bows, and bellowed his orders like thunder:"No one sleeps heavily tonight!"

"Form into groups of ten! Set up cheval de frise on all the hidden vantage points flanking the main mountain path!"

"Take all the hoarded snake venom and barbed caltrops in the camp, along with tons of rolling logs, and lay them out along that entire route!"

"I don't want a single damn fly making it up that front path!"

"Not only am I taking their weapons, but tomorrow, right here, I'm going to comfortably harvest those knights' heads to use as our chamber pots!"

"Yes, Boss!" Driven by his commands, over a hundred rogue orcs swarmed toward the only narrow, winding path leading up the front of the mountain, layering it with heavy defenses. …… The torrential rain lashed against the swamp like countless whips. Amidst the muddy, desolate wasteland, sixty-five dark silhouettes tore through the curtain of rain at a staggering pace. Soren ran at the very front of the formation.

Following closely behind him were Renn, Ein, Gary, Meyer, and sixty-one fully armed, elite frontline soldiers. To ensure maximum mobility for the climb, per Soren's strict military orders, they had all discarded their black iron leg armor, wearing only their black iron half-plate. Stolen novel; please report. After a forced march of nearly an hour, the unit suddenly halted. Ahead, the sky-high miasma began to thin. A lone peak thrust upwards from the earth—the Drybone Heights. Soren tilted his head back slightly.

Looming before them was the rear side of the Drybone Heights. It was a cliff face with a nearly ninety-degree vertical drop. Not a single blade of grass grew on the precipice; there were only countless jagged rocks protruding from the stone. The summit pierced deep into the thick fog, easily a hundred meters high. Gary wiped the muddy water from his face and lowered his voice, "My Lord, this is the place."

Before today, if any general of the Silvermoon Kingdom stood at the base of this cliff, they would have unhesitatingly turned around to attack the front. Because forcing iron-clad soldiers to free-climb such a slick, steep precipice was tantamount to mass suicide. Halfway up, the soldiers' arms would give out, and they would plummet to the bottom, turning into puddles of meat. This was exactly why the rogue orc leader, Gul, hadn't placed even half a sentry at the rear of the mountain.

Soren's cold gaze swept over the sixty-plus soldiers behind him.

"This is the perfect blind spot. As long as we scale this, we can drive our blades straight into the hearts of those greenskin beasts!" Soren slowly raised his right hand, snapping his five fingers into a tight fist. The execution order.

"Scale the cliff! Move out!" Instantly, sixty-five core unit members pressed themselves against the slick, black rock face. [Faint Titan Blood] surged violently within Soren's veins as his ten fingers clamped down on a jutting, jagged rock. He exerted force, hung suspended, and pulled himself up—the movements flowing seamlessly like water. Beside him, a truly shocking scene was unfolding.

Even with heavy throwing javelins and armor-piercing halberds strapped to their backs, the sixty-one elite soldiers were putting the monstrous physical attributes granted by the Troll Serum on full display. They wedged their fingers tightly into the rock crevices. Even as the rough stone tore the skin from their palms, they felt no pain. Their sheer wrist and forearm strength propelled them upwards, leaping from hold to hold as if walking on flat ground. Renn the Monk was the most absurd of all.

He didn't even need to look for protruding footholds; he simply jammed his five fingers straight into the weathered rock strata, scaling the vertical wall like a savage gecko. It took merely half an hour! Swish! A thick, powerful hand violently clamped onto the edge of the summit. Soren vaulted over the ledge, landing on the flat rear of the Drybone Heights. Behind him, all sixty-four men silently spilled over the insurmountable natural barrier, summiting the peak in its entirety! Not a single man was lost.

Soren crouched behind a pile of boulders near the cliff edge. Through [Eagle Eye Perception], he peered at the rogue orc camp situated a few hundred meters ahead. Just as Meyer's intelligence had stated, the rear of the camp was completely deserted. There wasn't a single soul in sight on the rudimentary log watchtowers. Gul, that arrogant greenskin, had deployed virtually his entire force to guard the front path against Alaric's anticipated retaliation.

"Maintain complete tactical silence," Soren ordered, making a swift throat-slitting gesture.

"Advance toward the enemy's rear gate." Hunched low, the unit used dead trees and massive boulders as cover, slinking toward the back of the camp. They were less than thirty paces from the rear gate, hiding behind a leeward dirt mound, when Gary—who was scouting ahead—suddenly dropped to one knee and threw up a swift military hand signal for "halt." Immediately after, he pointed toward two sections of dead tree trunks to their front-left.

There, bathed in flickering firelight, sat two hidden orc sentries tasked with guarding the rear stables. They had chunks of half-raw bloody meat dangling from their mouths, and in their hands, they were idly playing with two exquisitely curved longbows made of mulberry wood. It was the high-tier military gear they had just looted from the Royal Griffon Knights earlier that day. A thick-lipped orc boasted to his companion, smugly plucking the bowstring.

"Tsk, tsk! Feel the belly on this bow, it's so fucking smooth! Those human knight lords might be average in a fight, but they're top-tier at making these toys!"

"Right?!" The other orc spat out a mouthful of bone shards.

"With this batch of premium gear from the Royal Griffon Knights, we won't have to fear anyone in the Misty Swamp! Once we use these bows to shoot through the skulls of our pursuers tomorrow, our status in front of the Boss will also—" Before he could finish his sentence, a gentle breeze brushed against the back of his neck.