Chương 83: 83：Feeding the Meat Grinder

In the blind spot behind the two orcs' backs, Meyer, seamlessly blended into the surroundings with his [Chameleon] trait, and Gary, wielding [Stealth Mastery], struck simultaneously like two black mambas! The coordination between the two brothers was absolutely flawless. Meyer clamped his left hand tightly over the thick-lipped orc's mouth, smothering the impending scream deep within its throat. In his right hand, a dagger plunged viciously just below the root of the orc's ear.

With a brutal twist, he severed the spine! In that same split second, Gary vaulted onto the back of the other orc, locking his legs around its waist to drag the massive creature down. At the same time, he slashed his dagger violently across the orc's throat! Squelch! Dark green blood erupted like a geyser, splattering across the pristine longbows looted from the Royal Griffin Knights. The two massive orc bodies convulsed violently for a few seconds before Gary and Meyer dragged them silently into the dark brush.

"Clear," Gary signaled, flashing a double thumbs-up toward the rear. With the final lookouts eliminated, Soren led the frontline vanguard, creeping right up to the camp's rear gate—a flimsy structure nailed together from loose wooden planks. Soren drew the longsword from his waist and delivered a savage kick! BOOM! The rotting wooden gate shattered into splinters! Soren and his sixty-six men smashed into the completely defenseless rogue encampment! The rear of the camp was an open-air plaza.

A dozen large iron cauldrons boiled with foul-smelling meat stews, while around fifty to sixty rogue orcs sat scattered around, drinking, tearing into meat, and waiting for their guard shift. When the wooden gate suddenly exploded, revealing a strike force of elite human soldiers clad in heavy black-iron armor, the entire plaza of rogue orcs froze in collective bewilderment. Their brains simply couldn't process it. How had these humans bypassed the sheer cliffs to appear directly at the rear of their stronghold?

But Soren wasn't about to give them time to think.

"For Old Tom and Little Jack!"

"Kill them all!" With a flick of his left wrist, the [Windwhisper Bow] materialized in his grasp. Three cyan Wind Runes flared with an eerie glow! Twang! Twang! Twang! Rapid fire! Soren's fingers moved so fast they left afterimages on the bowstring. Three feathered arrows found their marks with deadly precision, punching straight through the eye sockets of three orcs scrambling for their battleaxes. The arrowheads burst out from the backs of their skulls, blooming into three gruesome flowers of blood!

"Exhilarating!" the Monk, Renn, roared. His bronze muscles bulged like granite slabs, the hundreds of scars across his torso looking especially savage in the bonfire's light. He didn't need weapons. He threw his entire body straight into the densest cluster of the enemy formation! A veteran orc, the first to react, swung a spiked mace directly at Renn's face. Renn didn't even flinch. Relying on the 70% physical damage reduction from his [Hardened Skin], he took the crushing blow directly on his shoulder! Bang!

The sheer recoil from the mace numbed the webbing of the orc's hands, yet Renn didn't budge an inch. In the orc's moment of stunned disbelief, Renn formed his hand into a claw and thrust it forward, his fingers digging brutally into the soft flesh under the beast's jaw. With a savage flex of his arm, he ripped downward! Accompanied by a sickening CRACK, the orc's entire lower jaw—skin, flesh, and bone—was torn completely off by bare hands!

However, what truly sent a chill down the rogue orcs' spines—as if they had been plunged into an icy abyss—were the sixty-one expressionless black-armored warriors. These elite infantrymen, biologically enhanced by troll serum, didn't charge forward in a disorganized melee like the orcs expected. Instead, the moment they stepped into the camp, they fanned out into a disciplined, three-rank crescent formation. In unison, they gripped the heavy throwing javelins strapped to their backs.

They leaned back, channeling power from their hips through their core, and launched them!

"FIRE!" Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! A dense volley of javelins tore through the air. Fueled by monstrous troll-enhanced strength, the terrifying penetrating force of sixty-one javelins rained down upon the completely unshielded cluster of orcs! Wooden shields were shattered into splinters! Thick, dense muscles were effortlessly punched through! One javelin impaled a burly orc, pinning him brutally to the dirt.

Before he could even attempt to pull it out, a second and third javelin struck, raining down like a torrential storm! Meanwhile, atop a towering watchtower in the center of the camp, an orc sentry was just raising a bone horn to his lips to sound the alarm when he suddenly felt a warm, wet sensation between his eyes. Perched on a rocky outcrop in the high ground far behind the lines, the sharpshooter, Ein, held a half-crouched stance, his bowstring still vibrating.

The terrifying accuracy granted by his [Nature Hunter] class allowed that single arrow to traverse a hundred paces and absolutely obliterate the sentry's head! If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. The bone horn slipped from dead hands, tumbling lifelessly from the watchtower alongside the headless corpse. All of this transpired in the blink of an eye, as fast and sudden as a thunderstrike!

Meanwhile, inside the main assembly hall at the very front of the camp. The chieftain, Gul, and his lieutenant sat on massive chairs draped in bear pelts. They were dead drunk, gulping from oversized wooden bowls embedded with human skulls. Scattered across the floor around them were countless pried-open crates of stolen Royal military armaments.

"What the fuck is all that racket outside?!" Gul roared, furiously smashing his bowl against the floor. A rogue orc, his intestines spilling out and trailing across the floor, violently crashed through the hall's doors. He crawled inside, shrieking in agony:"C-Chieftain! The rear mountain! Humans... humans are attacking from the rear mountain!" he gasped.

"The shift guards at the back... they're being slaughtered!" Gul shot up from his chair, his scarred, meaty face contorting in sheer fury. His first thought: Did Alaric's Griffin Army fly up here?

"How many?! Cavalry or Griffins?!" Gul bellowed, hauling the dying orc up by his collar.

"N-no mounts! Just... just sixty or so human infantry..." Before he could finish, the orc's head lolled to the side, breathing his last.

"Sixty humans?" Gul paused. He exchanged a glance with his scrawny, rat-faced lieutenant. The fleeting flash of panic in his eyes—born from the sudden ambush—was instantly swallowed by boiling rage! Sixty measly human infantrymen! No mages! No heavy armored cavalry! With numbers that pathetic, they dared to kick the hornet's nest here in the Drybone Heights?

"Bullshit! These humans must have a fucking death wish!" Gul roared from the depths of his chest, drawing a pair of massive, wheel-sized battleaxes from his back. He didn't consider sixty men a threat in the slightest. Out here in the Misty Swamps, even at one-to-one odds, human infantry were barely an appetizer for an orc. Let alone the fact that he currently had over two hundred warriors!

"Lieutenant! Relay my orders!" Gul barked arrogantly.

"Tell all the boys setting up barricades and traps at the front line to fall back immediately!"

"Those sixty fuckers aren't even enough for all of us to get a piece! Full camp counterattack! And tell them no arrows! I'm going to use my axes to shatter the leader's thigh bones myself and boil them for soup!" The orders echoed out rapidly alongside the lieutenant's roars. However, this would be the first—and most fatal—idiotic mistake Gul would make tonight.

As Gul's orders cascaded down the chain of command, the hundred or so orcs deployed to tightly lock down the front mountain path hastily grabbed their weapons and sprinted back toward the main camp. This rushed redeployment completely exposed the rogue orcs' glaring lack of military discipline! The front mountain path was narrow and winding, and their defensive lines had been stretched far too thin. There was absolutely no way they could reform into an organized battle formation on such short notice.

The result was chaotic: an initial wave of forty to fifty orcs charged into the camp plaza first, while dozens more were left pushing and shoving each other, bottlenecked on the path. The ones stationed furthest down the mountain hadn't even reached the camp gates! What should have been a crushing numerical advantage of two hundred against sixty was, in that exact moment, warped by this foolish logistical blunder into a piecemeal trickle—a textbook example of feeding the enemy isolated waves to slaughter!

And Soren was an absolute master at exploiting localized troop advantages. Soren stared coldly at the straggling, uncoordinated waves of orc reinforcements blindly rushing in from the assembly hall and the front mountain path.

"Form a circle! Interlocking advance!" The sixty-four frontline soldiers—now joined by Ein, Gary, and Meyer—immediately closed ranks, standing back-to-back! Abandoning independent combat, the vanguard infantry lowered their two-and-a-half-meter-long armor-piercing halberds, while the soldiers in the inner ring relentlessly threw javelin after javelin! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! At a devastatingly close range of thirty paces, the first wave of forty-something rogue orcs came screaming forward, axes raised high.

Before they could even cross the gap...... a tidal wave of gray-black javelins swept through them with world-ending force!

"Gyaaagh!"

"My leg!" Blood sprayed into the air as severed limbs went flying. Their crude leather armor offered absolutely zero resistance against the terrifying penetrative power of the onslaught. In mere minutes, the entire first wave of forty orcs was decimated. Relentless volleys of heavy javelins pinned them brutally to the blood-soaked earth, leaving the plaza echoing with agonized wails. When the second wave of thirty orcs finally arrived, they froze in absolute horror.

Blocking their path were not weak, easily slaughtered humans, but a mountainous pile of their own dead comrades, bristling with spears like bloody hedgehogs.