13：Prime Real Estate
Soren, his long steel sword held in a reverse grip at his side, walked up to the kneeling noble.
The man didn't speak immediately. Instead, he looked up with a guarded expression, a hand pressed tightly against a deep gash on his chest in a desperate bid to stem the bleeding.
His gaze locked onto Soren’s brassard, which bore the insignia of a blood-red crescent.
The Crimson Moon Knights.
The nobleman took two ragged breaths before using his bastard sword as a crutch to slowly push himself to his feet.
His eyes lingered on the corpse of the wolf-rider captain. An arrow had punched cleanly through the orc leader’s throat—a shot of unimaginable penetrating power.
Tearing his gaze away from the gruesome sight, the noble looked at the black-haired young man standing before him.
"You're with the Crimson Moon?"
He wiped a smear of blood from the corner of his mouth."I know of your order. You held Storm Rift Fortress against impossible odds. Now, I've seen your skills with my own eyes."
Soren had no intention of making small talk, this was a blood-soaked marsh, not a banquet hall in the royal capital."You shouldn't be here. The Blackstone army's main forces could appear at any moment."
At those words, the noble's expression instantly turned grim.
"That is exactly why I had to make a detour through this hellhole—a detour that cost the lives of my four knight retainers."
He patted his chest, confirming the presence of a sealed missive tucked carefully in his inner pocket.
"I had no choice. We underestimated these orcs. Warchief Blackstone may have fled, but he's rallying his scattered forces. Several minor clans from deep within the swamps are marching toward the border. This winter is going to be ten times more brutal than anyone anticipated."
The seasoned general adjusted his half-plate armor, his demeanor decisive.
"You saved my life. I, Gabriel, will remember this personal debt."
"But right now, this intelligence must reach the desks of the Royal Council within two days. The Kingdom hasn't realized that the sky in the north is about to fall."
With that, he offered Soren a crisp military salute—a warrior's respect for the strong. Turning away, he scavenged two spare daggers from his fallen retainers, rummaged through a pack to fish out a vial of Potent Alchemical Stamina Potion, and downed it in one gulp.
With no horses left, he took off on foot, sprinting southward across the partially frozen mud. Within moments, he vanished into the gray mist.
Soren turned back to look at his own men—a group of recruits who were currently cowering and at a complete loss.
Scattered among the lupine corpses strewn across the battlefield were twenty-eight surviving adult wargs. They were pacing around the bodies of their dead masters, whimpering softly or baring their teeth in low, warning growls.
Orcs were born beastmasters. These wargs had been trained since they were pups. They possessed massive skeletal frames, and their front paws featured thick, retractable fleshy pads and hook-like claws. This anatomy allowed them to perfectly distribute their weight across the marshland, unlike iron-shod warhorses that would easily pierce the crust of floating mud and sink.
Even with their masters dead, the beasts hadn't scattered. However, they were far from friendly. Their eyes burned with primal malice as they glared at the scrawny humans.
One of the bolder recruits slowly approached a massive wolf with a piebald coat. The moment his fingers brushed its mane—
Snap!
Without even raising its head, the beast lunged, its jaws clamping down hard on the shaft of the recruit's polearm. Had the boy been a fraction of a second slower in jerking his hand back, he would have lost three fingers.
The rest of the soldiers immediately tightened their grips on their swords.
Soren swept a cold gaze over the pack of vicious beasts."Sheathe your weapons. We have a use for these wolves."
Soren strode purposefully toward the largest, most muscular alpha of the pack. The brute crouched low in the mud, baring its fangs as viscous drool dripped from its maw.
A split second before the beast could launch itself forward to tear out his throat—
Thud.
Soren planted a brutal kick dead center on its forehead.
The sheer force sent the massive warg flying three meters sideways. Its eyes rolled back into its skull as it let out a breathless, wheezing yelp. It crashed heavily into a dead stump, snapping the rotting wood in two. As it lay paralyzed in the mud, whimpering pitifully, the savage glint in its eyes was utterly shattered, replaced entirely by primal fear.
Seeing the fate of their alpha, the surrounding wargs instantly tucked their tails between their legs and flattened their ears. All thoughts of resistance vanished.
"What are you waiting for?" Soren asked, turning away without so much as a backward glance."Everyone, pick a warg and mount up. Anyone who can't tame their mount gets to run behind us naked."
The recruits were stunned into silence.
He sent a waist-high apex predator flying with a single kick? So this was the true caliber of the legendary Captain of the 1st Vanguard Battalion—the man who had once single-handedly turned the tide of a battle?
Mimicking his sheer audacity, the twenty-five anxious young men began manhandling the beasts. With a mixture of slaps, tugs, and sheer desperation, they clumsily scrambled onto the wargs' backs, gripping tightly onto their foul-smelling, coarse manes.
An hour of rapid marching later.
The newly minted unit of human wolf-rider scouts had pushed over ten miles deep into the swamplands.
The alpha warg—whose personality had been thoroughly adjusted to that of an obedient lapdog by a single kick—carried Soren with an exceptionally smooth and steady gait.
The Warlord System interface abruptly chimed, displaying a new prompt.
[System Prompt: High-Value General Successfully Rescued.]
[Rewards Distributed: Wondrous Item【Arrow of Concealment】 x1, Skill: Advanced Orcish Mastery.]
Soren’s vision swam for a moment as his mind was flooded with alien memories. Countless bizarre guttural syllables and runic combinations were forcefully dismantled, restructured, and perfectly assimilated into his brain.
Alpine dialects, Northern Tundra slang, battlefield curses, the pathetic inflections of begging for mercy. . . What had been a garbled mess of barbaric noise just minutes ago was now as clear as his mother tongue. He could now easily discern whether an orc was signaling a charge or a retreat just from the pitch of a low growl.
Exhaling softly, Soren reached into the bottom of his quiver and retrieved the newly materialized arrow. Its shaft was forged from a bizarre, light-absorbing material, etched with subtle runes that pulsed with a faint, violet luminescence in the shadows.
[Arrow of Concealment: Single-use consumable. Once fired, it cannot be detected by the naked eye or standard divination spells. Grants the 'Silenced' and 'Armor-Piercing' properties.]
An absolute masterpiece for assassination.
Looking up from the arrow, Soren realized that their long trek was finally bearing fruit. Up ahead flowed a grayish stream, its surface choked with a layer of decaying insect carcasses.
This was the primary objective of his swamp expedition.
"Listen up!" Soren ordered."Follow the stream. We push upstream."
His decision to track the water wasn't merely about quenching their thirst. Where there was flowing water, there was life. Water was the fundamental anchor of any survival ecosystem.
If the childhood legends from his current life held any truth, then any surviving human settlements hidden within this unimaginably vast wetland would undoubtedly be located at the headwaters on higher elevation. Finding a human settlement was the prerequisite for any long-term base-building.
The unit redirected their mounts, fighting the current as they bypassed two dense forest belts choked with venomous briars.
Four grueling hours passed.
Near the front of the formation, two of the older wargs suddenly caught a scent, letting out low, excited whines. The terrain ahead abruptly elevated, transitioning from treacherous, sinking muck into a foundation of solid, pale-gray limestone earth.
Pushing through a dense, natural barrier of tall reeds, a deeply concealed settlement finally came into view.
It sat nestled on a gentle slope overlooking the river valley. Several dozen wooden stilt houses were built into the thick trunks of the ancient trees, suspended halfway in the air to avoid the pervasive dampness.
Instead of standard anti-cavalry palisades, the village perimeter was ingeniously protected by a ringed trench. It was filled with treacherous mud, sharpened wooden stakes, and stagnant black water.
Granted, the dwellings were little more than huts patched together with damp timber. Half-skinned fish hung drying by the doors, and the meager wisps of cooking smoke drifting from the roofs reeked of extreme poverty and primitive living. Yet, deep within the lethal, soul-crushing swamplands of the Dark Era, the mere existence of this settlement was nothing short of a miracle.
"There are actually living people here. . ." murmured one of the youngest recruits, a boy who had been on the verge of tears from the freezing winds and toxic briars. He stared at the village in dumbstruck awe.
Had they not seen it with their own eyes, not a soul in the Kingdom would have believed that humans could survive in this forbidden death zone. Not only had these Kingdom refugees defied death, but they had managed to secretly pass down their lineage for God knows how many generations, building homes, walls, and a life for themselves in the muck.
"This is the place." Soren remained seated atop his massive alpha warg, his gaze devoid of any overt emotion.
While the young recruits were still busy marveling at the miracle of life, Soren's eyes narrowed, systematically calculating every topological advantage the terrain offered.
It was a defensive masterpiece.
Its rear was backed against an ancient, primeval forest, providing endless resources and a secure avenue of retreat. To the left lay an impassable stretch of highly toxic, sinking quagmires. To the right, a geothermal fissure bubbled continuously, spewing natural geysers infused with heavy sulfur—a scalding, noxious barrier so potent that it would make the keen-nosed wargs sneeze uncontrollably if they even got close.
The only avenue of approach was the narrow, two-meter-wide path leading straight to the village entrance.
It was a textbook pocket-formation high ground. If the Blackstone Warband's massive army ever charged this place, the treacherous bogs would swallow a third of their forces before they even reached the perimeter. As for the rest? No matter how overwhelmingly they outnumbered the defenders, they would be forced into a brutal bottleneck, marching in single file to their deaths.
Soren was already subconsciously drafting up blueprints. That geothermal sulfur vent near the entrance was perfect, harnessing that heat for a blast furnace to smelt iron would be incredibly efficient. Alongside the riverbank was a raised, wind-swept rocky outcropping—prime real estate for a waterwheel mill and a Mage's water purification workshop.
Of course, to make any of that happen, he would first have to have a little "chat" with the current residents.