17：I Never Said We Were Escaping
Six hundred meters outside the perimeter of the Reed Bay outpost, dried stalks rubbed against one another in the marsh thicket, emitting a soft rustling sound.
Thirteen silhouettes were submerged in waist-deep muck, leaving only their eyes exposed above the murky water.
It was Eyn and the twelve village militiamen he had brought along.
Soren crouched behind a moss-covered log, methodically smearing foul-smelling mud over his body to mask his scent.
"Everyone, hold your positions. Bite down on your breathing reeds and sink below the surface. Unless you hear my command, anyone who dares to surface or make a sound will face martial law!"
Eyn gripped his longbow tightly and gave a firm nod.
Soren dropped low, flattening himself against the ground before vanishing into the thick mist.
The Reed Bay outpost was built like a typical circular logging camp. Its perimeter was ringed by a two-meter-tall palisade of sharpened logs, the gaps thickly packed with dried mud.
Two wooden watchtowers stood guard over the east and north faces. Braziers atop them crackled and popped, casting dancing shadows. Up in the towers, two burly Blackstone Orcs leaned against heavy, wooden-shafted javelins, their eyelids drooping with sleep.
Soren crawled forward through the sludge. He halted exactly twenty paces from the palisade.
Tethered at the base of the wall lay a mangy, scab-covered Warg.
The stench of the mud hung heavy in the damp air. The beast’s nose twitched. It didn't catch the scent of human flesh—only the pungent, rotting reek native to the swamp. Giving a low snort, the Warg tucked its snout under its hind legs and closed its eyes to resume its nap.
Up on the watchtower, one of the Orcs turned sideways, fumbling with his trousers to relieve himself. The splashing sound of urine hitting the ground echoed in the quiet night.
In that exact fraction of a second, Soren kicked off the ground, sending muddy water spraying out behind him.
His body surged forward, crossing fifteen paces in a flash. His hands splayed out, his fingers finding pinpoint purchase in the crevices of the tree bark between the logs. The muscles in his arms coiled and contracted. With a light tap of his toes against the wood, his entire body vaulted over the top of the palisade, gliding over the spiked logs as weightless as a falling leaf.
He dropped down, twisting in mid-air, and caught himself with one hand, flawlessly dispersing the momentum of his fall.
It was the textbook infiltration technique of a special forces operative.
Soren stayed low, weaving through stacks of black firewood piled three meters high. His eyes locked onto a large mud-brick storehouse dead ahead.
Just beneath the roofline sat a row of gaps meant for ventilation. Soren drew two daggers and wedged them into the seams of the rammed-earth wall. Alternating his grip and leverage between the twin blades, he scaled the wall and reached the roof in a matter of breaths.
Inside the storehouse.
A sliver of pale, dismal moonlight filtered through the ventilation gaps, illuminating the sallow, gaunt faces of Kael and Thorn.
Thorn was trembling, still muttering under his breath about the rumored human army that had slaughtered twenty-eight Orcs.
Suddenly, the pale beam of light from above flickered out, momentarily blocked.
A heartbeat later, from the deepest shadows at the back of the storehouse—just behind a pile of hay—came the soft crunch of a boot stepping onto dry straw.
A calm male voice echoed through the fetid, rotting air of the prison:
"You heard correctly. All twenty-eight of those greenskins are currently buried in a sulfur mud pit."
Every hair on Kael’s body stood on end.
He sprang off the broken wooden stump he had been sitting on, slamming his back flat against the mud wall. His right hand white-knuckled a sharp, triangular shard of stone. The muscles in his emaciated arm pulled taut as a bowstring as he aimed the makeshift weapon at the pitch-black corner.
Beside him, Thorn scrambled backward in sheer terror, tripped over his own ankles, and fell hard onto his rear in the muck.
The commotion jolted the other slaves awake. Thirty men were packed into the cramped space, and a cacophony of clattering iron chains filled the room as they shifted in panic.
"Who are you?!" Kael demanded, his voice dropping to a fierce, desperate whisper.
The figure in the shadows took a step forward.
Soren walked fully into the patch of moonlight. Half his face was caked in black mud, and a fine steel longsword rested silently at his hip.
But it was the left shoulder of his leather armor that caught the eye—a piece of rough cloth was tied there, bearing the insignia of a crimson moon.
The Crimson Moon.
Thorn’s gaze dropped from Soren's impossibly young face to his shoulder. When his eyes recognized the emblem, his hands began to tremble violently.
Kael froze, the jagged stone still raised in the air.
"You are in a death trap." Soren planted his feet, his gaze sweeping past the two men to survey the hollow-eyed slave auxiliaries huddled deeper in the room."Keep your voices down, unless you want the Orc guards coming in to inspect the noise."
"How is this possible. . . ?" Thorn muttered from the filthy puddles on the floor, his eyes bulging with disbelief.
There were layers of spiked barricades outside, overseers in the watchtowers, and even giant wolves prowling the perimeter. Yet this lone man had somehow bypassed it all without a sound, standing right here in a locked prison that thirty men couldn't escape even if they had wings!
Was this the human commander who had wiped out the Blackstone scouting party?
He looked so young—like a greenhorn barely in his early twenties. But his terrifying ability to infiltrate past fifty seasoned Orc warriors as if they were mere window dressing, coupled with the suffocating aura of absolute calm he radiated, instantly cured Kael of the foolish notion of judging a book by its cover.
Shock, intense wariness, and the feverish desperation of grasping at a single thread of hope rippled through the cell.
The sharp stone slipped from Kael’s grip, splashing into the muck.
Without a second thought, his knees gave out, slamming into the filthy puddles. He crossed his arms over his chest, turning his palms inward to grip the leather slave collar locked around his neck.
It was the ultimate gesture of submission—a slave begging a master for their life.
The remaining twenty-nine slave auxiliaries dared not hesitate. Amidst a chorus of clinking shackles, they followed their captain’s lead, sinking to their knees in the mud before Soren.
"My Lord! Please, save us!" Kael pleaded, his voice trembling so hard it fractured."We are the townsfolk of Reed Bay! I am Kael, the captain of these men. If you can just get us out that door, the lives of all thirty brothers here belong to you from this day forth!"
Soren didn't move. He didn't offer them a hand up, nor did he offer them any promises.
"Give me a sit-rep on everything you know, " he demanded, his tone unnervingly cold.
Kael’s heart skipped a beat.
"The situation is a nightmare. . ." He looked up, pointing at the heavy wooden doors behind him, struggling to keep the despair out of his voice."My Lord, there is a full garrison of fifty Blackstone regulars out there. These aren't just scouting grunts. Four of them are Decurions wearing bronze rings, and their leader is a Centurion wielding a double-bladed battleaxe!
"Every single one of those Orcs is strapped in scale-and-chain armor forged from black iron! That refined iron is only a hair weaker than pure steel—our rusty sickles wouldn't even leave a scratch on them! They carry long-hafted poleaxes. A single swing into a woodpile can cleave a thick log—and a grown man—clean in two.
"By the rear palisade, they’ve got fifteen Wargs tied up, fed on raw meat daily. One pounce and their jaws will snap a man's shinbone like a twig."
Kael cast a sorrowful glance at his emaciated comrades."And us. . . we don't even have so much as a sharpened stick to our names. Thirty men. We survive on a single bowl of rancid gruel a day, and they still force us to haul lumber from dawn till dusk."
It was an inescapable, ironclad cage. Despair visibly thickened the air among the slaves.
Even if this god-like commander had managed to sneak in, what difference did it make? Against fifty heavily armored greenskin monsters, the moment that iron padlock opened, they would be marching into a one-sided slaughter in the courtyard. Two human legs could never outrun those black-furred, long-snouted monstrosities.
Thorn knelt off to the side, adding through muffled sobs, "My Lord, if the Orcs sound their war horn—just three blasts—they’ll have the whole camp locked down. There’s absolutely no route to escape out there."
Just as the two men finished laying out their hopeless predicament. . .
[Ding!]
A crisp, mechanical chime rang out in Soren’s mind.
[Suitable Campaign Node detected. Warlord System issuing real-time quest.]
[Quest Objective: Escape is unnecessary. Lead the thirty sick and injured slave auxiliaries before you, coordinate with the thirteen recruits positioned outside, and annihilate all fifty Blackstone Orcs within the outpost.]
[Quest Reward Preview: Complete this monumental feat to receive the High-Tier Talent Skill:[Military Command Mastery]. This skill greatly enhances the user's ability to command large-scale legions.]
A Legion Command talent. It was the crucial stepping stone for transcending from an individual powerhouse into a supreme battlefield commander.
Soren’s expression didn’t shift a millimeter. But his very next action struck the two men kneeling before him like a bolt of lightning.
Soren drew the fine steel longsword from his hip.
"I never said anything about escaping."
"Listen closely. I have thirteen men waiting outside. I have thirty of you in here." Soren pointed a finger toward the center of the encampment, right where the Orc commander’s tent would be."Tonight, all fifty of those Blackstone Orcs are going to be corpses hanging from the palisades."
Everyone froze. Time seemed to grind to a halt within the squalid prison.
It was absolute lunacy! He wanted thirty starved, unarmed prisoners who could barely stand, plus a baker's dozen of unknown recruits, to carve straight through a fully fortified, heavy-infantry Orc squadron?!
Kael dug his fingers into the rotting straw, his pupils dilating and contracting in violent shock. A force of that caliber was equivalent to a fully armored heavy cavalry squadron of the Silvermoon Kingdom!
And they were supposed to crush them?!
"That’s impossible!! That’s suicide!" Thorn shrieked, no longer able to keep his voice down as he slumped on the ground.
Sneaking out and assassinating a lone guard was one thing, but annihilating an entire fortified Orc camp?! He squeezed his eyes shut, his mind instantly assaulted by graphic visions of heavy battleaxes cleaving human heads from their shoulders.
"Impossible?" Soren leaned in, bringing his face inches from Kael’s."You know the dampness in the air, the lay of the land, and the toxic weeds of this swamp better than anyone else alive. You hold a monumental home-field advantage, and yet you let them pen you up in here to be slaughtered like wooly pigs?
"My company has no place for cowards who only know how to run! If you want to follow me, you will have to carve your own path out in blood. You will fight for it with your lives!"
Mad.
He was completely mad.
The breathing of the thirty slaves grew ragged, their chests heaving in unprecedented turmoil.