24：The Monster in the Mist
Sylvia hurried over.
The first thing she saw was the corpses.
A massive pile of gray-green, heavily muscled bodies.
Every single orc corpse had been stripped bare, resembling freshly slaughtered and skinned livestock. Not a shred of armor remained, even the raw cowhide wrapped around their ankles had been peeled away without a trace.
"Drag them out. Count them, " Sylvia ordered, her voice turning ice-cold.
Iron hooks were driven into the backs of the corpses' necks, dragging them onto the flat ground one by one.
"One. . . ten. . . thirty. . ." The squad leader's voice began to tremble."Exactly fifty bodies. Someone buried them all right here."
Sylvia crouched down and touched the cold, rigid muscles of one of the corpses. The wounds showed no signs of swelling, and the coagulated blood was still thick and sticky.
"Dead for less than twelve hours."
"Commander! There are more over by the main gate!" the reports echoed continuously through the dense fog.
Hoisting her tower shield, Sylvia ran to where the camp's main gate used to stand.
There was no attempt at burial here. Dozens of even more heavily built corpses lay strewn haphazardly across the ground. They, too, had been stripped completely naked.
"These wounds are different. . . their sternums are entirely shattered, with iron shrapnel embedded in the bone. Penetrating trauma." The squad leader dug into a mass of mangled flesh and pulled out a snapped iron shaft about the thickness of a pinky finger.
Sylvia took the broken metal from him.
"Armor-piercing heavy repeating crossbows." She immediately recognized the siege-grade firepower—weaponry usually reserved exclusively for legion-level deployments.
"They were suppressed point-blank by heavy crossbows, then systematically harvested one by one with bladed weapons. Thirty heavily armored orcs died here at the main gate. There are twenty more piles of mangled flesh on the perimeter—judging by their skeletal structure, they were goblin scouts."
"Vice Commander!" a knight shouted from the ruined fire pits behind the mud storehouse. He had been tasked with sweeping the rear, and his voice betrayed an uncontrollable surge of terror.
Sylvia strode through the bloody mud, pushing past the crowd of onlookers.
Beside a large pit partially filled with sand lay a highly unusual corpse.
The body was emaciated with deathly pale skin. Everything above the neck was simply gone, the stump smooth from a clean, obtuse-angled decapitation. Scattered beside the corpse were several crow feathers dripping with a black, viscous ooze. The dead leaves surrounding the body had been melted into charred holes by the corrosive slime.
Sylvia's eyes immediately locked onto the objects held by a few of the knights: a demonic beast's spinal staff cleaved perfectly in two, and a severed head, its empty eye sockets still smoldering with sickly-green magical ash.
"An Orc Shaman. . ."
A cold sweat instantly drenched Sylvia’s back.
Fifty orcs dead in the depression. Thirty more dead at the main gate. Another seventy orc corpses found on-site, their bodies twisted in agony without a single sign of a struggle. Add to that a fully equipped goblin scout squad.
And, most lethally of all, a high-tier Shaman capable of unleashing widespread acid and toxic magic had stood guard over this camp.
This was an elite detachment of the Blackstone Warband totaling one hundred and fifty troops, fortified by the terrifying presence of a high-ranking spellcaster.
If she had stuck to her original plan today, blindly charging her proud company of three hundred dismounted heavy knights into this camp without preparation. . .
Those thirty armored orcs would have deadlocked her knights' battle formations while poisoned goblin arrows pierced her soldiers' eyes. And that high-tier Shaman would only need to cast a single spell of corrosive magic to melt her knights—full-plate armor and all—into a slurry of meat and steel.
Her entire force of three hundred would have been wiped out. Not a single soul would have survived.
But now, this trump-card orc garrison—a force more than capable of swallowing her vanguard whole—had been reduced to a hundred and fifty bare-assed corpses. Every scrap of supplies, every piece of lumber, down to the last broken cooking pot, had been scoured clean by some unknown faction as if the very earth had been scraped away.
Who did this?
Did the Royal Guards of the Silvermoon Kingdom march in? The Gryphon Brigades of the Holy Halycon Empire? Or perhaps some covert mercenary company numbering in the thousands?
Just what kind of monster was hiding in these muddy lands, capable of swallowing a force like this in a single bite?
The biting wind pulled the dense fog tighter around them. The three hundred heavy knights stood in the clearing, staring at the piles of corpses. The silence was maddening, giving them the creeping sensation that countless unsheathed blades were hidden within the suffocating white miasma.
"Everyone, maintain battle formations, " Sylvia ordered, plunging her sword into the mud. Her voice left no room for argument.
She didn't care who had massacred this stronghold. All she knew was that whoever stripped the camp of its supplies and armor was preparing to fight another battle. An unknown army of this caliber was something she absolutely could not afford to provoke.
"Gather any arrow fragments from the ground. Erase our boot prints from the mud."
"The rearguard is now the vanguard! Abandon the search for supplies."
"Retreat! Fall back at maximum speed! Move!"
Armor plates clattered together. Like a startled hedgehog pulling its spikes tight, the armored phalanx closed ranks and began a methodical retreat along the path they had come.
Deep within the fog, an icy drizzle began to fall from the sky without warning.
Once her unit had safely retreated to the relative security of the black woods, Sylvia turned her head to look south—towards the outer edges of the Misty Swamp.
Suddenly, her thoughts drifted back to the day they had split their forces at the border.
That man, Soren.
The man who had stood alone before the fortress gates against an army of thousands. The man who had single-handedly reversed the tides of war, crippling Warchief Blackstone with nothing but a bow, saving the Stormrift Fortress.
And yet, he had chosen to walk away with nothing but twenty-five raw recruits from the Crimson Moon Knights—boys who could barely even hold their swords steady.
Sylvia readily admitted that Soren's personal martial prowess was terrifyingly profound, he was a veritable god of slaughter. But the recruits he took with him were just too weak. Armed with a few battered javelins and carrying barely enough meager rations to last two or three days.
May you survive the mist, Sylvia whispered in her heart.
She couldn't fathom it. If Soren, dragging along his nest of fledglings, were to stumble across the monstrous army that wiped out this camp, or bump into a fully armored Blackstone Warband of this scale. . . he would be crushed into meat paste in seconds.
"Vice Commander, our formations are spaced out. The scouts have pushed forward and dispersed a two-mile perimeter, " the squad leader reported, wiping the freezing rain from his face.
Sylvia pulled her gaze back from the south. She hoisted her alloy tower shield with both arms, using it as a canopy against the increasingly heavy downpour.
"March at full speed. We need to report back to the Commander. There is a force hiding in this swamp that we absolutely cannot afford to provoke."
Deep within the heart of the Misty Swamp, the terrain abruptly jutted upward.
Three rushing rivers of black water converged here in a violent collision, carving out a massive, steep labyrinth of black stone pillars.
The Bloodfang Fortress was embedded directly into the highest of these circular precipices.
Centuries ago, this place had been cemented with the strongest masonry mortar on the continent of Aerasia. The royal banners of the Silvermoon Kingdom once flew proudly atop its watchtowers. Countless heavily armored human infantrymen had stood in formation here, relying on its towering walls and winch-operated ballistas to desperately hold back the endless tides of magical beasts surging from the south.
Today, the mortar was peeling away, and the grand walls were crumbling.
The watchtower, once intricately carved with the sacred crest of the God of Dawn, had been desecrated. The head of the deity's statue had been violently smashed to pieces, replaced by the ghastly skull of a Swamp Direbear.
The outer facade of the fortress wall was densely hammered with iron spikes. Air-dried human intestines and tattered knightly surcoats were tangled around the rusted metal, swaying morbidly in the drifting fog.
Looking past the fortress’s ruined battlements, the view expanded over hundreds of miles of dismal, gray mudflats below.
Hidden within this expanse was a massive orc military encampment housing an army of a hundred thousand strong.
During the battle at the Stormrift Fortress, Warchief Blackstone had ruthlessly abandoned his vanguard to retreat into the swamp and avoid the brunt of the human counterattack. However, using the pretext of "training exercises, " he had successfully bullied, intimidated, and violently annexed every wandering and scattered orc clan within the marshlands.
Bolstered by reinforcements from other clans within the Orcish Alliance, Warchief Blackstone's military might hadn't dwindled at all—it had exponentially exploded.
Stationed within the Bloodfang Fortress was the absolute core of his might: a vanguard of ten thousand elite troops.
The sea of military tents stretched on as far as the eye could see.
At the dead center of the encampment lay the core fighting force: five thousand greenskin orcs. They milled about bare-chested, their gray-green skin crisscrossed with violent scars. These monsters possessed an incredibly high tolerance for pain.
On a patch of dry ground to the west, over a thousand towering, bipedal Minotaurs sat in groups. They were busy grinding massive slabs of granite, lashing the heavy stones to thick tree trunks to craft devastating Totem Pillars for their shock charges.
At the fringes of the camp, units of Pigmen wallowed in massive mud pits. Heavy, crude iron plates had been brutally strapped onto them with iron chains, biting deep into their thick layers of fat to create walking, despair-inducing meat shields.
Perched in the twisted branches along the camp's outer perimeter were thousands of Kobolds. Their snouts twitched erratically, trying to pick up even the slightest trace of a foreign scent drifting through the dense fog.
In the primary waterways, pairs of slitted yellow eyes broke the water's surface. Lizardmen lurked just beneath the murky waves, their webbed claws gripping the submerged rocks—a legion of scaly, cold-blooded assassins in waiting.
Making up the vast bulk of the encampment were the slave legions, scurrying about like worker ants.
Ghouls were chained to wooden posts by heavy iron links, treated no better than rabid dogs. Diminutive goblins scurried between the roaring braziers, hauling baskets of coal that weighed more than they did. Nearby, a handful of red-skinned Lesser Demons were being viciously lashed by an orc overseer wielding a barbed whip.
At the very top of the fortress, within the command sanctum.
Warchief Blackstone reclined upon a throne of bones draped in shadows. His left arm was heavily wrapped in bloodied bandages, his elbow resting heavily on the armrest.