25：Sons of Titan
Thirty meters below, in the central arena, the sand was soaked in blood.
Four torches jutted from the stone walls.
A gladiatorial match was underway.
A human heavy infantryman, stripped of his border-issue armor and clutching nothing but a half-shattered iron sword, leaned heavily against the stone wall, gasping violently for breath.
Opposite him crouched a Swamp Direwolf that had been starved for five full days. Its hind claws dug deeply into the sand.
Suddenly, the human lunged forward, raising his broken sword above his head in a desperate bid to bring it down with his full body weight.
The Direwolf didn’t even try to dodge. It let the shattered blade bite into the flesh of its left shoulder, simultaneously pouncing forward to clamp its powerful jaws around the human’s neck.
Riiiip.
The carotid artery was torn clean out.
The human collapsed onto the bloody sand, thrashing as he clutched his spurting throat.
High upon his throne of bone, Warchief Blackstone watched expressionlessly.
Bang!
The iron-bound wooden doors of the command post were violently shoved open.
An orc lieutenant, not even bothering to unbuckle the scimitar at his waist, threw himself to his knees on the stone floor. He bowed his upper body as low as it would go, pressing his forehead against the freezing cracks of the stone as cold sweat dripped from his brow.
"Great Warchief, " he gasped."The convoy from Reed Bay. . . something has happened."
The index finger of Warchief Blackstone's right hand, which had been rhythmically tapping his knee, stopped.
"Did that imbecile Kash lose the camp?"
The lieutenant’s Adam’s apple bobbed frantically."Kash is dead. The entire camp was wiped out."
"Lord Shaman. . . Lord Shaman's head was found tossed onto the dirt."
"The potion ingredients from the convoy, the food supplies, even the Black Cedar timber meant for reinforcing the camp's defenses. . . every last scrap of it is gone."
A deathly silence descended around the Bone Throne.
The only sound was the sickening crunch of the Direwolf gnawing on human bones in the fighting pit below.
Warchief Blackstone did not fly into a rage or smash his goblet. He simply turned his head, his gaze fixed on the stiffening human corpse on the sands.
He appeared perfectly calm, but his thick right hand, resting on the armrest, suddenly clamped down into the hard skull of a magical beast.
Crack.
Bone fragments shattered outward.
A High Shaman. In the entire Alliance of the Thirteen Clans, spellcasters capable of communing with the elements and brewing magical elixirs could be counted on two hands. They were spellcasters holding more strategic value than a thousand heavily armored infantrymen—beings capable of instantly turning the tide of a battlefield.
And those potion ingredients. . . they were the core components for brewing the Berserker Draughts, his trump card for the all-out offensive against the human defense lines come spring.
And just like that, it was all gone. Devoured whole in some insignificant little logging camp.
"Who did this?"
The lieutenant trembled violently."We don't know."
"There were no signal flares for help. No residual shockwaves from magical explosions."
"At dawn today, three kobold gatherers went to the camp to collect the timber. They found only piles of corpses. Every single one of our brothers had been stripped bare of their chainmail."
"Whoever attacked them even brought in fresh dirt to cover up the blood on the ground."
Warchief Blackstone rose to his feet. His massive frame blocked out the torchlight, casting a long, dark shadow down the stone steps before him.
"One hundred and fifty orcs. One hundred of them wearing full-plate black steel armor. And my High Shaman."
Blackstone glared down at the lieutenant.
"To slaughter a force of that size in half a day without making a single sound. . . the enemy would need an army of at least three thousand men."
"But three thousand men hauling heavy siege ballistas through this treacherous mud? How could they possibly complete a raid, uproot my camp, and then vanish like a drop of water in a puddle, all in a single day?"
"No. . . this wasn't a large army."
"This was a highly elite, extremely small dagger-squad with terrifyingly precise execution."
The Silvermoon Kingdom? Impossible. If human war-mages had unleashed large-scale elemental spells, the magical fluctuations would have been obvious.
The Shaman was killed in a single strike! The attacker didn't give that old bag of bones even a second to struggle or cast a spell!
A fierce, deeply guarded glint flashed in Warchief Blackstone’s eyes.
He whirled around, barking orders into the dark corners of the room where his personal guards stood hidden in the shadows.
"Pass down my orders! Muster eight hundred Grey Direwolves! Have the wolf cavalry scour a thirty-mile radius around Reed Bay!"
"And drag those Shadow Priests out here! Send them to the ruins to perform a soul-calling. Even if the Shaman's soul was shattered, they will dig the magical residues out of the dirt and track the killer's scent!"
"Now get out of my sight and do it!"
Acting as if he had just been granted a royal pardon, the lieutenant scrambled out of the room, practically crawling. Even the hand he used to shut the iron doors was trembling.
The command post returned to silence.
Warchief Blackstone slowly sank back into his Bone Throne. A sharp, needle-like spasm of pain flared deep within the marrow of his left forearm.
His mind flashed back to that day beneath the walls of the Storm Rift Fortress.
At the very edge of his vision, two thousand meters away. . . a blurring afterimage.
An arrow, etched with wind-runes, had closed the distance in a fraction of a second. Before he could even draw his scythe, it pierced straight through the refined steel scales of his bracer and buried itself deep into the bone of his forearm.
A precise, ruthless, and entirely unblockable high-tier sniper shot.
Warchief Blackstone clenched his left fist. The phantom pain from the old wound thoroughly cleared his mind.
A pack of apex predators had infiltrated the Misty Swamp—predators capable of threatening his very life.
He raised his right hand and tapped three times on the skull mounted to his armrest.
From deep within the command post, behind an archway draped with a thick Kodo hide, came the sound of impossibly heavy footsteps.
Thud. Thud.
With every footfall, the flames of the torches lining the chamber flickered and cowered.
The thick hide was swept aside. Ten colossal figures strode across the black stone bricks and stepped into the dim light.
As they stood there, their heads nearly scraped the four-meter-high ceiling of the command post.
Every one of them was well over three meters tall.
They wore no metallic armor—they didn't need to. Beneath their coarse, slate-grey skin bulged hardened, rock-like keratin plates.
They possessed the incredibly rare bloodline of a Son of Titan. Though it was only the faintest, most diluted trace, it was enough to increase their bone density to the hardness of refined iron.
Earth mana bled from the ground between their toes, condensing in the air around them into floating, diamond-shaped shields of sand and stone that pulsed with a dull yellow glow.
Beyond their monstrous physical durability and these permanently active [Rock Shields], their slit-like pupils constantly radiated an eerie, dark-red hue.
These ten monsters were under the permanent effects of [Bloodthirsty Frenzy].
They felt no pain and knew no fatigue.
To ensure the terrifying sniper strike from Storm Rift Fortress could never happen again, Warchief Blackstone had poured his faction's deepest resources into secretly cultivating these ten walking fortresses of flesh to serve as his personal bodyguard detail.
The ten-man squad stood silently at the foot of the throne. With a single glance from their master, they would charge into an army of tens of thousands and carve a path of blood and gore using nothing but their bare fists.
Gazing upon his ultimate trump card, Warchief Blackstone finally felt the throbbing in his left arm subside.
He tilted his head back, resting against the crown of his Bone Throne.
"Investigate, " he rasped."Find whatever swallowed the bait. I don't care what kind of monsters they are."
"Unleash all ten Sons of Titan. I want the enemy's bones ground to dust."
The wooden wheels of the supply wagons ground through the muck at the entrance of Greywater Village, carving two deep ruts into the earth.
Four captured direwolves, bound in heavy harnesses, panted heavily as they dragged the wagons up the incline.
At first, only a few pairs of wary eyes peered through the thick fog from behind the wooden palisades of Greywater Village. But as the villagers who had stayed behind recognized Soren’s party, and saw the mountain of flour sacks and dried meat piled high on the wagons, the dead-silent settlement erupted.
Over two hundred emaciated, sickly-looking villagers poured out of their dilapidated stilt houses.
They swarmed both sides of the supply wagons. Too terrified to actually touch the goods, they simply flared their nostrils, greedily inhaling the scent of wheat permeating the damp air.
"Food for the winter, " Soren said, dismounting from his wolf. He gestured casually toward the wagons behind him."Unload the carts and get it into the storehouse."
Following the wagons, over twenty women and children dressed in tattered rags climbed down from several flatbed handcarts.
Their ankles were still covered in festering sores from iron shackles. They stood in the open square of the unfamiliar village beneath the cold, drizzling rain, looking lost and cowering in fear.
The old Village Chief hobbled forward on his wooden cane. One glance was all it took for him to understand.
"Just more poor souls trying to survive in this bloody muck. . ." The old Chief immediately waved over several robust village women, ordering them to bring over boiled tree-bark broth.
"Kowtow to our saviors!" a woman from Reed Bay, clutching an infant to her chest, cried as she threw herself into the mud.
Following her lead, the twenty-odd women and children all dropped to their knees, pressing their foreheads heavily against the stone slabs.
If not for Soren, they would have been devoured by the greenskin orcs by now.
The villagers of Greywater silently parted, every single pair of eyes converging on the tall man.
The looks they gave him now held a heavy, absolute, and undying loyalty.
With this dried meat and flour, Greywater Village would survive the bitter winter.
Over the next few days, Greywater Village was completely transformed into a bustling, noisy construction site.
Armed with the abundant timber harvested from the Reed Bay camp, Soren spared no expense, pouring every last log into upgrading the settlement's defenses.