26：No Rations, Only Vengeance
The entrance to Greywater Village was a natural, gently sloping bottleneck.
Following the exact measurements Soren had drawn in the mud, Kyle and the auxiliary troops buried sharpened black cedar logs deep into the earth, constructing a staggered, interlocking array of chevaux-de-frise.
Every joint was secured tight with rawhide bindings and iron nails.
Just ahead of the barricades, over thirty pit traps—each two meters deep—had been dug overnight. The bottoms were lined with upturned, razor-sharp poison-thorn stakes, while the tops were cleverly concealed beneath woven vines and loose dirt, creating an indistinguishable illusion of solid ground.
Flanking the village entrance, two crude but towering wooden watchtowers had been erected. Their lines of sight covered the main approach, the geothermal sulfur springs to the right, and the toxic swamp to the left. Any enemy attempting to sneak closer would immediately be exposed to the sentries above.
However, the recent influx of supplies had ruthlessly exposed the base camp's greatest shortcomings.
Thick smoke billowed by the geothermal sulfur springs on the right side of the village. At a crude, hollowed-out stone forge, two bare-chested villagers serving as makeshift blacksmiths were swinging heavy hammers.
A pile of looted black-iron scale armor had been tossed directly into the searing heat of a thermal vent. The subterranean heat gradually softened the black iron. The villagers pulled the glowing metal out with tongs, smashed it to pieces, and crudely forged it into conical arrowheads suitable for human use.
Soren stood by the vent, picking up a newly forged black-iron arrowhead from the cooling stone trough.
The edges were pitted and uneven, the center of gravity was entirely off. When he pressed his thumb hard against it, iron flakes scraped off easily. If an arrowhead of this quality was fired from a heavy repeating crossbow, it would absolutely veer off course past thirty meters.
"The temperature isn't high enough, and the hammering is far too rough, " Soren muttered, tossing the defective arrowhead aside.
As for the [Blacksteel Heavy Plate Armor] looted from the elite guards, it was a massive headache. The geothermal vents could only heat the blacksteel until it glowed red, it showed no signs of softening, let alone melting down for a recast. Furthermore, the armor was designed for the massive, broad-shouldered frames of Orcs. If a human soldier tried to wear it, they looked like a child wearing an iron barrel, unable to even bend their arms.
Beyond the inability to properly utilize captured equipment, other critical issues loomed over them.
First, the matter of medicine. Although they had captured a large batch of field first-aid potions and precious alchemical ingredients, the few elderly women in the village who knew a bit of herbalism only knew how to mash herbs and apply them to wounds. Such a crude method absolutely could not be used on rare alchemical materials. Without a proper alchemical apothecary and professional staff, mid-tier materials would go entirely to waste.
But the most deadly issue was fresh water.
The village possessed crude filters made from layers of linen cloth, coarse sand, and crushed charcoal. Villagers poured buckets of stream water through them—water that was a murky gray, often with insect corpses floating on the surface. An hour of filtering only yielded less than half a bucket of cloudy, bitter drinking water.
It was enough to keep two hundred people alive, but it was entirely insufficient to sustain the heavy consumption of an army undergoing high-intensity training.
They desperately needed an alchemist. They desperately needed a master blacksmith. They desperately needed water purification arrays.
Any other fledgling commander facing such a tangled web of suffocating bottlenecks would have been driven mad with anxiety.
Yet, Soren’s expression remained perfectly calm.
Within this foggy swamp lay countless encamped Orc warbands. Their enemy’s camps had smelting furnaces, captive human artisans, and magical well arrays.
As long as the blades in his men's hands were sharp enough, he just had to go take them.
Plunder the enemy to feed his own village, fueling a continuous cycle of bloody expansion.
The training ground by the toxic swamp.
The rain had stopped.
Sixty-three men stood in a rigid, inverted triangle formation.
Standing at the far left of the front rank was a recruit from the Crimson Moon Knights. His shoulder pressed tightly against a slave auxiliary who had recently crawled out of the mud of Reed Bay. To his right was a fisherman from Greywater Village.
All sixty-three of these men had killed Orcs. The shared scent of blood had become the perfect binding agent. Their previous affiliations had been broken down, they were now thoroughly forged into a single, cohesive unit.
At this moment, all sixty-three pairs of eyes burned with the same unwavering resolve.
Clang!
With one hand, Soren tossed a massive, two-and-a-half-meter-long Orc armor-piercing halberd into the muddy water at the front of the formation.
"Pick it up. Swing it once, " Soren commanded, pointing at a broad-shouldered, burly village militiaman.
The villager gripped the shaft with both hands. The veins in his neck bulged as he gave it a violent swing. The sheer momentum of the heavy weapon dragged his body forward, sending him crashing face-first into the muck with a heavy splat.
"Heavy, sluggish, and riddled with openings. You don't possess the brute strength of an Orc. If you take garbage like this into battle, your throats will be slit within three seconds."
Soren turned his head and kicked open two wooden crates. Inside lay nearly two hundred ash-gray short spears, captured from the Goblins who had invaded Greywater Village and from the logging camp's armory. The shafts were carved from ironwood, and the tips were slender, razor-sharp blades of refined iron.
"Each man take three. Use a rawhide strap to sling them diagonally across your back, behind your shoulder armor."
The training officially commenced.
Soren drew his longsword, standing in the center of the muddy field.
"Close formation!"
"Front rank, level thrust! Rear rank, aim for neck height, raise spears! Distance: twenty paces. Throw!"
The sixty-three men stepped forward in perfect unison. The front rank thrust their short spears out with blinding speed. The rear rank drew spears from their backs and hurled them with thunderous force!
This ragtag militia was rapidly shedding its old skin, transforming into truly elite soldiers.
As for the incredibly precious one hundred heavy repeating crossbows, Soren had ordered them wrapped in moisture-proof canvas and sealed away in a dry cave. Until he solved the issue of forging high-quality armor-piercing bolts, every captured bolt they fired was one less they had.
These were his trump cards for cracking hard targets in large-scale battles, they absolutely could not be squandered.
Three days later.
Soren stood atop the eastern wooden watchtower, the cold wind whipping around him.
He held a rough parchment map in his hand. He had drafted it himself, mapping out the terrain within a fifty-mile radius based on the intelligence extracted from interrogating the Orc Centurion. His gaze locked onto two highly lucrative targets ripe for raiding.
The wooden ladder rattled with heavy footsteps. Torn climbed up to the wooden platform and knelt on one knee.
"My Lord, refugees have arrived outside the defensive line. There are two brothers. No matter what we say, they refuse to leave. When the guards drew their swords to drive them off, they just knelt in front of the barricades and kowtowed. They said they must see the commander, and that they will join the army even if it kills them."
Soren shifted his gaze from the map, his brows furrowing slightly."Bring them in."
Shortly after, inside the stilted wooden command post.
Soren sat tall in the seat of command. The door was pushed open.
Two young men, covered in grass clippings and dirt, were escorted in by the guards.
The one on the left was heavily built. The backs of his hands were covered in bloody scratches from thorns and vines, and his eyes gleamed with a feral, beast-like ferocity.
The one on the right was much smaller and scrawnier, shrinking behind the burly youth. His head bobbed restlessly. The moment he entered the room, his gaze subtly and seamlessly swept over the door hinges, the ventilation gaps, and the refined steel longsword hanging at Soren’s waist.
A ripple flashed through Soren’s pupils. [Insight] activated.
As Soren’s gaze lingered for more than two seconds, the Warlord System’s translucent panel unfurled:
[Name: Gary]
[Class: Commoner Warrior]
[Talents/Proficiency: Trap Intuition (Excels at utilizing complex terrain to lay traps), Guerrilla Mastery (Able to use complex terrain for cover during movement)]
Soren shifted his gaze slightly, moving it to the man hiding in the back:
[Name: Meyer]
[Class: Spy]
[Talents/Proficiency: Chameleon (Exceptional camouflage abilities), Linguistic Mimicry (Can perfectly imitate any accent heard more than three times), Photographic Memory (Can memorize complex blueprints at a single glance)]
Soren’s hand, resting on the hilt of his sword, paused slightly.
A natural-born scout, and a peerless spymaster.
At this stage, his forces were practically blind. Relying on Ein and his men to climb trees and fumble around meant their field of vision was far too narrow.
Just as he was about to speak, the burly man, Gary, suddenly broke free from the guard trying to hold his shoulder down. He lunged two steps forward and dropped heavily to his knees with a loud thud.
"My Lord! I heard that over a hundred of those Greenskin bastards were slaughtered recently. I know it was you who did it!"
Gary craned his neck, shouting hoarsely:
"My name is Gary, and this is my younger brother, Meyer!"
"Ten days ago! A mountain scouting party from the Blackstone Clan entered our village. . ."
Gary dug his fingers so hard into the dirt floor that blood seeped from under his fingernails.
"Two hundred and ten people. They hung the elders and the babies from the dead tree at the village entrance and flayed them. They locked the women in the pigpens, carving flesh straight from their thighs to roast while they were still alive. . ."
"My brother shoved me into a cellar in the back mountain, hiding us under a pile of corpses. We lay there in the putrid, bloody water, listening to the screams for three days and three nights."
"Now the village is gone. Burned to ash."
The scrawny Meyer, who had been hiding in the back, paled and sank to his knees as well. He pressed his forehead firmly against the floor, his entire body trembling silently.
Gary looked up, his eyes burning:
"My Lord! You've dug so many traps outside your defensive line—you're preparing to fight the Orcs, aren't you!"
"Just give me the rustiest iron sword you have—even a sharpened wooden stick will do!"
"I won't ask for a single grain of your rations. In every charge, I, Gary, swear I will march in the very front rank! All I want is to hack those animals' bones to pieces!"