Another World: Building an Empire from Zero

This wasn't merely to stretch their muscles; it was a necessary ritual to keep their brutal, bloodthirsty battle-lust boiling through the agonizingly dull winter days.

The Ironblood Overlord was originally slated to be a core member of the inspection delegation—a high-ranking representative dispatched directly from the [Blood Province] to the southern frontlines.

By all logical accounts, he should have traveled alongside the Governor’s blood-nephew, Mogg, and the Provincial Oracle to conduct the inspection of Bloodhorn Keep.

Yet, fate is a fickle mistress.

The Ironblood Overlord had always been a pure, unadulterated warmonger. He absolutely despised the Oracles from the Governor's estate—those charlatans who spent their days hiding behind mystical riddles and fake divine authority. The two factions were fundamentally incompatible in both political stance and operational style.

Furthermore, he and Warchief Blackstone, who commanded this region, shared a blood-forged brotherhood having fought shoulder-to-shoulder in countless campaigns. Therefore, when the inspection delegation passed through Bloodfang Fortress, the Overlord used the flimsy excuse of "inspecting the craftsmanship of the local battleaxes" to forcefully break off from the group, opting instead to stay behind and drown himself in strong ale with his old comrade.

It was precisely this capricious decision—born entirely of personal prejudice and petty grudges—that had miraculously allowed him to dodge the apocalyptic, catastrophic ambush within the Soulsever Gorge.

"Hmph. If I hadn't stayed behind to down two extra barrels of your ale, I’d likely have shared the exact same fate as that idiot Oracle. My head would have been cleanly severed by that human, Soren, and hung out to dry on his spiked barricades."

The Ironblood Overlord spat a low curse. With a sharp flick of his wrist, the heavy throwing axe tore out of his grip, burying itself securely into the edge of the granite target with a deafening CLANG.

Warchief Blackstone did not respond immediately.

The supreme ruler of a hundred-thousand-strong horde possessed an exceptionally towering and heavily muscled physique. Even standing entirely motionless amidst the flickering shadows of the braziers, he radiated a suffocating, blood-soaked aura of absolute oppression.

Taking a massive stride toward the nearby weapon rack, he hefted two more heavy throwing axes.

At this moment, whether it was the Warchief or the Overlord, both men appeared to be casually tossing axes, yet their gazes kept darting toward the heavy, tightly sealed oak doors of the grand hall.

They were waiting.

Anxiously awaiting the post-battle damage assessment from the Wyvern squadron's aerial bombardment.

"Soren... Greywater Village..." Warchief Blackstone's voice dropped to a rumbling growl. Another heavy axe shrieked through the air. He ground the two names out between his teeth with venomous emphasis:

"Overlord, are you aware that this anomaly of a human has already become the absolute, most despised enemy of the Governor of the Blood Province?!"

The Overlord let out a cold sneer. Hooking his remaining axe back onto his belt, he walked over to the heavy stone table and picked up a wooden tankard.

"How could he not be consumed by absolute fury? Young Master Mogg was the Governor’s most beloved blood-nephew! And the Oracle was his literal mouthpiece!"

"Soren didn't just slaughter them; he effortlessly uprooted our vital stronghold in the Misty Swamp—Bloodhorn Keep!"

The Overlord took a heavy gulp of the burning liquor. His leathery face tightened, revealing a rare flash of profound wariness.

His mind involuntarily replayed the fragmented battle report he had received previously. The terrifying, utterly bizarre tactical paradigms it described—achieving the absolute annihilation of two thousand elite Orcs with zero casualties—had fundamentally, violently shattered his comprehension as an orthodox military commander.

To the high command of the Orc Alliance, human border garrisons had always been synonymous with absolute pathetic weakness. They were nothing but a flock of cowards shivering behind stone walls.

But suddenly, out from among those cowards, a terrifying, apex predator had emerged! A commander who flawlessly understood cascading trap-kill zones and combined-arms infantry strangulation tactics.

These blinding, utterly horrifying combat records had delivered an unprecedented, catastrophic humiliation to the entire Blood Province.

For the very first time, the absolute highest echelons of the Orc Alliance had deeply, searingly etched the names "Greywater Village" and "Soren" into their minds.

Soren's forces had violently escalated to become the Blackstone Warband's paramount, existential threat. They had to be entirely eradicated, immediately, at absolutely any cost!

Warchief Blackstone turned around, the flickering braziers casting long, sinister shadows across his grizzled face.

"To avenge his slaughtered kin, and to salvage the Blood Province's completely shattered dignity within the Orc Alliance, the Governor has paid a truly exorbitant price this time."

The Warchief spoke in a low, rumbling timbre, his words dripping with a savage, sadistic anticipation:

"He bypassed all red tape and directly approved my request. He even specifically redeployed ten elite Wyverns—beasts entirely in their absolute prime—straight from his core Provincial Guard, placing them directly under my command!"

Ten fully-grown Wyverns!

Controlling the sky equated to holding absolute, one-hundred-percent certainty of victory in war.

Upon the tactical sandboxes of the Orc High Command, this was supposed to be a completely suspense-free, punitive slaughter—a textbook execution relying on utterly unsolvable air supremacy to obliterate the enemy.

After all, what could a miserable human border village possibly possess? A few rotting logs carved into chevaux de frise? A few pathetic spike-pits dug into the mud?

Facing colossal beasts hovering over a hundred meters in the sky, those ground-based defensive arrays were as completely useless as paper.

The objective shared by the Governor and the Warchief was absolutely clear: they had zero desire to occupy that toxic swamp. What they wanted was to use a hyper-violent aerial carpet-bombing to reduce Greywater Village, and the man named Soren, entirely to ash!

BANG!

The Warchief hurled another axe, but this time, his precision was visibly skewed. The heavy blade violently smashed against the iron rim of the target rack, unleashing an ear-piercing, grating shriek of metal before plummeting to the stone floor.

The Warchief froze, his massive chest heaving violently.

He made no move to retrieve the weapon. Instead, he pivoted sharply. Planting his massive, bear-like hands heavily onto the stone table, he locked his single, bloodshot eye intensely onto the Overlord.

"Overlord, throughout my entire life, I have only ever placed my absolute faith in the battleaxe in my hand and the blood of my enemies. But today..."

The Warchief revealed a highly uncharacteristic crack in his iron facade. He took a deep, shuddering breath, his voice dropping an octave. "I feel profoundly restless."

The Overlord's drinking motion hitched for a microsecond, his sparse eyebrows shooting up in genuine astonishment.

"My instincts are screaming at me."

The Warchief jabbed a thick finger toward the frozen southern expanse, grinding his teeth. "Soren’s army entirely defies all conventional military logic! He managed to flawlessly map the Oracle’s covert route through lethal miasma. He uprooted Bloodhorn Keep with an absurdly inferior force."

"An enemy of that terrifying, cunning caliber... would he truly just stand completely defenseless in an open square, obediently waiting for our Wyverns to crush him into the dirt?!"

Having waged brutal wars across this unforgiving continent for fifty years, Warchief Blackstone’s military sixth sense had been forged in the crucible of countless slaughters. Right now, it was relentlessly bombarding his mind with blaring, agonizing warning signals.

Yet, in the face of the Warchief's profound paranoia, the Ironblood Overlord merely slammed his wooden tankard heavily against the tabletop, erupting into a fit of arrogant, borderline maniacal laughter.

"Hahahahaha! Old friend, I think that two-thousand-man rout has completely shattered your nerve!"

The Overlord planted a heavy boot onto the wooden bench, puffing out his chest. His leathery face was painted with absolute, unadulterated contempt.

"Instincts?! In the face of absolute, unmatched physical power, instincts are a pathetic joke!"

He thrust a thick finger into the air, waving it with insufferable arrogance. "Who exactly are we fighting here? A pathetic border garrison of the Silvermoon Kingdom! The entire continent knows those backwater militias are equipped with absolute garbage! They couldn't scrape together a single decent set of Mythril plate if their lives depended on it! They absolutely do not possess a single scrap of anti-air weaponry!"

In the rigid, orthodox military doctrines of generals like the Overlord, absolute air supremacy equated to irreversible, god-like hegemony.

Dripping with utter disdain, he mocked, "Warchief, use your head! Hovering over a hundred meters in the sky, a standard human bowstring doesn't have the tension to even tickle a Wyvern's belly!"

"Even if that brat Soren possesses heaven-defying luck, and manages to rally every last crippled elder and child in that village to mass-volley their mundane arrows into the sky..."

The Overlord sneered relentlessly, delivering his self-proclaimed, absolute tactical verdict:

"At best! At the absolute best, relying on the blind luck of a dead rat, they might coincidentally scratch or shoot down a single one of our Wyverns!"

"A one-for-a-thousand slaughter! No matter how you run the math, this exchange ends with us brutally trampling them completely into the mud!"

Hearing the Overlord’s highly confident, pragmatic analysis, Warchief Blackstone's deeply furrowed brow relaxed slightly. Yet, that lingering shadow of profound anxiety in the depths of his eye simply refused to dissipate.

The two supreme commanders sat in silence, clutching their tankards and staring into the leaping hearth fires as they waited patiently.

A volatile mix hung in the air: the blind, wildly optimistic worship of Wyvern hegemony, completely intertwined with the gnawing, instinctual dread that refused to be shaken.

Time ticked by, second by agonizing second. As the fine sand trickled through the hourglass, the atmosphere within the grand hall grew increasingly, suffocatingly heavy.

Suddenly.

BANG!

The heavy oak doors were violently shoved open from the outside.

A howling, freezing gale laden with heavy snow violently surged into the hall, causing the suspended wall sconces to flicker wildly.

An elderly Shaman, draped in heavy, beast-hide robes, stumbled frantically into the room.

The Shaman—who usually maintained a meticulously crafted facade of mystical, unapproachable majesty—had run so frantically that the bone crown on his head sat askew. His face was as deathly pale as a sheet of parchment. His withered hands tightly clutched a magical communication tablet, its surface pulsing erratically with a faint, blood-red glow.

"R-Report... Warchief! Frontline... Frontline battle report!" The profound, unadulterated terror practically bleeding from the Shaman's voice was impossible to hide.

The apocalyptic shockwave contained within that single battle report instantaneously, violently shattered the heavy silence within the vaulted halls of Bloodfang Fortress.

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/cw/Smiling123