231：Shattered Supremacy
The Ironblood Overlord turned around nonchalantly, downing the dregs of his ale in a single gulp. The cruel, arrogant smirk on his face only widened.
"What are you panicking for?! Look at you, trembling like a whipped cur! What, were Soren’s pathetic defenses a bit too prickly? Did they snag our payload nets?"
Taking a massive stride forward, the Overlord extended a hand, glaring down at the Shaman from his towering height.
"Speak. Exactly how much devastation did our glorious Wyvern Knights inflict upon that human mud-hole? Have they recovered Soren’s corpse yet?"
The elderly Shaman swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing violently. He absolutely did not dare to meet the eyes of the two supreme commanders. His knees simply gave out, and he collapsed heavily onto the freezing flagstones with a loud thud.
"N-No... it isn't that..." The Shaman's voice was a hoarse, ragged wheeze as he choked out the words that would violently shock everyone present to their very cores:
"The ten elite Wyverns deployed to Greywater Village..."
"Six of them... six of them were shot down on the spot by Soren's forces! The remaining four dumped their entire payloads and barely managed to flee back to the southern camps, completely consumed by absolute terror!"
An unprecedented, suffocating silence instantly slammed down over the vaulted hall.
Clatter.
The wooden tankard slipped from the Overlord's grip, smashing into two pieces against the floorstones.
His eyes bulged violently, filled with an utterly incomprehensible, world-shattering horror.
"What... what the fuck did you just say?"
The Overlord was absolutely certain he had misheard. He violently grabbed the Shaman by the collar, lifting the frail old Orc bodily into the air, flecks of spit flying onto the Shaman's face as he roared:
"Are you insane?! Six?! Those are six fully-grown, flying behemoths!"
"And you're telling me they were shot down by a pack of muddy, beggar-like villagers?! What the hell did they use?! Did they just reach up and rip the Wyverns from the sky with their bare hands?!"
Warchief Blackstone's massive frame violently jolted. A deafening ringing exploded in his mind. The towering warlord actually staggered two steps backward before collapsing heavily into his massive throne.
Over half their forces wiped out.
Six out of ten lost!
This catastrophic casualty ratio left both the death-hardened Warchief and the Ironblood Overlord entirely dumbfounded. In that singular fraction of a second, the fundamental military common sense they had spent their entire lives building was violently reduced to ash.
What "unsolvable hegemony"? What "absolute apex of the sky"?
Their supposedly untouchable air supremacy—the absolute trump card they believed made the Orc Alliance invincible—was instantaneously obliterated in the face of these merciless casualty figures. It had been reduced to a pathetic, utterly farcical joke!
"This is impossible... absolutely impossible..."
The Overlord numbly released his grip. The Shaman crumpled to the floor, shivering uncontrollably.
The Overlord clutched his own head with both hands, his facial muscles twitching violently. An intense wave of absolute absurdity, coupled with agonizing heartache and burning humiliation, plunged into the depths of his mind, profoundly torturing the two supreme commanders.
Those were core assets personally redeployed by the Provincial Governor! Every single Wyvern required oceans of resources and decades of agonizingly slow domestication to reach maturity!
Yet now, a human border garrison—a force universally recognized to possess absolutely zero anti-air capabilities—had systematically slaughtered their high-altitude magical beasts! This was tantamount to taking the absolute most elite foundation of the Blood Province and ruthlessly trampling it into the dirt!
"SOREN!"
Warchief Blackstone's long-suppressed fury finally reached critical mass and violently detonated.
He launched himself out of his throne. With a single, earth-shattering kick, he entirely pulverized the massive stone table in front of him. Heavy chunks of granite shrapnel flew in all directions, smashing into the old Shaman and leaving him bleeding from his head, yet the Shaman didn't dare attempt to dodge.
"INVESTIGATE!"
The Warchief let out a voice-cracking, blood-curdling roar:
"Dispatch every last scout we have! Even if you have to fill the swamps with their corpses, you will find out the truth!"
"That damned Soren! Exactly what kind of anti-air weaponry is he hiding in that dilapidated Greywater Village that can strike targets a hundred meters in the sky?!"
"Or did those humans receive some highly classified magical support from the Elves or the Holy Halycon Empire?!"
"If we do not figure out exactly what the hell this is, our army will live under Soren’s shadow forever! FOREVER!"
The Ironblood Overlord stood completely paralyzed, his eyes locked onto the pool of dark red blood seeping from the Shaman's forehead.
Mere minutes ago, he had been arrogantly mocking the cowardice of humanity, absolutely certain that the Wyverns would crush every last human soldier below into a bloody paste.
But at this exact moment, his absolute arrogance—his belief that all humanity was nothing but disposable weeds—was entirely reduced to ash in the face of six mangled Wyvern corpses.
He slowly bent down. With a slightly trembling, massive hand, he picked up a jagged shard of the shattered stone table. The sharp edges sliced into his palm, but he felt absolutely zero pain.
"Warchief..."
The Overlord spoke in a low whisper, his words heavy with a profound gravity. His dry, ragged voice echoed through the hall:
"We were wrong... We were so incredibly, completely wrong!"
He violently crushed the stone shard in his grip, granite dust falling like sand from between his fingers:
"We absolutely cannot use the conventional metrics of the Silvermoon Kingdom's regular army to judge that unit entrenched in the swamp!"
He raised his head, his bloodshot eyes swimming with absolute terror:
"Over a hundred meters in the sky, six heavily armored Wyverns! Exactly what kind of insidious, treacherous methods did Soren use to bring them down? The sheer threat level of this man has far, far exceeded the common sense of our entire history of warfare!"
Warchief Blackstone slumped back into his massive throne.
His single eye was locked dead onto the tactical sandbox of the Misty Swamp in the center of the hall. The location marking Soren's Greywater Village—originally just an insignificant, microscopic black dot—had now entirely mutated into a paramount, existential cancer threatening the very core of the Orc Alliance!
"You are absolutely right, Overlord."
"This is no longer a simple border skirmish."
Turbulent waves crashed through the Warchief's mind as a horrifying, apocalyptic strategic deduction fully formed in his head:
"Look at that location! Greywater Village sits exactly at the throat-chokepoint between the Blood Province and the two major human empires of the South! If Soren can use a mere few hundred men today to devour two thousand of our elites, decapitate an Oracle, and slaughter our Wyverns... what happens if we give him a year?! Two years?!"
The Warchief violently stood up, his colossal frame erupting with a terrifying, suffocating pressure. He paced furiously around the sandbox:
"If we allow this monster of a Lord to continue his explosive development, his entirely new tactical paradigm will rapidly spread across the entire human defensive line!"
"When that day comes, this thousand-mile stretch of the Misty Swamp will no longer be a safe rear-guard for our southern advance. It will become the absolute death-zone that buries our main forces!"
"The Blood Province's control over this entire region will completely and utterly collapse!"
Never before had such an intense, suffocating sense of crisis driven the two supreme Orc commanders to the brink.
Soren had to be eliminated! At absolutely any cost!
That singular thought crystallized simultaneously in both their minds.
"But... massing a main army requires time." The Ironblood Overlord stepped up to the sandbox, his brow deeply furrowed as he coldly analyzed their current dilemma.
"The Misty Swamp's environment is exceptionally hostile, choked with toxic miasma. Mobilizing the rations and heavy logistics for an army of a hundred thousand and forcing a march in the dead of winter... even our absolute strongest Orc infantry would suffer a thirty percent casualty rate to the swamp alone before ever reaching his walls."
He paused, shooting a dark glance toward the corridor where the Shaman had just scrambled away, grinding his teeth:
"As for air supremacy... the Wyvern fleet is fundamentally crippled. No matter how apocalyptically enraged the Governor gets, it is absolutely impossible for him to deploy his few remaining precious Wyverns on a suicide run. Conventional rolling-crush tactics are entirely obsolete against Soren."
The Overlord narrowed his eyes, a dark, venomous scheme taking root in his mind.
He suddenly raised his head, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, proposing an idea that severely violated orthodox Orcish combat traditions:
"Warchief. Since the Wyverns' brute-force assault failed to breach his defenses, and massing our main army is hindered by the winter logistics... why don't we employ unconventional warfare?"
"Unconventional warfare?" The Warchief’s single eye narrowed.
"Exploit the inherently vile, greedy nature of humanity!"
"Soren's Greywater Village has recently skyrocketed in infamy; he is undoubtedly absorbing massive waves of refugees and routed soldiers. Humanity is a pathetic race! As long as you feed them enough gold coins, they will betray absolutely anything!"
A savage, Machiavellian smile twisted the Overlord's face:
"I propose that I personally orchestrate this operation! We will tap into the secret treasuries of the Blood Province. We will deploy the human traitors we heavily bribed long ago—the ones meticulously trained by our Orcish intelligence network!"
"We have them blend in with the refugee waves! Let them covertly infiltrate Greywater Village, inch by inch!"
"Poison them from the inside! Sabotage their anti-air ballistas! Steal their perimeter trap blueprints! And perhaps... while that arrogant Lord is fast asleep, slit his damn throat!"
Listening to this rough blueprint for espionage and assassination, Warchief Blackstone slowly nodded.
"But relying solely on a few human traitors for an assassination is not enough to put my mind at ease."
Warchief Blackstone stepped back up to the sandbox. He grabbed a massive handful of blood-red flags representing Orcish military units and ruthlessly stabbed them into the map, completely surrounding Greywater Village.
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