236：The Disposable Vanguard
"What?!"
Renn’s shiny bald head violently snapped up, his eyes bulging with absolute, incomprehensible shock. "Absorb... absorb their unit?!"
Although Renn was a roughneck, he was well aware of the terrifying ferocity of the Steppe Barbarians. Legends spoke of these men—raised on fermented mare's milk—drawing heavy longbows from horseback and eagerly wrestling giant bears bare-chested in infantry brawls.
But!
"My Lord! You must reconsider!" The veins on Renn's forehead bulged as he dropped his voice to a frantic hiss:
"They are currently flying the official war-banners of the Ironpeak Duchy! They are eating the Duchy's official military rations!"
"If we casually march onto an allied defensive line and forcefully poach their garrison? The moment word of this gets out, the Ironpeak Duchy will completely sever ties and declare all-out war on us!"
Looking at Renn’s thoroughly panic-stricken face, Soren merely let out a cold, dismissive sneer.
"Eating the Duchy's official military rations? Renn, open your eyes and look closely. Do those men look like they've eaten a full meal in weeks?"
Soren harbored an absolute, visceral disgust for high-society politicians. Combining Meyer’s intelligence reports with his own razor-sharp battlefield observations, he mercilessly tore the veil off the filthy politics operating behind this freezing defensive line.
"These Steppe Barbarians have lived upon the vast, sweeping plains of the distant North for generations. Do you want to know what the ultimate, sickening irony is?"
Soren raised his voice against the howling blizzard:
"Their ancestral homelands do not share a single inch of border with the Orc Alliance's Blood Province! Even if the Orc horde marched north, they would have to completely overrun the Ironpeak Duchy and the Silvermoon Kingdom first before ever reaching the steppes!"
"But! The moment the human defensive lines began to buckle, and the desperate conscription mandates spread across the realm..."
"These Barbarian men—who are universally spat upon by the civilized nobles of the South—chose the survival of humanity as a whole! To prevent human women and children from being butchered by those green-skinned beasts, they abandoned their vast, open plains where their horses could run free."
"They voluntarily led their warhorses up into these treacherous, entirely alien, high-altitude mountains where even breathing is agony. And they did it to bleed and die for the very aristocratic lords who are currently cowering by their warm hearths!"
Hearing this, Renn’s heart violently trembled. Looking down at those ragged, freezing silhouettes, his previous misgivings instantly dissolved, replaced by a profound, heavy respect.
"And what exactly was their reward?" Soren ground his back teeth, his words dripping with pure, unadulterated venom:
"They are viewed with absolute contempt by the Ironpeak Duchy's regular army! They are mocked as 'uncivilized savages' by those impeccably dressed aristocratic officers! They are treated as highly disposable, utterly worthless cannon fodder!"
"Renn, why exactly do you think they lack armor? Why don't they have master-crafted heavy swords?"
Soren meticulously dissected the unimaginably ugly political motives of the Ironpeak high command, laying bare the absolute, brutal truth for his subordinates:
"It absolutely isn't because the Ironpeak Duchy is starved for funds. The root cause is paranoia! It is the sheer, suffocating terror of the ruling class!"
"These Barbarians are far too lethal. Too ferociously capable of slaughter."
"The high command of the Ironpeak Duchy is terrified. They know that if they ever arm this foreign force with razor-sharp military pikes and impenetrable heavy plate armor... if these outsiders ever grew furious and turned their blades inward, the Duchy's main legions wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of suppressing them!"
"Therefore, they deliberately, maliciously withhold their armaments. They refuse to provide adequate grain logistics. They subject them to the most blatant, institutionalized discrimination within the defensive hierarchy."
"They intentionally issue them the absolute worst scrap metal, then shove them right into the meat-grinder at the very vanguard of the Broken Blade Mountains! They are literally using them as cheap, disposable ablative armor to bleed the Orc horde!"
Soren’s words were exceptionally ruthless, flawlessly laying bare the sickening, Machiavellian darkness of the Ironpeak rulers.
"They are expected to hold the line against Orcish heavy axes in the dead of winter, while simultaneously having to guard their backs against the insidious starvation and betrayal of their own 'allies'."
"This is an entirely hopeless, one-way suicide mission deliberately designed to bleed them completely dry."
Soren slowly stood up to his full height, allowing the violent blizzard to lash against his face.
He stared down at those Barbarian warriors who, despite being entirely trapped in a political death-sentence, still gripped their broken swords with a white-knuckled intensity, ready to bleed to the last man to block the Orcs' charge.
This was exactly what Soren lusted after! This absolute, unyielding resolve! This terrifyingly fierce will to fight to the death for the greater good of their race!
"Right now, Greywater Village boasts an absolutely inexhaustible supply of [Swamp Tubers], and a volcanic forge capable of mass-producing purified Black Steel heavy plate!"
Soren's eyes burned with the absolute, dominating ambition of a warlord craving elite talent:
"These are men who have survived the most lethal frontlines and the most utterly depraved political meat-grinders! If I clad them in my Black Steel, and if I fill their bellies with hot meat... they will instantly become the most apocalyptic, terrifying slaughter-squad on this entire continent!"
"They are the absolute, perfect candidates for Greywater Village's military expansion! I, Soren, am going to give them a genuine path to survival!"
His declaration possessed an earth-shattering gravity, leaving Renn utterly awestruck and his blood boiling with pure adrenaline.
To hell with the Duchy's defensive lines! To hell with factional red tape! In the face of Soren's absolutely tyrannical, results-driven military creed, all those pathetic rules completely lost their meaning!
However, as a loyal subordinate, Renn had to bite the bullet and point out the final, most fatal flaw in the plan:
"My Lord, I harbor the utmost reverence for your righteousness and grand strategy. But if we truly poach this entire army... and the Ironpeak Duchy decides to pursue the matter, escalating their grievances all the way to the Holy Halycon Empire..."
"Pursue the matter? Escalate their grievances?"
Hearing this, not a single trace of anxiety appeared on Soren’s face. Instead, he let out a brazen, wildly arrogant sneer.
He turned around, clasping his hands behind his back, radiating the absolute, suffocating confidence of a mastermind manipulating the geopolitics of the entire continent.
"Renn, have you forgotten exactly who currently stands as our political backer?"
Soren looked down upon the distant borders of the Ironpeak Duchy, his tone entirely brimming with unshakeable audacity:
"The Ironpeak Duchy is nothing more than a vassal state of the Holy Halycon Empire."
"And the Supreme Commander of the Holy Halycon Empire's Northern Front, Grand Duke Valentine..."
Soren scoffed coldly, his stark white teeth flashing in the gloom:
"I, Soren, personally snatched that old bastard's life right out of the hands of a Shadow Priest! To this day, he still owes me his life!"
"So what if I casually absorb a batch of unpaid, heavily abused sacrificial troops from one of his minor vassal states?"
"As long as I, Soren, remain entrenched within the Misty Swamp for a single day... as long as I continue to act as their absolute shield against Warchief Blackstone's horde..."
"Even if the high command of the Ironpeak Duchy is suffocating on their own fury, out of sheer deference to Grand Duke Valentine, they would absolutely never dare to officially sever ties with me over a tribe of 'savages'!"
Absolute military strength. Earth-shattering battle merits. And an entirely unassailable political shield.
Soren had calculated this brutal political equation with absolutely flawless, terrifying precision.
Renn was utterly, completely subjugated. He crossed his arms over his chest and bowed deeply, his voice actually trembling with pure excitement: "Your foresight is boundless, My Lord! I am prepared to die ten thousand deaths for you! What are your orders?"
"Hold your positions."
Soren dropped back down into the snowdrift. His falcon-like gaze locked intensely onto the deeply suffering Barbarian camp below:
"I am going to march down there personally. I'm going to meet these iron-willed men that the human faction so casually discarded. And I am going to offer them a chip... they absolutely will not be able to refuse."
The blizzards of the Broken Blade Mountains were exceptionally brutal, ruthlessly ravaging the pitch-black night.
Soren halted his advance behind a leeward rock outcropping. He unslung the [Windwhisper Bow] from his back, reversing his grip to firmly wrap the weapon deep within his heavy cloak to prevent the freezing ice from seizing the bowstring.
He turned his head, looking back into the boundless, swirling blizzard.
"Lyra," Soren issued a low command.
Lyra, her silver hair dancing wildly in the wind, materialized completely silently from the snow. Her stealth-oriented light armor was heavily dusted with white frost, and the twin daggers she held in a reverse grip gleamed with a lethal, icy light in the darkness.
"Take the seventy Black Steel elites. Set up a concealed position behind the snowbank exactly five hundred paces outside the pass walls. Deploy in a wide, fan-shaped overwatch formation."
Soren's gaze was frighteningly cold. Even though his current objective was recruitment, the extreme paranoia and caution of a modern special forces operator had long since been etched into his very DNA:
"If Renn and I do not emerge within exactly thirty minutes, or if you hear the sounds of combat erupting inside the pass... do not wait for my signal! Immediately execute a suppressive heavy crossbow volley to sweep their walls, breach the gates, and slaughter your way in!"
"Understood, My Lord. Your back is safe with us." Lyra nodded, her face an emotionless mask as she made a sharp tactical hand signal behind her.
Within the snowdrift, seventy exceptionally burly juggernauts clad in matte-black [Black Steel Full-Plate Armor] stood entirely motionless. Like phantoms, they seamlessly blended into the boundless blizzard, silently establishing an airtight, lethal crossfire kill-zone.
Having established his absolute fail-safes, Soren finally patted Renn on the shoulder.
"Let's go. Time to formally meet these Barbarian warriors of the steppes."
The two men braced themselves against the howling gale, taking massive strides directly toward the mountain pass.
The defensive fortifications of the pass were so abysmally dilapidated it was physically sickening. A few thick pine logs were haphazardly lashed together to serve as chevaux de frise. And what should have been a heavily reinforced iron gate was actually just a few broad, rotting wooden planks barely nailed together, currently caked in thick, heavy layers of freezing ice.
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