Chapter 83 83: Duolis
"Lord Duolis has guarded the northern border for three years with great merit and relentless effort. This time, he quelled the barbarian rebellion in just a few short months. He truly deserves to be called one of the pillars of our dynasty. Please, accept this cup of wine from me!" Radagon said, lifting his chalice toward the man standing beside him.
Seeing this, Duolis quickly lowered his own glass slightly, raising it just enough to clink against Radagon's, and replied humbly, "It was merely wiping out an unruly rabble, Your Majesty. You could have easily dispatched any general to achieve the same result. With my meager abilities, how could I ever be considered a true pillar of the state?"
Radagon shook his head and chuckled softly. "Lord Duolis, there is no need to be so modest. Now that Chief Ordovis and Sirius are growing old, there are only a handful of people in the court who remain in their prime while possessing outstanding military achievements like yours. If you are not a pillar, then who else can I rely upon as my right-hand man?"
Duolis nodded deeply upon hearing those words, no longer offering any polite refusal.
In truth, this display of a wise ruler and a virtuous minister was not a mere theatrical act put on for the court. As a Duke of the Golden Dynasty and the undisputed head of the New Faction nobility, Duke Duolis was Radagon's most trusted and reliable general. In the years leading up to the chaos in the Far North, it was Radagon who had fought against all odds and intense court friction to place Duolis in the crucial position of Guardian of the North. His singular aim had been to allow his closest confidant to gather unmatched military merit and prestige.
Once the decree had been signed, Duolis had hastily taken office, accompanied by his only son, Carlyle.
Over the course of three long years, this man first relied on Radagon's absolute authority to take over the supreme command of the Northern Legion with an extremely forceful attitude. He then systematically replaced and filled many of the mid-level officer ranks with his own close confidants, step by step firmly grasping the reins of the Northern Legion, which numbered as many as fifty thousand men.
By the time this meticulous consolidation of power was complete, two full years had already bled off the clock since he first rode north.
Seeing that he had focused entirely on securing his grip over the military bureaucracy for two years while the rebellions launched by the barbarian tribes—such as the Mountain Demons, Misbegotten, and the northern Orcs—were growing steadily worse, the Old Party nobles of Marika's line could no longer contain their fury. They openly denounced Duolis in the grand court, launching a unified demand that he be stripped of his position as Guardian of the North.
Public opinion was in an uproar, both inside the palace and across the outer capital. Even within the military ranks, rumors began to circulate that Duolis was about to be recalled in disgrace. Yet, surprisingly, Queen Marika, the absolute leader of the Old Party, remained entirely silent at this critical juncture. Because of her strange neutrality, and with Radagon's arduous backing, the Old Party's fierce political counterattack ultimately collapsed.
In the third year, just as the brief summer arrived, Duolis suddenly reversed his previous inaction. He ordered the entire army to exploit the only relatively warm period of the northern year to construct small, interlocking fortifications across the frozen snowfields. He even went personally to the hidden Flame Cultist sanctuary nestled deep within the mountains, and after reaching a strict consensus with the seven archbishops, extended his forward camps directly to the jagged line between Castle Sol and the outskirts of Ordina. Through sheer force of logistical will, they successfully erected hundreds of temporary fortifications in less than two months.
Immediately following this, Duolis ordered a ruthless scorched-earth policy across the entire northern theater. Every mobile patrol was instructed to pull back behind the walls of their fortified redoubts, and all supply transports climbing from the capital of Leyndell in the south up to the gates of Sol in the north were brought to an absolute halt at the same microsecond.
This massive tactical shift threw the barbarian insurgents into immediate, absolute chaos. Due to the brutal, freezing climate of the Far North Ice Field and their complete lack of a permanent agricultural baseline, the rebels had historically relied on executing lightning raids against the Golden Dynasty's patrols, supply wagons, and independent merchant caravans to fuel their operational logistics.
Initially, they hadn't feared the sight of these fat imperial sheep sealing themselves indoors. The settlements across the north were scattered miles apart, and the jagged mountain trails and unrelenting, howling blizzard storms routinely crippled the movement of state supplies. Under standard conditions, if the capital simply suspended its supply trains for a handful of days, it was mathematically equivalent to cutting the absolute lifeline of the entire northern territory.
But the current layout operated on a completely separate calculus. Duolis had spent his initial two winters constructing nothing less than an iron wall of defensive network—which comprised not merely a sequence of isolated garrison fortresses, but a coordinated matrix of massive supply depots capable of sustaining the garrisons independently for months. Even by severing his own supply routes, he possessed the structural reserves to simply wait out and grind down the desperate rebels wandering across the empty snowfields outside his gates.
After searching frantically for more than ten suns amidst the biting, howling winds and blinding snow of the Far North Ice Field, the starving rebels finally realized that the Guardian of the North—whom their chieftains had jokingly mock-cataloged as the "General Turtle"—had pushed his scorched-earth strategy to its absolute, terrifying extreme. Their outriders couldn't locate so much as a single grain sack or supply horse moving across the vast, frozen open fields.
Driven to the edge of survival by the biting cold and absolute starvation, the barbarian rebels—who had previously exploited their massive physical frames and intimate familiarity with the treacherous mountain trails to strike with high agility—were forced to abandon their mobility. They massed their disparate tribes, attempting to launch a series of desperate assaults against the smaller outposts by relying on their localized numerical superiority. Yet, they had fundamentally miscalculated Duolis's tactical layout.
Given the immense, endless parameters of the Far North Ice Field, fifty thousand troops scattered across hundreds of micro-fortresses appeared dangerously thin on paper. However, inside those restricted structures, Duolis had meticulously optimized the combination of his troop types down to the last digit.
Under his defensive arrangement, each fortification anchored a minimum core fighting complement of five elite Rodel Knights and ten Erdtree Incantation Monks. Duolis had utilized rigorous statistical analysis to guarantee that the specialized armaments, specific martial forms, and targeted healing and protective miracles clutched by these fifteen operators formed the absolute most optimized, un-yielding output matrix possible. They were backed by a secondary tier of one hundred to three hundred physically robust, heavy spearmen, sword-and-shield sentinels, and longbow archers, transmuting every single outpost into a brutally tough nut to crack.
Trapped in those conditions, the rebel forces—suffering from severe systemic hypothermia and hunger, utterly devoid of siege engineering, and thoroughly disorganized—immediately suffered catastrophic losses the moment their lines crashed against this ironclad defensive perimeter. Even across the rare instances where their sheer desperation enabled them to overrun a minor outpost at the cost of fivefold or even tenfold casualties, the scraps of food they harvested from the ruins were mathematically insufficient to compensate for the horrific price their numbers had paid during the siege.
More crucially, the chaotic alliance of tribes that had risen against the Erdtree had never possessed the structural discipline required to confront the Northern Legion in an open, head-on field engagement. By forcing them to mass their forces to execute these fortress assaults, Duolis had inadvertently solved the legion's greatest tactical headache—converting a scattered, elusive guerrilla insurgent group that was notoriously difficult to locate into a single, aggregated target class.
The second their sieges disintegrated, leaving their broken numbers to scatter and flee back into the mountains as was their historical protocol, they discovered their vectors had been completely sealed by Duolis's steel-mesh network of outposts. The microsecond they fractured into small survival bands, the highly disciplined golden garrison of the nearest fort would clear their gates to systematically hunt and liquidate them across the ridges.
On the fifteenth watch of October, five hundred miles southwest of Castle Sol, inside a vast, barren wilderness surrounded by a ring of five interlocking outposts, thirteen thousand starving barbarian rebels found themselves completely stripped of an escape route. Before their leadership could attempt to scatter, they collided head-on with Duolis's long-dormant, heavy mobile strike force.
The exact watch more than a dozen veteran Golden Heroes cleared the blizzard lines to function as the tip of the spear, leading six thousand elite heavy cavalrymen through the screaming frost and driving snow, the rebel army's frantic wall of flesh and bone was instantly shattered like brittle river ice struck by a massive warhammer. Their hot blood carpeted the endless white snowfield in a bewitching, steaming crimson, and the massive cloud of white powder kicked upward by the charging hooves transmuted the gale into a bleak, bloody storm of red mist.
The knights, encased in heavy, gold-plated armor, vented deep, steaming breaths through the iron filters of their visors. Their gauntlets gripped blood-slicked greatswords as their bloodshot, hyper-focused eyes scanned the length of the valley, but their tracking networks could no longer isolate a solitary intact adversary across the waste. Every coordinate of the basin was mapped with mangled remains of varying shapes and sizes, lost beneath the endless, un-blinking descent of the northern snow.
Thus, the barbarian insurrection that had violently bled the northern frontiers for over a decade was permanently finalized and erased from the ledger. Duke Duolis had single-handedly silenced every whisper of political dissent across the capital ministries with the most illustrious, absolute military triumph logged since the closing watches of the Unification Campaigns, safely anchoring his identity among the most celebrated, legendary commanders of the modern era.
His magnificent, triumphant return to the capital streets was engineered for a purpose far more critical than merely clearing the administrative checks to receive titles and land credits; more crucially, his presence hand-delivered a massive, desperately required structural boost to the New Faction's political leverage, which had sustained a sequence of severe setbacks across recent watches against the joint alignment of the Old Party and the Ancient Dragon Temple.
Consequently, across the parameters of this Imperial State Banquet attended by the absolute directors of the realm, Radagon's intense, highly publicized display of respect and intimate concern for his chief marshal functioned simultaneously as an administrative encouragement to his faction and an explicit expectation that the Duke would clearly, flawlessly state his position following his success, remaining un-yielding inside the New Faction's inner ring. Duolis's deeply respectful, perfectly humble courtly posture before the Consort's chair comprised the absolute simplest, most direct affirmation of that exact contract.
"Lord Duolis, your shield has resided within the northern frost boundaries for several winters, leaving your archives entirely blank regarding the personal data of Lucia, Radahn, and the other young children who have cleared our gates to join the court," Radagon spoke, a relaxed smile lifting his brow as his eyes casually drifted to evaluate the sector where the young demigods had gathered across the floor. "Perhaps your boots might clear the high tables later down the watch to offer a few words of elder encouragement to their circle?"
"Your Majesty may rest his mind; my office comprehends the directive perfectly," Duolis replied, his head bowing with absolute, un-chipped devotion.
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