Chương 106: 106：The Uninvited Guest

The arrogant Duke's son abruptly stood up, pacing back and forth across the plush carpets of his grand tent. Not long ago, Alaric had personally led his royal guards up the ridge that had been washed completely bare of life, reduced to a blood-soaked plateau of bones. Over two hundred ferocious Blackiron Orcs, all dead from spear thrusts or having their chests violently caved in by armor-piercing halberds!

"That impossibly smooth cut that severed Gorzan's head, slicing through bone like it was tofu... that was absolutely the work of a master among masters..." Alaric muttered to himself, his eyes narrowing. His smuggled shipment of military-grade longbows and armor-piercing heavy arrows—at this very moment—was undoubtedly resting comfortably inside Soren's private armory! But how to make Soren spit it back out? If he dispatched an army for a frontal assault, Alaric, as a seasoned commander, knew the brutal reality.

In this miasma-filled swamp, his heavy Imperial cavalry would be completely bogged down. Soren would use the terrain to unleash a relentless guerrilla war, bleeding his elite knights dry, drop by agonizing drop.

"Valeriu!" Alaric suddenly spun around, a burning, intense light igniting in his icy blue eyes.

"Go prepare the horses! Select only the absolute best, the twenty most elite core knights of my retinue! You are coming with me!"

"Lord Commander? You wish to personally lead a punitive expedition to crush them?" Valeriu gasped in shock.

"Crush them? Bullshit!" Alaric ruthlessly snapped back, though a rare, almost imperceptible smirk of appreciation tugged at the corner of his mouth.

"They are a force capable of effortlessly slaughtering their way through hundreds of orcs!"

"First, the military assets I spent a fortune securing cannot simply be handed over to this Soren for free."

"And second..."

"I am going to personally meet the commander who started with twenty-five men and forcefully carved out his own bloody kingdom in this absolute death zone!" As an Imperial Commander, Alaric's mastery over men matched his towering arrogance. He saw the incalculable strategic value radiating from Soren. So what if Soren's current military rank was nothing more than a measly Knight Captain of a marginalized kingdom?

In an era of war and chaos, sheer, unadulterated competence was enough to make a Duke's son lower his head!

"Find the exact coordinates of Greywater Village immediately! Full speed into the heart of the mudflats! I will be the first man to knock on Greywater's gates!" Within the mist-shrouded territory of Greywater Village. The torrential rain had finally stopped. A gloomy, heavy light struggled to pierce the canopy, illuminating a settlement now pulsing with aggressive vitality. In the clearing behind the village. Rows upon rows of targets, stitched together from straw and beast hides, stood precisely thirty paces away.

"Keep your arms level! Breathe!"

"Do not stare at the arrowhead! Form a perfectly straight line with your jaw, your wrist, and the crossbow's mechanism!" Archery Instructor Ein paced fiercely through the ranks of the 4th-Line Reservists, an unyielding glare in his eyes and a thick rattan cane in his hand. This unit was a motley crew: elderly farmers with white beards, thick-handed women whose usual duty was stirring the stew pots, and even children barely thirteen or fourteen years old. Yet at this moment, their eyes burned with total focus.

Every single one of them gripped a newly minted Goblin Hand-Crossbow—freshly forged from Luger's assembly line at the blast furnace. Their fingers rested tensely on the triggers, bodies locked into rigid, standardized firing stances. Thwack! A muffled snap rang out. An old man's trembling finger slipped, misfiring his crossbow. The bolt missed the target entirely, burying itself deep into the mud. The old man flinched, shrinking his neck in fear of a beating.

Soren stood at the back of the formation, his hands clasped behind his back. He didn't utter a single word of reprimand. True military discipline wasn't built on screaming; it was fed, day by day, through relentless muscle memory. Mistakes during practice were permitted. Soren's goal was simple: to ensure that if the enemy ever breached the walls, even a village woman could close her eyes and instinctively pull an armor-piercing trigger at a distance of ten paces.

This was his vision of absolute, total mobilization. Just as Soren was running through the territory's development plans in his head, a series of rapid, splashing footsteps approached. Fina, the Master of Coin and Provisions, was rushing toward him. A fine sheen of sweat dotted her pale, aristocratic forehead. She had walked so fast she was practically panting.

"Lord Commander!" Fina lowered her voice, a flicker of genuine tension in her beautiful eyes.

"Deep breaths," Soren replied smoothly, not even turning his head. Fina's heart skipped a beat. The sheer, grounding weight of his calm forcefully suppressed her chaotic breathing. Regaining her composure, she delivered a sharp, professional report:"My Lord, the 3rd-Line Goblin Scouts patrolling the perimeter just triggered an emergency signal beacon ten miles outside the village." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"A massive VIP has arrived—someone we could have never anticipated!" Fina swallowed hard, her throat dry, her tone laced with urgency:"It's a small cavalry detachment flying the banner of the Imperial Griffon Scepter!"

"It's the Commander of the Royal Griffon Knights! General Alaric, the legitimate heir to a Dukedom in the Holy Halycon Empire!"

"He's brought only twenty escorts and is riding non-stop, personally heading straight for our gates!" After dropping this terrifying title, Fina stared at the side of Soren's face. A Supreme Commander of the Holy Empire! This was the equivalent of a radiant, mountain-shattering True Dragon suddenly nose-diving into their backwater mud puddle! The invisible chasm in social status and political power between them was immeasurable.

It was so vast that Fina, a noble-born lady trained in high society, felt her hands and feet turn icy cold the moment she received the intelligence. However. Faced with a bombshell that would have caused any Provincial Governor of the Silvermoon Kingdom to immediately throw themselves into the mud to welcome the guest... Soren's expression didn't change. Not a single muscle in his face twitched.

"Alaric?" Soren paused for a half-second. The gears in his mind clicked, instantly assembling the entire puzzle.

"He moved fast."

"That batch of military-grade longbows and armor-piercing bodkin arrows—the kind that would make regular armies drool with envy. The shadow merchant behind them was indeed this Imperial Commander."

"Smuggling Royal Imperial supplies under the guise of resisting the Orc invasion... he plays a slick game."

"But his shipment got hijacked by Gorzan's bandits. Then, I slaughtered Gorzan to the last man and hauled the entire arsenal back to Greywater."

"Looks like the original owner has come knocking to collect his goods." Want to take military assets out of my pockets? Unless snow lotuses bloom in this acidic mud. But what actually surprised Soren was Alaric's temperament and methodology. For a famously arrogant Duke's son to suffer a massive, silent loss, and not mobilize two thousand heavy knights to brutally flatten Greywater Village? Instead, he brought only twenty light cavalrymen right to Soren's doorstep. It was a brilliant political open-hand play.

He was here to probe Soren's bottom line, while simultaneously playing the role of the 'magnanimous lord humbing himself to recruit a talented subordinate.' Soren's expression remained utterly tranquil.

"Let him come. I don't care if he's the seed of a Duke or the spawn of the Emperor. Once he steps through the wooden gates of Greywater Village, even if he's a dragon, he'd better coil his damn claws and behave."

"Let's go, Fina. You grew up learning noble etiquette and know their tedious little games. You're coming with me to receive our guest." Soren stepped forward. He didn't increase his pace by a single fraction. He walked casually along the gravel-paved mud path, completely unhurried, as relaxed as a man heading to a tavern for a cheap pint of ale. Walking half a step behind him, Fina stared at her Lord's straight, unyielding back.

Seeing that he couldn't even be bothered to fake an ounce of urgency, the panic in her heart miraculously vanished. In its place, a blazing light of profound reverence and admiration flooded her eyes. Southwest corner of Greywater Village. A crude, hastily constructed wooden guest cabin. Outside, Alaric's retinue of twenty dazzling, gold-armored Imperial Knights had been "politely" directed to wait under a leaky rain tarp.

Inside the shabby, low-ceilinged cabin, the air was thick with the acrid smoke of a cheap wood fire. On the table sat two chipped clay bowls filled with boiled, but still visibly cloudy, swamp water. Archmage Valeriu stood awkwardly beside the uneven, raw-timber table. He didn't dare step casually, fearing his anti-slip leather boots would be ruined by the patchy mud floor. Drip. A drop of cold water slid through a crack in the ceiling and landed squarely inside the sleeve of Valeriu's priceless magical robes.

"This blasted, reeking acidic mud! What kind of barbaric wasteland doesn't even have a basic weather-warding spell on the roof?!" Valeriu gritted his teeth, his face flushed with deeply suppressed outrage. From the moment they arrived at the perimeter outposts and declared their Imperial titles, to being forcefully "escorted" (read: heavily guarded and marched at spear-point) by heavily armed pikemen to this literal dog kennel of a guest room...

The supposed "Legendary Commander," Lord Soren, hadn't even shown a shadow of his face! What was this? A deliberate power play? A slap in the face? Valeriu shot a glance to his side. Alaric, the Duke's son and Imperial Commander, wasn't flipping the table or roaring in fury. Instead, the brilliant, golden-haired general was sitting quietly on an uncomfortable, splintery log bench. He held the chipped, rough clay bowl in his hands, perfectly still.

There wasn't a single trace of impatience in his aristocratic posture. His piercing blue eyes were locked dead onto a small crack in the wooden wall, completely absorbed in watching every single movement of the Greywater soldiers drilling outside.