Chương 110: 110：The Imperial Commander's Despair

"A truly peerless army requires the unflinching, death-defying devotion of the common people." Alaric had read this exact phrase in countless ancient military texts. But as an Imperial Commander, he had always known it was romanticized bullshit. His Royal Griffon Knights were driven by the clinking of gold coins and the suffocating weight of aristocratic glory. Achieving that kind of mythical loyalty was fundamentally impossible!

Yet now, in this miserable, muddy backwater village of a few hundred people, he had witnessed with his own eyes the absolute pinnacle of civil-military unity—something that was supposed to exist only in legends! Alaric stared at Soren, who had just stood up and casually brushed the mud from his knees. A profound, bone-deep chill crawled up the Imperial Commander's spine. He is forging a god! Right here in the dirt!

He has planted the kind of fanatical, cult-like faith in the hearts of these commoners usually reserved for deities! For a single word from Soren, these mud-covered peasants would literally strip to the waist and kamikaze tackle a Blacksteel Orc! In this fleeting moment, the innate, towering arrogance of the Duke's son was thoroughly, undeniably crushed into the mud. Carrying this suffocating weight on his chest, the trio finally arrived at the training grounds in the southwest corner of the village.

Heavy, raw-timber targets dotted the perimeter. The air was thick with the explosive roars of drilling soldiers, the terrifying, rhythmic snapping of taut bowstrings, and the pungent, heavy stench of male sweat. Soren stepped up onto a raised wooden platform overlooking the field. Alaric's gaze immediately shot to the left side of the training ground. There, Archery Captain Ein stood bare-chested, his muscles glistening with sweat as he barked out a rhythmic cadence:"Draw! Hold breath! Loose!" THWAAANG!

Fifty bowstrings snapped back in perfect, synchronized unison. The overlapping sound was so dense it felt like the very air was being torn apart! A formation of fifty broad-shouldered, heavily muscled men stood in a rigid line. Their movements were terrifyingly uniform—even the angle at which the drawn bowstrings pressed against their chests was identical down to the millimeter. Fifty black streaks carved lethal, perfectly straight lines through the air. Thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack!

The arrows slammed into the center of the thick oak targets a hundred paces away. The kinetic force was so immense that the arrowheads split deep into the grain of the wood, the fletchings vibrating violently from the impact. Alaric saw it clearly. He recognized them instantly! The weapons gripped in the hands of those fifty shooters—coated in black, moisture-proof paint—were Imperial Military Heavy Longbows! Those were masterpieces that required five full years just to properly cure the ironwood!

And the ammunition those men were pulling from their leather quivers? The slender, triangular steel shafts... Those were the exact Armor-Piercing Bodkin Arrows he had lost at Bone Ridge! Arrows specifically forged to punch clean through the scales of Blacksteel Orcs! My armaments... Alaric's heart violently bled. He had literally just announced he was "gifting" them as a favor.

Now, watching these devastatingly lethal weapons display their terrifying power in the hands of someone else's troops, the pain was almost unbearable. Did he want to demand them back? Desperately! But he couldn't tear off his face as the Grand Commander of the Empire to do so! He could only take a deep, trembling breath and force his eyes away before his stoic expression completely collapsed.

Fortunately, his agonizing gaze was quickly captured by a dense, moving forest of black steel in the center of the training ground. It was Kyle, leading the phalanx of fifty-one heavily armored human pikemen! THUD! THUD! THUD! Fifty-one pairs of iron-shod boots slammed into the earth in perfect unison, sending acidic mud flying. Fifty-one men pressed tightly against each other, shoulder to shoulder. Their left arms were locked behind thick, iron-studded round shields.

Their right arms leveled massive, three-meter-long black iron military pikes! They formed a hyper-compact, five-rank square formation! Within this suffocatingly tight block, the spearheads of the second rank extended perfectly through the gaps over the shoulders of the first rank. The spearheads of the third rank extended through the gaps of the second. Three tiers of deadly black iron, layered and projecting forward like a mechanized porcupine.

"THRUST!!" Kyle roared, his voice cracking with exertion. The entire phalanx stepped forward a half-pace in perfect synchronization. Fifty black iron pikes violently stabbed the empty air, unleashing a unified, ear-piercing shriek of tearing wind. However. Watching this display, Alaric—who had just been deeply shaken by the village's morale—suddenly furrowed his brow. A look of profound confusion and disappointment flashed through his blue eyes. What an utterly backwards, archaic tactic!

Alaric couldn't hold his tongue any longer.

"Captain Soren, forgive my bluntness."

"Is this the core military force you relied upon to slay the Son of Titan and carve through the orc camp?" He shook his head, openly questioning the deployment:"Against primitive goblins or disorganized bandits, a dense formation like this is indeed effective."

"But this is the Misty Swamp! Our true enemies are the Blackstone Warbands! You deploy a formation with such suffocating density?"

"All it takes is a single Blackstone Centurion! Just one! When he charges in, he swings a hundred-pound battleaxe in a massive, sweeping horizontal cleave. Because you have absolutely zero skirmish spacing, your men are basically bunching up to offer their necks to his blade! One axe swing, and your entire front line's bones are shattered!" If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

"And that's not even mentioning the Orc Shamans! At this density, a Shaman casually tossing a single Flame Strike would roast all fifty-one of your men in one pot!"

"This isn't a battle formation. It's a suicide pact!" Facing the Imperial Commander's harsh, critical teardown... Soren's expression didn't ripple.

"Lord Alaric, you are absolutely correct. This kind of positioning naturally makes us a prime target."

"But that assumes the orc's battleaxe can actually reach my front line." Soren casually reached out, snapped a thin twig from a nearby fence, and squatted down. He rapidly began drawing lines in the dirt, visually breaking down his tactic: the scaled-down Macedonian Phalanx.

"Lord Alaric, I ask you to look closely at the differential in weapon reach." Soren tapped the dirt with the twig, pointing at his hypothetical phalanx.

"An orc relies on brute strength and genetic talent. Factor in their arm span and the length of a heavy battleaxe. Their absolute maximum lethal radius is two-point-five meters."

"But my phalanx infantry? They are wielding three-meter black iron pikes!" Soren violently thrust the twig forward, stabbing the circle representing the orc.

"The moment the phalanx plants its feet! Our frontal defense has zero blind spots! I don't care how berserk or terrifying the orc's kinetic impact is. When that Centurion attempts his horizontal cleave—hell, before he can even raise his axe to its apex..." Soren's eyes flashed with a freezing, murderous light. He held up three fingers.

"Simultaneously, there will be four. Remember, at least four razor-sharp, three-meter pikes projecting from the interwoven first and second ranks. Operating entirely within that safe half-meter range differential, they will ruthlessly preempt his strike, simultaneously impaling his eye sockets, his throat, his heart, and his gut!"

"They aren't charging a single man! They are charging a solid wall of fangs!"

"They will never even get the chance to initiate close-quarters slaughter! That is the absolute core of the Pike Phalanx." As a once-in-a-century military prodigy, Alaric only needed this single, precise breakdown to completely grasp the concept. Yes! The advantage of extreme polearms! It's a mobile, heavily spiked barricade! A brilliant, ecstatic light erupted in Alaric's icy blue eyes. He stared at the scaled-down Macedonian Phalanx relentlessly practicing their thrusts on the field.

He felt as though he had just unlocked the ultimate cheat code—a method for low-tier human infantry to successfully counter and slaughter elite orc shock troops on a frontal battlefield! If I take this tactic back... if I apply this to the two thousand auxiliary infantry attached to my Griffon Knights... But then. Alaric froze dead in his tracks. As a commander who had crawled out of mountains of corpses, the sheer reality of the battlefield suddenly crashed down on him.

He instantly recognized the true, terrifying prerequisite hidden within this seemingly simple formation. Fine beads of cold sweat began to seep from Alaric's forehead. He slowly looked up at Soren.

"But this is impossible..."

"How could anyone actually execute this?"

"Soren! Your frontal defense is indeed theoretically impenetrable."

"But picture the reality! Imagine the scene! A monstrous orc, completely painted in beast blood, standing a full head taller than a man. Muscles bulging like granite, eyes glowing crimson, drool dripping from his fangs. He is screaming like a demon, charging at you with an axe that can chop a horse in half!"

"The sheer, suffocating psychological terror of that impact... it is human instinct to step back! Even if it's just the knees going weak and flinching back half a pace!" Alaric threw his hands out, his voice trembling slightly as he stared at Soren.

"In a formation this tight, if even a single man in the front row takes half a step back out of fear..."

"Your interlocking defense instantly fractures! A gap opens!"

"That Blackstone Orc will instantly slam his massive body into that gap, get inside the spear points, and butcher the entire formation from the inside out!" Saying this out loud seemed to drain all the strength from Alaric's body. Yes. The Macedonian Phalanx didn't require secrecy. That was why Soren hadn't even bothered trying to hide it. Because the absolute foundation of this Phalanx—the literal mortar holding the bricks together—was the requirement of soldiers who viewed death as nothing!

This formation didn't wield god-like power on the battlefield because the spears were sharp or the geometry was clever. It worked solely because it demanded a level of psychological discipline where a soldier facing a roaring, charging orc wouldn't even blink! Even if the head of the brother standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them was smashed like a watermelon, they could not retreat. They could not dodge to the side. They had to stand their ground, level their pike, and thrust!

Alaric realized with total, crushing despair that the infantry of his Royal Griffon Knights were nothing but exploited, conscripted peasants. They were fine for fighting a winning battle, sweeping up routed enemies. But the moment they faced true, terrifying death? They would break and run. They fundamentally lacked the psychological fortitude to learn the Macedonian Phalanx. The only way to achieve it... was if Alaric did exactly what Soren had done. Treat the common soldiers with absolute fairness.

Protect them fiercely. Give them meat, give them warmth, and fight for their rights, so they would willingly die for him. But for him—a man flowing with the blood of a Holy Imperial Duke—that was nothing short of a laughable, impossible fairy tale.