Chương 223: 223：The Wyvern Raid

Soren drew his fine-steel longsword. Shifting his weight, he fluidly executed a diagonal slide-step.

"When thrusting the halberd, blade your stance! Use your hardened pauldrons and the thickest part of your breastplate to absorb incoming strikes! When retracting your step, tighten your guard, utilizing the suppressive weight of your polearm to shield your lower leg joints! Never, ever expose the unarmored gaps at your neck or beneath your knees to an enemy's short-blade!" This meticulous, highly pragmatic instruction triggered an absolute epiphany among the vanguard elites.

As battle-hardened, practical fighters, they immediately began mirroring Soren's movements in place. They simulated the rapid shifts in their center of gravity, profoundly grasping the technique of using weapon positioning and dynamic footwork to actively conceal their armor's inherent physical blind spots.

"Point Three: Stamina Consumption and Load Distribution!" Soren's voice cut cleanly through the freezing wind:"This Black Steel armor isn't just an impenetrable physical fortress; it is a suffocating, boiling oven. If you swing your weapons wildly with zero restraint, within ten minutes, severe dehydration and oxygen deprivation will put you in the dirt before the enemy even touches you!"

"Listen to me! When on the offensive, unleash explosive kinetic force! But when the frontline deadlocks—breathe! Learn to consciously regulate your breathing rhythm inside those heavy helmets!"

"Use the absolute minimum micro-movements necessary to parry incoming strikes! Hoard your stamina, saving your most taxing, devastating cleaves for the exact fraction of a second when the decisive, lethal strike is required!"

"Your stamina is the sole currency that buys your survival!" Finally, Soren turned and pulled a massive, two-and-a-half-meter-long armor-piercing heavy halberd from a nearby weapon rack. This monstrous polearm featured a wicked, reinforced thrusting spike at the tip and a broad, heavy axe-blade on the side—a weapon engineered explicitly to butcher heavy infantry.

"The final point! Phalanx Formation Advance!" Soren violently slammed the butt of the halberd into the earth, the ground trembling upon impact, as he laid down the ultimate tactical doctrine for these seventy elites.

"You will lock ranks! Form a dense, impenetrable thicket of armor-piercing halberds! Absolutely no individual heroics!"

"Weaponize your Black Steel defensive superiority! Completely ignore any light skirmishing from the enemy! Stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a dense shield-wall and use these two-and-a-half-meter polearms to relentlessly steamroll forward! You will form an insurmountable wall of moving iron! Crush the Orcish infantry lines!"

"Compress their swinging arc! Force them into a dead corner, and brutally skewer every last one of them on your halberds!" The howling wind swept across the dormant volcanic crater, yet the clearing remained utterly silent. The seventy vanguard elites listened with rapt, unbroken focus, unwilling to even blink.

Soren's curriculum—a flawless, lethal amalgamation of modern special forces tactical doctrine, raw physics, and medieval heavy armor—had fundamentally, violently shattered their primitive understanding of warfare as a chaotic, mindless melee. They deeply understood that what they were learning today was the absolute law of maximizing their physical superiority in a slaughterhouse.

"Do you understand?!" Soren roared.

"Sir, yes Sir! My Lord!" The synchronized, thunderous roar of seventy juggernauts shook the very earth. Every single man was practically overflowing with battle-lust. The profound reverence for their new hardware, completely intertwined with an insatiable hunger to execute these new tactics, fundamentally upgraded the combat paradigm of this heavy infantry unit. Looking at his subordinates, Soren nodded in deep satisfaction.

He knew with absolute certainty that when these seventy heavy troopers—clad in Black Steel Full-Plate and armed with lethal, scientific tactics—were deployed into the next brutal meat-grinder within the Misty Swamp, they would introduce those arrogantly invincible Orcs to the true, suffocating terror of having absolutely nowhere to run. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

A quiet afternoon settled over Greywater Village, the territory operating with clockwork efficiency. Standing in the center of the village square, Soren looked down, auditing the logistical manifests submitted by his Chief Financial Officer, Fina. The rhythmic clanking of hammers echoed in the background.

In the distance, the geothermal blast furnaces spewed thick plumes of smoke tinged with the sharp scent of sulfur, while goblins navigated the muddy paths pushing wooden wheelbarrows overflowing with [Swamp Tubers].

"My Lord, based on our current consumption rates, our reserves of dehydrated premium sorghum will only last..." Fina was busy circling figures on the parchment with her quill. Suddenly, Soren's breath hitched in his throat. Ding! [Warning! Talent 'Danger Perception' Triggered! Crisis rapidly approaching!] An absolute, freezing terror spiked straight from the base of his spine to his skull. Soren's muscles instantly pulled taut like a fully drawn bowstring, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. But...

something was wrong. Soren's mind raced at terrifying speeds.

"My [Danger Perception] instinctively warns of hidden arrows or magical lock-ons within a hundred-meter radius. But the perimeter of Greywater Village is choked with hundreds of heavy beast-traps, interlocking toxic spike-pits, and chevaux de frise! If this was a ground assault, or even a cloaked assassin, Meyer's hidden sentries would have triggered the alarms long ago!" Soren frantically scanned the dense, horizontal fog. There were zero ripples of mana fluctuations. Not a single echo of a snapping twig.

"No danger on the ground. Nothing in front, behind, or to the sides... Then, the only absolute blind spot is..." Soren violently snapped his head up, staring straight into the gloomy, overcast sky. The sky! Even though the grey, freezing mist churned high above, rendering any enemy completely invisible to the naked eye and muffling even the cry of a bird, Soren immediately deduced the threat.

"It's an aerial bombardment originating from completely outside our defensive perimeter! They're targeting the village directly!" Without a single microsecond of hesitation, Soren violently shoved Fina aside mid-sentence.

"Enemy attack!" Soren drew his fine-steel longsword, ruthlessly hammering the flat of the blade against the massive bronze alarm bell suspended in the center of the square. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! The thick, deafening tolls violently shattered the tranquil afternoon of the territory.

"Everyone in the village, drop everything you are doing right this second! This is not a drill! Eyes to the sky, prepare for anti-air protocols!" Soren channeled the full power of his lungs, his thunderous roar echoing into every single corner of the territory:"All fourth-line logistics personnel, the elderly, women, children, and crippled veterans! Evacuate south to the primeval forest immediately! Move! Get under the tree canopy and into the half-elf treehouse bunkers!"

Though absolute terror painted the faces of the toiling villagers at the sound of the bell, thanks to Soren's insanely strict, daily military drills, not a single person panicked or ran blindly.

"Move! Drop those worthless potatoes and lumber! Run south!" Kyle, the Quartermaster and Spearmen Captain, let out a savage roar. Relying on his raw, brute strength, he clamped a crippled, mobility-impaired veteran under each arm and sprinted like a madman toward the southern forest.

"Forget the pots and pans! Save your lives! Get under the canopy cover!" The second-line soldiers instantly surged from the barracks, forming human walls at the intersections to ruthlessly and efficiently direct the flow of the evacuation. The elderly half-elf women and young human girls clung to each other, rapidly vanishing into the dense, southern primeval forest along the soldiers' pre-designated safety routes.

The towering canopies and tightly overlapping branches instantly provided them with a natural, heavy anti-air umbrella. Just as the village completed its lightning-fast evacuation, and the very last goblin apprentice scrambled wildly into the bushes at the forest's edge... WHOOSH! A deafening, thunderous howl of violently displaced air erupted from high above the cloud layer. The distant, low rumble morphed into an ear-piercing, structural-shaking roar within seconds.

"They're here," Soren muttered. Standing completely alone in the center of the empty square, he tilted his head back and activated his [Eagle-Eye Perception]. His dynamic vision instantly pierced the thin mist, locking onto the high-altitude airspace. The cloud layer was violently ripped open. Ten colossal, pitch-black silhouettes descended like falling meteors, radiating a suffocating, blood-soaked aura of oppression as they brazenly entered the airspace directly above Greywater Village!

They were ten fully-grown Orcish Wyverns! Every single one of these apex aerial predators boasted a terrifying wingspan of over twelve meters. Their bodies were densely plated in virtually impenetrable, dark-green keratinous scales. Every single beat of their massive, leathery wings churned up localized, visible tornadoes in the freezing air. And clutched securely in their wicked, razor-sharp talons were massive hanging nets.

Woven from thick, steel-like vines, these heavily bulging nets were packed with hundreds of pounds of solid boulders and brutally sharpened iron spikes. Soren's split-second early warning had bought the territory the absolute most precious window of reaction time. By now, the village square was entirely deserted. High in the sky, the Wyvern Riders peered down at their target. The Orc Captain, mounted atop the lead Wyvern with his face painted in bloody war-stripes, let out a cruel, mocking sneer.

"Hahaha! Look at those pathetic, dilapidated human wooden shacks! They'll be crushed into splinters!" The Orc Captain raised his heavy spear, laughing maniacally into the howling wind. In the traditional military doctrine of the Orc Alliance, while a pathetic human swamp-village might rely on insidious traps on the ground, against a high-altitude aerial strike, they were absolutely defenseless prey! The maximum effective range of a standard human infantry bow couldn't even scratch the paint at a hundred meters.

The Orcs believed they didn't have to account for anti-air fire whatsoever!

"Enjoy this one-sided slaughter, boys! Let these miserable worms learn the price of angering Warchief Blackstone!" the Captain roared, violently pulling his reins.

"Cut altitude! Dive-bomb them to hell!"