Chương 291: 291：A Thousand Miles for a Banner

With the instructor appointments finalized, Soren's expression hardened into the grim, unyielding mask of a supreme commander. He took long, purposeful strides toward the center of the training grounds. There, the [Macedonian Phalanx], numbering over a thousand men, had already formed up in perfect, immaculate ranks, their pikes at the ready. Warchief Blackstone's thirty-thousand-strong army was preparing to encircle them.

Greywater Village desperately needed an even more terrifying, highly concentrated offensive spearhead to break the impending siege.

"Darion! Talon!" Soren called out to the two commanders of the pikemen. In his hand, he held a thick parchment ledger documenting the military merits of every single soldier.

"From the second-line pike formations, read these thirty names aloud! Have them step forward!" As the names were boomed across the training grounds, thirty heavily muscled, fiercely battle-hardened veterans stepped out of the phalanx. Among them were former human slaves liberated from the Orcs, and fierce Steppe barbarian warriors who had recently pledged their loyalty.

But without a single exception, they were all men who had held the line in the bloody meat-grinders against the Orcs, repeatedly surviving and accumulating the absolute highest tiers of military merit! Soren walked slowly down the line of these thirty veterans.

"Your deeds and your spilled blood are recorded crystal clear in the ledgers of Greywater Village." Soren reached out and pulled away the red cloth from a wooden tray held by an attendant, revealing thirty crystal vials radiating an eerie, abyssal green glow. The [Basic Troll Serum].

"Today, I officially promote you thirty men! You are hereby drafted into the frontline Black Steel elites! Strip off your half-plate, and go claim your [Dark-Silver Full-Plate] and your armor-piercing heavy halberds!" Soren picked up a single vial of serum, raising it high for all to see: "Drink it! Endure the agonizing, bone-drilling pain, and claim the power to tear Orcs apart!" The thirty veterans didn't display a microsecond of hesitation.

They stepped forward as one, took the vials, threw their heads back, and downed the thick serum in a single gulp.

"Urgh... AAAAAAAGH!" Harrowing, guttural roars of agony erupted across the training grounds one after another. The thirty veterans collapsed to their knees in the snow. Their muscles began to grotesquely, violently engorge at a speed visible to the naked eye. Thick, cyan veins bulged beneath their skin like writhing serpents, accompanied by the sickening, cracking symphony of their skeletal structures forcibly realigning.

Yet, under Soren's expectant, commanding gaze, not a single man backed down or lost consciousness. When the potion's effects were fully absorbed, and these thirty men slowly rose back to their feet... their physical frames had expanded by an entire size. With every breath, they exhaled thick plumes of white steam into the freezing air. Even a casual movement now possessed a tyrannical, terrifying kinetic force that utterly shattered the limits of human biology.

With this, Greywater Village's frontline vanguard—an invincible heavy infantry unit where every single man was encased in [Dark-Silver Full-Plate], armed with a heavy halberd, and equipped with a winch-drawn heavy repeating crossbow—had officially reached its absolute maximum operational capacity of exactly one hundred men! Meanwhile, even after drafting these top-tier elites, the second-line Macedonian Phalanx still maintained a colossal, highly formidable scale of 1, 004 men.......

After the massive military expansion ceremony concluded, Soren turned and strode back into the Lord's Command Cabin. Inside, Duran and Felix were standing ramrod straight, quietly awaiting the Commander's summons. Soren produced two more vials of the Basic Troll Serum, handing them directly to the two men.

"Take them," Soren ordered with absolute, unquestionable authority.

"In Abysswater Keep, Duran, you slaughtered two fully armed Orc elites barehanded."

"Felix, you operated entirely alone, deep behind enemy lines, and successfully assassinated multiple high-ranking Orc officers."

"Your battle records flawlessly meet Greywater Village's absolute standard for outstanding military merit. Drink it. This is the reward you have earned in blood." Duran accepted the serum with both hands, trembling so violently from sheer excitement that he couldn't even speak. Without a moment of hesitation, he poured it down his throat. Felix, the knight who normally maintained a veneer of aristocratic reserve, was equally thrilled as he gripped the crystal vial. He didn't say a word.

Instead, he executed a flawless, textbook swordsman's salute to Soren, before tilting his head back and draining the vial. As the violent effects of the serum took hold, Felix agonizingly clenched his jaw. Cold sweat instantly soaked through his linen shirt, yet relying entirely on his ironclad willpower, he endured the torturous skeletal realignment without uttering a single grunt of pain.

Taking advantage of the brief window while Felix absorbed the serum, Soren mentally called up the system to review this fallen knight's talent panel. He had originally assumed that a ruthless operative capable of executing three Orc Overseers inside a heavily guarded fortress would undoubtedly possess specialized talents like 'Covert Infiltration', 'Assassination', or 'Shadow Stealth'.

However, when the text materialized on the translucent blue panel, Soren was genuinely startled, immediately followed by an overwhelming, surging wave of absolute ecstasy! [Name]: Felix [Class]: Knight [Talent Panel]: [Knightly Swordsmanship Mastery]: A master of orthodox combat. Exceptionally proficient in both two-handed greatsword and sword-and-shield combat arts, boasting peerless capabilities in both mounted and grounded warfare. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

[Cavalry Charge Command]: An innate genius at orchestrating heavy cavalry shock tactics. When launching a charge, he perfectly maximizes formation cohesion, pushing mounts to their absolute peak velocity, and flawlessly transmuting that momentum into staggering, apocalyptic kinetic impact!

"So that's what it is..." Watching Felix's complexion gradually regain its color and his physical frame turn increasingly rugged and powerful, Soren mentally cheered. He had just picked up an absolute, continent-shifting treasure! Felix was never a damn assassin! The only reason he resorted to sneaking around and slitting throats in Abysswater Keep was simply because he had lost his warhorse and his family's retainers!

Pushed to the absolute brink of despair, he was forced to adopt extreme, unorthodox methods just to survive and fight! In his bones, in his very DNA, flowed the pure, orthodox blood of a Heavy Cavalry Commander! Soren understood perfectly well that on the continent of Eresia, the Heavy Cavalry Charge remained the most orthodox, mainstream, and devastatingly destructive doctrine of war.

Currently, Greywater Village's unit composition appeared flawless: the frontline heavy halberdiers to absorb pressure, the second-line pike phalanx to act as the meat grinder, the longbows and magical rangers to provide ranged saturation fire, and the Wolf Cavalry to handle high-speed flanking and harassment. But... Greywater Village strictly lacked a unit capable of pure, unadulterated structural devastation!

They lacked a force clad head-to-toe in heavy armor—where both man and mount merged into a tidal wave of metal—capable of violently shattering an entrenched enemy formation during a brutal stalemate: [Orthodox Heavy Shock Cavalry]! Buck's Wolf Cavalry was agile and highly lethal, but Wargs biologically could not bear the astronomical weight of heavy iron barding. They were strictly relegated to acting as light-to-medium cavalry.

There were two reasons Greywater Village had never formed a Heavy Cavalry unit: First, the treacherous, muddy terrain of the Misty Swamp simply couldn't sustain a massed horse charge. Second, Soren completely lacked an orthodox cavalry general capable of commanding such an elite, high-tier unit. A true heavy cavalry charge wasn't just a mob of men riding horses forward. It required exquisite, hyper-precise formation scheduling, velocity control, and the flawless kinetic conversion of momentum into impact!

But now, Felix's arrival perfectly, flawlessly filled this glaring void in Greywater Village's command structure!

"Felix." Soren stared at the newly empowered knight. In his mind's eye, he could already envision a future battlefield: A magnificent array of warhorses, clad entirely in impenetrable Dark-Silver barding, led by Felix as they tore through an Orc legion with earth-shattering momentum.

"Familiarize yourself with the newfound strength pulsing through your veins," Soren said, his voice brimming with profound, epic expectation.

"In the near future, I will procure the finest Northern warhorses for you. I will forge indestructible barding. The Heavy Cavalry Charge of Greywater Village... will be forged by your hands!" The mornings in Greywater Village always began with the rhythmic, thunderous roars of the geothermal blast furnaces.

Thick plumes of white steam spewed from the tops of the high furnaces, weaving seamlessly into the perpetually lingering, sickly-pale toxic miasma of the swamp, forming a striking, industrial landscape entirely unique to this territory. Soren had just concluded his routine morning inspection of the encampment.

"Lord Commander! Emergency military intel!" A frantic, heavy barrage of footsteps violently shattered the morning peace of the camp. Meyer, the Captain of Intelligence, didn't even bother to drop his camouflage disguise. He sprinted wildly through the mud, slipping and sliding in a state of absolute frenzy. He was running so fast that the usually calm and collected spymaster actually stumbled on the wooden stairs, gasping aggressively for air.

"Meyer, what happened? Has Warchief Blackstone's vanguard mobilized?" Soren instantly gripped his longbow, his muscles instinctively locking into maximum combat readiness.

"No... it's not the Orcs!" Meyer swallowed hard, desperately trying to calm his violently hammering heart. He looked up, his eyes wide with sheer, unadulterated disbelief:"It's humans! My Lord, it's humans! Over five hundred of them are currently massed right outside our northern chevaux-de-frise barricades!"

"Over five hundred people?" Soren's brow furrowed deeply.

"Which routed army is it? Or are they refugees from the Ironpeak Duchy?"

"Neither!" Meyer frantically waved his arms, his voice actually trembling with emotion:"They came here to enlist! They speak with accents from every corner of the continent! There are exiled veteran soldiers from the Silvermoon Kingdom, destitute rangers from the Holy Halycon Empire, and even hot-blooded youths from the southern coastal city-states!"

"They crossed thousands of miles of national borders! They slipped through the Orcs' heavily guarded blockade zones! They braved the toxic bogs and lethal predators of the Misty Swamp... And every single one of them came here seeking your banner!" Hearing this staggering report, Soren took a deep, slow breath. In his mind, the image of Battlefield Scholar Lucia's exclusive interview—the very gazette that was currently plastered across the mainstream publications of the entire continent—instantly surfaced.

"The Lifelong Pension and Care System for Crippled Soldiers."

"Leave No Man Behind."