Chương 313: 313：The Zero-Casualty Miracle

"You were a brilliant general who should have illuminated the entire continent, Soren. It is a tragedy that the gods granted you so little time..." Alaric closed his eyes. In his mind's eye, he could already picture the horrific, tragic scene of Greywater Village burning to the ground beneath the crushing hooves of the Centaurs. BANG! Just as Alaric was drowning in his sorrow, the heavy oak doors of the tower command post were violently smashed open! Freezing wind and swirling snow rushed into the room.

The adjutant of the Royal Griffon Regiment—a battle-hardened, high-ranking knight—stumbled frantically through the doorway. His expression was one of pure, unadulterated shock. He completely forgot to execute a standard military salute. Clutching a parchment war report just delivered by the high-altitude Griffon scouts, he stammered, his voice trembling violently:"C-Commander! It's here! The first battle report from the Greywater Village frontline... it's here!" Alaric's eyes snapped open.

His towering frame shot up from his chair. Lunging forward, he grabbed the adjutant by the shoulders, his voice thick with desperate urgency.

"Greywater Village... has it fallen? Is Soren... is he dead?!"

"N-no!" The adjutant gasped for air. With trembling hands, he offered the parchment scroll up to Alaric and roared:"Greywater Village has not fallen! Not only have they not fallen... Lord Soren didn't even activate his main defensive arrays! Using only one hundred infantrymen and a few dozen Wolf Riders, right at the edge of his defensive line, he orchestrated an apocalyptic slaughter! He completely annihilated the five-hundred-strong Centaur vanguard! And... and..."

The adjutant swallowed hard, his eyes bulging in disbelief.

"Greywater Village suffered zero casualties!" BOOM! Those two words—zero casualties—struck Alaric's mind like a physical thunderbolt. Alaric was gripped by a profound, unprecedented shock! He snatched the war report from the adjutant's hands, his eyes devouring the parchment as if trying to permanently sear every single syllable into his brain.

The report painted a painstakingly detailed picture of the battlefield observed from the sky: One hundred human infantrymen, clad in pitch-black armor, stood entirely exposed on an open slope. Braving the full-draw, heavy volley fire of five hundred Centaur elites, they executed a merciless, forward-marching steamroll! The Centaurs' raw iron heavy arrows—projectiles packing enough kinetic force to cleanly punch through rhinoceros hide—slammed into the infantrymen's armor, failing to leave even a single dent.

The arrowheads simply shattered into dust! Immediately after, those infantrymen leveled bizarrely designed repeating crossbows, erupting with a localized storm of suppressive fire so rapid and terrifying it made even the sky-bound Griffon Knights shudder! Coupled with the highly agile Wolf Riders executing flanking and severing maneuvers... five hundred arrogant Centaur vanguards were wiped off the face of the earth in less than half an hour!

"H-how... how is this even physically possible?" Alaric muttered, his voice trembling with awe.

"One hundred infantrymen actually dared to break cover and reverse-push a highly mobile horse-archer force? And with zero casualties?! Just what kind of cursed metal is that armor forged from? How do those repeating crossbows possess such staggering range and penetrative power?!" Alaric stared intently at the tiny marker for Greywater Village on the strategic sand table. That man, Soren... Just what kind of terrifying, epoch-making army had he forged within that foul, rotting mire?!

"Commander, I would argue that this is absolutely nothing to celebrate." Just as Alaric was drowning in profound awe, a sharp, caustic voice echoed from the shadows of the room. It was the Senior Military Advisor assigned to the Griffon Regiment by the Imperial High Command. This calculating bureaucrat—who always wore impeccably pressed silk robes—was currently frowning deeply, analyzing this miraculous war report through the cold, cynical lens of politics. The Advisor stepped up to the sand table.

Tapping his riding crop against Greywater Village, and then against the adjacent borders of the Silvermoon Kingdom, he spoke with feigned concern:"Commander, do you truly not see the catastrophic political implications hidden behind this victory?"

"Soren's military might is expanding rapidly! It is expanding at a rate that is genuinely terrifying!" The Advisor's voice turned chillingly pragmatic.

"If Soren truly relies on his own forces to single-handedly crush the siege of ten thousand Centaurs... think about it. His absolute prestige within the Silvermoon Kingdom—and across the entire human faction—will skyrocket to unprecedented heights! It will effortlessly eclipse the authority of the Silvermoon Royal Family and The Prince Regent!"

"When that day comes, an independent warlord faction—one completely beyond our sphere of control and possessing massive war potential—will have risen directly upon our Empire's border!"

"This will become a massive stumbling block for the Empire's future territorial expansion to the south! His newfound power is absolutely not a good thing for the Empire!" Hearing this venomous, heavily calculated political drivel, Alaric slowly snapped out of his shock. He turned his head, his gaze locking onto the Advisor with an aura of imposing, terrifying authority.

"Shut your damn mouth! Keep your pathetic calculations of borders and power to yourself!" Alaric's furious roar echoed like thunder through the command tower, terrifying the bureaucrat into violently stumbling back a half-step. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"While the Orcs are penning humanity up and butchering us like livestock! While our brethren are screaming in agony beneath the whips of Bloodfang Fortress! You actually have the gall to worry whether a hero actively slaughtering the Orcs will hinder the Empire's expansion?!" Alaric lunged forward, grabbing the Advisor by his pristine silk collar and effortlessly hoisting him into the air, his eyes burning with absolute disgust.

"I am a soldier of the Empire! But before that, I am a living, breathing human being! Witnessing a fellow human forge a military force capable of completely crushing the alien threat, I do not feel fear—I feel absolute, unadulterated pride and exhilaration!" With a violent shove, Alaric hurled the Advisor aside like a piece of trash. He turned on his heel and strode purposefully to the window.

The howling gale whipped his golden hair wildly around his face, but at this moment, his heart was boiling with a blood-pumping, euphoric battlelust he had never felt before! The suffocating dread that had previously clouded his mind—the absolute certainty that Soren was destined to fall—was violently, completely shattered by this miraculous war report! If a mere one hundred elites could flawlessly wipe out five hundred Centaur vanguards without a single scratch...

Then, staring down the impending onslaught of the ten-thousand-strong Centaur main force, what kind of apocalyptic, continent-shaking slaughter would Soren's unfathomable tactical genius orchestrate next?!

"Soren... my brother. It seems my father's Teleportation Scrolls are completely superfluous after all."

"You might actually pull this off. You might actually bury this arrogant Centaur tribe alive within the Misty Swamp!" Alaric violently drew his knightly longsword from its scabbard. The cold, gleaming steel reflected the ambient light, casting a resolute glow across his face. Turning to his adjutant, he issued an absolute, uncompromising military decree:"Relay my direct orders!

Every single Griffon Scout Knight currently airborne across the Imperial frontline is to converge and hold position in the airspace above the Misty Swamp!"

"No one is permitted to retreat! Even if they have to brave the apocalyptic blizzard, even if they completely drain their stamina, they are to monitor this wildly disproportionate war with absolute vigilance!" Alaric's voice trembled with fierce, eager anticipation.

"I want to be the first to know exactly how every single bolt is fired from the Greywater Village defensive line! I want to witness with my own eyes how Soren orchestrates an absolute miracle for all of humanity within that death trap!" High noon. Inside the central stilted longhouse of Greywater Village: the combat command post. A massive tactical map was firmly nailed to a wooden board with thick iron spikes.

Across the parchment, every single toxic sinkhole and dense thicket of the Misty Swamp had been meticulously marked with vibrantly colored dyes. Creak. The heavy wooden doors were shoved open. Accompanied by a biting gust of cold wind, Meyer, the Captain of Intelligence, strode rapidly into the room. The magical camouflage currently enveloping his body was slowly fading. His skin, previously entirely blended with the grayish-brown muck of the swamp, was gradually returning to its natural human hue.

Gasping violently for air, Meyer snatched a crude ceramic bowl from the table and downed the water in a single, desperate gulp.

"My Lord, the situation has changed." Meyer marched straight up to the tactical map. Extending a finger, he tapped with pinpoint precision onto a location just outside the northern slope defensive line.

"The Centaur main army did not lose their rationality and launch a chaotic, blind charge after the annihilation of their vanguard," Meyer reported with absolute, grim precision.

"They executed a tactical fallback. The entire horde halted their march over a mile away. They are now behaving with extreme caution, establishing a massive encampment on a strip of solid ground exactly two kilometers from our primary defensive line."

"Two kilometers?" Talon, the Commander of the Macedonian Phalanx, furrowed his thick brow so deeply it formed a harsh V. His burly, heavily muscled frame leaned forward over the table.

"My Lord, two kilometers... that is absolutely not a distance we can afford to relax about."

"Correct." Soren stood with his arms crossed firmly over his chest, his piercing gaze locked entirely onto the coordinates Meyer had just marked. His voice was as cold and calm as a frozen lake.

"According to orthodox cavalry doctrine, two kilometers is a flawlessly calculated, absolutely perfect starting point for a mass charge." Rapidly running the enemy's tactical logic through his mind, Soren systematically dissected the impending threat for his commanders:"If they deploy too close to our lines, the Centaurs' gargantuan bodies won't have enough runway to accelerate to their absolute maximum velocity, severely crippling their kinetic impact.

If they deploy too far back, by the time they bridge the gap and reach our trenches, their stamina will be catastrophically overdrawn, causing their rear formations to violently stall out." Soren tapped the map.

"By establishing their staging grounds and forward command post at precisely two kilometers... Chieftain Heka's intent couldn't be any more obvious."

"He is forcibly restructuring his ranks. Leveraging this exact distance, he intends to fully spread out his massive ten-thousand-strong army and orchestrate an apocalyptic, saturation-level mass assault!"