Chương 331: 331：The Spark of Revolution

"Long live the Lord..." someone murmured, choking back hot tears. Immediately after, an astonishing, earth-shaking roar erupted from behind the defensive line. It was no longer a bloodthirsty howl of battle, but a resonant, passionate validation of a monumental ideal. On the other end of the battlefield. Centaur Commander Luke knelt in the freezing, muddy water, his face already completely drenched in tears. Having heard Soren's words, he felt profoundly overwhelmed by shame and an unfathomable shock.

As an Orcish general, he had actually witnessed a vastness of spirit in a human commander that not even the Orcish gods possessed.

"A farmer's son... class oppression..." Luke muttered under his breath. He finally understood why this human army possessed such terrifying, unbreakable cohesion. Because the man they followed was a true, magnificent pioneer! Luke struggled to his feet. Pressing his right hand firmly against his left breastplate, he faced Soren atop the watchtower and executed the absolute most devout, reverent salute of the Centaur race.

"Your mercy and wisdom, I, Luke, shall not forget for as long as I draw breath. The grace of Greywater Village will be forever etched into the hearts of the Centaur survivors." Luke turned and dragged his mangled, severely burned body toward his dazed, traumatized kin.

"Let us go. We are going home. We are leaving this battlefield." Under Luke's lead, the over six thousand surviving Centaur women and children supported one another. Dragging their desolate, tragic silhouettes, they slowly turned to depart this Misty Swamp—a place that had brought them an endless, apocalyptic nightmare, yet granted them a miraculous rebirth in their absolute final moments. However, amidst this massive, retreating exodus, an unforeseen anomaly occurred!

After marching a short distance, a cluster of frail silhouettes suddenly halted their steps. It was a group of Centaur youths—boys and girls numbering roughly two hundred. The oldest among them were no more than fifteen or sixteen, while the youngest had barely reached ten, their hooves not yet fully hardened. They did not continue to follow the main horde. Instead, tearing themselves free from the grasping hands of their elders, they decisively turned around.

Voluntarily breaking away from the retreating column, they braved the howling blizzard and marched right back toward the defensive line of Greywater Village!

"What are you doing?! Come back!" Luke screamed in sheer horror. But the youths did not look back. In the devastating first charge yesterday, the elites who died were largely distant relatives—uncles and older cousins. Their direct parents were primarily elders and females stationed in the rear, who hadn't been swept into that initial brutal meat grinder. Consequently, these youths did not harbor a deep-seated, agonizing blood feud against Greywater Village.

Conversely, during the intense battle, these sharp-minded youths had witnessed with their own eyes how Greywater Village's medical logistics corps had completely disregarded their own safety, charging directly into the frontline kill zones to drag back their wounded. They had witnessed the profound, explosive bonds of camaraderie that drove the human soldiers to protect their brethren.

More importantly, they had just personally survived the apocalyptic tragedy of Warchief Blackstone indiscriminately carpet-bombing them with Alchemical Fire-Oil. A profound, bone-deep hatred toward the Orc Alliance—an entity that treated the lower classes as completely expendable fodder—had permanently taken root in their hearts! And Soren's world-shattering declaration—a vow to obliterate class oppression and racial discrimination—had fiercely ignited the inferno of rebellion within these youths!

The two hundred Centaur boys and girls marched to a halt exactly fifty meters from Greywater Village's trenches. In perfect unison, they dropped to their knees in the mud. The Centaur boy leading them, his face thickly coated in soot and ash, bore an expression of absolute resolve.

"Lord Soren!" the boy roared in heavily accented, broken human Common.

"We do not want to go back! If we return to the tribe, the moment we grow up, Warchief Blackstone will still force us to act as cannon fodder! To invade! To die a meaningless death!"

"We hate the Orc Alliance! We yearn for that world devoid of oppression you spoke of!" The boy pressed his forehead firmly into the freezing earth, his voice tearing with overwhelming emotion as he shouted again and again: "Please, take us in! We are willing to completely sever our ties with the Centaur tribe! We will follow you, and fight for your ideal! Even if we must bleed out every last drop of our blood!"

This sudden, unprecedented twist left the commanders of Greywater Village staring at one another in sheer bewilderment. Take in aliens? And a group of combat-incapable, underage Centaurs at that? Soren quietly looked down at the two hundred Centaur youths. He had permanently forfeited the System's reward of the Armored War Elephant, yet he did not feel a single microscopic shred of regret.

In this moment, gazing at these emotionally charged youths with hot tears brimming in their eyes, Soren smiled—a smile of profound, genuine gratification. Soren understood better than anyone that to forge a brand-new order upon this rotting continent, he absolutely could not rely on the older generation—a generation already entirely assimilated by archaic dogmas, deep-seated hatred, and vested interests.

Only these impulsive, yet pure-hearted youths—those whose souls overflowed with unadulterated ideals and an unyielding spirit of rebellion—were the true, primal engine capable of driving epoch-making revolution! Right now, they might not even possess the arm strength to draw a bow. But in ten years? Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

As long as they received the ideological and tactical education of Greywater Village's military academies and foundation schools... these two hundred Centaurs would become the absolute, razor-sharp scalpel Soren would use to violently rip apart the internal class hierarchy of the Orc Alliance!

"Open the barricades!" Soren violently swept his cloak, decisively nodding his approval.

"From this day forward, you are no longer the cannon fodder of the Orc Alliance, nor are you the oppressed lower class." Soren looked down at the Centaur youths, who were now sobbing tears of pure joy. His voice was warm, yet it resonated with an earth-shaking, unyielding power.

"Welcome to Greywater Village. You... shall be my, Soren's, true comrades on this path to changing the world!" Meanwhile, far to the north, inside a sprawling, mobile command pavilion hauled by eight heavily armored Kodo Beasts. BAM! Warchief Blackstone's gargantuan, broad-shouldered frame heaved violently. Thick veins bulged obscenely across his right arm as he ruthlessly grabbed the Orcish ranger scout who had delivered the news, brutally slamming him against a thick wooden pillar.

The scout's sternum shattered instantly. Spraying a massive geyser of blood, he didn't even have the time to unleash an agonizing shriek before he slumped limply to the floor, twitching a few times before all life left his body. But Warchief Blackstone didn't spare the corpse a single microscopic glance. His eyes bulged in pure disbelief, locked entirely onto the urgent military dispatch resting in the pooling blood.

"LIES! This is an absolute, fabricated lie concocted by a pack of cowardly deserters!" Warchief Blackstone's ragged, heavy gasps echoed through the pavilion. Consumed by an apocalyptic fury, he bared his massive tusks and unleashed a thunderous roar.

"Ten thousand Centaurs! A full ten-thousand-strong army possessing the absolute greatest mobility on the continent! That is an apex force capable of executing a frontal charge and shattering three human Heavy Knight regiments on an open plain!"

"And that human named Soren... his godforsaken territory possesses a pathetic two thousand soldiers!" Warchief Blackstone violently surged to his feet. Taking a massive stride directly over his long war table, his face twisted into a mask of demonic savagery as he shrieked:"And now, this pathetic scrap of parchment is telling me that they were routed?!"

"Three thousand core Centaur elites, slaughtered to the absolute last man?! Even that arrogant fool Heka was turned into a pincushion by repeating crossbows?! And the remaining six thousand elders and cubs were so terrified they simply turned tail and fled without even daring to look back?!"

"How is this physically possible?! This completely violates every absolute law of warfare! What are they, descending gods?!" The Warchief's mind plunged into absolute chaos. A profound, creeping terror was currently inflicting a catastrophic, sledgehammer blow to his previously unbounded, blinding arrogance. As the supreme overlord commanding a hundred-thousand-strong Orc army, he possessed crystal-clear tactical acumen.

In the era of cold-weapon warfare, numerical superiority and troop-type suppression were absolute, insurmountable chasms. Even if Greywater Village possessed impregnable natural terrain, even if they had a hundred heavy infantrymen... faced with the ten-thousand-man saturation bombardment and absolute mobility of the Centaurs, they should have been ruthlessly bled dry! Yet what was the result? The Centaur elites were entirely exterminated, and Greywater Village's defenses remained unbreached!

This brutally authentic war report severely humiliated Warchief Blackstone, entirely vaporizing every last microscopic trace of his previous contempt and hubris. Inside the pavilion, dozens of high-ranking Warlords and Chiliarchs were terrified into absolute silence. They didn't even dare to breathe too heavily, mortally afraid that drawing the apocalyptic wrath of the Warchief would result in them being physically torn to shreds on the spot. Amidst this suffocating, dead silence...

A steady, rhythmic thud of heavy boots slowly echoed from the deep shadows of the pavilion. The Ironblood Grand Warlord. This supreme tactician, renowned across the continent for his chilling, pinpoint calculations, stepped expressionlessly over the pool of the dead scout's blood. Bending down, he calmly retrieved the military dispatch from the gore and gently flicked away the mud.

"Great Warchief, blind fury cannot solve the absolute dead-end we are currently facing," the Ironblood Grand Warlord stated coldly.

"The scout did not lie. The Wyvern Riders in the sky transmitted the exact same reconnaissance data."

"The Centaur race... has undeniably been exterminated at the defensive line of Greywater Village by the man named Soren."

"Huff... Huff..." Warchief Blackstone stared intensely at the Ironblood Grand Warlord. He slumped heavily back into his sprawling throne draped in thick magical beast pelts, agonizingly burying his face in his massive hands. This tyrannical overlord, who had always worshipped nothing but absolute, brute-force steamrolling, now displayed a staggeringly rare expression of profound struggle and despair.

"Grand Warlord... our provisions... can only sustain this grand army for exactly four more days."

"This godforsaken rotting mire, this apocalyptic, freezing winter weather... it is relentlessly draining the physical stamina of my troops!"

"I originally believed that the Centaurs could utilize their sheer speed and gargantuan mass of lives to completely flatten Greywater Village's traps and exhaust their crossbow bolt reserves."

"But now... even the apex-mobility Centaurs have been completely annihilated!"