Chương 355: 355：Murder by Borrowed Knife? Soren's Solo Decapitation Strike

Veteran General Rodman's face contorted in pure fury. Pointing a trembling finger out the window toward the Royal Palace, he ruthlessly tore away the veil of this political conspiracy:"The Prince Regent! And that venomous snake, Duke Fernando!"

"Earlier, we were all racking our brains! How was it that our Supreme Command's early-warning magical arrays could perfectly capture the massive mana fluctuations of a thirty-thousand-strong Orc legion mobilizing toward the Misty Swamp... yet Ironwood Fortress and Broken Horn Ridge, stationed merely dozens of miles away on the front lines, didn't react at all?!"

"Why didn't General Galahad and Gabriel dispatch a single reinforcement unit—not even a measly scouting party—to relieve Greywater Village?!" The old General's hair practically stood on end from his sheer rage.

"It wasn't because our frontline commanders were cowards who feared battle!"

"It was because the absolute highest echelons of the Capital directly invoked Royal Edicts! They despicably, systematically blockaded and severed every single distress signal transmitted to the surrounding fortresses!"

"They deliberately jammed the magical communication frequencies encompassing the Misty Swamp, and ruthlessly intercepted every single physical courier who tried to ride out and deliver the warning!" The moment those words left his mouth, a chorus of sharp, collective gasps echoed through the operations room. Following the old General's terrifying train of thought to its logical conclusion, every single battle-hardened officer felt a marrow-freezing chill shoot straight down their spines.

"So that's how it is..." A one-eyed General ground his teeth together so hard they nearly cracked, his fists clenched in pure fury.

"Those absolute, motherfucking bastards! They knew damn well that thirty thousand Orc elites were bearing down on the border! They knew Soren couldn't possibly hold the line with a measly two thousand troops! Yet they deliberately, forcefully locked down the early-warning channels of Ironwood Fortress and Broken Horn Ridge!"

"Exactly!" Veteran General Rodman added, his voice thick with profound, agonizing sorrow.

"The Prince Regent didn't just refuse to issue a single grain of wheat or a single rusted sword in supplies! They ruthlessly severed his only lifeline to allied reinforcements!"

"This was an absolutely premeditated, orchestrated murder using the blades of the enemy! They actively weaponized Warchief Blackstone's vanguard to bury an unparalleled military genius beloved by the people! They wanted to drown him, and the spark of resistance he had bled to forge, right in the foul, stinking muck of that swamp!" A wave of vicious, guttural curses instantly detonated across the operations room.

As veteran commanders who had bled and suffered on the front lines, they possessed a bottomless, visceral hatred for this kind of political backstabbing—a venomous betrayal that completely disregarded the lives of tens of thousands of refugees and the absolute security of the nation's borders purely to eliminate a political rival.

"But! They catastrophically miscalculated!" The heavily bearded Chief of Staff could no longer suppress the turbulent, boiling adrenaline in his chest. He took massive strides to the mahogany long table and violently snatched up the parchment battle report.

"Lord Soren wasn't just 'erased' by this sickening, treacherous conspiracy! He turned around and delivered a devastating, world-shattering backhand right across the faces of those very nobles who plotted his death!" The Chief of Staff took a deep, shuddering breath, desperately trying to rein in his overwhelming emotion, but his violently trembling hands betrayed his sheer, unadulterated hype.

"Gentlemen! I want you to listen carefully to this absolute miracle, broadcast to the entire continent by the Holy Halycon Empire!"

"The Greywater Village defensive line met a vanguard of thirty thousand Orc elites head-on! Not only did they shatter the initial wave of assaults, but they utterly repelled the enemy's entire frontline offensive!"

"They achieved the total, localized annihilation of three thousand elite Centaur backbone troops right on the barricades!"

"And it doesn't end there! Lord Soren did not cower behind his walls and wait to be besieged!" Reaching this point, the Chief of Staff violently ripped open the stiff collar of his military uniform. With a voice that caused the very brains of the listeners to tremble, he roared the next few lines of the battle report:"Commander Soren personally led a highly mobile strike force of a mere three hundred men!

Under the cover of a howling midnight blizzard, he violently penetrated the absolute core of the enemy formation! Through guerrilla harassment, he forced an army of ten thousand heavy-axe Minotaurs into an apocalyptic camp-collapse and total rout within a single night!"

"And directly before the Royal Pavilion—the absolute command center of a hundred-thousand-strong army—Soren stood entirely alone! Facing eight overlapping layers of devastating magical wards, and the absolute physical barricade of a hundred black-steel heavy Royal Guards..."

"With a single, unblockable arrow, he pierced his target's heart, executing the supreme commander of the enemy forces—Warchief Blackstone—on the spot!" As those earth-shattering declarations violently reverberated across the operations room, it felt as though all the oxygen had been instantly sucked out of the room. The Generals were rendered completely statuesque, paralyzed by sheer shock. Men stood with their jaws completely slack, their faces locked in expressions of absolute, stupefied disbelief.

A long moment passed. Then, the one-eyed General violently crushed the ceramic teacup in his grip. Ignoring the shards biting into his palm, he threw his head back and unleashed a roaring, hysterical, completely uninhibited laugh!

"Hahahaha! Fucking flawless! He directly blew a hole right through Warchief Blackstone's heart!"

"That was an absolute, suffocating death trap woven by thirty thousand elite troops!"

"Not only did he survive, but he grabbed a hammer and violently smashed a hole right through that inescapable dead end!"

"Gods above! Is this man commanding a military campaign, or is he writing a mythological epic of a mortal slaughtering a god?!" With the eruption of that roaring laughter, the suffocating tension that had chained the operations room for days completely evaporated. Stolen novel; please report. The Chief of Staff was now fully, entirely in the zone. Snatching up a long wooden pointer stick, he marched aggressively toward the massive 3D strategic sandbox, radiating absolute, manic energy.

"Gentlemen, snap back to reality! As the Supreme General Staff, our job isn't to just sit here and bask in the dopamine rush of a bard's tale!" The Chief of Staff's pointer aggressively slammed into the sandbox, directly targeting the sector representing the Orcs' [Blood Province]. He immediately launched into a high-level, profound strategic analysis of the geopolitical shockwaves this heaven-defying victory would generate.

"Let's crunch the numbers. Let's tally up an apocalyptic blood debt that the Orcs will forever be traumatized by!" BANG! The Chief of Staff violently yanked out the cluster of black marker flags representing the [Spire of Shadows] and their dark cultists. He brutally snapped the wooden dowels perfectly in half and casually tossed the pieces into the wastebasket.

"First off! The Shadow Priest Zagar, alongside his entire assassination unit of [Son of Titan] monstrosities—creatures devoid of pain that even our heaviest infantry phalanxes absolutely dread facing! They were systematically, flawlessly purged by Soren during their infiltration phase. Completely eradicated. Not a single scrap of meat made it out!" CRASH! He violently swept his hand across the suspension wires, knocking all twelve of the miniature Wyvern figures directly into the dirt of the sandbox.

"Secondly! A full aerial strike squadron of twelve Wyverns! These are apocalyptic aerial predators capable of establishing absolute air superiority and carpet-bombing our cities into oceans of fire! Over half were violently shot out of the sky in a single engagement! They were completely stripped of their aerial bombardment capabilities!"

Following that, the Chief of Staff shoved his wooden pointer like a bulldozer straight across the map, violently crushing the flags representing the three thousand Centaur elites and the Warchief's Royal Pavilion.

"Three thousand elite Centaur vanguard troops—unmatched in horse-archery and ultra-high mobility—completely and utterly slaughtered!"

"And as the absolute grand finale... the very beating heart of this invasion force, the supreme leader himself, Warchief Blackstone... decapitated!" The Chief of Staff grew increasingly frantic, the wooden pointer vibrating violently in his grip. His blazing eyes swept over his shocked, battle-hardened peers as he delivered a conclusion that would fundamentally rewrite the global theater of war:"Gentlemen, this is no longer just a localized, tactical victory!

This is a catastrophic, apocalyptic wound that has violently ripped the absolute core fighting strength right out of the Orcs' Blood Province!"

"Their absolute elite legions have been bled dry! Faced with a military disaster this humiliating, the priests of the [Spire of Shadows] and the political warlords of their high command will inevitably plunge into a bloody, vicious cycle of finger-pointing, internal purges, and an endless civil war for the power vacuum!" Clenching both fists, the Chief of Staff roared his absolute certainty: "I am willing to bet my entire thirty-year military career on this!"

"Terrified by this impossibly skewed casualty ratio, and paralyzed by the bloody power-shuffle within the Blood Province... as long as Lord Soren breathes and stands his ground in the Misty Swamp, the Orc Alliance will absolutely not dare to march a single large-scale legion against our Northern Defense Line for at least the next six months to a year!" The moment the Chief of Staff laid out the geopolitical math, the atmosphere inside the operations room surged to a fever pitch.

The Imperial Generals nodded vigorously, their faces etched with absolute, unadulterated awe. They knew better than anyone what a guaranteed six-month strategic buffer meant for the crumbling, exhausted human defensive lines. Yet, just as the officers were excitedly praising this sudden, miraculous strategic buffer, Veteran General Rodman finally broke his silence. His voice was calm, anchoring the room:"You have only calculated the surface-level casualty statistics.

You still haven't managed to pierce the veil and see the profound, terrifying strategic calculation hidden beneath every single one of Soren's seemingly suicidal tactical gambles in the Greywater Village campaign." The old General's words instantly acted like a bucket of ice water, completely quieting the clamoring staff officers. Moving with unspoken synchronization, every single eye in the room locked onto the legendary tactician.

Veteran General Rodman strode slowly over to the sandbox, his piercing gaze locking dead onto the ragged little flag representing Greywater Village. As a battle-hardened veteran who had witnessed the rise and fall of countless campaigns, his tactical mind had already completely bypassed the blood-soaked surface of the battle report, unraveling a masterful, long-term strategic blueprint.

"Have any of you actually thought about it?" The old General pressed both hands firmly against the wooden rim of the sandbox, his gaze sweeping over his subordinates.

"Facing a massive siege from an army of thirty thousand, what would any standard human commander do?" The one-eyed General didn't hesitate for a microsecond.

"Naturally, we would rely on fortified terrain and execute a layered, defensive delay. As long as we could bleed the enemy's logistical supply lines dry, or stubbornly survive the initial, devastating momentum of their vanguard, forcing a withdrawal would be hailed as an absolute triumph."

"Exactly. Because our forces are perpetually outnumbered, the absolute primary objective of our military doctrine is mere survival." Veteran General Rodman gave a slow nod, before his voice abruptly sharpened into a stern rebuke:"But Soren didn't do that!"

"Not only did he refuse to cower passively behind his defenses! The exact microsecond he shattered their initial assault, he deliberately pivoted to an absurdly high-risk tactical doctrine! He scattered his forces into the dark, executing a full-scale, highly mobile night-raid guerrilla operation! He even threw caution completely to the wind, charging in completely alone to execute a decapitation strike!"

"Gentlemen, I ask you: Why the hell would he intentionally back himself onto a tightrope woven from absolute death?! Was it purely to rack up some unprecedented, legendary military merit to brag about?"