Chương 363: A Dragon That Cannot Be Leashed by Royalty

Leona's throat was so bone-dry she couldn't string a single word together. Elena, standing beside the tactical sandbox, was faring even worse. The military cleric, famously known for her immaculate, unwavering grace, was so utterly horrified she was completely paralyzed, rendered entirely speechless. Within the deeply ingrained military reality of these two veteran commanders, this campaign was an absolute, inescapable death sentence! It was two thousand ragged soldiers against thirty thousand Orc elites!

An apocalyptic fifteen-to-one disparity in military strength! According to every ironclad law of warfare, facing the aerial carpet-bombing of Wyverns holding absolute air superiority, and staring down the massive hooves of Centaurs and Minotaurs capable of casually flattening fortress walls...

even with the treacherous terrain advantage, if Soren's two thousand men had managed to cower deep within their trenches and stubbornly survive for just two more days without being breached, it would have been hailed as a literal miracle. But now?! Those two thousand men hadn't just held the line. They had actively counter-slaughtered the highly mobile, elite vanguard! They had forcefully driven the enemy's fiercely proud, monstrous main force into an apocalyptic collapse and total rout!

And what fundamentally shattered all common sense... was that amidst a massive, heavily guarded army, they had flawlessly executed a decapitation strike, cleanly severing the head of the enemy's supreme commander?! To Leona—a fiercely untamed, veteran commander who spent her life dancing on the blood-soaked front lines of life and death—this was no longer just a simple tactical victory! This was the violent, absolute subversion of the very laws of war across the entire Erythian Continent!

"The b-battle report... give it to me!" It took a full, agonizing minute for Leona to violently wrench herself out of her catatonic stupor. Seething with absolute disbelief, she aggressively strode forward. Using pure, unadulterated brute force, she violently snatched the parchment directly out of the communications officer's hands. She frantically shoved the parchment directly beneath the flickering torchlight. However...

this fiercely proud, crimson-haired Commander, born from the absolute gutters and possessing apex-tier martial prowess, was notoriously, hopelessly illiterate. Staring at the dense, blocky Common script packed onto the parchment, the black ink simply warped into a chaotic, dizzying swarm of meaningless lines spinning violently before her eyes. She couldn't read a single damn punctuation mark!

"This has to be some absolute bullshit concocted by a scout who ate too many hallucination mushrooms! It's impossible! Even if Soren is a goddamn monster, there is absolutely no physical way he led two thousand men and assassinated Warchief Blackstone..." Leona's breathing was violently ragged, her chest heaving heavily. Practically begging, she abruptly spun around and aggressively shoved the parchment right into the cleric's chest.

"Read it! Elena, read every single damn syllable on this page for me!" Leona gripped Elena's arm so fiercely her fingernails practically bit into the cleric's flesh.

"Tell me this is nothing but the psychotic delusion of a mad scout! How in the hell could this be a real, physical war?! How on earth can a battle be fought like this?!" Elena was violently shaken out of her stupor. She rapidly brought the parchment up to her face. The exact second her eyes landed on the magical wax seal representing Soren, followed by the cold, rigorously detailed kill statistics... Elena's emerald eyes darted frantically across the text. Her breathing completely hitched.

"Gods above... it's real... Leona, it's all real!" Elena snapped her head up, her voice cracking into a shrill shriek of pure, unadulterated adrenaline. She desperately, frantically confirmed the absolute authenticity of the intelligence.

"And... the battle report explicitly states that Greywater Village unilaterally shattered the first wave of the massive Centaur army, and not a single soldier was killed in action..." Elena violently sucked in a breath of freezing air, feeling her entire cognitive reality physically collapsing around her.

"And all of this... every single bit of this is entirely because of Commander Soren!"

"What kind of absolute, logic-defying entity is he...?" Elena gripped the parchment as if it were a sacred, divine artifact. She turned her gaze to pierce through the heavy canvas of the tent, looking dozens of miles into the distance toward the coordinates of Greywater Village. As a highly educated cleric who had spent years dissecting the military histories of every single Duchy and Kingdom, Elena understood the apocalyptic weight of this campaign better than anyone.

Completely abandoning her normally reserved poise, she hoisted the parchment scroll high into the air. Trembling, yet burning with absolute conviction, she delivered the highest, most exalted praise of her entire life:"Leona, we do not need to launch a rescue! Furthermore, absolutely no one is qualified to rescue him! Because that man... is the literal avatar of a War God walking upon this mortal earth!"

"This campaign is no longer just a localized counter-offensive within the Misty Swamp! Soren weaponized a mere two thousand troops to violently, permanently shatter the mythical invincibility of the Orcs' endless hordes and high-tier magic!"

"This battle will be violently seared, word for absolute word, into the military history of the entire Erythian Continent!" Elena's passionate, hysterical declaration completely overpowered the apocalyptic blizzard howling outside the tent:"In this suffocating Dark Age, where humanity is endlessly butchered and crushed by bottomless despair... this is an absolute, epoch-defining triumph!

It is a glorious victory capable of detonating across the entire human faction and violently shaking all thirty-plus nations to their very core!" Commander Leona stood completely frozen. It took several agonizing minutes for the tectonic shockwaves battering her brain to slowly recede. And what violently surged up to replace it... was sheer, unadulterated joy! Absolute, uncontrollable euphoria! Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"Hahahaha! He won! He actually fucking won! And he even executed Warchief Blackstone?!" The famously untamed, drop-dead gorgeous Commander—born of common blood—completely discarded every last ounce of aristocratic composure. Planting her hands on her hips, she threw her head back and unleashed a roaring, hysterical, completely uninhibited laugh. She spun around, her vibrant crimson hair whipping through the air in a fierce, wild arc.

She aggressively marched right up to Elena, throwing her arms around the cleric's slender shoulders. Violently shaking her, Leona began to boast at the top of her lungs:"Elena! Did you see that?! Did you fucking see that?! ZERO CASUALTIES! He completely slaughtered tens of thousands of Centaurs and sniped the supreme commander of the enemy horde!"

"This is an absolute miracle! A feat that even those arrogant, stick-up-their-ass Royal Knights of the Holy Halycon Empire couldn't achieve in their wildest dreams!" Leona paced frantically around the command tent, vibrating with pure hype.

"And do not forget! Nominally, Soren is still the Vice-Commander of our Crimson Moon Knights! His official military commission is still registered under my banner!"

"This is an apocalyptic triumph capable of violently shaking the entire Erythian Continent!"

"With a heaven-defying battle record like this backing us, the next time I march into the Supreme Command at the Silvermoon Capital... I want to see which of those snobby, dismissive mainline Legion Commanders ever dares to act high-and-mighty in front of the Crimson Moon Knights again!" The more Leona calculated the political fallout, the more intensely euphoric she felt.

In her mind, as Soren's direct commanding officer, she could literally strut in front of any human general on the continent and demand absolute respect. And her fiercely loyal Crimson Moon Knights—an Order relentlessly oppressed, starved, and stabbed in the back by the corrupt elites of the Capital—would see their prestige within the global human faction absolutely violently skyrocket. However...

facing Leona's wildly out-of-control, borderline blind optimism, the silver-haired cleric, Elena, did not join in the cheering. Instead, she quietly, methodically retrieved the crumpled parchment from the table. Using her slender fingers, she carefully, reverently smoothed out the wrinkles Leona had violently crushed into it. Her movements were incredibly solemn.

"Leona. Snap back to reality." Elena spoke with an anchoring, heavy calmness that acted like a bucket of ice water, instantly cooling Leona's fever-pitch adrenaline. She raised her head, looking at the hyper-excited Commander with piercing objectivity, offering a soft but razor-sharp reminder:"Stop blinding yourself with the euphoria of his victory. I want you to think. Think deeply. The terrifying capabilities Soren displayed in this campaign...

are they truly still within a realm where we can casually claim the credit?" Leona abruptly froze.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"What I mean, Leona, is that Soren's ability to command an army, his apex-tier personal combat strength, and his absolutely flawless tactical genius... have completely, violently shattered the ceiling of what constitutes a 'mortal human general'!" Elena forcefully tapped her finger against the few brief lines of text detailing the three-hundred-man night raid that completely dissolved an army of ten thousand Minotaurs.

"Fighting massively outnumbered? You could desperately chalk that up to exploiting the treacherous swamp terrain. But facing overlapping layers of High Shaman magical wards, completely surrounded by a hundred heavily armored Royal Guards... and utilizing a single arrow from five hundred meters away to flawlessly blow a hole through the supreme commander's heart?" Elena's voice dropped into a sharp, undeniable truth: "Possessing an apocalyptic, logic-defying strength of that caliber...

do you honestly believe that our desperately impoverished, perpetually starving Crimson Moon Knights is a container large enough to hold a dragon like him?" Elena's interrogation was razor-sharp and merciless.

"The stage the Crimson Moon Knights can offer him is laughably small. We are fundamentally incapable of matching a supreme entity like Soren, a man possessing the sheer gravity to violently rewrite the geopolitical landscape of the entire continent."

"His ultimate destiny will absolutely not be confined to playing the role of your subordinate Vice-Commander. He is destined to ascend to the absolute, supreme pinnacle of power across the entire human faction... and the entirety of the Erythian Continent itself." Though Leona was a rough, untamed frontline brawler, she was absolutely no idiot. In a split second, she grasped the crushing weight behind Elena's words. But Elena wasn't finished. Her strategic dissection cut even deeper.

"Leona, I need you to pierce the veil and look at his true intent. Do you genuinely believe that over the past three days, Soren was merely holed up in the muck, passively trying to defend Greywater Village?"

"No! He was absolutely not just fighting to survive!" Elena's emerald eyes burned with profound clarity.

"From the resolute, localized slaughter of three thousand elite Centaurs, to the hyper-mobile night raid that terrified ten thousand Minotaurs into an apocalyptic rout, and finally culminating in the cold, unhesitating assassination of Warchief Blackstone..."

"Soren was executing a flawless, violently overwhelming display of psychological deterrence!"

"He weaponized an apocalyptic massacre against the Orc Alliance to violently carve his inviolable supremacy directly into the minds of the entire Blood Province!"

"Using the miserable corpse of the enemy's supreme commander, he hasn't just saved Greywater Village! He has violently, ruthlessly hammered out a massive, long-term era of uninterrupted peace for humanity's entire Northern Defense Line across the Misty Swamp!"