Chapter Fourteen: Victory

Bang, splat—the relentless clatter of impacts was swiftly followed by the grisly sound of weapons sinking into flesh.

The first three ranks of shield and spear soldiers held firm against the goblins’ frenzied assault, their one-meter spears stabbing ceaselessly into the mindless horde. Behind them, longbowmen and torsion-powered stone throwers unleashed a rain of missiles onto the goblins further back, littering the goblins’ charge with limbs and bodies. The stone throwers, especially, wreaked havoc—smashing goblin bodies to pulp with terrifying ease.

“The Bloodlust spell needs continuous chanting to sustain it. I wonder how much longer those shamans can keep it up,” Sun Li mused, watching the distant orc shamans chanting their incomprehensible incantations without pause.

The phalanx of three thousand shield-and-spear soldiers, backed by the rear’s ranged firepower, slaughtered goblins with frightening efficiency. Yet the goblins’ numbers were overwhelming. After nearly ten thousand casualties, even rotating the shield-and-spear soldiers at the front line, their stamina was reaching its limit—killing with cold steel exacted a heavy toll. As losses mounted, casualties among the shield-and-spear ranks began to climb.

“Reinforce the front with the reserve shield-and-spear soldiers,” Sun Li ordered, seeing the front line’s exhaustion. He committed every shield-and-spear soldier to the battle. As long as the formation held, their exchange rate remained impressive—eight goblins for every human lost. Such was the terror of a disciplined army formation; if not for the Bloodlust spell, the goblins would have broken long ago.

“Chief, the Bloodlust spell is about to end. The shamans’ mana is nearly depleted,” an orc leader reported to the Barbarian King.

Watching goblin casualties rapidly climb toward twenty thousand, while the human phalanx suffered losses but remained unbroken, the Barbarian King realized that breaking the enemy lines with goblins was futile.

“Deploy all strong orcs—attack the enemy’s right-wing spear phalanx. Half-orc archers forward, provide cover,” the Barbarian King commanded, glancing at the Mamluk mounted atop his tall steed. He judged the spear phalanx easier to breach.

Seeing the orcs mobilize their elite infantry to the right flank, Sun Li quickly redeployed the crossbowmen to the front of the spear phalanx, forming four ranks: the first crouched, the second ready, two ranks firing while the other two reloaded, increasing the rate of bolts. The longbowmen, exhausted from rapid fire, rested in the rear and could not support.

Soon, the orc force pressed forward, evidently confident in their archers. The half-orc archers surged ahead, intending to loose a few volleys. Among orc-kind, half-orcs were the best marksmen, but still far inferior to human archers.

Before the half-orc archers could even enter their effective range, the crossbowmen unleashed a coordinated volley, felling scores. As the half-orcs reeled from the lethal power at such distance, the next two ranks of crossbowmen unleashed another volley. Of the thousand half-orc archers who advanced, barely a hundred fled back—clearly unable to fight further.

This enraged the strong orc leaders behind them, who promptly led over six thousand powerful orc warriors in a reckless charge.

The massive orcs, far more formidable than the small goblins, rushed forward. After two volleys left over a thousand corpses, they closed within ten paces of the crossbow line.

Trained crossbowmen swiftly withdrew through gaps in the spear formation, while the spearmen formed three dense ranks, their spears bristling toward the charging orcs.

Splat—cries erupted as the two lines collided. The length of the spears granted a tremendous advantage; the strong orcs’ loose formation crashed against the tight ranks of spearmen, finding it nigh impossible to reach their foes, throwing lives away in vain.

Yet these battle-crazed, ferocious orcs, intoxicated by bloodlust, were undeterred by casualties, continually hurling themselves forward, draining the spearmen’s stamina with sheer numbers.

As the strong orcs struggled to breach the spear phalanx, the Bloodlust spell on the front line expired. The goblins, regaining their senses, collapsed utterly. In the era of cold steel, armies rarely broke before losing half their men; these goblins could almost be called elite, if only for the spell’s effect.

Seeing his forces gain absolute advantage on the front, Sun Li immediately dispatched all reserves—the Viking warriors—as an assault force. On the right, the strong orcs, relying on their numbers, surrounded the spear phalanx from every direction, and the exhausted spearmen suffered ever higher casualties.

As the spearmen, now reduced by half, grimly resolved to take at least one enemy with them, the wolfish, tigerish Vikings surged in from the flank, striking at the strong orcs.

Thus, the battle-weary strong orcs met the rested berserkers. Amid the carnage, the orcs’ vaunted honor was abandoned—the strong orcs fled, wailing like the cowardly goblins they once scorned.

A thousand Viking warriors pursued, slaughtering their way from Sun Li’s formation all the way to the orc position, leaving corpses strewn across two kilometers. Only when the Barbarian King led two thousand tiger-headed shock troops to intervene did the Vikings halt their pursuit.

The Barbarian King would not let these ruthless killers escape. Shouting, he led the orcs’ last reserves in pursuit of the Vikings.

At some point, the Mamluk elite cavalry arrived on the right flank. As the Barbarian King’s force surged forward, they wheeled from the side, unleashing several volleys from horseback, filling the air with the screams of tiger-headed warriors, before charging straight in.

Since ancient times, cavalry charges had spelled doom for infantry. Even with ten times the numbers, infantry needed to form up with spears and shields to withstand a mounted assault. Here, two hundred elite Mamluk guards plunged into two thousand panic-stricken shock troops, slicing through the scattered tiger-headed warriors like wheat, circling back for another pass.

After several charges, the tiger-headed force was shattered, their morale broken. Sun Li seized the moment—a thousand Vikings wheeled about and launched a deadly counterattack, striking the Barbarian King himself. After the battle, his corpse lay among a litter of severed limbs.

“All forces, attack!” Sun Li commanded. The signal horns rang out, and his blood-soaked army surged forward. The routed orc remnants crumbled at the assault, not even the noble shamans escaping the human onslaught.

The plains were filled with fleeing orcs. After a brief pursuit, Sun Li paused to reorganize and sweep the battlefield, then marched straight for the heart of the Tiger Tribe. From that day on, the southern borderlands of the Orc Empire fell completely into human hands.