Chapter 442: A World in Upheaval (2)

As the main orcish force broke off, the Lyon troops gave chase. That was their fatal mistake. The pursuit stretched their formation, breaking apart the tight defensive structures that made their legions so effective.

The orcish commander seized the moment. He ordered the Blacktide, hovering high overhead, to begin its aerial bombardment.

In the darkness, the Grunt undead rained down from altitude in a fall of black iron.

Lyon originally thought that they were merely arrows, which their enchanted armor would handle, but they were gravely mistaken.

These were Grunts fitted with armor-piercing heads. Combined with the velocity from the high-altitude drop and their auto-targeting, the damage was devastating.

Only the heavily-armored paladins could absorb the impact, but the orcish commander had anticipated exactly that and deliberately directed the bombing toward Lyon's auxiliary infantry instead. The first salvo killed over a thousand.

Then the air-undead sealed inside the Grunts released on impact. The poison spread in an instant, creating a dead zone where any Lyon soldier who entered would begin convulsing and dying within seconds.

The speed of the onset was the key. Many of the priests couldn't even begin a holy light purification before they were already writhing on the ground.

In the darkness, the toxic zone was invisible. More than a few Lyon troops stumbled into it without realizing where the boundary was. The deaths multiplied.

It took a full ten minutes before Lyon forces identified the source of the problem and began organized purification efforts.

By then, the casualties were already catastrophic. While the Lyon troops were scrambling, the orcs came back. They closed in from every direction, surrounding the paladin legions at the center.

The orcish night assault hadn't been targeting the town at all. From the beginning, the target had been Lyon's forces. The intel leak had been deliberate.

In all their years of fighting the orcs, this was Lyon's first complete tactical defeat. No orcish force in living memory had possessed this kind of operational sophistication.

More alarming than the tactics themselves was the discipline. A feigned retreat required troops to believe they were losing and hold formation anyway. Without elite cohesion, a fighting retreat became an actual rout. The orcs had never had a force capable of this before.

Lyon fought back ferociously, sacrificing a thousand paladins on the field to break out of the encirclement.

They only succeeded thanks to the paladins' almost inhuman resolve, every one of them fighting without regard for their own life, cutting their way out with one Sacred Slash after another.

The engagement gave Lyon a new, uncomfortable understanding of the orcs' capabilities. They had no choice but to consolidate their forces into larger fortress cities and await reinforcement.

Ambrose made a substantial profit. The orcish side was very satisfied with the aerial bombing service. And Ambrose learned the name of the orcish commander: Urbano Pacheco, quite young, barely twenty, and not even a legendary-tier combatant.

Ambrose would have thought this impossible among the orcs. What orc would accept a young commander without exceptional personal strength?

Ambrose was very curious. For an orc to hold military command, tradition demanded that he had to defeat the previous commander in single combat. Somehow, this young man had circumvented that.

It almost certainly involved divine blessing from the orcish patron deity Grush, but Ambrose couldn't guess the specific nature of that blessing.

He doubted it was a gift for military command specifically. Grush was known as a warrior, not a strategist—a deity who had once challenged the elven god Choralan to single combat and come away with one eye shot out.

That was impressive by any measure. Facing Choralan in his prime and losing only an eye was an achievement worthy of greater divinity. But military genius? That didn't match Grush's profile.

The orcs, having won their ground, were in no hurry to press the offensive. They settled in to establish a stable foothold beyond the mountain passes—a methodical, patient approach, not unlike Lyon's own campaign against the desert dwarves in earlier years.

Lyon found the situation suffocating. They had never endured humiliation like this.

In the end, they had no choice but to transfer Angus Watson to this front.

At that moment, a Lyon on the verge of internal fracture set its internal disputes aside, exactly as Ambrose had predicted. External pressure of this magnitude didn't break a country on the edge; rather, it would push it back from the edge.

Angus Watson did not disappoint. He gave a masterclass in the art of war, won three consecutive engagements, and took a legendary orc's life.

Having personally observed and commanded Ambrose's undead army, Angus Watson understood the Grunts' capabilities, which meant the orcs could no longer achieve surprising feats. With Lyon's forces on alert, the Grunt formation's effectiveness dropped sharply.

Just as Angus Watson was on the verge of driving the orcs back into the highland passes, Urbano Pacheco pulled off a move of startling audacity. No one could determine how this young orc commander had guided his forces through what amounted to an airtight Lyon encirclement, but somehow he managed the feat. He struck deep into Angus Watson's rear, burning down more than half the supply column, and taking a significant number of Lyon civilians prisoner. Angus Watson was forced to abandon the orcish outpost he had been about to take.

Urbano Pacheco secured his foothold. The orcs had taken heavy losses, but Lyon had failed to achieve its strategic objective of expelling the orcs from the highlands. Both sides had paid a price, and both sides chose to keep fighting.

By the time the campaign settled into a stalemate, Ambrose's own situation was looking considerably better.

In the Sea of Volcanoes, Aige had won engagement after engagement. What had started as two zones under her control had grown to a dozen and beyond. The undead army's advantage in the ocean was enormous. Without holy light to counter them, they were by far the supreme fighting force.

Aige was smart about it, too. Rather than rushing to consolidate more territory, she prioritized eliminating enemies while they didn't yet have an answer to the Grunts.

Her primary focus was the ixiray. As she brought the merfolk more and more ixiray corpses, the merfolk delivered her more and more of their exiles.

The scale of merfolk "indulgence crimes," it turned out, was surprisingly large. Over ten thousand merfolk were already willing to live under Aige's governance. That was enough to constitute a respectable merfolk settlement in its own right.

Aige paused the military campaign and turned her attention to gathering the merfolk's faith.

For Aige, this was genuinely difficult work. She was still a mortal, after all.

Even a legend without a divine domain couldn't directly absorb or use faith. It could only be accumulated through patient absorption over time, a slow process that required endurance.

But things couldn't remain quite so easy indefinitely. The Goddess of Fate had a habit of balancing the odds.

Just as Ambrose's position solidified into an overwhelming advantage, the kouto, ixiray, and shagin formed a temporary alliance.

It wasn't a loose coalition, this time.

The three races' patron deities had agreed to cooperate, issuing divine commandments to their followers to work together against Ambrose's growing power.

To settle the matter of the Sea of Volcanoes quickly and limit unnecessary casualties, the three deities sent an invitation for Aige to participate in a war game with them.

If Aige lost, she would leave the Sea of Volcanoes immediately with all her troops. If she won, the three deities would each contribute a portion of their power to grant her faith and elevate her directly to godhood.

But when Ambrose read the actual invitation, he turned to Aige and said, "Those three deities think we're complete idiots. This isn't a war game. They want to wait until you ascend to godhood, then tear you apart and consume you."

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