Soon, thousands of orc soldiers stepped onto the ice bridge. The slippery ice surface and fear of water slowed down their marching speed to a certain extent, so they walked slowly. From time to time, a clumsy guy would fall down, causing many of his comrades around them to fall down, causing other hot-tempered orcs to start shouting and cursing, further aggravating the chaos on the ice bridge.
At this time, the orc leader was still holding the line on the cliff on the north bank. Hearing the noisy sound below the cliff, even though the fog obscured his vision, it was not difficult for him to imagine what a chaotic scene it was on the ice bridge.
However, there was no other way. Although most pure-blooded orcs were physically strong, they were dull-witted and had very bad tempers. With such a nature, even if they received a long period of training, they could not achieve the same level of organization as the human army.
Thinking of this, the orc leader couldn't help but let out a long sigh. After all, the Lord Beast King was too eager for quick success. If he could prepare for another ten or eight years, wait until there were more "new generation orcs" like him who were both smart and strong, and completely suppress those stubborn old-school orc elders, then launch a full-scale attack on the human race. It would definitely be safer than it is now.
The orc leader was secretly sighing with emotion. At this time, the vanguard of the orc army on the ice bridge was about to reach the other side. The leading soldier even jogged excitedly, wanting to leave the slippery and unstable ice bridge and step onto solid land as soon as possible.
However, when the vanguard was less than a hundred meters away from the south bank beach, an orange-red light suddenly appeared in the fog above their heads. Many orcs subconsciously thought that the sun had risen, but they did not think of common sense at all.
Under normal circumstances, the sun does not rise from the south!
Accompanied by a whistling scream, a high-level fireball hit the ice bridge hard, followed by the second and third. Five consecutive fireballs hit the ice surface but did not explode. Instead, they squirmed and transformed into human shapes, forming a human wall of fire men, blocking the advance of the orc army.
This sudden ambush caught the orcs, who thought they were unaware of anything, off guard. The people at the front were blocked, and the people at the back could not see the situation ahead because of the heavy fog, so they still followed orders and stepped onto the ice bridge and moved forward, making the bridge even more crowded.
Before the orc leader realized that something was wrong and ordered the follow-up troops to stop advancing, he heard a series of rumbling "thunders" coming from the distance, one after another.
"What's that noise?"
Before the confused orcs could figure out what was going on, explosions occurred one after another on the surface of the ice bridge. Some orcs with good eyesight who happened to be near the explosion point could barely see that some round or pointed iron lumps fell from the sky and exploded when they landed on the ice, turning many of the surrounding orcs into minced meat.
The densely packed troops on the bridge meant that each shell could kill hundreds of orcs in an instant. Even more deadly was the damage caused to the ice bridge by the explosion. The broken bridge caused many orcs to fall into the freezing sea water without warning.
Some people were swept under the ice by the current and quickly suffocated, while others hit drifting ice blocks as soon as they surfaced, or were even squeezed in the middle by several pieces of ice and crushed into meat paste.
Roaring and screaming, against the backdrop of explosions and flames, turned the originally tranquil fjord into hell. On the land on the south bank, the orc cavalry who had gone ashore first to be responsible for the outer perimeter guard had now turned from hunters into prey. Many cavalrymen didn't even see the shadow of humans before they were hit in the face by the cross shurikens that flew out of the darkness, and died in a daze.
On the treetops, Kasumi and Ayane began their competition silently. Hongye knew that the two sisters would compete with each other as soon as they got the chance, so she did not participate in the competition between them, but looked for targets of higher value.
She soon discovered a figure that was different from the other orcs. He was thinner than the average orc, but was wearing metal armor that was obviously more finely made. He was carefully guarded by four orc cavalrymen in the center. It was obvious that he was not an ordinary soldier.
Seeing this, Hongye thought to herself that this time the credit depends on you!
119. Orcs
On the south bank of the fjord, Dick controlled the five fire demon puppets he summoned to prevent the orc army from crossing the ice bridge to the shore. The fleet of ship girls led by Befa bombarded the entire ice bridge from the side. For a moment, the ship's guns and screams roared at the same time, and the flames reflected the blood.
This ambush, which nearly resulted in a massacre, went more smoothly than Dick had imagined.
The orcs suffered from underestimating the enemy and lack of intelligence, but the most crucial thing was that they were unaware of the existence of the ship girls.
All along, Befa has been Dick's trump card that he has intentionally hidden. The firepower of her twelve six-inch naval guns is enough to determine the victory of a battle at a critical moment.
Just like now, tens of thousands of orcs tried to sneak across the fjord but were attacked halfway across. The orc soldiers were trapped on the ice bridge and could not move forward or backward. Their situation was no different from that of a living target.
The bombardment lasted less than three minutes. No matter how hard the shamans tried to cast spells, they could only watch the ice bridge shattered into a pile of ice debris drifting with the waves under the cover of artillery fire. Some unlucky people even died directly under the artillery fire without even a chance to escape.
On the cliff on the north bank, the orc leader finally learned the situation below from the soldiers who escaped back. He was so angry that his eyes were wide open, but he could only roar helplessly towards the other side.
The human side obviously planned an ambush and specially prepared strategic weapons such as "magic cannons". However, due to underestimation of the enemy and misjudgment, he sent tens of thousands of orc soldiers into the muzzle of the enemy's cannon to be bombed.
At this time, several black crows flew back from the bottom of the cliff and landed in front of the orc leader, turning into several dusty shamans, among whom was the old shaman whom the orc leader respected very much.
"teacher!"
"We've fallen into a trap, retreat quickly!"
"The people below..."
"Hopeless."
The old shaman's words directly determined the fate of tens of thousands of orc soldiers.
It wasn't that the old shaman didn't want to save them, but he didn't have the ability to do so. After the ice bridge was destroyed, almost all the orcs on the bridge fell into the water. The sea water at this season was freezing cold, and even with the orcs' physique, they would be frozen stiff after soaking for three to five minutes, and finally sink to the bottom of the sea in despair to feed the fish.
Moreover, the human army's bombardment did not stop for a moment, not giving them any chance to rescue people.
Knowing that the smuggling plan had failed, the orc leader had no choice but to accept the fact of failure. After gathering a small number of soldiers who had a chance to escape, he led the remaining troops to retreat quickly. Because he could not be sure whether his current location was within the range of the human magic cannon, he did not dare to stay on the cliff for long.
When they retreated to the rear camp in a panic and began to count the number of people, the orc leader realized that they had lost more than 8,000 people in this battle. Forty percent of the orcs in the entire Eastern Corps were left in the cold water of the fjord. They were unable to set foot on the south bank that the orcs had longed for, nor were they able to return to the rear alive.
Perhaps the only good news is that the military rations that were originally in short supply are now no longer in short supply.
At the same time, on the south bank of the fjord, Dick was roasting a fire while looking at the bruised and battered little orc leader that Hongye had dragged back.
This was not the first time Dick had seen an orc, but unlike the orc slaves in the imperial capital who had been tortured to the point of almost losing their vitality by slavery magic and torture, this guy was still very wild. Even though he was beaten black and blue by Hongye, he was still unruly. After seeing Dick, he kept yelling and cursing, and only shut up after being slapped more than a dozen times by Hongye.
What concerned Dick more than the metal armor on this guy was his obvious appearance of a human-animal hybrid.
"Interesting, an orc?"
"Don't even think about getting any information out of me."
"Hey! You can speak human language, who taught you?"
"..."
The captured orc leader kept silent, and Dick didn't waste time talking to him. He directly took out a syringe from his space bracelet and gave it to Hongye, asking her to give the orc an injection.
The syringe contained the confession agent specially prepared by Lily. Considering the physical fitness of the orcs, Dick was afraid that the effect of one was not effective enough, so he took out another one.
The orc leader thought the syringe was some kind of torture device and tried to struggle, but Dick used his telekinesis to restrain his limbs. He could only watch the needle pierce his body. As the medicine was injected, he suddenly felt dizzy. The humans in front of him increased exponentially, and they squirmed and deformed like slimes.
"You, why are you... flattened..."
"Next, I'll ask the questions and you'll answer them."
"Whatever you want to ask, I won't tell you even if you kill me."
"Then if I didn't beat you to death, you can tell me."
"Eh? That's right!"
Seeing the orc leader's eyes full of wisdom under the influence of the potion, Dick secretly praised Lily's potion and began to ask questions. It turned out that the orc cavalry captain who led the vanguard troops to land and reconnaissance was actually the younger brother of the commander of the opposing corps.
The captured orc's name is "Nag", and his brother the leader is called "Neg". Both brothers are half-orcs, and their father's identity is even more unusual, as he is the current Beast King Ramon.
In other words, Dick actually captured a beastman prince.
However, the value of this orc prince is not high, because the Beast King Ramon has many descendants, more than 500, and most of them are half-orcs like him.
Dick learned that this Beast King Ramon proclaimed himself the Beast King more than 20 years ago, and then unified the originally loose orc tribes by force.
Before Ramon, the Orcs had had several Beast Kings, but none of them had been able to truly integrate the Orcs. But Ramon was different. Not only did he possess extraordinary martial arts power, but he was also smart. He believed that the Orcs had only brute force but no wisdom, and they deserved to be chased away by humans to the barren wasteland where they could only survive.
In a one-on-one duel between orcs and humans, they can indeed overwhelm and beat up those small shrimps, but once a large-scale war breaks out, the situation will be completely reversed.
Therefore, this guy thought of a way to improve the average weight of the orcs, that is, to actively interbreed with humans, capture human women and breed smarter orcs.
He personally took action to this end by becoming a stud, and also received support from the shaman community.
During the years when Ramon was the Beast King, the orcs went south to plunder. While they were wantonly capturing humans, they would intentionally capture women alive. However, because of the stereotype that orcs were cannibals, humans thought that these captured humans had become food for the orcs and did not think about other aspects at all.
While Ramon was "improving" the population, he was secretly accumulating strength. He felt that the annual looting was just a small fight, which could not change the living conditions of the orcs. The damage caused by the looting was not a big deal to the entire human population.
His plan was to hold back for a big attack, to use the orcs' full strength to directly capture all the human lands north of the Central Mountains, and then just hold on to those few mountain passes. They would gain a large area of "warm and fertile (relative to the wasteland)" land, as well as millions of human slaves, and the rise of the orcs would become possible.
120. Forced Solidarity
The orcs in the wasteland prepared for this full-scale invasion for a long time, and finally assembled an army of more than 100,000 and attacked the human territory in three directions.
The time they chose to launch the attack was deliberately one month after the beginning of winter.
Although the severe cold and snow in winter can have many adverse effects on marching and fighting, the inconvenience caused by the climate does not favor any one side. Orcs are physically stronger than humans, so their resistance to such negative effects is naturally higher.
On the other hand, although the human race has been carefully guarding against the direction of the wasteland over the years, they still have a deep-rooted stereotype about orcs, that is, they think they are a group of beasts who don't use their brains. They never thought that these reckless men would use such tactics to deceive the enemy.
After finding out the enemy's situation, Dick couldn't help but break out in a cold sweat, thanking God for helping him. He had only heard some rumors from merchants before, so he went to the fjord to inspect the coastal defenses, but he happened to stop the invasion of the orc army and inflicted heavy damage on them.
Dick didn't know how many orcs they killed in this battle, but the initial estimate was over five thousand (actually over eight thousand). Most of them drowned after the ice bridge broke. Not many were killed directly by artillery fire. The casualties on Dick's side were in the single digits, all caused by the capture of prisoners.
All we can say is that it was thanks to Lukoya's early discovery that Dick had time to prepare, allowing him to deliver the fatal blow at the critical moment.
Whether it is earlier or later, we cannot achieve such fruitful results!
After learning about the orcs' battle plan, Dick immediately ordered all messengers to be dispatched to deliver the message as quickly as possible so that the border troops stationed in the north and the local lords would be prepared for war.
This is not an internal struggle within the country, but an invasion by a foreign race. If they really defeat other territories with overwhelming force as they planned, only Laguge will be left and will not be able to remain unscathed.
As the saying goes, things have their priorities. At this critical juncture, no matter how big the grudges are, they have to be put aside first.
There are a hundred thousand orcs there. The fate of humans who surrender to them will not be as simple as becoming second-class subjects and being oppressed. Instead, they will be directly transformed into edible livestock!
So after thinking for a moment, Dick felt that it was not enough to just notify the northern lords. He had to send this terrible news back to the imperial capital through magic communication and ask the central government of the empire to send troops quickly.
After Dick's message was sent, the surrounding lords soon received the news one after another, but most people were skeptical about this horrifying news even after seeing the orc heads that the messenger deliberately displayed. Some simply didn't believe it at all and ridiculed Dick for having delusions.
In the eyes of these northern lords, the orcs' raiding southwards was indeed terrible. Those man-eating beasts were more brutal than bandits, but they were no more dangerous than wolves.
Their long-standing knowledge has made them firmly believe that orcs are stupid by nature and are not united internally. They fight each other in tribes. Usually, there are a dozen or twenty orcs in a team. They sneak into human territory to plunder. Large troops of hundreds or thousands are extremely rare.
But Dick now told them that the orcs had become smarter. A Beast King emerged among them. After seven years, he had integrated the large and small orc tribes in the wilderness and raised an army of 100,000 to launch a full-scale invasion of the empire. This was simply a fantasy!
However, Count Hoffman, who had a feud with Dick before, took the news very seriously after receiving it, and without further ado, ordered his territory to be fully mobilized. He also sent a trusted retainer as a special envoy to visit Laguge in person, hoping to learn more detailed information about the orc invasion.
When Hoffman's special envoys entered Lagug, they could tell at a glance that the local atmosphere was very tense. Several large villages they passed by were reinforcing their barracks, and the town was under full martial law. Many private soldiers could be seen busy on the outer city walls, obviously preparing to defend the city.
After showing his identification, the envoy soon met Dick, who was now the Count of Lagouge.
The first time he saw Dick, the envoy was impressed by Dick's youth and the deceptiveness of his handsome appearance. If his lord had not suffered a loss at his hands once and was familiar with his many iron-fisted methods in Laguge, he might have mistaken him for a little brat and subconsciously looked down on him.
"I am very glad that you can meet me in your busy schedule, the respected Lord Laguge."
The envoy called himself "Eucis" and was the close secretary to Count Hoffmann. After a few brief greetings, the two sides quickly got straight to the point.
Okis came here for two main purposes: to verify the authenticity of the large-scale invasion of orcs, and if it was true, to learn as much detailed information as possible about the invasion. Before leaving, Hoffman specifically told Okis to allow him to make certain concessions to Dick on this issue, and as long as it did not affect their core interests, he could agree to it first.
Hoffman was different from those stupid and arrogant local tycoons. He didn't think Dick was a naughty kid who made silly jokes just to scare others. Assuming that the story was true, if he was the first to get the news, he would also inform other lords as quickly as possible, because this was not a disaster that could be handled by one family alone.
One hundred thousand orcs, that's the number of people that Count Hoffman has. If those beasts really rush into his territory, they can eat him and his people up physically.
So while the idiots were still laughing and joking, Hoffman was sweating profusely.
As for the authenticity of the invasion, Okis believed it as soon as he arrived at the town of Lagug, because in order to confirm the authenticity of the news to his subjects, Dick beheaded all the orc corpses salvaged from the fjord and built a mausoleum at the city gate.
That’s more than 2,000 orc heads. There’s no way to borrow from fellow villagers to fake it!
As for the details of the orcs' advance, Dick did not hide anything. He shared all the intelligence he had learned from interrogating prisoners using confession drugs, and also told the other party on the map the route he speculated the enemy might choose.
Dick told the other party very bluntly that he had the ability to blockade the fjord. The Eastern Army of the Orcs had just been severely damaged by him and suffered heavy casualties. The other two orc armies were attacking from land. No matter which route they took, they would have to pass through Hoffman's territory before they could reach Lagug!
Therefore, nothing Dick said at this moment was false. He sincerely hoped that Count Hoffman could hold on for a few more days!
121. Ramon
In order to get more information, Okis hopes to see the living orc captives.
Dick did not refuse, and readily said that he could personally take Euquis to the castle dungeon, where all the surviving high-ranking prisoners were now being held for interrogation.
The dungeon of Lagoge Castle is very large. It is said that it was originally used as an underground bunker and ice storage. Later, it was transformed into a dungeon by a governor who was particularly fond of catching people. Because it is located on the west side of the castle, it is also known as the "West Ice Storage".
After Dick took office as governor, he once thought about converting this place back into a warehouse, but later found that the transformation was not cost-effective, so he continued to use it as a prison to detain important criminals.
Therefore, those who can be imprisoned in this place are not ordinary small characters.
As Orkis followed Dick through the corridor in the middle of the dungeon, a hand suddenly stretched out from the iron window of one of the cells and tried to grab Orkis.
But before the hand touched Okis, it was struck back by a bolt of lightning that Dick casually shot out.
Startled, Okis looked carefully and found that the prisoner who was shouting for his life behind the iron bars seemed familiar. After a little recollection, he immediately remembered.
"Yitzhak!?"
The prisoner who asked Okis for help was a former Mossad spy who was captured along with other members of the Dead Tree Party.
This unlucky guy who couldn't make it on Earth originally served Count Hoffman, and relied on some "professional skills" from Earth to be the chief of spies under the Count. Later, he was forcibly taken over by Hammuradi, and finally surrendered and was captured in Laguge.
Dick did not execute this guy, but locked him up in a dungeon. One reason was that he still had information that could be extracted from him, and the other was that he could use him as a handle to threaten Count Hoffmann.
This grandson has done a lot of dirty work for Count Hoffmann, and some of these things, once exposed, would be enough to ruin the reputation of his old master.
Although the nobles in this world are corrupt and decadent, they attach great importance to their reputation. Even if they do all kinds of evil things, it doesn't matter as long as they are not discovered.
So ever since Hoffman fell into Dick's hands and he implicitly told Hoffman that this old slave who knew a lot of his dirty laundry was still alive, the Earl has been extremely cautious and has never caused any trouble for Lagug again.
