Cthulhu Gonfalon Chapter 924 - A Harassing Attack

Chapter 924: A Harassing Attack
For the humans, such a tragic exchange ratio amounted to an extremely bloody and heartbreaking battle. Even the Orcs, who had gained the upper-hand, could not help dreading the sense of fear when they looked back on the night of arduous struggle on the battlefield.
Dozens of miles of ground had become scarlet red. Countless skeletons were strewn all over the place and could be seen practically everywhere. In the few places where the battles had been particularly frequent, the dead bodies had even piled up in stacks, forming an appalling mountain of corpses.
A majority of these dead bodies belonged to the humans. But even if it was just the bodies belonging to the Orcs, the number was more than enough to terrorize even the bravest Orc warrior.
With a battle fought to such extent, no one was able to continue fighting any further. Without a bit of tweaking, the humans would not be able to hold out any further, while the Orcs might also be at risk of bombing their camp.
Therefore, this bloody battle was put to rest for the time being. The humans retreated hastily, utterly abandoning the camp bases that they had so laboriously constructed previously. They directly retreated to the defense line of the Great Wall that was built over many years. The Orcs, on the other hand, cleaned up the battlefield to avoid epidemics such as plagues.
Sui Xiong watched all this from the sky and sighed deeply.
“Please rest assured, Your Majesty. Now, the weather is still cold, and together with the constraints I’ve imposed, there will be no outbreak of plague,” said the God of Plague, who was Sui Xiong’s accompaniment. “And the Orcs have always been good in dealing with corpses. They don’t waste resources.”
Sui Xiong froze for a moment, then immediately understood what the God of Plague meant.
The Orcs’ method of dealing with corpses was very simple: corpses of human officers in fine, elaborate armor could be preserved while awaiting someone to pay to redeem them. The corpses of ordinary soldiers and Orcs would have their belongings removed and dealt with before being sent over to be handled as “meat.”
Be it the humans or the Orcs, if they were dead, they would just be considered as meat. It was costly to transport corpses home, and the families of ordinary soldiers simply could not afford such amounts. So all that could be done for these families was to sort out the belongings of the dead soldiers.
When a large army was mobilized, a great amount of food supply would be required every day. It was always good to be able to have more meat as a food supplement.
Large cauldrons were set up, one after the other. Dead bodies, regardless of race, were disposed of and thrown into these cauldrons and eventually stewed into a pulpified mix of meat broth.
The two sides that once fought each other to death were finally merged into one, regardless of who they used to be. And they became the motivation for the other warriors to continue the fight.
Sui Xiong watched everything happening under his nose with great sadness but did nothing to stop it.
He had once wanted to stop all this, but after careful consideration, he did not do so.
War was cruel, survival was difficult. If the Orcs wanted to win this battle, they would have to exhaust all means possible. If Sui Xiong were to step forth to stop them from turning all the corpses into food, he would, on the contrary, be undermining his stance as a neutral party.
In fact, the Orcs were not born to be so cruel. Back in the years, after the battle of Sun’s Death Day, they did not make food out of the dead bodies. At that time, it was probably because the war was over…
“War, war… has never changed…” he could not help muttering a line of famous saying that he had heard somewhere. “Cruel war…”
At the same time, within the void where the two God Kingdoms collided, the various God Systems that united to fight against the humans had fully spread out as though they were casting a net. They were doing all they could to search for the traces of the human gods.
The human gods had not fallen. This was apparent from the fact that their temples on Earth had not lost their holy lights. But they had to be so severely wounded, even to the extent where they were unable to provide divine support to their clergymen.
The other God Systems had to take advantage of the current situation to finish off the human gods. Finish off the human gods before they had the chance to get their breath back, then the rest of them would all be the unlucky ones instead.
Fortunately, the God Kingdom of the human gods had been destroyed. Without the foundation of their God Kingdom, it would not be so easy if they had wanted to catch their breath.
There were already gods who had sent their Oracles flying to Earth to launch attacks on the churches and temples of the human gods. However, due to the influence of the enchantment of the Main Plane, the things that the other gods could do on Earth were limited. The clergymen of the human gods could still withstand the attacks by relying on the defense of the temples.
But everyone knew that if the human gods did not reappear, so long as this situation was allowed to persist for a certain period, their clergymen and temples would not be able to hold out any longer.
Likewise for them. Since they had been putting up with everything till now, when the time arrived for them to appear, they would be bound to launch an earth-shattering, ferocious attack!
And this war had temporarily fallen into an impasse.
To break this deadlock, the Orcs sent out an excited, harassment troop.
This time, it was unlike the civil war of the Commonwealth of Gold Coins, which consisted of only a small troop of a thousand men. This was a large army comprising tens of thousands of soldiers. Making use of the flying magic beasts, they flew across the defense line at the Great Wall and directly charged into the core region of the Kingdom of Light.
This Orc army was not as brutal as the previous mobility troop led by Earl Hauss. They did not carry out massive massacres over every land they passed by. Instead, they made sure to completely destroy all the production tools and food reserves in every town and village along their way; then they left, leaving the refugees in a state of panic because in the dead of winter, they were stranded in the cold with no food and clothes.
This approach was naturally the decision the advisory board of the Orc Empire arrived at after discussion. They felt that blindly massacring would only be a waste of their soldiers’ physical strength. It would not bring them much benefit—in this final battle between the two races, slaughtering people would not serve to demoralize. It would only make each other even angrier and was simply meaningless.
On the contrary, if they were to only destroy the production tools and food supplies, the humans would face a great difficult—should they save the refugees who had lost their good, tools and even had their houses destroyed? Or should they not? If they were to save them, how would they do so?
Unquestionably, this would greatly restrain the military strength of the humans. It would also put a toil on a large number of their resources.
To the Orcs, such an outcome was far more useful there a mere massacre.
“The living are always more useful than the dead. It’s just a matter of how we use them,” the former Orc Emperor Junero Tiger had once said. Now the Orcs were learning and applying his teachings with full vigor. And they seemed to have benefitted well.
As for Emperor Junero himself, he was now a warrior under the command of the Orc gods and a member of the Orc army searching for traces of the human gods in that void.
However, he was also keeping a watchful eye over the war situation on Earth. The Orc gods held his advice in high regard. They had appointed a few Oracles, who were not very powerful but had quick feet, to be his liaison officers, so that he could keep abreast of the war situation on Earth in a timely manner.
When he got to know that the Orcs had sent out a harassment troop to destroy the humans’ production means and resources, but did not kill any civilians, thus leaving only countless refugees, he could not contain his laughter.
“Well done!” he said. “Continue doing so, we will salvage ourselves from our terrible plight, bit by bit. And eventually, we’ll take down victory!”
“Your Majesty, can we really win this war?” that young man asked. He had become an Oracle not long ago.
“Of course!” Junero replied and laughed with great confidence. “This time, the humans are actually thinking of becoming enemies with all the races. They are simply courting their own doom!”