When Soei finally returned from his latest recon trip, it was finally time to get this meeting started.
We started off with Soei's report. I'd had him investigate just about everything, so his report was broken into three parts.
First off, the state of the other goblin villages. As the forest's most populous, yet weak monster race, I was interested in how they were responding to the orcs' movements.
Long story short, they'd generally taken two approaches to it. The majority of the goblins had left their village to follow that idiot, Gabil. Honestly, it wasn't that surprising. He was stupid, but he was probably around a B-plus in battle, and those stupid goblins probably fell for his flash hook, line, and sinker. Part of me kinda felt bad for those idiots. Whoever hadn't gone with Gabil had fled the forest, mostly going toward human territories. I doubted that they had much chance out there, but frankly, that was their fault. I'd already accepted four villages of goblins on top of Rigurd's. If they weren't willing to come to me, then I owed them nothing.
As for Gabil, he'd managed to assemble a force of goblins roughly seven thousand strong. They were camped at the foot of a mountain range between us and the lizardman stronghold.
The second part of Soei's report pertained to the state of things in the marshlands, where the lizardmen lived. They'd been assembling their own forces. Apparently, the lizardman chief had an army ten thousand strong holed up in a cave network that spanned the entire marshland, safe and well fed via fish. They could hole out there as long as necessary.
Essentially, the lizardmen were totally prepared for a grueling war for survival. That was how much of a threat they believed the orcs to be.
As for the orcs themselves, we finally got to the third and final portion of Soei's report.
"The orcs number… approximately two hundred thousand."
"TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND?!" Someone shouted.
"So the thousands of orcs that attached our home was just part of the orc's whole army?" One of the kijin asked, shocked. The sheer number was beyond what I'd ever anticipated.
"Indeed. The main force is working its way along the Great Ameld River from the south, covering a relatively broad range as they do. My estimates are based on their forces' length and the width of the roads used, but at minimum, it cannot be less than 150,000. They also have multiple squadrons making inroads into the forest here and there, so I'd warn against lowballing the estimates." So, basically, there was a massive horde of orcs taking up entire roads as far as the eye can see, But where were they going? I posed the question to Soei.
"As far as I can tell, they're heading toward the marshes But if they keep going beyond that, they'll go on to encroach on several human nations."
We had no idea whether the orcs would stop after defeating the lizardmen, or if they'd just keep going, basically declaring war with the humans. I supposed it didn't really matter, either. If we let them destroy the lizardmen, then the orcs would basically have the whole forest in their grasp. Either we stopped them before that, or we suffered the consequences. The last thing we wanted was to fight any battles near our home village.
We ended up mapping the orcs' invasion route out. Basically, they'd left their habitat in the north, near demon lord lands, and their main force had followed one route. The only route capable of sustaining that many orcs. But the thing that confused us was in the splinter forces they were sending out, in order to pick off the stronger races of the forest. For example, the ogres weren't in their way at all, but they'd still gone out of their way to defeat them.
Our first thought was that they'd wanted to seize their food stores, but that definitely wasn't enough of a reason to accept so many casualties. And if they just thought that the ogres were a threat, then they'd have probably offered to hire them as mercenaries before wiping them out, but they hadn't. They'd been fully hostile from the start, no more, no less.
Eventually, we came to a horrifying realization. "Soei. Did you find any? At the ogre village?" Shuna was the one to ask the question. Soei responded with a subtle shake of his head.
"No. No bodies at all."
"So the orcs are eating the dead to keep themselves going?" Risa said what everyone was thinking.
"The only thing that could mean is…" Hakuro started. Benimaru finished for him.
"They're being led by an orc lord."
According to the kijin, an orc lord was something roughly on par with kijin, as far as monster classifications went. Born every few centuries or so, the real terrifying thing about them was in their leadership skills. Specifically, a unique skill. Starved. Basically what it did was inflict an unceasing hunger upon the caster's allies, turning them into mindless, fearless beasts that would devour everything around them. And whatever monsters consumed by an orc under the effects of Starved would instantly be transferred to the caster. At least, a little bit, maybe. For example, by defeating the ogre village, the orc lord probably got quite a bit stronger physically and magically. And that strengthening effect would then be filtered down to the masses under his control.
The only known way to deal with it was with humans. Since they used Arts, rather than skills, the orc lord would have nothing to seize.
"Alright. These orcs already have knights, and someone gave them all that equipment. If this orc lord really exists, then it might become a demon lord before long. We should do everything we can to stop it before that happens, but we need to prepare for the worst. I say we send someone over to take a message to Kabal at the guild in Blummund. We should also prepare evacuation measures, just in case. Rigur, can I leave appointment of people for both tasks up to you?" I asked.
"Yes, my lord!" Rigur replied. I'd half-expected some argument, but everyone here was deadly serious about this threat. Even Risa saw the value in preparing, in case we somehow couldn't defeat this threat.
But the first thing we needed was information. We needed to verify that there was an orc lord, before we could bring the humans in.