The orcs were finished.
As early as their invasion of the Autumn Leaf Plain, the orcs had suffered considerable casualties, particularly during the siege of Falling Leaf City. Soren had not only descended as an avatar but also used the Dragon Covenant to summon an ancient brass dragon. The orcs had lost even more warriors that time. The ancient brass dragon had swept back and forth across the battlefield several times, plowing through it with dragon breath. Over a thousand had died on the spot. When the casualties were tallied afterward, that single siege had cost the orcs nearly six thousand adult warriors.
Those losses were substantial, but still within what an entire race could bear.
The orcs numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Falling Leaf City had somewhere between two hundred thousand and two hundred fifty thousand half-elves, while the orc population was slightly larger, probably over three hundred thousand. After excluding the elderly, the weak, women, and children, the ratio of total population to those capable of taking up arms was roughly three to one. In other words, if the orcs fully mobilized, they could muster an army of one hundred thousand.
One hundred thousand.
That sounded like a lot, but it was, in fact, the full reserve of strength the orc race possessed. The primitive productivity of this era, coupled with a civilization caught between farming and nomadism, meant that if the orcs lost too many adult warriors, they would no longer be able to sustain even basic production and cultivation. Their underdeveloped civilization severely limited population growth. Invading the Autumn Leaf Plain had itself been an all-or-nothing gamble, and casualties up to a certain point were still something Yugin could accept.
But...
All of that had only been the beginning. After the siege, Yugin had led