Richard's body, empowered by the system, possessed senses far sharper than those of ordinary people.
The dim, lightless night posed no obstacle to him, allowing him to see the numerous corpses scattered sparsely across the reclaimed land ahead. Packs of carrion-eating coyotes frolicked around the bodies, each with a belly swollen round from gorging itself.
Some of the corpses belonged to Wildlanders, while others belonged to dwarves.
Some were still relatively fresh, retaining the appearance they had worn at the moment of death. Others had clearly been left there for a considerable amount of time. Mosquitoes, flies, and maggots crawled in and out of their eye sockets, while their bellies bulged high, as if they were about to burst at any moment.
"What an awful smell." Annie frowned and pinched her nose. She should have been grateful that Half-Elves had not inherited the elves' vision completely.
After all, it was summer. A piece of raw meat left outdoors overnight would spoil.
"Yeah, it smells like blue cheese." Richard replied casually.
Dwarven culture placed tremendous importance on concepts like their people, their ancestors, and their souls. If even the corpses of their comrades who had died in battle had not been properly buried, it could only mean that their situation had become truly dire.
And that was indeed the case.
The dwarves had clearly devoted considerable thought to building their home.
Their camp had been set up on elevated ground beside a lake, where the terrain rose slightly. The excess earth along the gently sloping edges had been removed and smoothed into a vertical drop reaching a person's waist. A wall two blades high had been built atop it from stone and slag, making the camp easy to defend and difficult to attack.
But several sections of the wall had now been knocked down, and more than a hundred hulking black men were charging through the gaps, rushing inside and pounding away.
Every one of them stood over two and a half blades tall. Their torsos were wider than door panels, and they were brutally savage. They were none other than the ferocious Bearfolk warriors. But to Richard's surprise, quite a few smaller figures followed around them, leaping about with crude wooden spears and bamboo pikes as they coordinated with the Bearfolk.
These short little creatures had easily recognizable red eyes and large ears, as well as impressive jumping ability. If one ignored the blood on their faces, they were generally rather cute.
"Rabbit-headed Humanoids?" Lord shouted inwardly, How strange, how strange. How did the Bearfolk fall so low as to mix with Rabbit-headed Humanoids?
The tall, burly Bearfolk standing alongside the thin, tiny Rabbit-headed Humanoids made for an extremely striking visual contrast. The combination reminded him of a joke about a bear and a little white rabbit.
"What's so strange about that?" Annie said matter-of-factly. "They're the Bearfolk's vassals."
"Vassals?" Richard searched through all his memories, but couldn't find any knowledge that matched the situation before him.
But when he blinked and looked at Annie, then at Gunther and Hert, he found that each of them wore an expression that said this was nothing unusual.
So Lord immediately put on an affected look and nodded. "Oh, they're vassals."
His performance had been so obviously forced that the air around them suddenly fell silent for a moment. Then Annie couldn't hold it in and snorted with laughter.
Hert was the one who bailed him out. "My lord, powerful races like the Bearfolk are often specialized in combat and poor at production, so they gather vassals to handle miscellaneous tasks for them. They also bring them along to battle as reinforcements."
"Most large tribes consist of an overlord and vassals. Only small tribes consist of a single race." Gunther scratched his head and added another explanation.
"If you all knew that, why didn't you say so earlier?" Richard asked helplessly.
"How could we have guessed that you didn't even know this?" Annie replied, even more helplessly.
The differences brought about by their environments were obvious at this moment. Richard had remained in the Southern Province and rarely had any opportunity to encounter such information, while the three of them, being familiar with tribal life, couldn't imagine that anyone wouldn't understand such common knowledge.
"Tsk, tsk." Lord lay in the grass and looked through his telescope for a while longer, clicking his tongue.
Annie had mentioned earlier that, to prove their resolve, every warrior of the Bearfolk tribe had blinded one of their own eyes. At the time, Richard had thought that although this bunch was dull and foolish, they truly deserved to be called ruthless for being able to go through with something like that.
But now he saw that it wasn't quite like that. It was true that every one of the Rabbit-headed Humanoids had one blind eye, but every single one of their overlords, the Bearfolk, had both eyes intact. It seemed that even if the last Rabbit-headed Humanoid had to be sacrificed, the Bearfolk tribe would never abandon them.
"Miss Annie, you said that large tribes have over a thousand warriors. Does that include their vassal races?" Richard seemed to see a glimmer of victory. He had noticed that the Bearfolk numbered at most one-fourth to one-fifth as many as the Rabbit-headed Humanoids.
Although this world was not exactly fair, in many respects, different races each had their own strengths. Powerful races like the Bearfolk might be formidable, but their reproductive capacity was destined to be no match for races like the Rabbit-headed Humanoids. That was nature's constraint upon them.
"Mm." Annie nodded. "Don't underestimate the Rabbit-headed Humanoids. As long as their overlord is present, they can often fight together until the very end."
"What if their overlord isn't there?" Richard couldn't help asking curiously.
"Uh... They might surrender outright without putting up a fight."
"Damn, so after all that talk about how formidable they are, they can only fight when everything's going their way?" Lord silently cut the Bearfolk's threat rating in half.
Clearly, it wasn't reasonable to count everyone together indiscriminately, regardless of their strengths and weaknesses. There was an enormous gap between the combat power of overlords and vassals.
Although the Rabbit-headed Humanoids were more numerous, calling them filler would have been generous.
The first thing the dwarves did after beginning to mine ore and forge iron was arm their own people. As a result, their equipment was exceptionally lavish. Fine full-body Plate Armor had been issued even to low-ranking soldiers, making the High Mountain Keep guards, who had only just begun changing their equipment, drool with envy.
Though short, the dwarves were sturdy and powerfully built, and they wielded hammers skillfully. Their combat strength was actually quite impressive.
Under the wise leadership of Lord, High Mountain Keep's military industry had only just begun. Their rearmament order was weapons first, armor second. The few centaur Busmi were devoted believers in the theory that slow work produced fine goods, and their output was even lower than that of the sole hen that laid eggs. The guards had only barely finished replacing their weapons once before setting out.
That was why the barbarians' iron armor varied wildly in quality and style. Much of it consisted of loot captured in the past, and compared with the dwarves, they had an unmistakable poor-peasant air about them.
But if the comparison was changed to the Bearfolk, they suddenly seemed unbelievably fortunate. The Bearfolk's equipment couldn't even compare with High Mountain Keep's. At best, they had managed to equip each person with one primary heavy weapon. Iron armor, to them, was a luxury possessed by only a small minority.
Many Bear Warriors could only wear self-made leather armor, whose defensive ability was merely a little better than nothing.
Yet in actual combat, the best-equipped dwarves failed to gain any advantage against the Bearfolk, who looked like beggars. These Half-Orc warriors were simply too savage and too strong!
Roaring as they swung their arms and unleashed heavy blows, they struck with their crude weapons. The explosive clang of metal meeting metal sounded like bells being struck, and even the dwarven warriors, wrapped in iron armor, were beaten until they spat blood.
By comparison, although the Rabbit-headed Humanoids looked quite valiant, their actual performance explained why vassals could only be vassals. Against heavy Plate Armor, their clumsy attacks felt like tickling. They were nothing but cannon fodder.
The main reason the Bearfolk had brought them along was probably to distract the dwarves.
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