Minotaurs

"It's really shaking." Gunther simply lay down and pressed his ear to the ground. A moment later, he gestured for Hert to come over and listen too.

"We centaurs can't lie down like that." Hert stood outside the house, looking troubled.

Richard returned all the candy beans to the dwarf who had been crying because he was about to lose, not forgetting to warn him that if he ever gambled again, he could expect a beating.

"Let's go. Everyone at High Mountain Keep has assembled." He patted the dust from his backside and led the way toward the dwarf warriors' camp.

Their activity startled the guards who were taking shifts nearby. They asked in confusion, "My lord, is something wrong?"

Several deep, resonant horn blasts suddenly rang out from the arrow tower in the distance. "Enemy attack!" the sentry shouted desperately.

The sleeping camp quickly awoke. For a while, all that could be heard was the chaotic pounding of footsteps. The dwarf warriors did not remove their armor when they slept, and they kept their weapons beneath their pillows, all so they could quickly prepare for battle upon waking.

The sky had already begun to lighten—or rather, this was what people called "the moment before dawn, when it was easiest to let one's guard down." However, Lord felt that saying was probably nonsense. He had seen the dwarf sentries changing shifts on time and maintaining a high degree of vigilance.

"Who's coming this time?" Richard ignored Robbie and directly addressed the most senior warrior among the dwarves.

The old man was named Sendak. Since the current chieftain was a snot-nosed child with barely any hair on his lips, Sendak effectively held the position of the tribe's highest military commander.

Sendak exchanged only a few hand signals with the sentry atop the arrow tower before saying to Richard:

"The Bloodhoof Tribe."

"Minotaurs?" When Lord had exchanged intelligence with Annie earlier, this tribe had been emphasized repeatedly, so he remembered it clearly.

"Yes." It was usually difficult to discern any change in expression on a dwarf's stony face, but the gravity on the old dwarf's face was obvious even to a blind man.

Minotaurs were also known as bovemen. They were a relatively rare race in the wilderness, and their overall appearance could be described as that of intelligent yellow oxen walking upright.

In that respect, they differed from the other Half-Orcs. Whether Bearfolk or werewolves, they looked more human than beast. Minotaurs, on the other hand, looked more beast than human.

Though they looked so much like yellow oxen, their dispositions had nothing to do with gentleness. In fact, they were an exceptionally savage race.

Minotaurs lived on meat and were passionate about war and slaughter. Most of them spent their entire lives either fighting or on their way to fight.

Even that alone was not enough to make them stand out among the wilderness's many powers. The truly crucial point was that adult Minotaurs were all towering brutes standing three blades tall and weighing nearly a thousand pounds!

Judging purely by their physical attributes, they were born to be the finest heavy infantry. But Minotaurs had one fatal flaw—their discipline was truly terrible. Once they entered combat, they would enter a state known as "Semi-Berserk State."

In the Semi-Berserk State, the Minotaurs' already terrifying strength and endurance would be further enhanced, turning them completely into tireless killing machines. Unfortunately, every benefit came with a drawback. The battle lust filling their minds also made them utterly impossible to restrain.

This was a fatal flaw on the scale of a great army. Not only would they fall into chaos themselves, they would also scatter the formations of allied troops. Several human generals who had tried to tame Minotaurs had paid the bitter price of defeat for it.

But if the conflict was limited to the scale of tribal warfare, this trait was not merely a flaw—it could even be considered an advantage, since their opponents generally had little discipline either.

"How do you plan to deal with them?" Richard asked curiously.

Two of the short, stocky dwarf warriors around them, stacked on top of each other and jumping, would barely reach the height of a Minotaur. In theory, even with some equipment advantages, they should still have no chance of winning.

Yet since the dwarf tribe had held out for so long without being breached, that was enough to show they were not entirely defenseless. Otherwise, the ones staying here now should have been the Minotaurs.

"Bovemen are extremely impulsive. With a little bait, we may be able to lure them away from the group." Sendak seemed to be explaining it to Richard, yet also seemed to be muttering it to himself to bolster his courage. "Then we dwarf warriors will have a chance to swarm him and take him down!"

"..." Lord was drenched in an imaginary waterfall of sweat. He felt that the "little bait" and "swarm him" parts might not be as easy as they sounded.

"Besides, they're too tall. Unless they bend over, it'll be difficult for them to hit us." Robbie happened to emerge from the house and added a comment.

Imagining a Minotaur bending over with all its might during battle, Lord unconsciously twitched the corners of his mouth twice. Gunther and Hert leaned against each other and laughed until they trembled.

"Marshal Hert, you're too tall. I'm afraid you're in danger today," Gunther said solemnly.

"Marshal Gunther, you're not short either." Hert refused to back down.

Richard was utterly speechless. To go this far for the sake of protecting the so-called "god-given ore deposit"—only stubborn, thickheaded dwarves could do such a thing.

From High Mountain Keep's standpoint, of course, they hoped the dwarves would hold out as long as possible. But if he put himself in their place, Richard could no longer understand this persistence. The dwarves should have understood the principle that if the land remained while its people perished, both the people and the land would ultimately be lost.

"How many warriors do they have?" Richard raised his telescope and looked toward the direction indicated by the sentry.

"More than forty, I think," Sendak said. "There were nearly sixty originally. We killed more than a dozen of them, and they also have several hundred Goatfolk vassals."

Richard lowered the telescope. After all, a telescope could only see far; it could not see in the dark. Under the current lighting conditions, he could not make out anything too far away.

However, he did not have to wait long. Soon, everyone could see some blurry black shadows approaching in the distance.

At such a distance, it was difficult to directly sense the Minotaurs' strength. Only when they saw the goat-headed men around them could they use the smaller figures for comparison and suddenly realize just how enormous those shadows truly were.

"Good grief, those things are huge." Compared to the tense dwarves around him, Richard looked quite relaxed, as if he had no idea just how terrifying an enemy the Minotaurs were.

"How many bolts do our ballistae have left?" Robbie suddenly turned his head toward the arrow tower.

The sentry replied quickly, "Chieftain, only six."

Richard and Sendak exchanged a glance, and both saw helplessness in the other's eyes.

Robbie was far too inexperienced—something like ammunition reserves should never be asked about in public, lest it negatively affect the army's morale.

Now even the lowest-ranking soldiers knew that their ballistae would become Magic Null after only a few shots. The odds that they felt comforted by this were probably, perhaps, eighty percent—not particularly high.

"Lord Richard, please have your troops serve as the reserve assault force. We dwarves will do our best to divide them and bear the brunt of their pressure."

After hearing this, Lord could not help but feel solemn respect. The old man was an honest and decent person. He was unwilling to make the allied troops who had come to reinforce them shoulder the task of directly engaging the Minotaurs, even though that could almost certainly be expected to be the stage with the heaviest casualties.