Although gnolls were crude and most of them were illiterate, their experience in war ranked among the best on the entire continent.
After all, four hundred and fifty years had passed since the first Black Calamity. For centuries, gnolls had either been fighting the whole continent or warring with rival clans. Calling them a "warrior race" was no exaggeration.
You could say that if combat were a talent, gnolls had maxed it out. Combined with their already outrageous physical prowess, that had allowed these creatures to keep living their rowdy little lives in the Dark Mountains despite centuries of the continent joining forces to hunt them down.
The descendants inherited the combat experience of their ancestors, generation after generation. Then, through four consecutive Black Calamities—continent-spanning wars—they assimilated that experience and developed new branches of it. The direct result of this martial legacy was that even if a group of gnolls were dropped onto a deserted island, the first things they made would always be fortifications and weapons for war.
Take the seemingly ordinary hilltop position before them, for example.
After the rookies from Transia had used their devastating mass-suicide tactics to chew through the first line of defense and kill the warlord who had come to take command, they found no disorganized camp spread across flat ground that they could simply sweep through.
On the contrary, once the first line had fallen, the gnolls in the inner positions hadn't panicked. Under the command of their lesser warlords, they began forming up to meet the enemy.
In particular, when Colonel Fraser led roughly two-thirds of the artillerymen in pushing forty field guns into position and began shelling the gnoll camp, preparing to replicate the combined charge they'd just made alongside the Transians, the Cleaverclaw Overwarlord in the camp immediately sensed the