Meanwhile, in the royal palace of the Kingdom of Thousand Springs, the current king, Dake Spring, was also furrowing his brow in worry.
As the ruler of a nation, of course he was not troubled by a lack of cannon fodder. What troubled him was something else.
Not long ago, he had received reliable intelligence that the Orc Empire had dispatched roughly two thousand elite soldiers to support the Dwarf Kingdom.
Two thousand was not a large number, but if those two thousand were elite soldiers, that was an entirely different matter.
The terrain of the Cloud-Breaking Mountains was far from open. Armies numbering in the tens of thousands could not even deploy properly there, while two thousand elite troops would be enough to hold the vital passes. Even an army of a thousand upon thousand would never break through.
Not to mention that the orcs could make up for the dwarves' greatest weakness—their shamanic spells had the drawback of short range, but they were still far more nimble than dwarven rune magic and covered a much wider area. Their support in war was simply on an entirely different level.
Dake picked up the secret report and read through it carefully once more, unable to stop himself from sighing.
Because the Orc Empire had changed emperors, its personnel had undergone a measure of upheaval, and the spies had found quite a few openings to exploit. Even so, the intelligence they gathered was not detailed enough. They only knew that two thousand elite troops had arrived, including no few spellcasters—but who exactly had come? How many spellcasters were there? They had no way of finding out.
Those were truly secret matters. No matter how hard the Kingdom of Thousand Springs' spies worked, they could not easily uncover them.
After all, spies