The battle against the King Boar had not been the most perilous fight of that winter. The truly most dangerous one had been the campaign against the ogre camp.
There was a group of ogres in Dar Territory, living on a mountain at the edge of the swamp. Baron Dar had never considered attacking them in the past. For one thing, despite their name, ogres did not actually make humans their staple food. At most, they occasionally came down the mountain to seize one or two people to improve their diet, and those they took were naturally farmers and the like—utterly insignificant to Dar Territory. For another, those ogres were powerful, and their camp was in treacherous terrain, leaving him with little confidence.
How strong exactly were those ogres? He did not know very clearly, but he could be certain that they had shamans among them.
An ogre tribe with shamans was entirely different from one without. The latter was still roughly akin to beasts; the former could practically be considered barbarians. Beasts and barbarians of equal strength differed as vastly in danger as heaven and earth.
Nor was the ogre camp easy to attack. It lay halfway up the mountain, accessible only by a single steep path. Anyone who was not a hunter accustomed to traveling through mountains and wilderness year-round would likely fall into the ravine before even reaching it, without so much as a whole corpse left behind. As a result, the hundred elite soldiers Dar Territory took pride in would be useless, and even among the archers, at most one-third could safely traverse that steep mountain path.
And after crossing the mountain path, how was the ogre camp arranged? How many ogres were inside? Aside from the shamans, how many had advanced into ogre warriors? Was