"Damn it!"
Iron Horse Mountain, outskirts of Falling Petal Valley, inside a truck retreating under the protection of a large number of soldiers.
Through his binoculars, Major General Tony Laila, commander of the 1st Division, watched the Centaur Legion still clinging relentlessly to his forces from behind, his expression utterly grim.
Especially when he thought of the tactical arrangement he had originally devised: relying on the Beam-Piercing Magitech Cannons equipped on the mobile armored mage cannon vehicles, using elite Magic Eye Observers to predict enemy positions and effectively restrain their mobility, while infantry regiments wielding Steel Body Art established an outer defensive perimeter.
Then, with the Flame Regiment wielding Flame Art creating a vast wall of fire, combined with locked-on barrages of fireballs and the carpet bombardment of ordinary magitech artillery regiments, they would form a perfect defensive line.
Those Centaur Legion troops on the other side, still relying on simple arts and the cold weapons he utterly despised, should have been relics long discarded by the times. They should have been thoroughly defeated by his targeted deployment.
Yet the result had been the complete opposite of what he expected!
This unforeseen turn of events and defeat filled Major General Tony with rage and humiliation.
He had never imagined that just as he had engaged the enemy again, intending to deploy the tactics he had planned and deliver a devastating blow from the new era to those obsolete beastfolk fools ahead—
Those damned Orc Shadow Forces had appeared inside his ranks out of nowhere and swiftly assassinated every member of the Flame Regiment he had arranged.
Even the armored mage cannon vehicles had suffered inexplicable explosions that blew apart their tracks, turning them into lumps of metal that could do nothing but sit in place and sway.
And without the