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Chapter 437: Zharun Tribe’s Betrayal

They were trapped under Veylara’s heavy-handed martial law. With the war drums beating, any sign of hesitation or political bickering would be treated as high treason on the spot, and the Warchief’s spear didn’t care about council status, birthright, or past contributions, after all they were not a few elders who had perished under her spear.

They were forced to fall in line, their influence entirely broken by the sheer, crushing reality of the impending war.

"We have an alliance pact," one of Thorne’s remaining elders stammered, his voice weak as he tried to find a foothold. He shuffled forward by half a step, his fingers twitching over the smooth surface of his staff. "The Zharun tribe... the southern border clans. They swore an oath to protect the western valleys if the Coalition ever mobilized. Surely we should wait for their envoys to arrive? If we act too rashly, we risk risking the lives of our warriors. We should send fast messengers southward to coordinate a pincer strike. Let them take the brunt of the frontal assault while we hold the high ridges."

Veylara slowly lifted her head. Her eyes fixed on the speaking elder with a gaze so cold it made the old man visually flinch and step back.

"The Zharun are dead to us," Veylara said, her voice dropping into an ominous, enraged tone.

Everyone was stunned by her declaration, and looked at her in surprise.

"We sent three fast messengers to their main camp before the drums even started." She continued. "Two hours ago, the spirit-hawk of the third messenger returned alone without any message."

The war room went completely, dead silent.

"These bastards... they didn’t just ignore the call," the Lion Commander growled, his massive fists smashing down onto the obsidian slab, leaving faint fractures in the polished volcanic glass. "The bastards broke the sacred pact. They must be part of it."

"They are either coordinating with the Coalition or waiting for us to exhaust our forces so they can scavenge the remains," Veylara said, her expression entirely unreadable. "It changes nothing. It was after all gambling with luck, and we knew their true face. It’s just that poor girl Lumi... sigh!"

Even the most hardened, scar-faced captains looked down at the floorboards, their jaws clenched in a mixture of deep shame and raw fury.

They couldn’t lift their heads.

They had genuinely believed the Zharun would honor the ancient, sacred blood pact when the survival of their species was on the line. After all, they were all humans in the end, surviving in the rotting, hostile depths of the Great Orrath. surrounded by alien races. That’s how it has been since ancient times.

No matter the grudges, at crucial times like these, they always form sacred pacts and fight the alien races together.

But they hadn’t expected them to not honor the sacred pact, and their own kind to discard them like trash at such a crucial, life-or-death moment, leaving a young Veynar girl like Lumi entirely alone in the southern den of traitors.

An elder from the back of the room, desperate to avoid a direct, bloody clash in the open jungle, spoke up loudly. "If the Zharun have abandoned the pact, then marching out into the valley is pure suicide! Look at the charcoal markings! Thousands of Zerith stalkers and Gray Marauder reserves must have already be prepared! I suggest we pull back all peripheral units entirely.

We lock the gates, fortify the spires, and force them to fight us through our narrow defensive rings! We have storehouses of dried meat and petrified wood. We can outlast their siege!"

"Outlast a siege?" a scout commander stepped forward, his leather armor caked in gray swamp mud, scoffing openly at the elder. "Are your brains rotting inside your skull, old man? The Zerith’s necrotizing venom will poison our water supplies within a week if they control the outer streams! If we lock ourselves in a box, we aren’t defending... we’re just picking out the longhouses we want to starve in!"

"Then we use sneak attacks!" another tactical commander shouted, slamming his bone-dagger into the edge of the table. "We don’t march the main army out. We break the Vanguard into twenty-man hunting cells. We use hit-and-run tactics in the deep ravines. We bleed their supply lines, poison their rot-water pools, and take their heads from the shadows before they even know the pride is awake!"

"A hundred small cells will just get surrounded and chewed to pieces one by one by their massive number, and do you think they are fools and didn’t expect this lousy tactic?" Thauren, the Lion Commander, interrupted, his deep voice easily drowning out the shouting captains.

He stepped closer to the stone map, his yellow pupil eyes scanning the charcoal lines representing the central valley. He pointed a thick, scarred finger directly at the overlapping boundary lines between the three tribal territories.

"We don’t hide behind our walls like terrified cubs, and we don’t scatter into the brush like insects," Thauren rumbled, looking straight at Veylara. "If we want to break thousands of warriors, we have to control the terrain before they can organize their full numbers. Look at the high ground in the central Hunting Grounds... the ancient stone plateaus and the petrified ironwood ridges.

If we march now, we can establish fortified, heavy defensive positions right across those narrow ridges before their main force finishes setting up their camps.

We will form an unyielding wall of bone-shields right in their throats. And force them to funnel their numbers through the narrow rocky passes, and we cut them down as they climb."

Veylara stared down at the map, her eyes tracing the strategic plateaus Thauren, the golden lion spirit commander was describing.

The other commanders and elders fell quiet, waiting for her decision as she contemplated the strategy.

Standing inside walls meant slow starvation; scattering into small ambush cells meant losing their unified strength; but seizing the high ground of the Hunting Grounds meant forcing a brutal, face-to-face war on their own terms.

"The choke point is a good start, Thauren," Sol’s voice cut through the heavy silence, casual and smooth.

Every head in the room snapped toward him. The older elders frowned, annoyed that an outsider was chiming in on tribal military doctrine, but Thauren just narrowed his yellow eyes, waiting to hear what the kid had to say.

Sol stepped up to the obsidian slab, leaning his hands on the volcanic glass. He didn’t look at the elders; his eyes were locked entirely on the charcoal lines of the valley.

"But Thauren’s plan assumes the enemy is stupid," Sol continued, tapping a finger on the plateaus. "If we just sit on top of the ridges and wait, they’ll realize it’s a trap the second their vanguard gets chopped up in the passes.

A force that outnumbers us this badly won’t keep throwing bodies into a meat grinder. They’ll just leave a holding force to block us, bypass the ridges through the lower marshes, and march straight for our empty tribe."

A tense murmur rippled through the room. The reality was staring them right in the face, even if their pride hated it. The Veynar only had about a thousand warriors in total, and that was counting every single available body... the hardened deep-jungle veterans, the inner ring guards, the reserves, and even the fresh, green recruits who had barely learned to hold a bone-shield straight.

The Coalition, between the Zerith and the Gray Marauder, was packing a combined force of easily four to five thousand killers.