Chapter 289 (2/2)

Records of the Orc side were not as detailed. Around 650,000 had been in the battle altogether, and nearly 350,000 of them had died; nearly 100,000 had died of injuries and illnesses with ineffective treatment from shamans, or they had escaped. An additional record of the Orcs was the loss of 150,000 in the elite units and around 300,000 in others.

In total, the battle had involved over a million forces and Oracles led by real gods. It had resulted in the passing of the first human patron saint, the highly reputed God of Knights. Countless casualties of Oracles and followers and more than 750,000 humans had died in the war!

Such dreadful battles had rarely happened in the past. Even the legendary battle between the humans and Orcs had much fewer casualties than this one, though more forces had been involved. More than one million, five hundred thousand forces were in that battle with casualties of around 300,000—less than half of that at this time.

An important reason for a large number of casualties in this battle had been the use of Oracle forces on both sides and the complicated warfare. The Oracle forces of legendary level had been a daunting power for humans but the latter—with the help of strong spells—had been unprecedentedly courageous to fight back though they had usually fled when confronting slaughter. The humans’ fearless fight regardless of physical conditions and casualties had dramatically increased the number of dead and injured. Moreover, an additional mass of people had died of the consequent injuries and illnesses after the battle.

Especially when the human forces broke through the Orcs front and slaughtered the less powerful auxiliary Orc soldiers at the back of the Orc troops, they were killing like wheat-harvesting farmers. There was enough blood flowing to form a small lake. But they also paid the price—the humans hardly survived, and most of them died in the Orcs’ field.

But things were opposite during the difficult fight. Though all the Orcs elite units had been defeated, they had also killed humans several times over than the humans had killed them.

And it would take time for one to discover the subsequent grave results.

The Eagle Kingdom had a population of around five million. The Duke of Griffin led a semi-independent region in the east. It was not a large land, but it was rather fertile, feeding nearly a million people. The Duke of Griffin sent merely three thousand people to support this battle, and this troop had been quite sly. They had mostly stayed in the more secure corner of the battlefield and avoided as much harm to themselves as possible.

Among the remaining four million people, four hundred thousand were involved in the battle—a show of strength from the Eagle Kingdom. At last, it suffered a direct loss of two hundred thousand and seventy thousand injured or escaped—nearly seventy percent of the force had been lost. Essentially, more than one-fifteenth of the five million people had been sacrificed. For regions which had sent off fewer forces—maybe just five had been sent in a village—only three survived and returned; but for regions that had sent off more, they had to face a more heartbreaking fact. All the families there would no longer be complete; there would be more orphans and widows, and several funerals were taking place at the same time.

The Orc Empire hadn’t recorded its real population, assumedly around twelve million to fifteen million. Yet most of the tribes there hadn’t really obeyed the emperor though they had claimed to do so. No more than sixty to seventy percent of the population were true supporters of the emperor—seven million to ten million of the population.

To take the median number optimistically, assuming that the emperor could mobilize his forces among nine million apart from the auxiliary ones, then he would have no more than three hundred thousand in the elite units. While one hundred thousand of them died, the emperor’s power had already been weakened significantly. Not to mention, the loss of the three hundred thousand auxiliary soldiers could bring about negative impacts to the grass root communities even if not directly to the emperor’s rule.

For the Orc Empire, it had been a sign of the fall of many strong tribes and the less strong ones would be annexed. The subsequent internal chaos and slaughter would be unimaginable.

In addition, they should not forget those knights, troops, and adventurers who had come from other states to support the Eagle Kingdom in the name of interests, faith or the king’s order. They had suffered a great loss. The elite followers of the God of Knights had all been killed on the main plane, and only one in five volunteers survived and made their way back home. The adventurers, though suffering less loss, still lost half of their numbers.

This was war, an unimaginably dreadful war.

Many people had presumed the result of the war before it even started. Some had bet on a win-win result, and some had bet on a draw. Even the craziest or the most pessimistic people hadn’t ever expected the war to be so bloody!

Even the Goddess of War and Death in the War God System had been touched by this furious war. She had long been encouraging furious battles and even planned massacres with the God of Hunting and Holocaust. But this brutal and evil god couldn’t help but flinch upon witnessing such a big battle resulting in seventy percent of the fighters dying; her followers who should have applauded the battle stayed silent.

In terms of both scale and number of casualties, this battle, named by later generations as “the Battle of Sun’s Death Day,” was impressive for humans and gods.

In terms of its influence to later generations, it might be a more profound battle than the war of gods, in which the Human God System had defeated the Sun God System.