“There is one thing all you gentlemen keep forgetting to consider. How could people motivated only by plunder, glory, and riches compare to those who fought to defend their homes and families, their way of life and their existence as a whole? The two sides were never comparable to begin with.” - Levatix Norsnoes, History Scholar, during a debate about the early northern crusades and their debacles.
Less than an hour after the battle which historians later named the Great Debacle of the First Northern Crusade started, it came to an end. Out of the twenty seven thousand strong human army, less than half escaped. The orcs took no prisoners - other than a few badly wounded people Aideen singled out for later interrogation -, and while the initial volley of arrows merely took out a few thousand soldiers at best, the chase that ensued after the humans routed reaped the lives of over ten thousand people.
The remnant of the human army, still ten thousand or so in number, dispersed all over the southern regions of the prairies by the time the orcs gave up the chase. Without doubt, some would eventually gather at the fort they erected a day’s travel to the south, where another two to three thousand humans were left in garrison, but many would be lost to the prairies itself, either to the bestial inhabitants of the land or simply by getting lost and dying of hunger and thirst.
What was left behind was a carpet of human corpses that covered the prairie as far as the eye could see, made even more morbid by the groans and screams of pain from the abandoned injured that had not given up the ghost yet. The orcs who scoured the field for usable things slowly took care of that however, as they simply put the injured out of the misery for good as they passed by.
Strewn amidst the field of corpses were over two hundred thousand arrows that the horde had fired. Many of the arrows - those that found their target or struck something hard - were damaged, with a number broken from the impact, but others, ones that missed their target and sunk into the soft soil, were relatively undamaged, and the orcs picked those out and gathered them for reuse.
Even the damaged arrows that were not too badly damaged, those with blunted or broken arrowheads and the likes, were gathered up, since those could be fitted with new arrowheads and reused as well. As such, the majority of the horde scoured the battlefield for anything that could be used again while they waited for the forces under Warchief Buknug, who led the pursuit, to return in triumph.
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They also stripped anything usable from the human corpses as they passed. While many of the conscripts merely had makeshift armor made of boiled leather or several sheets of padded fabrics, some of the wealthier ones had proper chainmail on their bodies. The orcs diligently peeled off the armor from the corpses, at times making certain that it was a corpse they stripped in the first place by delivering a finishing blow to the still-struggling injured humans.
Other than the armor, the weapons from the fallen humans - including those discarded by the fleeing ones - were also of great interest for the orcs. The orcs were relatively poor in metal, so they happily collected the spearheads from the human weapons, though given how their looks soured after they gave the swords they picked up from the bodies of some knights and officers, Aideen thought that the orcs probably found them too small and finicky for their own use.
After all, the crude blades that many warchiefs favored were a good bit thicker and larger than most swords, easily the size of a two-handed blade, yet used single-handed by the sturdy orcs. There were a few greatswords that met the orcs’ approval amongst the looted weapons, but they were rare, because most human knights trained as cavalry, and such weapons were impractical for horseback usage.
Aideen even saw Orica nod approvingly at one particularly big example one of her warriors proffered to her as she picked it up and gave a few test swings.
As for the captives she singled out for later interrogation, it was easy enough to identify likely important people amidst the human army, since they dressed better than the rank and file, and were almost always the ones rich enough to afford full sets of plate mail. Even so, the ones she found were generally unconscious and dying, only spared from death by a quick dose of healing from her to preserve their life for a bit more while the orcs stripped them down to their loincloths.
Despite the carnage, Aideen was entirely unmoved, having seen scenes just as horrible in her past, but Celia was not as calm of her. The younger unliving woman even dry heaved for a bit from the sight before her, before she calmed down, though still with a pale face from the slaughter. Along the way Aideen had not only picked out some injured humans who were likely nobles of officers to interrogate, but also healed the orcs who were unfortunate enough to get injured as she passed.
The horde had taken practically no casualties in the one-sided massacre. At most their dead numbered in the tens, those who charged in and to run into particularly brave humans who fought back with all they’re worth. The injured numbered less than a couple hundred, many mostly out of their own fault as they tripped on corpses as they chased after the routed human army.
Aideen healed them all as she passed by, and though some of the orcs grumbled on why she “saved” some of the invaders as well, at least until their chiefs gave them a slap on the backside of the head and a stern talking-to. The chiefs had already been informed about it, and had agreed that information on the invaders would be highly valuable for the future, since none of them believed that this invasion was going to be a one-time thing.