100: Chapter 100 Welcome to the Performance-Based Warfare

Cayden's actions were like sparks thrown into a powder keg, instantly detonating the entire quarry.

"Damn it! I'd rather die on the charge than die in the mine!"

"A knight's head... restore my status! Restore my status!"

"Don't block my way! That two-handed sword is mine!"

The instinct for survival and the temptation of restored status were like the strongest spirits poured down the throats of these prisoners, whose nerves had long been paralyzed by despair and hard labor.

They roared, shoved, and swarmed toward the few crude weapon carts.

Rusty swords, notched axes, or even just sharpened wooden sticks became the ladder to freedom at this moment.

In their eyes, there was no longer fear of the Northern Army, only vigilance and hostility toward the "colleagues" beside them who were also reaching out their arms.

Graham Byron—no, he should be called the Wartime Special Defense Officer of Blackstone Territory now—watched this chaos with cold eyes.

He made no attempt to organize any formation; he only needed to build the roughest framework, a framework that would allow them to exert their strength in the same direction.

He grabbed a former knight squad leader who had been fighting over a spear a second ago and growled in an unquestionable voice: "You, take your men and hold that highest pile of ore on the left! It has the best view; call out the location of the enemy officers! Whoever calls it out first gets one team merit!"

He pointed to another group of strong men waving mining picks and Iron Hammers: "You lot, go to the ramp on the right, push those piles of rubble down, and block their horse legs for me! Complete the mission, and everyone's points will be doubled!"

His orders were simple and brutal; there was no tactic, only KPIs.

Every instruction precisely struck the most sensitive nerves of this group—points, merit, and that pie drawn on the stone slab.

The chaotic prisoners were roughly manipulated by this invisible hand, gradually forming a crooked, jagged line of defense on the uneven mining hills outside the castle.

They had no unified uniforms, no flying flags, only ragged prison clothes and the same madness in their eyes.

Every one of them understood that the solitary black castle behind them was the only dealer in this high-stakes gamble, their only "employer."

On the castle's highest arrow tower, the biting night wind made the torches crackle, stretching human shadows into thin, distorted shapes.

There were no generals planning strategies here, no anxious staff waiting.

Levi stood behind the battlements of the arrow tower, with only the Chief Operating Officer Evelyn and three clerks holding thick ledgers, shivering from the cold, by his side.

Their quill tips hovered over the parchment, ready to record at any moment.

Levi did not hold a longsword symbolizing power, but a brass monocular.

This was the masterpiece of the dwarf engineer Borin, with lenses ground from crystal, allowing him to clearly see every detail below the hillside at this distance.

With the cold lens pressed against his eye socket, in his field of vision, the vanguard cavalry of the Duke of the North had already surged like a black tide against his fragile dam made of "employees."

"Record." Levi's voice was calm, without a ripple, as if he were not watching a bloody war, but auditing a financial report.

"Three o'clock direction, top of the ore pile, target Cayden's squad. They routed the opponent's five-man scout detachment, beheaded three, with one casualty of their own. Record one merit, team performance points increase by twenty percent."

The clerk behind him immediately lowered his head, his quill scratching rapidly against the parchment, making a "rustling" sound like the scythe of the Grim Reaper harvesting.

"Five o'clock direction, middle of the ramp, Squad 073. Signs of rout appearing, two men have retreated more than ten steps." Levi's voice turned cold. "Notify Uncle, use the reserve team to plug the gap. Squad 073, all members' points for this session are cleared, send them to the lowest level of the mine after the battle, mark them as 'high-risk assets,' and never employ them again."

The messenger immediately took the order and signaled with a small flag toward the bottom of the hill.

Evelyn looked at Levi's profile; there was no emotion on that handsome face, only a kind of near-cold focus.

Her palm, gripping the sword hilt, seeped cold sweat.

She once thought she had seen the cruelest battlefields, but this scene before her completely overturned her perception.

This was not a war; this was an extremely bloody performance review.

Below the hillside, the vanguard officer of the Northern Army, Knight Layton, known as the "Ice Wolf Cub," curled his lip in contempt.

The warhorse beneath him snorted uneasily, its hooves pawing at the rubble.

"A bunch of miners with sticks?" He sneered at the adjutant beside him. "It seems that bastard of House Byron truly has no one left to use. Pass on my order: First and Second Cavalry Squads, cone formation charge. Within a quarter of an hour, I want to be drinking hot wine on the gatehouse of that castle!"

"Woo—"

The horn of the charge sounded again.

The steel torrent composed of two hundred heavy cavalry, with thunderous momentum, smashed fiercely into that "miner" line of defense that looked like it would collapse at a touch.

Layton had even begun to imagine those ragged guys being trampled into meat paste by horse hooves, fleeing in panic while crying out.

However, the scene that followed made the smile on his face freeze.

The collapse he anticipated did not happen.

Those "miners" not only did not run away, but instead let out an unintelligible howl, mixed with greed and excitement, and rushed toward the charging cavalry.

A cavalryman's lance easily pierced a prisoner's chest, but before dying, the prisoner used his last ounce of strength to smash the mining pick in his hand fiercely into the warhorse's knee.

The warhorse neighed and knelt, and the cavalryman was instantly thrown flying.

Before he even landed, at least seven or eight "miners" pounced on him like hyenas smelling blood, their broken weapons frantically hacking at the gaps in his armor.

They were not coordinating; they were fighting over him!

Fighting over the head that could be traded for freedom!

Two of them even shoved each other over who would cut the neck first, giving the knight a chance to draw his short sword and kill one of them.

But this was meaningless; in the next second, more weapons submerged him.

This scene was constantly being staged across the entire battlefield.

The attacks of these prisoners were disorganized and chaotic, but they carried a madness that disregarded casualties.

They would kill each other for an enemy squad leader, or give up defense to fight for a shield that looked fancy, but it was precisely this chaotic greed, with "taking a head" as the primary goal, that unexpectedly dragged down the momentum of the elite cavalry charge.

The cavalry's most powerful weapon—the impact force of a group charge—was constantly dissolved in this messy, individualistic biting.

They seemed to have fallen into a quagmire made of human bodies, and every step forward required a huge price.

Behind the lines, Graham was covered in blood; he had just used a captured longsword to chop off the head of a prisoner who tried to desert.

"Listen!" He held the bloody head high and roared at the guys with flickering eyes nearby, "There are only two types of people on the battlefield! Employees who create value for the Lord, and worthless trash! If you want to be trash, this is the end!"

He was not executing any sophisticated tactics; he was just trying his best to maintain a basic "transaction order."

He was surrounded by a dozen of the smartest and most desperate guys selected from the prisoners; they were his "data collectors."

"Left flank! The one with the flag on the left! That's the standard-bearer! The bounty is equivalent to a captain!"

"The fat guy on the white horse in the middle! There's a badge on the armor! High-value target! Whoever takes him down, I will personally apply to the Lord for a full reduction of their sentence!"

Graham was like a crazy auctioneer, constantly roaring the location information of "high-value targets" to the greediest and strongest prisoners.

His command was to project the destructive power of these people, like guided weapons, onto the key nodes of the enemy.

Cayden heard his roar; he licked his chapped lips, and the smell of blood made him even more excited.

He glanced at the fat man on the white horse, then at the remaining dozen men beside him.

"Brothers!" He roared, "Finish this job, and we'll be free! Follow me!"

Like a cheetah, he led his equally crazy "team members" and rushed forward without hesitation toward the "super performance package" marked by Graham.

The battle fell into a bloody stalemate.

The casualty rate of the prisoner army was rising sharply.

The courage brought by greed ultimately had its limits; when the people around them fell like wheat, and the enemy's lances were close at hand, the fear of death began to spread like a plague.

Small-scale routs had already appeared at the edge of the line, and even though Graham personally beheaded deserters, he could not completely curb this downturn.

On the arrow tower, Evelyn's face became paler and paler, and her voice carried a trace of imperceptible trembling: "My Lord, the casualty rate has already exceeded forty percent! At this rate of consumption, this temporarily assembled troop will completely collapse in half an hour—no, maybe a quarter of an hour. I suggest... I suggest immediately shrinking the defense line and holding the castle!"

She was a knight; in her view, using human lives to trade for results was justified.

But she could not understand Levi's approach; this did not look like a battle, but more like a cold-blooded liquidation, using the enemy's hands to screen out those most vicious, most useful, and least trustworthy "tools."

Levi slowly lowered the monocular in his hand.

The metal frame of the lens left a circle of cold red marks around his eye socket.

His expression remained unchanged, as if that forty percent casualty rate was just an insignificant number in the ledger.

He ignored Evelyn's suggestion and turned to a messenger who was standing by, saying: "Notify Engineer Borin."

His voice was very soft, but it clearly reached everyone's ears.

"Initiate the 'Blackstone No. 1' plan."

The messenger's body shook violently.

"Target area," Levi pointed his finger toward the middle and rear of the battlefield below, the area where the Northern Army's reserve team and commander were located, "The rear flank of the enemy's center."

He paused and added the last sentence, as if speaking to the messenger, and as if speaking to himself.

"Tell him, the real-world data from this technical validation model is more important than the output of the entire quarry for the next ten years."