Finally, I asked about the orcs.
“The orc forces number…” Soei paused for a moment. “Approximately two hundred thousand fighters.”
“Two hundred thousand?!” someone shouted.
I think it was a few thousand that laid waste to the ogre’s fort…
“So you mean to say that the force that attacked our home was merely a fraction of the entire army?”
“Indeed,” Soei reported. “That is what I found in my investigations. We believe the total number involved to be two hundred thousand. The main force is working its way along the Great Ameld River from the south, covering a relatively broad range as they do. My estimate is based strictly on the length of their marching forces and the width of the roads they are using, but based on that, they can number no fewer than one hundred fifty thousand. I’ve confirmed that some squadrons affiliated with them are making inroads here and there into the forest as well, so I would warn against lowballing our estimate.”
A massive parade of orcs, occupying entire roads for miles on end, as far as the eye could see.
“Do we know where they’re headed?”
“Yes, my lord. The force is aiming for the marshes that spread around Lake Sisu, working straight through the lizardman territory. However…”
“However?”
“However, with their current trajectory, they will reach human territory immediately afterward. It is unclear where their ultimate objective lies, but if they continue along a straight line, they will be unable to avoid confrontation with a number of different human kingdoms.”
Wow. What’re they thinking? Wait a second… If all they wanted was control over the forest, would they simply stop once they destroyed the lizardmen? What did they want anyway?
“What do you think about all this, Soei? Are the orcs seeking to destroy the lizardmen? Or will they continue their conquest into human lands?”
“It is hard to say as of yet, my lord.”
I suppose not. I had only a dim idea of the geography involved anyway.
“Well, I think finding out about that should be the next priority. Do we have a map or something handy, Soei?”
“What do you mean by…‘map,’ sir?”
“Huh?”
………
……
…
This was a bit of a surprise. The concept of a map was seemingly alien to most everyone in the room.
Kaijin, bless his soul, knew what I was talking about. He knew, but he didn’t have a lead on one we could purchase. Apparently, the way the world was at this point in its history, maps were still considered confidential military intelligence.
Well, so be it. I had the assembled members line up a number of wooden boards on the table and then craft something simple for me so I could see where things were, relative to one another. Most monsters had Telepathy, which let them share a pool of information with one another. This was helpful, but it had the adverse effect of delaying the development of printed, or recordable, media.
Hakuro started by drawing the general area around the ogre homeland, using what he heard from his grandfather as reference. The lack of paper was really starting to bother me, but I had more boards brought in so we could draw up the region around our town. Thought Communication came in handy for this, letting people pick up on exactly what one another was picturing in their minds. Too handy, really, given how it let people exchange accurate information without putting it down on paper. I wouldn’t necessarily call it an improvement over life on Earth. It was a dilemma, honestly, even if it posed no hindrance to day-to-day monster life.
It was a given that humans were a lot better at transmitting knowledge down to future generations than monsters. That was the core behind developing a civilization, after all. The monsters around me might dismiss this mapmaking as a needless extra step for now, but I was sure they’d thank me later.
I had the Sage collate all the information people were feeding me with their minds. Once I had it all, I neatly jotted it down on the wooden boards. The result was a fairly serviceable map. The distances and such were bare estimates, of course, but it could stand up to practical use well enough. Sucked that I had to waste a bunch of time on this map before we got to the main subject, though.