"The greatest victory is that which requires no battle" Sun Tzu
**
News of the priestess and the group being missing had already become known in the settlement.
And everyone, without exception, mourned her loss and prayed to the goddess for her to be able to rest within her realm.
After the grief and mourning, there was widespread anger, but the chief had managed to somehow control the situation.
That was until a single severed foot of the priestess was found.
It was almost as if the goblins were taunting them.
This was the tipping point that sent all humans into a frenzy filled with anger.
The whole human settlement was fuming with rage and a burning desire for vengeance.
Men were currently being armed with the finest weapons tribes had access to.
At this point, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that a big war was about to erupt between the settlements.
*"
Meanwhile, in the Goblin Settlement, a similar situation was ongoing.
It was obvious to even the hobgoblins, with their limited amount of intelligence, that the steel ant attack on their settlement was planned.
While they were able to somehow contain the ants and kill them thanks to their high numbers.
Due to the ants being far stronger than them and the attack being a surprise, as well as their weapons not even working on the beasts,.
They had lost more than half of their population, and most of their settlement was in complete ruin.
As if that alone wasn't enough after the attack, somehow all their spare weapons in the warehouse as well as their food were gone.
If nothing was done soon, their entire population was going to starve to death.
The situation was more desperate than it had ever been.
It was obvious to them that a human was responsible for their current predicament.
After all, humans were the only ones clever and insidious enough to devise such a scheme.
Many of the enraged goblins wanted to go to war right away.
But remembering all the help they had received from humans over the past,.
They managed to hold back for a few days.
Choosing to wait for a few days for the priestess to come like usual for the exchange.
But even days after the appointed time, no one showed up.
The little doubt that had originally clawed the hearts of goblins,grew threatening to consume them.
With time, it was slowly becoming obvious to them that, despite what they wanted to believe, humans were responsible for their terrible predicament after all.
And now it was too late; their people were growing hungry, and if nothing was done soon, they would all die of starvation.
After all, there was only so much that the goblins could hunt before their race started dying out.
In the end, the only choice left was to steal human settlements food.
While a few of them were originally against it, in the end, there was nothing they could do.
After all, desperate times called for desperate measures.
It was either them or the humans.
And the goblin chief had chosen his own people.
He was currently preparing all his people for war with whatever little weapons they had left.
Today they were going to make the humans pay for betraying them and steal all their food.
**
The alliance that had taken the priestess years to establish had come completely crashing out mere days after her death.
As expected, the dreaded time of war had eventually come.
Both the enraged humans and hungry goblin armies met in the middle of the path connecting their respective settlements.
The goblin chief tried to communicate with angry humans, confused by their seemingly angry state.
But all it got back was some angry remarks and curses, which it obviously couldn't understand.
It seems due to its experience always dealing with the priestess and hungry mind, it momentarily forgot that their races were incapable of communicating with each other.
It finally clicked inside its primitive mind that their alliance was doomed to fail regardless of the circumstances.
After all, two parties who can't understand each other could never work together.
It didn't know what exactly had happened to the humans for them to be so mad and ready for war, but it did understand that they wanted to kill them.
With this realisation, it ordered its kin to attack and kill without hesitation.
Or at least tried to, but it was a heartbeat too late as the human archers were faster, killing one of their people the moment the arrow hit.
And this was just the start, as following that one arrow, multiple of them fell down the sky, piercing and killing multiple of their kin.
Just like that, the war between races had begun.
Goblins, while far superior in number, were weakened due to their hunger and lack of weapons for most of them.
Also, due to losing the initiative to attack, they had lost morale.
Whereas it was the opposite for humans.
Despite being outnumbered by a significant margin, thanks to their anger at the betrayal and the death of their priestess, their morale stayed up.
And this morale only increased even more after seeing multiple goblins easily die at the start of the fight.
Thanks to their weapons, superior training, morale, and reach, humans were able to bridge the gap between numbers and seemed to be dominating the fight.
With tens of goblins dying every minute, barely even a single human died.
Soon, the once-clean ground was littered with limbs, corpses, and lots of blood, both green and red.
It had been hours since the fight started, and despite the humans dominating initially, exhaustion caught up to them, allowing goblins to counterattack.
As the situation stood, it was extremely hard to predict who was going to come out on top.
While all this was happening, neither race had even a single clue about the fact that they were currently dancing on the palms of the man responsible for all their misfortunes.
Speaking of him, he was currently standing almost a whole kilometre away from the sight of battle, casually enjoying the bloodshed and violence that he caused.
Victory and salvation were within reach.
Soon he was going to leave this accursed forest.
This was his perfect victory.
Or was about to be, but not quite.
There was still one more thing left for him to do.