"Respected Bishop, this way please, don't mind the lingering scent of desperation and unfulfilled prophecies," Galen 2 waved away his priests, clearly eager to escape their utterly useless ministrations. He then, with the gait of a man whose spine was made of overcooked spaghetti, shuffled deeper into the church, Galen following closely behind.
Galen's hands, hidden with sinister grace within his priestly robes, began to hum with concentrated power. A soundproof nodule, shimmering with arcane energy, rapidly inflated like a cosmic bubblegum bubble, swallowing the entire interior of the church. No more eavesdropping, no more inconveniently timed divine interventions.
At this precise moment, Galen dropped the pious charade faster than a goblin drops a hot potato. He seized Galen 2's scrawny neck from behind, his grip like an iron clamp forged in the fires of Mount Doom, and abruptly changed direction, dragging the sputtering prince towards the church's secret underground chamber.
"Hiss… Who… are you?! And how in the name of the Holy Light do you know about the Trollbane family's secret room?!" Galen 2 thrashed like a fish out of water, but the vice-like grip on his neck was as immovable as a mountain of pure, unadulterated stubbornness.
Soon, they arrived at the bottom of the tomb, a place so morbidly cheerful it probably hosted regular skeleton dance parties. A brand-spanking-new coffin, looking suspiciously eager for a tenant, sat prominently at the entrance.
Bang!
Galen 2 was unceremoniously flung in front of the coffin, landing with all the grace of a sack of wet laundry. At this point, Galen dramatically whipped off his hood, revealing his face. The moment Galen 2's eyes, wide with terror, finally registered the sight, his expression of horror froze solid.
"You… you… YOU!" Galen 2 stammered, his mind short-circuiting. How could there be someone who looked exactly like him, but with significantly less existential dread?
"Repent, Galen Trollbane!" Galen intoned, his voice resonating with the gravitas of a cosmic judge about to hand down a particularly harsh sentence. He drew his family sword, Trol'kalar, a blade that had been sealed for so long it probably had cobwebs on its hilt.
"No! No! Who the hell are you?!" Galen 2 shrieked, scrambling backward like a terrified crab.
Galen's eyes were colder than a winter's night in Northrend, and he remained utterly unmoved. With a flick of his wrist, he thrust the ancient family sword forward, its tip finding Galen 2's heart with unnerving precision.
"You don't need to know who I am," Galen murmured, his voice a chilling whisper. "You only need to know that Stromgarde will rise, not under your pathetic reign, but under the glorious, iron-fisted rule of the 52nd King, Galen Trollbane!"
Galen 2 felt his already limited strength draining away faster than a bathtub with the plug pulled. Before darkness claimed him entirely, he heard a final, mocking sigh: "I hope your father won't beat you up in the Shadowlands… provided you can even get there!"
Ugh!
Rest in pieces, Thoras of this timeline!
The sigh echoed through the tomb, bouncing off the ancient stones, lingering for an uncomfortably long time before finally dissipating. Galen, ever the pragmatist, peeled off his priest suit and draped it over Galen 2's rapidly cooling corpse. Then, with a casual flick of his wrist, he imbued it with a touch of Holy Light energy – just enough to char the face and ensure no pesky necromancers would try to recall Galen 2's utterly useless soul.
He then rummaged through the dusty corners of his backpack, pulling out the standard Stromgarde armor he'd worn a decade ago. The familiar weight, the worn leather, the faint scent of old battles… it was like a sudden, glorious flashback to the good old days when the Red Flame Army was just a twinkle in his eye.
Now, all he had to do was repeat his greatest hits!
Galen, with the ease of a man carrying a feather duster, hoisted Galen 2's body and casually strolled back into the church. He found the three bewildered priests and the ever-loyal Varokal, and then, with a voice that brooked no argument, announced:
"A villain, masquerading as the Bishop of the Southern Diocese, attempted to murder our beloved Prince Galen and seize the sacred sword of the Trollbane family: Tokaral! But fear not, for Prince Galen, with unparalleled bravery, fought valiantly against this scoundrel and, in a truly heroic display, slew him!"
The substitution was complete, smoother than a freshly polished marble floor. After a quick mental scan confirmed their power levels were laughably low, Artoria and the farmer were deemed innocent bystanders and were conveniently relocated to the cemetery behind the church area.
Galen had originally planned a quiet, fatherly comfort session for his daughter, but then he noticed Artoria looking at him with an expression of pure, unadulterated admiration. She even secretly made a face at him, mouthing, "Father, you are awesome!"
"It's just so-so," Galen thought, a smug smirk playing on his lips. "Basic operation, really."
Since he hadn't traumatized his daughter (a minor miracle), he got down to business. A quick perusal of Galen 2's pathetic letter scrolls confirmed his suspicions: this once-proud kingdom was crumbling faster than a stale cookie.
When the capital fell, a staggering 500,000 people had apparently chosen to flee south to the Stormwind Kingdom, proving that even in a fantasy world, people prefer not to live in a city overrun by ogres. Now, a mere 300,000 souls remained, clinging to existence. The three major farms in the northeast were barely churning out enough food to keep them from gnawing on their own limbs, and even that meager supply was constantly threatened by the Trollbane family's arch-nemesis: the Witherwood Trolls, who apparently had nothing better to do than harass farmers.
The few remaining Stromgarde troops were barely holding onto the northeast region, leaving Galen 2 with a pitiful thousand-odd soldiers, utterly incapable of reclaiming his own city.
"Honestly," Galen scoffed internally, "if you don't have the ability, why bother being a king? Just keep letting your resentful father support you from the grave. Wouldn't it be better to just lie down and do absolutely nothing?"
"Without Frostmourne, what's the point of being a filial son anyway?" Galen chuckled, a dark, mirthful sound echoing in his mind. "You insist on being the king of Stromgarde, you utter fool!"
He mused, "People only know that the Roman Empire fell during the reign of Romulus Augustulus, but you can't blame it all on him, right? Some kings just have bad luck… or are just plain bad at their job."
As dusk painted the sky in shades of bruised purple and angry orange, Galen, with his newly acquired farmers and the ever-present Artoria, quietly slipped into Faldir Bay in the back mountain. With a casual wave of his hand, a full-blown town hall materialized out of thin air. With the Stonest Ogres, Syndicate Thieves, and Stromgarde City Guards busy tearing each other apart, no one was going to notice a little construction project on an abandoned bay dock.
Galen hadn't even explored the upper limits of his Heart of Origin's slots. This creation-level artifact, a true marvel of cosmic engineering, maintained the synchronization of his resource bar even in another timeline. This, he mused, saved him an absurd amount of time.
As the days blurred into weeks, the Faldir Bay base exploded in size. The town hall, with a series of arcane upgrades, rapidly transformed into a third-level castle. Next to it, the jade-white Altar of Kings shimmered with divine power, and the open space in the middle became a dense, verdant carpet of farms, churning out food at an alarming rate.
More than a dozen barracks, bristling with newly trained soldiers, sprang up along the foot of the mountain, alongside several arcane temples and even a few griffin nests. The military strength of this burgeoning kingdom reached a staggering 10,000 people!
The first step in the glorious, inevitable rise of the Kingdom of Stromgarde: Recapture the capital!
Five thousand infantrymen, looking absolutely terrifying in their new, shiny armor, formed the vanguard. Behind them marched three thousand musketeers, their rifles glinting menacingly, flanked by five hundred priests and wizards, ready to unleash holy wrath and arcane destruction. On the flanks, fifteen hundred heavily armored knights, a thunderous wave of steel and horseflesh, completed the formation. They marched into the town of Bravecaller, just outside the capital of Stromgarde, a mighty, unstoppable force.
Varokal's patrol cavalry, ever vigilant, discovered the situation first. He galloped back to the church, his face a mask of utter bewilderment.
"Your Highness, the Prince!" he gasped, practically falling off his horse.
"What are you panicking about, Lieutenant!" Galen's voice boomed, now imbued with the majestic aura of a king who had just had a really good breakfast. Varokal felt a wave of regal power wash over him. Since that bizarre incident with the "assassination by priest," His Royal Highness the Prince had changed… dramatically. If Varokal hadn't followed the prince since his youth, if he didn't know every embarrassing childhood anecdote, he would have sworn the prince had been replaced by a significantly more competent, albeit slightly unhinged, doppelganger!
Varokal forced himself to calm down, his heart still doing a frantic jig. "Your Highness, an army has arrived outside the city! They're wearing standard Stromgarde armor and carrying the eagle flag of Arathi, but Marshal Omar simply does not possess the organizational skills to assemble such a colossal force!"
The next moment, the lieutenant's eyes widened to the size of dinner plates at the prince's casual words: "Oh, those guys? Yeah, those are my men…"
"This," Galen announced, a mischievous twinkle in his eye, "was a backup plan I arranged many, many years ago, just in case things went spectacularly sideways. When I lost control of Stromgarde – which, let's be honest, was inevitable under… previous management – I sent out messengers to summon this army. And today, they have finally arrived! Just in time for tea and a good old-fashioned bloodbath!"
"Varokal…" Galen continued, turning to a stunned Varokal. "Congratulations, you've been promoted! You'll be the leader of the new knight order. Try not to get too much blood on the new uniform."
On that glorious day, Prince Galen's private army, the Arathor Legion, took only one night to completely reclaim the west and south of the city, sweeping away the ogres and syndicates like so much dust. Varokal would never, ever forget that hellish scene for the rest of his life! The Arathor Legion was like a tiger unleashed from a cage, tearing through those four-meter-tall ogres with the effortless grace of a hot knife through butter. The Syndicate thieves, who fancied themselves masters of the shadows, were even more pathetic, scattering like cockroaches caught in a spotlight!
In the ensuing "carpet-style cleansing," the entire city was practically flooded with blood. Except for the people wearing white armor with red edges and eagle-like battle robes, there was not a single living creature left standing! The efficiency was almost terrifying.
The style of an army, it turns out, is largely influenced by the deranged genius who controls it. Perhaps Galen was simply furious, or perhaps he was just really eager to increase the population of his new kingdom. Either way, the battle to retake Stromgarde was brutal. The army alone lost a thousand infantrymen, a mere trifle in the grand scheme of things.
Not a single ogre from the Stonest tribe survived the onslaught. And as for the Syndicate, not a single Galen (a particularly annoying type of thief) who had been driven out of Alterac by Daval Prestor was left alive. It was a clean sweep, a total annihilation.
While the long-suffering people of Stromgarde in the northeast were ecstatic, Marshal Omar, Commander Amarelin, and a gaggle of exiled nobles were utterly stunned. Unlike the marshal and the commander, who were simply confused, the nobles were already salivating at the prospect of returning to the capital and reclaiming their ill-gotten real estate.
Therefore, driven by the insatiable greed of the nobles, a large-scale immigration wave was set off again, and the ruined capital began its frantic, desperate reconstruction. Galen, however, couldn't care less about these petty squabbles. His focus was already on the Garson Mine, the Deadbeard Mine, and the Deadwood Village Mine in the Arathi Highlands…
Subsequently, the Witherbark Tribe trolls, who had dared to annoy his farmers, were utterly obliterated. The entire Arathi Highlands, from its highest peaks to its deepest valleys, was now firmly in Galen's iron grip.
The plan had entered Phase Two: Uncontrolled, utterly reckless mining of minerals and a large-scale, utterly insane military explosion had officially begun.
…Meanwhile, on Mardum, a world that looked like it had been put through a cosmic blender.
The situation here was eerily similar to the "outer world" in later generations – the original planet had been shattered into a million pieces, leaving behind only a collection of floating islands, drifting aimlessly in the void.
"Illidan! Lord Kil'jaeden will not let you get away with this, you smug, blind elf!" An ugly female humanoid demon, looking like she'd just survived a particularly aggressive tumble dryer cycle, was in a truly miserable state. Half of her blood-red, spider-bone wings were missing, and her right arm had simply vanished, leaving behind only black, smoking burn marks.
This was the Spider Queen, Tyranna, Sargeras's personal pet ruler of Mardum, an Alanas spider-like demon. More importantly, she was the keeper of the Sargerite Keystone, a fact she seemed to cling to with the tenacity of a barnacle.
Opposite her, Illidan, looking impossibly cool with his twin green battle blades, radiated an aura of profound impatience. "Tyranna, darling," he sneered, his voice dripping with condescension, "your troops have been beaten to pieces. Hand over the keystone, and I might consider letting you join my fabulous entourage!"
Spider Queen Tyranna, clearly not one to recognize a losing battle, probably relying on her ability to return to Twisted Boredom (the demon equivalent of a respawn point) or some other pathetic trick up her sleeve, shrieked, "You and your servants are worthless! Lord Sargeras himself bestowed the Keystone upon me! You will never get it, you traitorous, blind fool!"
"Stubborn!" Illidan sighed, raising the Warglaive of Azzinoth. "Then die, dramatically!"
"It's you who's going to die, blind man!" As the Spider Queen finished her defiant declaration, dense green spots of light, like cosmic acne, erupted across the gray sky of the floating island!
Call out! Call out! Call out!
Meteors, blazing with fel energy, began to rain down from the heavens! Illidan recognized them instantly: Hellfire! Only an Eredar Warlock Legion could summon such an absurdly dense number of them.
"Is this your trump card?" Illidan scoffed, his fel-infused eyes burning with a deadly light. "Your trump card has been revealed, and you're still against me? How utterly disappointing!"
"Nothing!" With a mighty roar, Illidan spread his huge, leathery wings and launched himself forward like a cannonball fired from a demon-powered cannon!
On the positions painstakingly built by the Illidari around the floating island, thousands of red fireballs erupted, forming a dense, roaring barrage that clawed its way into the sky! The red fireballs and the green Hellfire meteorites collided in a spectacular, self-destructive ballet, painting the sky with a different, more violent kind of light!
The meteorite rain continued to fall, relentless and utterly inconvenient! Several fire snakes, composed of red fireballs, writhed through the air, forming a dense, glowing network of firepower, intercepting the incoming celestial projectiles.
"Who is searching, in the pouring rain, trying to escape from someone's embrace… Every minute and every second is torture for me…" An ominous, off-key song seemed to ring in the ears of Spider Queen Tyranna, a truly terrible soundtrack to her demise. The very next moment, she was sliced clean in half by Illidan's green battle blade!
"Lord Sargeras, nooooo!!" she gurgled, her last breath a pathetic plea.
When Illidan heard the name that was practically tattooed on his soul, his fel-spewing eyes narrowed. Then, with a casual wave of his arm, the Spider Queen's soul was sucked into his palm, a tiny, screaming wisp of energy, and was then absorbed into his body along the magical patterns on his skin. Talk about a power-up.
"Wastefull!" A voice, dripping with exasperated Eredar annoyance, echoed through the void. "You couldn't even hold out for this little while?!"
Illidan looked up. An Eredar demon, a hulking Doomguard, and a truly monstrous Pit Lord were descending upon him. Judging from its sheer, terrifying size, the Doomsday Guardian seemed to be on par with the Abyss Lord, though that Abyss Lord looked particularly beefy! Even bigger than Mannoroth, with a greatsword in one hand and a hooked glaive in the other!
But so what! It wasn't like Illidan, the Lord of Doom and the Lord of the Abyss, hadn't killed bigger, angrier demons before. His attention was solely on the Eredar demon, the one clearly in charge. Eredar demons, once the proud natives of Argus, had joined the Burning Legion and had their skin corroded by fel energy, turning them a rather fetching shade of blood red.
"You're the reinforcements for this spider?" Illidan chuckled, a dry, humorless sound. "Haha, you came just in time… to die!"
"Hmph! Just you?!" The Eredar demon snarled, a ferocious, utterly misplaced smile stretching across its face. "Traitor! But you can be proud, little elf. Lord Kil'jaeden specifically asked me to extract your soul. For this, I brought all the Legion soldiers within a hundred thousand light-years around Mardum!"
Illidan looked up. Indeed, a truly obscene number of portals had ripped open above Mardum. Demons, looking like they'd been squeezed out of a cosmic toothpaste tube, poured from the portals, launching a full-scale assault on the Illidari positions on the various floating islands.
"Want to take back Mardum from me?" Illidan scoffed, a dangerous glint in his eye. "It depends on whether you have enough numbers… or enough lives!"
Mardum had been under Illidari control for years. Those floating islands had been meticulously fortified by Illidan's servants. In addition to anti-aircraft guns that spat dense fireballs, they also had… other defensive means!
Indeed! The very next moment, a terrifying barrage of dark green lasers shot up into the sky. Demons, caught in the beams, simply evaporated into ash, one by one!
"Damn it! It's the Spire of Sorrow!" The Eredar demon roared, clearly annoyed that his grand entrance was being upstaged.
The Spire of Sorrow, a truly lethal defensive weapon, was built by the Eredar using the crystal technology of Argus. It relied on evil crystals as its motive force, gathering the souls of the dead to generate a colossal force of resentment, which then became the energy that powered the giant tower! No matter if they were demons or races conquered by the Legion, they couldn't rest in peace even after death. Their souls were relentlessly exploited until they simply shattered. Illidan just hadn't expected the iconic weapon of this very Legion to be turned against them, and by two levels, on Mardum!
"Kurull, Bruttalus!" the Eredar demon commanded, his voice dripping with imperative authority. "Go and destroy them! Now!"
A flicker of dissatisfaction, like a tiny, angry spark, flashed in the fel eyes of the Doomguard Lord named Kruul and the Abyss Lord named Bruttalus. However, the identity of this Eredar demon was not simple. His name was Talgas. In the Legion, Talgas was a master of corruption, skilled at twisting the native inhabitants of various worlds. He was Kil'jaeden's right-hand man, the lieutenant of the Burning Legion! With Kil'jaeden's unwavering support, the two demon lords, despite their immense power, were afraid. They had no choice but to obey his orders!
"Don't worry, Talgas," Bruttalus rumbled, a sadistic grin spreading across his face. "My sword has been thirsty for a very long time!"