Fort Thrag

I inhaled sharply as I drew back the arrow in my longbow to my mouth and released it at the undead ranger currently engaged with a Warmonger Tribe Olog Commander and his gang of troll folk.

With fluidity unseen outside of Elven armies I moved down the line of five arrows I'd stabbed into the ground before me and had two more arrows in flight before the first became known to Talion's unnatural senses. The follow up arrows were aimed at his most likely angles of evasion and sure enough the fullness of Calebrimbor's reflexes and grace asserted themselves as the Ranger rolled out of the path of my first arrow only be struck in the belly by my third shaft, the second plowing into the a nearby tree.

Talion managed to slice the forth arrow out of the air, but the fifth and sixth buried themselves center mass and the man lost his feet with the final strike, left dying on the jungle floor while the Ologs beat their chests and howled like oversized gorillas.

I handed my bow back to Ishbug and mounted my dire caragor, my mounted posse surrounding the Ologs as they took turns smashing the dead tark into something resembling lasagna.

"Great timing on those arrows." The Olog Commander stated as he held a hand over one of his ruined eyes to stem the bleeding, "Manswine almost had the best of me."

"You and your boys follow me now." I informed the leader who nodded his head in acceptance.

Dominance and submission aren't particularly convoluted in Mordor. Backstabbing and betrayal are expected, but if you succumb to them you never really deserved your position in the first place. It is; however, very unlikely in cases such as this. Breaking a life debt is a quick way to get rejected around here.

The iron armored Olog put his crested helmet back on and rallied the dozen thicc bois that obeyed and followed the thirty caragor riders I had tagging along with me back to our fortress.

With now over forty Ologs and just under five hundred Uruks working under my direction, the earthen work fortifications are being replaced with three stone ring walls, made in the Incan style of pounding huge stones smooth and shaping them into puzzle pieces that fit together so tight you couldn't slip a razor between them.

It was hard laborious work, but Uruks don't get tired and Ologs are basically bipedal backhoes. Add in a few hundred orc slaves we don't mind working to death and you can start getting the picture of just how fast the forces of evil can build shit when they have a great leader cracking the whip.

"Master Thrag approaches!" shouted Hawkeye Bragga loudly enough so that his less observant and far more mouthy coworker Gate Captain Dush wouldn't get his daddy bag kicked again. The pair had ascended along with Humgrat the Bard to captaincy from my internal forces, and it has been dueling banjos ever since.

I definitely needed the extra captains to keep my ever growing army of Uruks in line and also to match up with the disproportionately large segment of Olog Captain's I'd picked up since my first gain with Az-Baruk the Hairy. Four in total with the newly acquired Ur-Hakon the Horn Blower.

With eleven captains under me, I now had more followers of importance than Ratbag and Ranger, but the pair had Sharkhburz and thus the tenuous loyalty of the many thousands of dark beings that populate Nurn. They had the façade of legitimacy and the Dark Lord's favor as masters of one of his fortresses.

I had better men. Of that there can be no doubts. Talion had fallen to our collective three times and my captains regularly partake in dangerous hunts, bawdy feasts, cunning ambushes, and big recruitment drives. Each and every notable task successfully undertaken is just a little bit more power and prestige. We'd even started seeing Epic Traits start cropping up amongst them.

And at the center of it all we have me, Thrag. My leadership had come a long way since my days doing my best impersonation of the great king Bobby B on the Tunchankan wastes, but I still held in my heart that a people that cannot be welded together through hunting, feasting, and fucking are not a people worth leading in the first place.

But we don't be fucking here in Mordor. Not unless we bring some outside pussy in, cause I'd been running up and down these fields and forests and no hos had mine eyes beheld.

It was pretty fucking depressing actually.

At least building shit was cool. Most of my defenses were temporary towers with anti-siege scorpion bolt throwers on top. The forces of Mordor are very familiar with siege warfare as, and I have asked around to confirm this, stone walls and metal gates don't get torn down in minutes around here.

Thank God, because the sieges of Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith were dope as hell and the fortress assaults in Shadow of War fucking sucked.

This also meant that Talion wasn't moving from region to region taking forts in a matter of days. The guy had been in Nurn for months now and was still in the process of getting his siege equipment built. The guy was planning a ladder assault with minimum softening of the defenders coming from a half dozen mangonels.

He obviously didn't care about losses, but I predict that he has just enough forces to get the job done, especially as the Ratbag and Ranger duo mostly relied on beast support for their defenses and that just gives Talion all kinds of options for Gravewalker fuckery.

Either way, I win as both sides will be gutted and if Talion and his boys try to pull a fast one and march on Fort Thrag we will sally out and end them rightly. My boys and I got shit these fools ain't ever seen before. I like to call it discipline and intelligent military doctrine.

I doubt this world is ready for that shit.