Gorkamorka Wyvern was not your traditional Greenskin Warlord.
Aside from his tactical cunning, he didn't just think about how to better WAAAAAGH! over an enemy on a strategic level.
Instead, Gorkamorka united with the pirates and Skaven to launch a surprise attack that destroyed the Estalian Invincible Armada.
He used decapitation tactics to surround Magritta, the kingdom's capital, at the very start of the war, severing its links with the outside world.
This directly caused the Southern forces to become leaderless, with every region fighting its own isolated battle.
This was also why the Warboss set his WAAAAAGH! target on Estalia rather than neighboring Tilea.
Tilea, with its highly autonomous and independent city-states, where every principality and city was a self-contained little kingdom, was a place Greenskins could certainly chew through one by one.
But doing so would inevitably force Estalia to send aid.
If the Invincible Armada hadn't been in port for maintenance and festivities and had instead deployed into the Great Ocean, the pirate and Greenskin warships would have had to tuck tail and run.
Even if this WAAAAAGH! eventually succeeded in sweeping Tilea, it would inevitably cause too much damage to his army.
Afterward, the Greenskins would have to face an already mobilized Southern Kingdom with a population of millions that had healed its North-South divide.
So, the Warboss convinced his two treacherous allies and set his sights on Estalia. He had indeed reaped a rich harvest.
The Great WAAAAAGH! was already one-third successful. He had forced the Magrittans to submit to him.
Although nominally a "ceasefire," it was practically no different from being a vassal state.
The defenders, having reached their wits' end, accepted the council's decision.
Opponents either submitted to the trend or went underground to resist; a few radicals were disarmed by the ceasefire faction and taken into custody.
Under the supervision of pirate and Greenskin overseers, the Magrittans humiliatingly sent out laborers and slave-gangs made of captured citizens to dismantle the walls of Magritta piece by piece.
Including buildings damaged during the long siege, everything was torn down.
The materials were transported by sea to the Port of Bermoz and used by the Greenskins to construct Rogue Idols.
In this way, Gorkamorka both humiliated and eroded the dignity and resolve of the Magrittans while demonstrating that he indeed kept his word and would not slaughter them further.
Then came the price of surrender.
Magritta had to pay a vast amount of resources to the Warboss, while continuously draining its precious manpower to serve the Greenskin army, handling supply and engineering tasks.
Simultaneously, the Warboss continuously sent humans captured and enslaved by the Greenskins into Magritta.
He used the submission of the kingdom's capital to strike awe into hearts, allowing the Magrittans to integrate and train this manpower to continue bleeding for the Greenskin horde.
With Gorkamorka's permission, several ships from neighboring Tilea risked entering Silent Bay.
They docked at the city of Magritta, which had been blockaded for nearly a year.
There, they felt no prosperity, only a deathly silence.
Above everyone's heads
seemed to be a pair of invisible eyes. They communicated in silence, they worked in silence...
The Tileans, terrified, finished their trade and hurried away.
They needed to report this situation back to Tobaro and Miragliano—that proud neighbor with whom they had shared a thousand years of rivalry and cooperation, the capital of the Estalian Kingdom that shared their faith in Myrmidia, the Pearl of the South, Magritta, had submitted to the Greenskins!
With the capital's call, the speed at which the Greenskins swept through various regions increased significantly.
Although slaughter and destruction to satisfy their bloodlust still occurred, many people mustered a desperate courage.
Summoned by demoralized herald knights from Magritta, they emerged from their hiding places and chose to return to the fields to work.
The South began to slowly emerge from the flames of war, licking its wounds in an unexpected way.
But now, every beat of the Kingdom's heart had half its blood and nutrients sucked away by the Greenskin horde led by the cunning Warboss.
On the great plains east of the Guadaz River, the Warboss designated massive Spore Farms.
Hordes of Snotlings began sowing spores across this nutrient-rich land.
As long as the nourishment was sufficient—in one or two weeks for the fast ones, a month or two for the slow—innumerable mushrooms would grow.
The first to be born were the Snotlings; they served as both food and overseers, tending to the other mushrooms until they grew into Greenskins!
This ranch, which would leave any human trembling with fear, was undoubtedly one of the most terrifying things to appear in the Badlands, or even the New and Old Worlds!
Great Warboss Gorkamorka, this anomaly among Greenskins, was not only attempting to conquer rather than enslave (though it looked similar for now) humans for his own use,
but he also took a terrifying measure:
Sowing and cultivating spores on a massive scale, growing Greenskins to provide a never-ending stream of "good boyz" for his unprecedented WAAAAAGH!
The only thing humans could do here was to continuously send food and supplies to provide nutrients for the Greenskin farms, accelerating the growth of the spores, while being forced to forge weapons and ordnance to arm the Warboss's legions.
Even those intentionally shoddy items were slightly better than bone clubs, stones, or scrap-iron knives.
In the hands of a Greenskin, they were lethal weapons enough to smash an enemy.
The Warboss sighed with satisfaction; in the first month of humans serving him, they had already created significant value.
Maybe it didn't match a raid, but he understood that raiding and sweeping an enemy city provided a one-time gain.
Human "umgi" were not Greenskins; you couldn't sow a crop and harvest it.
Chop an umgi, and you have to wait over a dozen years for a new one to grow. The Warboss realized this early on.
Once the North was flattened and the Boyz' desires were mostly satisfied, he could rest for a short while, then turn around and unite with the Skaven things and pirates to WAAAAAGH! the Tilean umgi to the east.
In Gorkamorka's eyes, a WAAAAAGH! wasn't just about hitting and smashing a place; it included occupation, conquest, and governance.
He was very different from traditional Greenskins; he was a special kind of Orc.
Currently, the North was all that remained before the Warboss. But on the path to WAAAAAGH!ing the North, there was one conspicuous obstacle.
Upon learning that the force led by Warboss Bald Beast was ambushed and broken at the walls of Veling,
Gorkamorka had never ignored the hidden enemy in the forest—the "red-skinned beast big-uns."
Getting no relevant intelligence from his allies, the Warboss summoned humans, but there was no definitive information regarding the tribes in the forest.
At most, he got useless bits like: "Oh, Piña? There are plenty of beast tribes in there..." or "Red-skinned Beastmen? Never heard of 'em..."
If they were just ordinary beasts, Gorkamorka had beaten plenty in the Badlands.
He even had a few Beastman tribes under his command who had submitted to him.
Compared to the Badlands Greenskins, whose society was near-anarchic without a strong power to lead and where violence was the only constant,
ordinary Beastman tribes had slightly higher productivity and could provide some value to the Warboss.
But to be able to defeat his thirty thousand Greenskin Boyz—and Bald Beast was a tough one, too—and be broken so easily...
The Warboss felt this had slipped beyond his calculations.
However, looking at the enemy's movement from Veling to Magus and then to Cerebrio, they always marched fast and retreated fast, emphasizing a swift rotation.
They looked a bit sharp, but not necessarily hard to break.
In the Battle of the Guadaz River, the human and Greenskin sides together deployed over a hundred thousand troops—fifty thousand humans and ninety thousand Greenskins.
Aside from the siege forces, the Warboss threw every Boy he could call for a scrap into the mix.
Yet there were still a large number of Greenskins roaming elsewhere as independent thug warbands.
If the Warboss wanted a decisive battle, completely disregarding the consequences—
such as the South rising up while his main force was gone, or the army being bogged down by supplies if they couldn't win quickly,
leading to Greenskins eating each other or scattering—
he could concentrate a Greenskin horde of nearly two hundred thousand.
This was a terrifying power. After Emperor Justinian defeated the Great WAAAAAGH! of Gorkamorka at Black Fire Pass,
the Old World had not seen a mobilization on the scale of a hundred thousand,
aside from a few major battles where the Tsarina led the Kislevite legions north to pound the Norsca-Kurgan-Hung and various Chaos, nomadic, and barbarian tribal coalitions.
The green boyz were howling. The activity of the Rogue Idols had sent every Greenskin's morale soaring, screaming for a fight.
The Great Warboss, caught in the massive momentum of the WAAAAAGH!, let his mind return to instinct, infected by his Greenskin nature.
Beastmen? It's not like I haven't beaten them before.
The Warboss thought it over. For the sake of prudence, hitting the remaining humans in the North and making them kneel and pay tribute could wait.
He would WAAAAAGH! through the nearby forest first to secure his flank.
"Might as well call the human umgi over too. They might not like hitting other umgi, but they shouldn't mind hitting beast things."
Meanwhile, in the forest, a certain self-satisfied Everchosen was arranging his battle lines while thinking the exact same thing:
Greenskins? It's not like I haven't beaten them before!