In the vast, swampy, fish-stinking cesspools of Azeroth, there exists no greater menace to peace, sanity, or clean boots than the murlocs, those shrieking, slippery, semi-sentient frog-fish things with all the grace of a drunk goose and the tactical coordination of a toddler's soccer team.
You can find them everywhere. Mudflats? Check. Coastal lagoons? Check. Lakes big enough to skip a stone? Oh yes. They multiply faster than rabbits at a spring festival, and they're about as welcome.
Their key features? Slippery, mucous-coated hides that glisten in the sun like greasy sausages. Comically oversized, jittery eyes that scream "I haven't slept in weeks!" A dorsal fin so flamboyant it would make a punk cry tears of jealousy. Add to that a wardrobe of natural rainbow coloration and a collective vibe of street thuggery, and you've got the murloc package.
Individually, they're a joke. A literal punchline in any adventurer's tale.
Picture this: Duke faces off with a lone murloc.
"Kuaohhh!" screeches the fish-idiot as it charges.
"Ah!" Duke winces as he's mildly inconvenienced. The murloc slaps him with a damp, smelly paw... then instantly turns tail and flees like someone just offered it a bath.
"Oh-ho! Not today!" Duke gives chase—rookie mistake.
Because the moment you cross that invisible aquatic tripwire, every murloc within a ten-mile radius gets a telepathic group text: "Free snacks, bring spears."
"Kaah-kaah-kaah!" echoes through the dunes.
Boom! Ten more murlocs barrel toward you like a flailing tidal wave of amphibious fury. You kill five? Guess what? Now you've attracted the next wave. Congratulations! You just triggered the Murloc Swarm Cascade Protocol.
Duke learned that lesson the hard way.
So why was he walking straight into murloc territory again?
Simple. Murlocs are minions. Subordinates. Bottom-rung servants of some truly terrifying deep-sea eldritch horrors still napping beneath the waves. And being enslaved for thousands of years kind of breaks your will to resist... just a little.
More importantly, they're organized. Not smart—no no, don't be ridiculous—but alarmingly coordinated. Which begs the question: is someone else pulling the slimy strings?
But the biggest reason Duke came crawling back to the scaly folk was this: one dark night in Elwynn, after feeding a particularly uncharismatic thief to a nearby murloc band as a midnight hors d'oeuvre, Duke got a system prompt.
"New language unlocked: Murlocese."
Apparently, the system's translation module finally gave up and said, "Fine, if you're going to keep talking to fish, here's a Rosetta Stone."
Duke was delighted. Sure, the language sounded like a blend of whale calls and a toddler gargling alphabet soup, but it worked.
When he tried saying "peace," what came out was "wa la, ga oh!"
Majestic.
So with a grin, Duke hatched a bold plan: infiltrate the murlocs. Subjugate the slimy. Build an army.
That morning, Duke strolled alone onto the shoreline, mentally prepared to communicate, eliminate, and delegate. He'd take out the dumb ones, leave the less dumb ones, and install a semi-competent fish to lead the rest.
But fate had jokes.
On the sands before him, two massive murloc tribes were in the middle of a full-blown turf war.
"CLASH OF CLAMS!" Duke whispered dramatically.
Hundreds of murlocs. It should've been a brutal, fishy bloodbath. Instead?
It was... a giant game of hide-and-seek.
Tribe A chased Tribe B. Tribe B split, doubled back, bumped into their own, reversed roles, and now Tribe A was running. One murloc threw a rock. It hit another murloc in the eye. He screamed and ran like he'd been hit by a trebuchet.
The AI translation popped in.
"Kao-ga-ao" = "It's not that we don't want to fight, we just don't have a Gundam!"
Duke facepalmed so hard his brain jiggled.
"Excuse me?! That pebble is NOT a kinetic railgun! APOLOGIZE TO ALL GUNDAMS!"
He watched. He despaired. He snorted.
The dream of the Murloc Army died on that beach. No way in hell was he selling swords to a gang of stick-wielding toddlers.
Still, Duke decided to make a statement.
With a flick of his wrist, he summoned his ace: the Wizard's Hand.
Now, normally, a mage hand is a glorified glove-on-a-stick. You use it to fetch your wand from under the bed or to flip off enemies from a distance. Duke's, however, was... enhanced.
Thanks to a stroke of genius and a crash course in motion-capture systems, Duke's version looked like something out of a magical horror film: eight glowing, arcane hands floating behind him, ready to slap reality into anyone.
One particularly bold murloc made a break for him. Mistake. Four magical hands grabbed, stretched, and shredded it like seaweed at a sushi bar.
Silence fell.
Then, the murlocs dropped. Bowed. Worshiped.
"Hooaooohlalah (Messenger of the Great Ocean, we submit!)"
"Wa la goo doo (Oh Lord of the Depths, we bow before your eight-handed wrath!)"
Duke blinked.
"That... was easy."
It felt too easy.
As if summoned by irony itself, a loud splash exploded behind him.
Naga.
Elegant, terrifying, snake-bodied Naga—the cursed descendants of high elven nobility who decided that if they were going to fall from grace, they might as well go full sea monster.
Two squads, duking it out.
And leading the charge, a stunning female Naga whose upper half screamed "elf supermodel," and whose lower half said "don't step here unless you're into scales and constriction kinks."
She took one look at the murlocs, pointed imperiously, and hissed in Murlocese:
"I command you in the name of Avis! Block those buffoon males chasing me!"
Duke froze.
...Wait. I have a murloc army. I have a Naga war.
He grinned.
"It's gonna be one of those days."
And thus began Duke's glorious, slippery, and completely unhinged conquest of the beach.