"Damn it! Goddammit!"
Commander Leona was butchering low-tier orc warriors on the flank, escorting Soren forward. Suddenly, she was forced to swing her greatsword wide, flat-packing away several bone arrows aimed at their horses.
The heavy impact left of her hands buzzing with a numb, stinging pain.
Being battered without any way to strike back fueled the roaring fire in her chest. Snatching a human javelin from a nearby corpse, Leona planted her feet, twisted her core, and hurled it toward the distant cliff with all her might.
Whoosh!
The javelin sailed for over four hundred meters before gravity cruelly dragged it down, burying it harmlessly in the snowfield—still a full eight hundred meters short of the enemy lines.
A chorus of piercing, jagged laughter erupted from the rocky heights above.
The commander of the bone archers didn’t even bother to take cover. It stood arrogantly at the very edge of the precipice, too lazy to even raise its circular bone shield. In its primitive mind, these fragile humans were just waiting to die in the bloody mud.
It hoisted a black command flag, preparing to signal the third volley of suppressing fire to wipe out the Crimson Moon Knights.
Down below, a pale, suffocating aura of despair hung over the ground forces.
Meanwhile, Soren stood safely behind Sylvia's massive tower shield. He reached down and yanked a steel-fletched arrow out of the permafrost. The shaft was perfectly intact, though smeared with a bit of gray brain matter.
Without a word, Soren simply wiped it clean on his tattered sleeve and nocked it to his bowstring.
Sylvia glanced back at him."If you're crazy enough to step out from behind this shield, you'll be turned into a pincushion in two seconds flat."
Soren didn’t answer.
He parted his feet, planting himself firmly into the earth.
Deep breath.
His heart rate plummeted.
The chaotic roar of the battlefield faded away. The world went perfectly, utterly silent.
Eagle Eye Perception. Locked.
A split second ago, the Blackstone orcs, the boulders, and the fluttering banners on the distant cliffs were nothing but a mosaic of blurry colors.
The very next second, reality warped. Space violently compressed and stretched. His vision zoomed forward with terrifying speed, like a high-powered camera lens furiously focusing.
He could see the dark red rust flaking off the archer commander's nose ring. He could see the murky, contemptuous yellow of its eyeballs beneath the iron helm. He tracked the exact direction the freezing wind whipped the coarse bristles on its cheeks, and he perfectly read the invisible, sinking drafts in the frigid air.
Soren’s fingers clamped around the bowstring. The Windwhisper Bow was drawn back into a flawless, taut crescent.
Creak!
One. Two. Three.
A trio of cyan gale-runes flared to life in sequence, cascading up the spine of the bow. A raging tempest condensed into a pinprick at the tip of the steel arrowhead.
Compressed to its absolute limit.
Release.
There was only a singular flash of light. Nobody even saw the arrow leave the bow.
One thousand four hundred meters.
High upon the rocky precipice, the orc commander—who was just about to swing the black command flag downward—suddenly froze. The flag remained suspended at its absolute zenith, locked in place forever.
BANG!
Its head snapped violently backward. The cervical vertebrae shattered on impact, and the top half of its pulverized skull was blasted five meters out over the void!
The now masterless, headless corpse remained standing, flag still gripped in its rigid fist. It took three agonizing seconds before the body finally crumpled to the stone.
The torrential rain of fire from the high ground—three hundred fully drawn bone bows—ceased instantly.
The mocking laughter was snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane.
Every single orc stared at their fallen commander in stark terror, wildly snapping their heads around in a panic. Down below, the bloodstained snowfield in front of the fortress plunged into a deathly silence.
At the vanguard, Leona had assumed the lull was merely a tactical pause. She was heavily panting, preparing to bark out her next order.
Then, she glanced up and witnessed the terrifying spectacle atop the crag.
Even from this distance, she could just make out the blur of the commander's headless corpse tottering on the edge. Her crimson lips parted. Her eyes widened, inch by inch, caught in absolute shock.
And then. . . her brows shot up. The dried blood and gore cracking on her face as she broke into a wide, genuine grin.
"AHAHAHA!"
It was a wild, savage laugh, completely devoid of any aristocratic grace.
"It's dead!"
"Who the hell popped that bastard's melon?! It literally popped!"
"Vice Commander!" Leona roared over the battlefield, shouting toward Sylvia at the vanguard."My eyes aren't playing tricks on me, right?!"
Sylvia had completely forgotten to lower her heavily cracked tower shield. She stood utterly frozen, holding up the massive slab of steel as she slowly, mechanically turned her head.
Soren was standing right beside her. His expression was placid—borderline apathetic. The cyan bow in his grip was still swirling with residual magical light.
In that brief window, a second scavenged iron arrow had already been nocked to the string.
"Archery like that. . . how the hell is that even—" Sylvia’s sentence died in her throat.
Soren didn't have time for small talk. His gaze flicked, locking onto a new target atop the high ridge.
The orcs maintained brutal battlefield discipline, the moment the commander died, its adjutant violently shoved the twitching, headless corpse aside. The hulking deputy scooped up the brain-spattered black flag, hoisting it to its chest in an attempt to re-establish the chain of command.
It was a window of merely three seconds.
The bowstring unleashed another shrill shriek.
THWIP!
CRACK!
The exact same spot. Dead center between the eyes.
Before the deputy could even roar the command to loose arrows, the dense bone of its face exploded into bloody shrapnel. The black flag and its second owner tumbled over the edge, plummeting down the cliff face.
Every single bone archer took a collective step back.
Too fast. Too accurate!
As panic began to infect the ranks like a plague, an enraged Shaman Priest hoisted its bone staff. The tribal tattoos on its skin flared with a bloody crimson light as it prepared to cast an AoE spell to stabilize the troops' breaking morale.
This time, everyone saw it.
A hyper-thin white contrail physically carved through the battlefield air, drawing a razor-straight line from the earth to the sky!
SQUELCH.
The top half of the Shaman’s withered, ancient head was cleanly sheared off.
Once. Twice. Thrice!
It wasn’t a battle anymore. It was an unstoppable roll call of death.
Leona stomped her armored boot into the muck, violently kicking up a shower of crimson-stained slush. She no longer felt suffocated by despair, a surging tide of absolute fanaticism rushed into her heart.
Catharsis!
Every time the sickening, muffled crunch of a skull shattering echoed out, it hit harder and sweeter than a barrel of dwarven spirits.
A manic grin took over her striking, battle-hardened face. Completely ignoring the circle of utterly dumbfounded soldiers around her, she punched the air with all her might, screaming at the top of her lungs:
"YES! BEAUTIFUL!"
"FUCK YEAH! DID YOU SEE THAT?! NOW THAT IS FUCKING ARCHERY!"
"The Legion wastes thousands of gold coins nursing those 'Royal Marksmen, ' and compared to this guy, they’re a bunch of suckling babes!"
"Over there! On the left! That big bastard is trying to rally them—take him out!"
She didn't even need to ask. The Windwhisper Bow flared once more.
The newly self-appointed archer commander slumped over backward.
The orc ranged battalion completely broke, paralyzed by raw terror. Three hundred elite bone archers stared at the growing pile of headless officers on the rock floor. Pinned down by arrows flying from the hand of an invisible god, not a single one of them dared to peek over the cliff edge.
The tide of the battle in front of the fortress gates swung violently.
The vanguard of the orc ground forces—likely part of the Blackstone Warband—was already in a state of chaos, caught entirely off guard by the Crimson Moon Knights’ earlier counter-charge. In a bitter stroke of irony, half of the brutalized corpses littering the killing fields belonged to orc infantry who had been slaughtered by their own archers' indiscriminate suppressing fire.
The battlefield remained eerily quiet for the span of two breaths.
Then, the silence was cleaved apart by a deafening female roar. Unquenchable fire burned in Leona’s eyes as she glared at the deeply shaken orcs in the vanguard—forces whose numbers had already been vastly thinned out.
Her helmet had been knocked off during the earlier suppression barrage. Now, with her fiery red hair thrashing in the wind and her face smeared with blood and gore, she looked like an Avatar of War.
Scraping her greatsword against the rocky permafrost, she sent a shower of sparks flying as she pointed the massive blade straight down the enemy path.
"Brothers of the Crimson Moon!" Leona unleashed the most savage, earth-shaking warcry of her life.
"What the hell are you standing around staring for?!"
"COUNTERATTACK! WE CHARGE NOW!!!"
ROAR!
Fueled by hours of suffocating, pent-up rage, the human battle lines exploded forward. With the oppressive rain of arrows finally broken, the garrison surged from the fortress gates like a tidal wave, launching a frenzied, all-out counter-offensive!