Chương 337: 337：Extinguishing the Light

"Wind's Whisper! Mutilate!" Under Ilya's command, the half-elf magic rangers, firmly anchored on the backs of the direwolves and Centaur youths, released their bowstrings in perfect, deadly unison. Over a hundred arrows, violently pulsating with wind-blade magic, tore through the pitch-black night. BOOM! They detonated in mid-air, scattering into countless razor-sharp torrents of cyan wind. This massive, inescapable blender of localized wind-shear crashed mercilessly head-on into the Minotaur rearguard!

Simultaneously, the one hundred frontline elites securely straddling the Centaur youths unleashed a storm of pure, unadulterated physical destruction.

"Loose!" CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! One hundred viciously engineered [Heavy Repeating Crossbows] snapped their mechanisms in brutal synchronization. The ear-piercing thrum of releasing bowstrings completely drowned out the howling blizzard. Driven by the terrifying kinetic energy stored within their winches, hundreds of thick, massive crossbow bolts tore through the night in a flat, devastating trajectory, laying down a suffocating carpet of suppressive fire.

Meanwhile, Ein's Longbow Battalion drew their Imperial military bows to a full crescent. The [Tri-Edged Armor-Piercing Bodkins] carved highly lethal parabolas through the storm, dropping with terrifying, pinpoint accuracy right into the enemy's vital spots. Had this suffocating barrage landed on the Orc Alliance's heavily armored Pigmen infantry, their thick iron plates might have allowed them to stubbornly weather a few waves.

But fatally, the Minotaurs' absolute core tactical trait became the exact catalyst for their instantaneous slaughter! To maximize the explosive acceleration and devastating kinetic impact of their Totem Charge, Minotaur warriors traditionally abandoned heavy armor entirely. They took immense pride in their naturally thick, leathery hides—and against standard human wooden bows or cheap iron swords, that hide truly acted like armor. But against the heavy, over-engineered firepower of Greywater Village?

It was like wet paper! SQUELCH! THWACK! SHHHCK! The sickening sounds of tearing flesh and shattering bone erupted in massive, cascading waves across the Minotaur rearguard. Ilya's localized wind-shear magic mercilessly flayed open the Minotaurs' thick hides, instantly severing muscle tissue and deeply slashing their tendons. The heavy crossbow bolts from the frontline elites were even worse—carrying unstoppable, armor-punching kinetic force, they punched clean through the Minotaurs' massive, broad chests!

"GAAAHHH!"

"AMBUSH! WE'RE UNDER ATTACK FROM THE REAR!" Caught entirely off guard, the Minotaur rearguard suffered catastrophic casualties from the sudden, overwhelming blitz. In the span of just a dozen breaths, over a hundred towering Minotaurs were violently turned into pincushions. Their massive, collapsing corpses and the pools of boiling, steaming blood instantly choked the narrow land bridge. Their marching formation was already severely congested and completely chaotic due to the treacherous swamp muck.

But the moment this ruthless backstab struck, the entire rear column immediately collapsed into blind, terrifying panic and lethal stampedes.

"Stop pushing! Hoist your totem poles! Use them as shields!" the surviving Minotaur officers screamed, tearing their vocal cords raw as they desperately tried to organize a counterattack. Hundreds of blood-drunk, enraged Minotaur warriors hoisted their hundred-pound solid wooden totem poles. Roaring with pure, unadulterated fury, they pivoted their massive frames, intending to rely purely on brute force and their terrifying momentum to charge straight into the darkness where the fire was pouring from.

"They're charging, my Lord!" Buck warned, his knuckles white around his reins as his direwolf let out a low, uneasy growl.

"They want a melee? Keep dreaming." Soren let out a mocking, ice-cold sneer, flawlessly executing the tactic he had prepared from the start.

"Do not get greedy! The enemy advances, we retreat! Maintain a strict fifty-meter safety buffer! Fire while withdrawing! We are going to kite them and bleed them completely dry!"

"Move!" At his command, the 205 Centaur youths and 93 Wolf Riders instantly demonstrated their absolute, flawless value as ultra-mobile tactical mounts. Without a single second of hesitation, they pivoted flawlessly. Exploiting their natural agility and adaptability on the swamp's outer fringes, they melted smoothly back into the dense, foggy darkness like ghosts.

Yet, even as they executed this rapid, perfectly stabilized tactical retreat, the Greywater Village marksmen straddling their backs didn't pause for a microsecond. The furious storm of heavy crossbow bolts and armor-piercing arrows continued to rain down relentlessly! The pursuing Minotaurs crashed into a wall of absolute despair. They quickly realized their massive, top-heavy frames and clumsy hooves couldn't build any momentum in the thick, sucking muck.

They could only watch helplessly as the sources of those deadly arrows—flickering phantoms in the pitch-black night—maintained an agonizing, entirely unreachable distance. Meanwhile, all around them, their brothers were being violently pinned to the mud by an endless barrage of merciless heavy bolts. The harrowing screams, the panicked, blood-curdling roars, and the violent booms of detonating wind magic completely shattered the dead silence of the Misty Swamp, echoing rapidly up the marching column.

Deep into the front lines of the Minotaur army, several high-ranking Orc commanders were mounted on massive Kodo beasts, struggling to push forward against the freezing blizzard. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Hearing the explosive commotion from the rear, these commanders violently yanked their reins, halting their mounts. They exchanged bewildered glances, their thick-horned faces etched with utter confusion and logical short-circuiting.

"What in the hell is that noise?! What is the rearguard doing?! Did they stumble into a nest of Dire-Crocodiles?!" a Minotaur Overseer snarled in deep agitation, his brows furrowed.

"No..." An experienced Minotaur Legate perked his ears up, the blood instantly draining from his face.

"I hear the mechanical clack of human crossbows! And the violent flux of mana! It's the humans of Greywater Village! They're hitting our rear!"

"Impossible!" The Overseer barked defensively, completely shackled by centuries of rigid military doctrine. In the hundreds of years of blood-soaked history between Orcs and humanity, whenever massive Orc armies marched, human defenders had always cowered cowardly behind towering stone walls and deep trenches. They relied purely on boiling pitch, rolling logs, and falling rocks to passively survive.

"Humans are utterly spineless cowards! There is no fucking way they would abandon their heavily fortified lines, brave a freezing blizzard, and wade into a deadly swamp just to engage us in a night raid! This has to be a trap! Either that, or some idiot in the rear column triggered a mutiny!" This modern, hit-and-run guerrilla tactic—one that completely spat in the face of conventional warfare—threw the hopelessly rigid-minded Minotaur commanders into a massive, unrecoverable tactical blind spot.

They couldn't even begin to comprehend Soren's true intent. They were completely oblivious to the terrifying reality: that from the very beginning, this human Lord's strategic ambition had never been limited to simply surviving at the Greywater Village defense line. Soren intended to weaponize the pitch-black night, the treacherous swamp, and his core advantages of ultra-mobility and heavy ranged firepower. He was going to bleed them. He was going to kite them.

And piece by bloody piece, he was going to utterly annihilate this entire ten-thousand-strong Minotaur army!

"Torches! Light the damn torches! Illuminate the swamp!" a Minotaur Centurion bellowed from the mud, furiously clutching a stray bolt embedded in his shoulder. Scrape. Fwoosh. Flint sparked against steel, igniting pine resin. Yet, in the face of a howling winter blizzard, these crude torches slathered in animal fat were laughably weak. The moment the flickering orange flames ignited, the gale-force winds violently suppressed them, pressing the flames nearly flat against the wood.

The heavy sheets of driving snow and the dense, soupy fog violently compressed the weak halos of light, restricting visibility to barely three meters around the Minotaur warriors. Three meters beyond that? It was an abyss of absolute, crushing darkness.

"Where are the Shamans?! Have the tribal Shamans cast [Light of Illumination]! Light up this cursed night! Those human rats are hiding in the dark!" The Minotaur Overseer in the rear frantically waved his saber, roaring in sheer desperation. From within the chaotic Minotaur ranks, an elderly Totem Shaman tremblingly raised his bone staff, the monster core embedded at its tip beginning to glow. His shriveled lips rapidly chanted, forcefully drawing upon the meager, thinning mana in his old body.

A blinding orb of white magical light slowly levitated from the tip of his staff, attempting to aggressively banish the darkness within a thirty-meter radius. In standard Orcish warfare, this was their absolute go-to method for countering night raids and revealing hidden enemies. However, the very moment that orb of light floated a mere five meters into the air...

"Absolutely idiotic. You just painted a massive target on your own backs." Two hundred meters away on a concealed ridge, Soren stared at the floating orb and let out a chilling sneer. He didn't even need to raise his own bow. Standing right beside him, Sharpshooter Ein had already locked onto that solitary beacon of light in the dark. BANG! A bowstring snapped with explosive force! A single [Tri-Edged Armor-Piercing Bodkin] violently tore out of the darkness at lethal velocity.

The razor-sharp, refined steel arrowhead didn't just pierce straight through the magical orb—carrying terrifying, unabated kinetic energy, it slammed directly into the chanting Totem Shaman. SQUELCH! It violently blew his entire head apart like a crushed watermelon! The orb of light instantly shattered into a shower of dim, fading mana sparks. The Shaman's headless corpse slumped into the mud, and the surrounding area was immediately plunged back into suffocating darkness.

"THE SHAMAN IS DEAD!"

"DO NOT LIGHT YOUR TORCHES! NO MAGIC! WHOEVER GLOWS, DIES!" This brutal, blood-soaked lesson instantly shattered the Minotaurs' desperate attempts to illuminate the battlefield. The Orc Alliance was already pitifully lacking in true Elemental Spellcasters. With this sole Shaman executed, the Minotaur rearguard was completely blinded. They were trapped in a one-sided nightmare, reduced to nothing but massive, defenseless meat targets in the dark.

Meanwhile, perfectly concealed within the pitch-black perimeter of the battlefield... Soren and his high-mobility strike force of Wolf Riders and Centaur youths achieved true, terrifying tactical supremacy. They were apex predators, roaming with absolute freedom in the dark.