Chương 339: 339：The Arrow of Concealment

Outside the pavilion, dozens of Orc Shamans wielding staves continuously maintained a glowing defensive array. Worse, four massive Wyverns circled in low-altitude patrols directly above the Royal Pavilion, serving as a vigilant aerial guard. Seeing this obscenely extravagant transport, Soren's breath literally caught in his throat.

"My Lord... what is that?" The half-elf Ilya had also spotted the behemoth through the blizzard. Her beautiful face was painted with absolute disbelief.

"Not even a Minotaur Chieftain would have the authority to use eight Kodo beasts to pull their chariot, right?"

"That isn't some Minotaur Chieftain..." Soren slowly lowered the bow he had been raising.

"In the entirety of the Misty Swamp, the only entity with the authority to use eight heavily armored Kodo beasts to pull his pavilion... the only one who can make Shamans and Wyverns willingly serve as his personal bodyguards..." Soren's blood began to pump with sudden, surging adrenaline. He spat the name out, syllable by bloody syllable:"There is only one. The Supreme Commander of the Orc Alliance's hundred-thousand-strong army—Warchief Blackstone!" This deduction sent a massive shockwave through Soren's mind.

It completely shattered his previous strategic projections! Why? Why the hell is he here? Soren's brows knitted tightly together. According to conventional military logic, as the supreme commander of a massive army, Warchief Blackstone should be sitting comfortably within the heavily fortified walls of Bloodfang Fortress, drinking fine wine and waiting for his frontline generals to deliver my head!

A dictator of his exalted status would absolutely never willingly step foot onto this filthy, highly volatile frontline swamp! But a split second later, the bloody truth behind this extreme anomaly clicked perfectly into place in Soren's mind! I get it. Of course! Soren coldly ran the tactical simulation in his head, a supremely confident sneer spreading across his lips.

Because I sniped the lord of Abysswater Keep and burned his logistics hub to ash, his army of a hundred thousand is facing an imminent starvation crisis! Because just yesterday, I utterly crushed ten thousand Centaurs and achieved the absolute miracle of zero casualties! Warchief Blackstone has been forced into a corner! He's scared! He is terrified that once this massive Minotaur army learns of the Centaurs' catastrophic defeat, they will lose their nerve! He fears desertion, or worse, a full-scale mutiny!

So, he had no way out! To maintain his aura of invincible authority, and to use strict military law to forcefully suppress the Minotaurs and make them throw their lives into the meat grinder, he had to abandon the safety of Bloodfang Fortress. He had to personally accompany the army into this swamp to oversee the slaughter! Having unraveled this underlying logic, a violent surge of pure, unadulterated excitement coursed through every fiber of Soren's being.

The trajectory of war was always full of unpredictable, bloody irony. Before launching this night raid, Soren's original strategic objective truly had been nothing more than a slow, bleeding war of attrition. He just wanted to use his three-hundred-strong high-mobility detachment to relentlessly harass the outer fringes of the Minotaur army.

He aimed to reap a couple of thousand heads, completely shatter their morale, and force them into a mental collapse so they would abandon the fight, thus completing the System's quest to either annihilate or rout the Minotaurs. But now? Fate had handed him the ultimate punchline! The exalted Warchief Blackstone, coerced entirely by Soren's own ruthless pressure, had actively marched out of his impregnable fortress.

Riding in his obscenely flashy Royal Pavilion, he had stepped right into the very domain where Soren ruled supreme as an apex predator! Even better, right at this very second, thanks to Soren's ruthless guerrilla harassment on the fringes, the Minotaur army's formation was in total chaos. Massive chunks of elite troops had been blindly redirected to the rear and the flanks to hunt for the hidden assailants.

This meant that while Warchief Blackstone's central pavilion was still heavily guarded, the macroscopic defense of the ten-thousand-strong army had fractured, exposing a fatal, exploitable flaw!

"How perfectly convenient..." Soren inhaled a deep breath of the freezing, ice-laced air. He looked down at the [Windwhisper Bow] in his grip, its cyan runes faintly pulsing with power. Then, he looked back at his hundred frontline elites and longbowmen, who had just been prepping for a tactical withdrawal.

"My Lord, what is our vector for retreat?" Buck asked quietly, his direwolf already shifting its paws in the blizzard, ready to pivot. Retreat? Shift vectors and keep harassing? Soren abruptly snapped his head up. In this world, what tactical maneuver could possibly end a massive, multi-legion war faster and more efficiently than ripping the head clean off the enemy's supreme commander?! Fuck the slow attrition! Fuck the guerrilla harassment! A Decapitation Strike!

That is the absolute pinnacle of modern special operations! Soren gripped the hilt of his steel longsword tight. Staring dead ahead at the massive, luxurious Royal Pavilion in the distance, a dark, chilling chuckle escaped his lips. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

"We are not retreating."

"Gentlemen, hunting down ten thousand braindead cows might cost us the entire night, and even then, we might not kill them all."

"But..." Soren spun around, raising his longsword and pointing the steel blade straight down the wide, frozen avenue toward the behemoth pavilion pulled by the eight Kodo beasts.

"If, tonight, we can sever Warchief Blackstone's arrogant head and mount it on the barricades of Greywater Village..."

"The entire Blackstone Warband will utterly collapse before the sun even rises!" As his mind raced with the lethal calculations, Soren reached into the specialized quiver strapped close to his chest. When he pulled his hand back out, resting between his fingers was an ancient-looking, highly unassuming projectile. This was the incredibly precious, miraculous item rewarded by the System: the [Arrow of Concealment].

High-tier weapons in this world were usually accompanied by dazzling visual effects and violent fluctuations of mana, but this arrow was an absolute anomaly. Its shaft was an ashen, dead gray that seemed to absorb all surrounding light. The arrowhead bore no intricate, glowing magical runes whatsoever. It felt impossibly light in his grip, yet it radiated an intense, bone-chilling aura. Soren knew exactly how terrifying this arrow truly was. When fired, it was absolutely silent.

There would be no sonic shriek of tearing air, nor even the slightest ripple of mana. It could perfectly bypass the magical perception and spiritual lock-on of any spellcaster, and it possessed the absurd, rule-breaking property of cleanly piercing through all conventional physical armor and magical defensive arrays in this world. It was, in the truest sense of the word, a weapon of absolute death. But he only had one. Which meant Soren had exactly one chance to pull this off.

To ensure this ultimate decapitation strike was executed flawlessly, Soren snapped his attention back to his fully armed and combat-ready commanders.

"Buck, Ilya, Ein! Rally on me! Tactical shift!" Soren ordered in a low, authoritative bark. The three core commanders immediately spurred their direwolves and Centaur mounts, converging on Soren.

"Do you see that wide avenue frozen solid by Ice magic straight ahead? That pavilion pulled by the eight armored Kodo beasts belongs to Warchief Blackstone." Soren spoke with rapid-fire precision.

"My orders are as follows: Disperse immediately. Buck, take your Wolf Riders and flank hard left. Ein, your Longbow Battalion takes the right flank. Ilya, lead the Magic Rangers and completely loop around to their absolute rear!"

"For the duration of this operation, I want you to unleash every single [Wind-Blade Enchanted Arrow], [Tri-Edged Armor-Piercing Bodkin], and heavy crossbow bolt you have directly into the outer perimeter of the Minotaur formations! I want you to make as much noise and cause as much absolute chaos as physically possible! Make them believe that the entire main force of Greywater Village has completely surrounded them!"

"My Lord, what about you?" The half-elf Ilya possessed razor-sharp instincts. Sensing the anomaly in his orders, she asked with deep anxiety.

"Me? I am detaching from the main force. I'm going in for the decapitation strike." Soren spoke with terrifying calmness as he smoothly nocked the ashen [Arrow of Concealment] onto the bowstring of his [Windwhisper Bow].

"What?! You're going to charge their center on foot? Alone?!" Buck was so shocked he nearly jumped right off his direwolf.

"My Lord! That is the supreme commander of a hundred thousand troops! Even if their perimeter guard has been thinned out, the pavilion itself will be heavily fortified! Going in alone is absolute suicide! Let the frontline elites go with you for cover!"

"Idiots!" Soren barked, ruthlessly cutting off his subordinate's panic.

"Do you still not understand the tactical board? There are Wyverns patrolling the airspace above that pavilion, and Orc Shamans maintaining magical surveillance perimeters on the ground!"

"If a force of a hundred men tries to push that center, it will trigger an immediate, massive mana reaction and completely blow our cover! If that happens, the main Minotaur horde will collapse inward and crush us all to death in the mud!" Soren pointed to the suffocating pitch-black darkness surrounding them, explaining the harsh reality of war to his commanders.

"The dark easily claims the lives of the weak, but it is the absolute greatest ally to an apex assassin."

"This army of ten thousand Minotaurs might look overwhelmingly massive, but they have zero communication protocols, no NCOs, and are fighting entirely on animal instinct."

"As long as you generate enough catastrophic chaos on the outer perimeter, those brain-dead cows will absolutely be enraged by your sniper fire. They will blindly charge into the darkness in all directions to hunt you down."

"The second their main force is dragged away by your aggro, a massive defensive vacuum will open up right around that Royal Pavilion! By operating completely solo, my threat signature drops to zero. I can slip through their lines completely undetected, breach Warchief Blackstone's personal radius, and deliver the killing blow."