Chương 135: The Lost Exit

At a dizzying height, perched specifically above the branch of a legendary oak whose width matched that of a royal caravan highway, Dex Williams crouched in a low squat. He surveyed the scene far below with cold eyes, sharp as those of a killing eagle pinpointing its prey with precise calculation before the strike.

For this mission, Dex had not chosen heavy metal armor that might restrict his movements or betray his position with a telltale clink, he had opted instead for a light suit crafted from treated black Manticore hide, which absorbed light and blended seamlessly with the dense shadows of the enormous trees. In this moment, he carried neither bow nor spear. His lethal weapon at this stage of the battle was not the arrow or the blade, it was prior knowledge and absolute control of the field.

Beside him, Lumia stood perfectly upright, a statue carved from silver marble. Her eyes were closed completely to concentrate her magical senses, and her right hand was extended in the air before her in a fluid, flowing gesture, as though she were playing a death symphony on an invisible stringed instrument. Her long fingers moved in precise, complex, rapid motions, touching the very fabric of space and reality, toying with its threads.

Her magical aura was reined in and compressed within her body at Dex's instruction, so that the enemy's mages or their Vision Stones would have no means of detecting the presence of an alien celestial energy, but the invisible effect of what her fingers were doing was terrifying by every physical measure.

"They've passed the point of no return... they've entered the Dead Zone I marked on the map," Lumia murmured without opening her eyes. Her voice was devoid of any human emotion, dry and cold, as though she were reporting the weather or a routine statistic. Dex nodded slowly, his enhanced eyes tracking with precision the moving magical heat signatures below, representing the one hundred riders of the Hawk Eyes unit as they pushed deeper, blindly and arrogantly, into the heart of the trap.

"Wait a little... not yet... let them believe for a few more moments that they're safe, that the fog is nothing but a natural obstacle. Let them go deeper until the last sensory or magical connection to the outside world behind the forest is completely severed." The trap Dex had designed, exploiting his knowledge of reality's blind spots and Lumia's rare spatial magic, was built on a tactical doctrine that no general's academy had ever taught. It was not a conventional military ambush relying on trees and arrows.

It was a geometrical manipulation of the terrain itself. The area the riders had entered was a narrow, elongated valley hemmed in on both sides by trees impossible to climb, but Lumia was performing a surgical folding of this valley's spatial dimensions. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

The moment the last rider of the Imperial unit's rearguard crossed the invisible magical mark Dex had pre-placed on the trunk of a rotting tree, Dex turned to Lumia and gave the signal in a low voice: "Now... close the door behind them." Lumia snapped her wrist in a sharp, powerful motion, as though throwing a cosmic lock into place. Down below, in the fog, the riders heard no thunderous explosion, saw no stone walls rising from the earth to block their path.

What happened was far more terrifying and confounding to the human mind: the thick fog behind the unit suddenly twisted and rippled in a spiraling motion, like colored oil swirling in a basin of water. The wide path they had ridden in through only minutes ago, whose deep hoof prints were still clearly pressed into the wet mud, vanished from existence entirely.

In place of the open trail connecting them to the Imperial Army, there appeared, without warning, impossibly dense trees, enormous twisted roots interlocked and thick with moss, as though they had stood there for thousands of years and no living being had ever passed between them. Lumia had, at Dex's command, connected the end of the path to its beginning in a closed Spatial Loop, fully isolating this region from the fabric of the real forest.

The one hundred riders were now circling inside a bubble severed completely from physical reality. The precise magical compasses they carried began spinning in frantic, erratic confusion, and the long-range communication enchantments tethering them to General Vargas's central command cut out suddenly with a sharp, ear-piercing burst of static.

"The door of the great cell is shut," Dex thought, a cold and ruthless smile settling at the corner of his mouth. Dex took no pleasure in the act of killing, itself, but he knew with the certainty of a prisoner who had suffered profound injustice that showing mercy in the face of a beast like the Empire meant nothing but certain annihilation for himself and everyone he loved. These riders, through Dex's analytical gaze, had ceased to be human beings with hopes and families.

They had become nothing more than enemy pieces on a decisive chessboard, and they had to be removed with complete cold-bloodedness before the real game could begin. Dex and Lumia descended from the branch with skill and speed, moving between the lower boughs like ghosts, drawing closer to the edge of the imprisoned valley below, where the true hell was beginning to boil.