Chương 136: Hell of the Phoenix

Deep inside the white fog that had transformed into a spatial prison, the war horses, their animal senses far sharper than those of their trained riders, began to feel the approaching danger first. Muffled, panicked whinnying started echoing through the void, accompanied by violent stamping of hooves and desperate attempts by the steeds to bolt and flee this place that reeked of imminent death.

Captain Valerius, who in all his military career had never faced anything his magic could not explain, felt a lethal cold course through his spine. He wheeled his horse sharply around to order an immediate tactical withdrawal, only to be struck dumb by the sight of the forest that had "moved" and swallowed the way back entirely. Not a single trace of the path they had ridden in through remained.

"Closed defensive circle formation! Now! Prepare offensive magic!" Valerius bellowed at the top of his lungs, drawing his broad sword, which began to blaze with a defensive blue mana. The panicked riders converged rapidly, pressing their backs against one another in a tight iron ring, their long lances aimed outward toward the featureless white unknown that surrounded them on every side. Silence returned, but it was not a calm silence.

It was a heavy silence, charged with static electricity and a tension that nearly burst every chest in the formation. Above on a nearby branch, Dex raised his right hand high into the air.

He held between his thumb and forefinger the end of an impossibly thin, faintly glowing thread of fire mana, nearly invisible to the naked eye, that stretched from his finger like a strand of burning spider silk into a vast, intricate web buried with expert care beneath the layers of fallen leaves and earth covering the valley floor.

"Welcome to the hell," Dex whispered in a tone utterly stripped of mercy. Then he closed his fist with force and finality, cutting the mana flow and triggering the first spark. That fist was the detonator. Without warning, the ground heaved violently beneath the hooves of the Imperial reconnaissance horses. It was not the tremor of a natural earthquake, it was the deep, muffled sound of something detonating with tremendous force beneath the surface of the soil. Boom... boom... boom...

The chain explosions cascaded one after the next. Dozens of chemically and magically modified Explosive Resin barrels, which the dark elf warriors had spent the entire night planting under Dex's supervision, detonated simultaneously at precisely the right moment. These were not massive fire explosions designed to incinerate everything. They were pressure detonations, engineered with deliberate care to unleash colossal shockwaves and a thick, viscous black gas.

The gas was not toxic in the conventional sense, it would not kill outright. Instead, it was a suffocating, nerve-shredding agent, designed by Dex to systematically disable the senses and the mental concentration required to activate defensive magic. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. The black smoke spread at lightning speed, blending with the thick white fog and turning the visibility inside the valley into an impenetrable gray nightmare.

The horses began to rear in wild panic, hurling their armored riders to the ground under the force of the shockwave and their own terror, then trampling one another in a blind, desperate attempt to flee the choking darkness. The riders, despite their impenetrable steel armor, began coughing with such convulsive violence that some were retching, their eyes streaming with burning tears that verged on temporary blindness.

The Hawk Eyes unit's iron discipline collapsed completely within a matter of seconds, transforming the absolute elite into a mass of terrified men wrestling simply to breathe.

"Now! Don't let a single one of them see daylight!" Dex's voice thundered, amplified by the roaring phoenix mana, cutting through the noise of the explosions to reach every dark elf warrior concealed like shadows in the upper branches surrounding the valley. From between branches and from behind the trunks of ancient trees, dozens of gleaming predatory eyes emerged.

The dark elf archers, masters of concealment and silent death, drew back the strings of their black bows, crafted from Ebony Wood, in a single, perfectly synchronized motion. The arrowheads they carried were not ordinary. They were forged from Coldstar metal and dipped in a glowing crimson liquid that pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light. These were Phoenix Arrows, Dex's newest strategic innovation, fusing the high-frequency fire mana of his bloodline with the elves' own techniques of energy concentration.

"Fire!" The first volley was released. There was no war cry, no clamor, only a sound resembling the tearing of silk fabric under immense pressure, the sound of the Phoenix Arrows slicing through the air. Hundreds of glowing red lines split the thick fog and black smoke like small, furious meteors. The moment these arrows made contact with the enchanted Imperial armor, they made no attempt to pierce it physically as ordinary arrows would. What happened instead was far more lethal.

On contact, the explosive, compressed phoenix mana packed into each arrowhead reacted with the protective blue mana embedded in the armor. Ka-BOOOM! Powerful, concentrated detonations began ringing out at every point of contact. The armor, the pride of Imperial military manufacture, designed to repel blades and conventional magic, was transformed in a single instant into timed bombs strapped to the bodies of its own wearers.

The enchanted steel plates shattered and became razor-sharp metallic shrapnel that drove inward with the force of the explosion, tearing through the bodies of the riders beneath their own armor. The battlefield was transformed within a matter of moments into a true slaughterhouse, lit by nothing but the strobing crimson flashes of successive detonations, the screaming of men facing a death they had never once trained for, and the shrieking of horses torn apart in the midst of the chaos.

Dex stood in the heights above, watching the disintegration of the Imperial elite, his eyes reflecting the blaze of the fire, fully aware that this was nothing more than the beginning, and that the message had now been delivered in unmistakable terms to General Vargas: Falus Forest is not a place for hunting expeditions. It is a graveyard.