Chương 137: The Hawks' Terror

"It's a trap! A premeditated ambush! Retreat immediately! Break the ring formation and force open a path back!" Captain Valerius bellowed at the top of his lungs, his voice tearing from the combined assault of the choking gas and the dread that had begun to gnaw at his battle-hardened heart.

Dark red blood poured freely from a deep gash above his left eye, struck by a stray shard of shrapnel from one of his own men's exploded armor, and his black steel plate, of which he had long boasted its indestructibility, was cracked and deformed in several vital places.

The Captain, summoning every last fragment of military discipline still available to him, tried desperately to rally what remained of his men, scattered now like terrified sheep, attempting in vain to find any gap, any weakness, in this invisible and devastating assault that was grinding them to pieces. He drove his massive horse, shrieking in madness, trembling from head to hoof, with desperate force in the direction his internal compass was screaming was north, toward the open plains and safety.

But the moment he lurched forward a mere few meters, stumbling over the bodies of his fallen men, he slammed into a wall of pure hell. Without warning, without any preceding spoken incantation, a towering wall of blue fire erupted from the ground before him, cold in appearance yet lethal in effect, rising from nothing like a curtain of death, sealing off any remaining hope of advance. The heat radiating from this fire wall was scorching, alien, and utterly unnatural.

It was not merely a heat that burned skin, it was a heat that melted metal and consumed magic. So intense was it that it instantly dissolved the thick iron bridle of his horse, reducing it to droplets of molten iron that rained down on the animal's neck, driving it to further madness and agony.

Dex, from his elevated and protected position, had just ignited the Explosive Magic Threads that the dark elf warriors had buried throughout the previous night in a precise and intricate geometric pattern encircling the entire valley like an airtight cage. This blue fire, derived from the fusion of suppressed phoenix mana with forbidden elf enchantments, was no conventional fire that merely charred wood and flesh.

It was fire engineered to feed, it burned the mana present in the air itself and devoured any enchantment that drew near it, creating a magical and physical barrier that was impossible to breach or extinguish with ordinary water magic.

"We are completely surrounded! There is no way out! They're slaughtering us!" screamed one of the young lieutenants, his face blackened with smoke and streaked with tears of pain, before his voice was cut off suddenly, and horrifically, as an arrow of unknown origin pierced his throat with terrifying surgical precision and pinned him to the trunk of a nearby tree. The true panic that paralyzed the Hawk Eyes unit was not the primal fear of death, these were soldiers trained to accept their end.

The true panic, the kind that shatters the mind, came from the absolute sensation of helplessness. The riders and the few mages among them who desperately tried to regain their composure and deploy counter-offensive magic found themselves launching fireballs and lightning bolts at nothing but fog and smoke. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

The dark elf archers, under Dex's strict orders, were releasing their lethal arrows then vanishing instantly back into the shadows of the upper tree canopy like ghosts, leaving the riders to attack empty air. Or worse, far, far worse, and the thing that had shattered the riders' morale completely, the arrows were arriving from physically and geometrically impossible angles.

Thanks to the terrifying and masterful manipulation Lumia was performing on the fabric of the space surrounding them, a dark elf archer would loose his arrow from the right, only for it to disappear into thin air and then emerge suddenly from a tiny, invisible spatial portal Lumia had opened, striking the Imperial rider in the back, or from the left, or even from directly above into the crown of his helmet. The morale and formations of the Hawk Eyes collapsed completely and without recovery.

This was no longer a fight or a battle between two armies, it had become a systematic execution, a massacre calculated with merciless precision. Dex watched this hell from above with two orange eyes cold as winter ice, issuing commands with chilling composure and extreme exactness through a telepathic communication enchantment linking him to the dark elf squad commanders:"Squad Alpha, focus your fire now on the right flank. There's a cluster attempting to build a collective magic shield.

Break it before it completes. Squad Beta, leave the riders for now and cut the legs of the living horses. Immobilize them entirely, make them stationary targets. Squad Gamma, show no mercy to anyone who raises a weapon. Every arrow you loose must kill a target." The tactics Dex was employing in this moment would have been described in Imperial chivalry manuals and the codes of noble military academies as "dirty," "cowardly," and "dishonorable."

Exploiting the terrain's confinement to neutralize cavalry superiority; using choking gas to blind the enemy; planting explosive traps underfoot; and most critically, striking from long range and impossible angles with no direct physical confrontation whatsoever, no fair duel, no honorable engagement.

But to Dex Williams, the man who had come from a harsh and modern world, the man who had spent years as a reviled prisoner in a dark cell, the concept of "military honor" was nothing more than a hollow and fabricated phrase. A phrase the victors wrote into the history books to beautify their massacres. The supposed honor of knights would not save his father from the poison coursing through his veins, and it would not protect Lumia from her dark past.

In Dex's cold, analytical mind, efficiency and results were the only two measures of survival. He watched the riders, the elite force that had terrorized entire kingdoms, fall one by one like broken dolls into the mud. The black smoke strangled their lungs, the blue fire encircled them from every direction and dissolved their hope, and the crimson arrows rained on them without mercy from every impossible angle.

The glorious Hawk Eyes unit had transformed, within a matter of counted minutes, into a herd of terrified livestock, crammed into a narrow slaughterhouse, awaiting their inevitable turn to be slain at the hands of ghosts that could not be seen.