Chương 138: The Bloody Message

The entire horrifying massacre took no more than ten consecutive minutes. Ten minutes, enough, and more than enough, to reduce one hundred elite riders, one hundred of the proudest products of the Imperial Army's great military academies, into nothing more than a disfigured heap of torn bodies, charred flesh, and twisted molten iron.

Very slowly, as though nature itself were exhaling in relief after a suffocating nightmare, the white fog, laced with black smoke and the copper stench of blood, began to lift and dissolve, making way for the cold morning light to reveal with stark clarity the full scale of what death and tactical genius had wrought together.

The violent noise of battle had subsided; the explosions had stopped, the shrieking of terrified horses had ended, replaced by a silence heavier and more harrowing than any of it: the moaning of the very few wounded still drawing their last breaths in the mud, and the faint crackling of the remaining blue magical fire as it dimmed and guttered, having consumed everything consumable.

Dex descended from the great oak branch with a motion smooth and light as a falling shadow, landing quietly in the center of the killing ground he had designed himself. His black leather boots pressed into earth muddied with hot blood, gray ash, and scattered armor fragments. He walked at a slow, unhurried pace among the bodies, inspecting the results of his work with features entirely empty of expression, no gloating triumph, no regret, no pity. His face was a mask of ice over a roaring fire.

As he walked, the dark elf warriors began descending in absolute silence from their upper concealment. They moved like ghosts between the bodies, collecting the black arrows that remained intact and usable for future battles, while simultaneously, in swift movements that were merciful in their very brutality, finishing off with their daggers those few riders who had not yet died, sparing them the prolonged agony of a slow death.

"Stop!" Dex commanded suddenly in a sharp, cutting voice, pointing his right hand toward a single rider. That rider was crawling with tremendous, agonizing difficulty across the blood-soaked mud, attempting to flee toward the sealed edge of the valley, despite his left leg being broken in a hideous manner with the bone protruding through the flesh, and his steel armor shattered and torn in several places.

He was young, barely older than Dex himself, perhaps, with locks of blond hair matted with mud and blood, his blue eyes wide and filled with an indescribable animal terror, the terror of a man who had looked upon hell with his own eyes. Dex approached him with slow, heavy steps and dropped to one knee directly before him, bringing himself level with the young rider's gaze.

The young rider made one last desperate attempt, with a trembling, blood-soaked right hand, to grasp the broken sword lying at his side for a final act of defense. But Dex, in a motion swift and sudden as a serpent's strike, kicked the sword beyond his reach, extinguishing his last hope. Then, with a force disproportionate to his frame, Dex seized the rider's trembling right arm in a firm grip, the arm still covered by a heavy iron gauntlet.

"You are very lucky, young man... or perhaps, when you think on it later, you will realize you are profoundly unlucky to have survived and been left to carry this burden," Dex said in a voice quiet and low, yet more terrifying than any battlefield cry.

"I chose you, out of a hundred corpses, to be the one survivor." Before the panicked young rider could process the meaning of those words, or attempt to respond, Dex summoned phoenix fire suddenly into his free left palm. But this time it was not the wild, battle-destroying blaze of combat, it was a heat concentrated, compressed, and condensed to an almost inconceivable intensity in a single small point.

Dex pressed his palm, blazing with brilliant orange fire, directly over the iron gauntlet covering the rider's forearm. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. The rider let out a thunderous scream, a scream of pure pain and pure agony that tore through the dead silence of the forest and sent a shiver even through the dark elf warriors themselves.

The thick iron of the gauntlet began heating at a maddening speed under the phoenix fire, passing beyond red-hot into white-hot radiance, then beginning to melt partially and hideously, fusing itself completely to the skin and muscle of the arm beneath it, leaving behind a wound deep, disfiguring, and permanent, a brand bearing the shape of a blazing Phoenix Feather.

"This is not merely a simple burn, and this is not merely a souvenir of a failed invasion," Dex said coldly, releasing the rider's scorched arm, which still trailed wisps of smoke from the charred flesh, as the young man writhed on the ground from the force of the pain.

"This is a living message that walks on two legs." Dex seized the rider by the collar and pulled him close, looking directly into his shattered, tear-drowned eyes, and spoke with absolute clarity, as though drilling a lesson into him that he would never forget as long as he lived: "Go back now to your cursed army's camp. Go back to your arrogant General Vargas. Don't stop running until you reach the door of his tent.

Show him this arm of yours, and tell him in painstaking detail everything you saw and heard here today." Dex leaned in closer, until the rider felt Dex's cold breath striking his sweat-drenched face: "Tell him, word for word: Falus Forest does not welcome those whose hands are stained with blood. And every additional step his arrogant army takes inward, toward the elves' land, will cost him another hundred heads, severed and burned, exactly like the heads of your comrades that surround you now.

Tell him, loudly, so that every soldier in his camp can hear, that the Ghosts of the Forest await his Hawks with great anticipation... to roast them alive." Dex rose and gestured toward Lumia, who stood in silence at the valley's edge. With a simple motion of her hand, Lumia opened a small breach in the invisible spatial wall, a narrow, temporary gap forming the only exit, leading back to the army's camp.

"Run!" Dex roared in a voice like the snarl of a beast.

"Run as though the demons of hell are at your heels!" The young rider rose, ignoring the pain of the broken leg he dragged behind him, ignoring the excruciating agony in his branded arm, and ran in blind madness. He stumbled over corpses, fell in the mud, then hauled himself upright again, driven by pure survival instinct and an absolute terror that had seized complete control of his mind, until he passed through the magical breach and vanished entirely beyond the horizon.

Dex stood alone amid the rising smoke and the heavy stench of death, looking coldly at the trail the fleeing rider had left behind. He clenched his right fist until his knuckles went white and the veins rose on the back of his hand. The feeling of intoxicating satisfaction at the crushing tactical victory was mixed in his chest with the bitter taste of the hard reality that had forced him to become this monster.

"This is the first and last warning, General Vargas," Dex murmured to himself, his voice dissolving into the cold wind.

"This beginning was easy, nothing but an arrogant reconnaissance unit we surprised in our own backyard. But the real hell, the full-scale war, has not yet begun." Dex turned to Lumia, who was approaching him in silence. She was looking at him with an extremely complex expression, a strange mixture of admiration for his brutal military genius and a deep fear of the necessary yet excessive cruelty he had just displayed, a cruelty that reminded her, if only for a moment, of her own past as a weapon of annihilation.

"The entire Sixth Legion will move with its full strength and heavy weapons now, the moment they receive this bloody message and absorb the shock," Dex said in a practical, firm voice, wiping some of the scattered ash from his pale face.

"They won't send cavalry scouts next time. They will send the great war mages, the machines and the heavy mana-cannons, and they will burn the forest inch by inch. Prepare yourself, Lumia, and inform General Okonnor immediately to ready the defenses. The great battle, the one that will determine the fate of our small world, will come knocking at the World Tree's door very soon."