Chương 139: The Melting of Iron and Flesh

General Vargas, the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Sixth Legion, was not a man known for patience or tolerance, but he was known across the continent for cold military cunning and a methodical cruelty that knew no mercy. When the sole survivor of the elite Hawk Eyes unit came crawling on his belly through the mud at the forest's edge, charred flesh still fused to the remnants of his melted armor, Vargas did not shout in anger, nor did any human emotion flicker across his face, hardened as stone.

The General merely looked with terrifying calm at the deep, hideous brand burned into the trembling soldier's arm, the Phoenix Feather mark still reeking of scorched flesh. Vargas listened coldly to the panicked soldier's mumbled account of "forest ghosts" and "blue hell," and then, with a swift motion entirely free of hesitation, drew his personal dagger and ended the young soldier's suffering with a merciful and precise strike directly to the heart.

"I received the message clearly," Vargas said in a calm and steady voice, wiping his dagger blade on the dead soldier's cloak, yet the terrifying combat aura that detonated from his body in that moment, the aura of an A-rank warrior, made the massive command tent shudder violently as though struck by an earthquake.

"They want psychological warfare? They want to frighten us with forest tricks? Very well. We will give them an annihilation so complete it leaves nothing behind." Vargas did not repeat the fallen Captain's tactical mistake of sending more light cavalry or small reconnaissance units into narrow, unmapped terrain. Instead, he decided to employ overwhelming brute force and moved his heavy pieces immediately. Three full assault companies, three thousand elite soldiers, received orders to advance.

These companies were not conventional infantry formations. They were a tactically terrifying composite designed for wars of annihilation and deep penetration. The front ranks consisted of Heavy Armored Infantry, giants clad in massive, tower-like armor enchanted with multiple layers to repel the most powerful physical and magical assaults.

From behind this moving wall of steel, battalions of Battle Mages followed, specialists in long-range magical bombardment, capable of raining devastating enchantments upon the enemy from safe distances.

"Advance slowly and with caution. Burn every tree that stands in your path and every shadow that looks suspicious or dense. Tear out the roots, level the hills, and leave not a single stone upon another stone, not one hiding place for these pointed-eared rats." Vargas's orders were clear and uncompromising, relayed through the magical communication horns.

The great Imperial army moved like an unstoppable harvesting machine, tearing away the vegetation before them with catapults and fire enchantments to widen their field of vision and prevent ambushes. At first, Vargas's classic scorched-earth strategy appeared to be working with crushing success, the forces had pushed two full kilometers inside the forest's borders without encountering any meaningful resistance, nothing but the silence of burning trees.

What Vargas failed to grasp, in his customary military arrogance, was that his adversary, Dex Williams, was not a general defending territorial ground. He was a predator who used the land's own geography as a lethal weapon. High above, at a towering height, concealed with expert precision among the branches of a colossal pine tree that scraped the clouds and overlooked the army's line of advance, Dex watched their slow and arrogant movement.

Alongside him, spread along the adjacent branches, dozens of dark elf elite archers, masters of shadow, stood ready, each drawing with intense focus the string of a specially designed long bow crafted from rare, flexible Black Ebony Wood.

"Wait... maintain absolute silence..." Dex whispered, his voice transmitting with perfect clarity into the minds of the archers through the collective telepathy enchantment Lumia had woven.

"Let them swallow the bait whole... let them enter the perfect kill zone we prepared." If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. The army continued its arrogant advance, breaking trees and destroying the natural world around them, until the vanguard of the heavy infantry reached a vast natural depression between two hills, a hollow ringed by dense trees in a formation resembling a suffocating green dome. Here, the geography itself worked against their crowded formations.

In that decisive moment, Dex gave the long-anticipated signal.

"Now! Show no mercy to anyone, rain the guided phoenix hell down upon them!" The dark elves did not loose their arrows in the conventional, indiscriminate way into open air. The previous night, through an effort that had drained a considerable portion of his energy reserves, Dex had activated a new collective command skill, one he had freshly devised by fusing his exceptional fire with ancient elf enchantments: [Guided Flame Link].

Every black arrow carried by the dark elves had been pre-charged with a precise and concentrated fragment of Dex's own fire mana, phoenix fire. Thousands of arrows were released simultaneously, in a single synchronized volley. There was none of the usual whistling wind-sound that accompanies a rain of arrows. Instead, there came a terrifying sound resembling the roar of a colossal waterfall of blood pouring with great force.

These arrows did not merely fall from the sky by the pull of gravity alone, they appeared alive, as though each one possessed its own individual will to kill. The metal arrowheads blazed in a deep, blood-red and terrifying hue, leaving in their wake through the air long trailing tails of red smoke and scattered sparks like small, furious meteors. Below, as the Imperial soldiers glimpsed the sky raining blood and fire, the heavy infantry raised their enormous tower shields with perfect discipline and training.

"Tortoise defensive formation! Close ranks!" the company commanders shouted swiftly. They were blindly confident that their enchanted armor, battle-tested across hundreds of campaigns, would repel these as easily as it repelled ordinary arrows. That confidence was the last and most lethal mistake of their lives. The arrows charged with phoenix fire were not designed to penetrate armor physically through sheer force of impact.

The instant they made sharp contact with the surface of the enchanted armor, these arrows consumed and absorbed the defensive mana within it with ravenous greed, converting it into fuel to magnify their own heat, then detonated in the blink of an eye. Boom! Boom! Boom! The green hollow transformed within seconds into a raging inferno.

The successive explosions were not ordinary yellow fire-bursts that scatter through the air, they were dark crimson detonations, heavy and viscous, like liquid volcanic lava poured from the sky. An arrow striking a shield did not bounce off or shatter, it instantly melted the enchanted steel at the point of impact and dropped the liquefied metal, at an unbearable temperature, directly onto the panicked soldier sheltering behind it, burning his flesh down to the bone.

"Damnation! These aren't ordinary arrows! It's a rain of molten lava!" screamed one of the Battle Mage commanders in terror, scrambling to raise a magical water barrier above his head, before a guided arrow punched through his barrier as though it were paper and detonated in the center of his chest, turning him to ash where he stood. But the true terror that shattered the Imperial formation was not the heat of the detonations alone, it was the supernaturally precise targeting.

Through the Guided Mana Link Dex controlled, he was able to steer the arrows' trajectories mid-flight in slight yet decisive deflections, bypassing the wide outer edges of the shields, striking with terrifying accuracy the extremely narrow gaps between soldiers' helmets and their body armor, or targeting the unprotected joints between plates. The hollow's killing ground transformed within a matter of terrible minutes into a human cremation in the fullest sense of the word.

The stench of burning human flesh mixed with nauseating thickness alongside the smell of magical sulfur and boiling blood. There was no real combat, no genuine engagement, only a silent, one-sided massacre, a systematic annihilation executed by invisible snipers.

Of the three thousand heavy infantry soldiers and battle mages who had entered the hollow in full arrogance, only a few hundred remained standing, swaying in mad disorientation amid thousands of charred and disfigured corpses, staring up at the blood-red sky with absolute terror, waiting in hopeless dread for the next lethal droplet of the merciless Red Rain to find them.