Chương 154: The Wrath of Nature

In that very moment, amid the sweeping chaos and the mad flight of the Imperial soldiers, a deep and majestic horn blast thundered across the horizon. It was a sound rising from the deepest point in the heart of dark Falus Forest, a sound nothing like the resonant brass war horns of human armies. It was a sound wooden and mournful and frightening, carrying in its very timbre thousands of years of vengeance, ancient justice, and eternal warning.

It was the horn of the dark elves, the announcement that the hunting season had begun. Atop a high rock overlooking the army's escape route, Okonnor appeared. He was no longer the calm and measured commander who weighed every step with wisdom, the last masks of diplomacy had fallen away. He had watched Falus Forest, his home and his sanctuary, being burned without mercy. He had seen his people slaughtered like blades of grass. And now, with the serpent's head fallen, the hour of bloody reckoning had arrived.

His green eyes blazed with a predatory light resembling the eyes of wolves on bitter winter nights. He raised his two swords, still dripping with Imperial blood, and cried out in a voice that shook every corner of the forest, addressing his warriors who were still concealed in the shadows like lurking ghosts:"Don't let them escape! Don't leave a single one of them to spin a false account! Don't let the Empire's filthy hand return to write another lie in their history books!

Cut them off at the root, for the trees that charred without guilt! For our brothers and sisters whose blood was spilled in the darkness! The forest demands their blood. Fall upon them like inevitable death!" The dark elves' response was thunderous and swift beyond description. From every tree, from behind every boulder, from beneath mounds of burnt leaves and charred trunks, the dark elf warriors erupted like famished shadows slipped free of their chains.

They were not numerous compared to the Legion, perhaps a tenth, but in this moment they were not soldiers. They were the Ghosts of the Forest, made flesh. Poisoned arrows charged with the mana of nature's fury began to rain like dense black rainfall upon the backs of the fleeing Imperial soldiers.

There was no escape, not even a slim hope of survival, for the elves, drawing on their absolute knowledge of their homeland's terrain, had set lethal ambushes and magical traps on every withdrawal route that the human soldiers had believed to be safe and open. More terrifying than the elven arrows and blades was the behavior of the forest itself. Falus Forest appeared to reclaim its angry, living consciousness with the death of Vargas and the dissipation of his oppressive aura.

The earth that had drunk the blood of its children decided to swallow its enemies. Massive roots, which had lain dormant for centuries, burst suddenly from beneath the soil like enormous wooden serpents, tripping the hooves of cavalry horses and shattering their legs with a brutality that wrung the heart. The thorned branches of the ancient trees descended with a terrifying fluidity to snatch helmets from the heads of infantry and tear at bare faces and panicked eyes.

The dense fog, laden with illusion spores, began to envelop the escape paths, driving soldiers to run in hollow circles, screaming into empty air, only to find at the end of their blind running a cold elven blade waiting to open their throats. Mother nature, in all her terrible majesty, had transformed into a judge who accepts no appeal and an executioner who shows no mercy, simultaneously.

Amid all this insane tumult, the thunderous death screams, the clash of colliding swords, the howling winds playing a melody of annihilation, Dex stood motionless in his place, like a stone statue carved at the heart of the storm. He did not move a single inch, not from courage, but because his body had begun to betray him entirely. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

He felt the world around him losing its vivid colors, gradually converting to faded shades of gray and black. The adrenaline, that vital fuel, that natural narcotic that had driven him to transgress the limits of his human body and allowed him to trade blows with a titan, had begun withdrawing from his veins with sudden and merciless speed, leaving behind a desolate and dark void. And as the adrenaline receded, the pain attacked. It was not ordinary pain that could be endured by biting the lips.

It was a sensory explosion in every sense the phrase allows. Dex felt as though every fiber of muscle in his body had been severed and wrenched from its place with fire-heated pliers. He felt as though the bones of his chest had transformed into shards of shattered, poisoned glass, driving their sharp edges into his lungs with every desperate attempt to draw breath. The delicate mana channels within him, which minutes ago had been rivers running with blazing lava, had become dry, cracked, dead deserts.

Those damaged channels were sending pulses of dry burning directly to the center of his brain, making him sway where he stood. His vision began narrowing progressively, as though he were peering through a dark tunnel that grew tighter by the second, and his ears began to ring at a high, invasive frequency that drowned out the screams of the soldiers around him.

Dex tried to take just one step to check on Lumia, to reassure himself about the girl who had risked everything for him, but his feet no longer obeyed the commands of his exhausted brain. He had consumed every last drop of the Ancient Nectar's energy that had healed him, and drained every glowing atom from the phoenix core.

He fell with extreme slowness, as though gravity was granting him a few merciful moments, first to his trembling knees, producing a muffled sound as they struck the mud saturated with the blood of battle, then his torso began to lean toward the earth. Before his face struck the mud, he felt a warm, soft, and familiar hand seize his shoulder with desperate force and prevent him from falling completely into the abyss of darkness. It was Lumia. She too was in a pitiable state no less dire than his.

Her silver hair, which had always radiated moonlight, was scattered and stained with ash. Her beautiful face was pale as the dead, her eyes ringed with dark halos of magical exhaustion. Her clothes were torn and burned in several places from the enormous pressure of the spatial barriers she had been forced to open time and again to deflect Vargas's assaults. But despite all that ruin, she was smiling.

A broken, tired smile, her eyes full of tears, but a smile full of pure pride and a relief that could not be put into words.

"We did it, Dex..." Lumia whispered close to his ear, her voice trembling violently from the extremity of exhaustion and the rush of colliding emotions.

"The hammer that terrified the world has fallen. We defeated the impossible, together." Dex smiled with tremendous difficulty and rested his heavy head against her slender shoulder, closing his scorched eyes. He breathed deeply one last time before losing consciousness, breathing in the scent of the burning forest, mingled with the scent of blood and the scent of approaching rain that carried with it promises of cleansing.

In that fleeting moment, and despite the crushing pain tearing through his cells, and despite the sounds of enemy armies still being slaughtered and screaming in the far distance, Dex felt a strange and deep peace he had never experienced before. He had been nothing but a despised prisoner yesterday, a nobody with no future in dark cells, and now, on this rainy night, he had become the man who shattered the prestige of the greatest Empire on the continent.

Dex's consciousness faded gradually, sinking into a warm and comforting darkness, as he felt the first cold drops of rain falling on his feverish face. The sky had begun to weep, to wash away some of the blood of the battle and its sins, while the screams of the collapsing Iron Legion faded little by little into the dark forest's horizon, announcing the end of one era and the beginning of a new legend.