Chapter 95: The Silent Slaughter (2)
The forest behind them got washed with blood.
Eighty figures in muted greens and browns had been tailing Reidar, Mara, and Aaron. They were hunters.
His Rift-Sprites, having already been given the skills to summon more creatures, acted without hesitation.
Creatures appeared amidst the trees behind the unsuspecting pursuers. The Bone Militia hit the enemy’s back first.
The attackers turned around while shouting in alarm, but with those screams cut short by their deaths. A volley of elemental attacks rained down from the sprites hiding in the branches above.
Fireballs turned two men to ash before they could even fall. Wind Blades cut through bows and armor like they weren’t even there. Stone Bullets cracked skulls with ugly, wet thuds.
The Primal Pack struck next, the wolves lunged at the hunters. With jaws snapping bones and tearing throats, the wolves drove the panicked fighters straight into the skeletons’ waiting blades.
Each death registered in Reidar’s mind as a chime, since he was getting more and more notifications, and another bunch of Survival Points were added to his pool. There wasn’t any real fight to it, just a swift, brutal cleanup.
The ambush shattered. One of them with a scarred face bellowed, "To me! Defensive circle, now!"
Men and women scrambled to obey, raising shields and parrying the first wave of skeletal attacks. For a moment, their experience held.
They formed a tight knot of steel and desperation, swords lashing out at the endless tide of skeletons closing in.
It wasn’t enough. Their defense lasted less than a minute. The Primal Pack wolves crashed into their flank, ignoring the hastily raised shields. One of them seized a man by the leg and dragged him screaming from the formation, while another leaped over the shield wall entirely, landing amidst the terrified humans. The defensive circle broke.
Above them, the Rift-Sprites continued their attacks. A man trying to nock an arrow was impaled by a shard of razor-sharp ice.
Another, trying to cast a healing spell on a comrade, was engulfed in a fireball. The skeletons advanced without pause. They felt no pain, no fear, and their sheer numbers were a suffocating tide of death.
[Enemy human defeated.]
[Enemy human defeated.]
[Enemy human defeated.]
[Enemy human defeated.]
[Enemy human defeated.]
[Enemy human defeated.]
Reidar forced his breathing to remain calm.
"...and sometimes, the mana cost is just too high," Mara was saying, her voice tinged with the fatigue of too many triages. "You have to make the choice. Save the one you can, to hopefully save more later."
Reidar gave no outward sign of the battle raging just a hundred meters back. He couldn’t afford to. He didn’t trust the two.
Worse still, if they truly weren’t allies as he’d suspected all along, he’d be exposing the full extent of his capabilities right before them, something he’d been carefully avoiding since he reached Havenwood.
The following moment, a combined volley from a dozen Rift-Sprites turned the area into a charnel house of elemental energy.
[Enemy human defeated.]
[Enemy human defeated.]
[Enemy human defeated.]
The slaughter was brutal, but chaos still had its own currents. Two attackers tore free from the failing formation, their discipline had been replaced by raw panic. They fled in opposite directions, crashing through undergrowth in terror.
The Rift-Sprite Contubernium observed. One fugitive was a bowman, light and quick. The other, larger, carried a heavy axe. It would be faster to chase and easier to kill.
The Primal Pack wolves, a Guardian Shade, and a bone militia peeled away from the main group. They ignored the archer and chased the other man.
The larger man crashed through the brush, struggling to breath because of the fear. He glanced back, and terror gripped him even more. Not because he saw the pursuers he knew were there, but because he couldn’t.
Who the absolute fuck was the target? The higher-ups hadn’t said a damn thing about this power, hadn’t even hinted at it. This guy wasn’t just some survivor, as they claimed him to be. He could command monsters and turn them into an army. That wasn’t just unusual; it was fucking unnatural, something out of a nightmare.
He kept running, and at some point swerved right, crashing through a thorny thicket that ripped at his armor and clawed his skin.
Pain was better than panic—he’d take a hundred cuts for a head start. The tangled vines would slow the beasts down, and the skeletons were too clumsy to follow fast. It was his only shot.
He burst through to the other side, stumbling into a small clearing. He spun around, his heavy axe held in a two-handed grip, ready to cleave the first creature that emerged. But nothing came through the vines.
Instead, a low growl drew his eyes to the left. An absurdly large wolf had circled the thicket entirely, its lips peeled back to reveal a set of gleaming white fangs.
Another growl answered from his right. A second wolf.
Desperation started consuming him. He abandoned the idea of a chokepoint and bolted again. The wolves fell in behind him. They weren’t even sprinting; they were just pacing him, tiring him out.
The axeman recoiled, his heart hammering against his ribs. He couldn’t fight these things despite him having pumped all his attributes into S.H.I.E.L.D. He skidded to a halt and changed direction again, but he knew he was losing ground.
He cursed in terror and ran, crashing through branches, slipping on moss but scrambling forward, desperate to escape the monstrous hunters.
It was at that moment that a figure appeared from the dense foliage ahead. A woman intercepted the fleeing axeman.
But her blade didn’t go for the wolves. She slipped right past them. The axeman barely saw her before steel flashed across his throat. He dropped, choking out his last breath.
She stood over the body. Wiping her blade on her trousers, she turned and scanned the summoned wolves and the Guardian Shade floating nearby. Her expression stayed neutral. She didn’t make a move toward them.