Chương 166: 166：The Impossible Shot

Hiss! The moment those conditions dropped, every single Half-Elf in the vicinity sucked in a sharp breath of freezing air. Two hundred meters out! In the dead of a stormy night! A single, erratically falling leaf! Let alone human eyes, even a nocturnal owl couldn't pierce through this atrocious weather to spot such a microscopic target. This wasn't just a test of eyesight.

It was an absolutely brutal trial of one's innate connection to nature—calculating wind shear, humidity drag, and the chaotic trajectory of a falling object!

"Interesting. After you." Instead of backing down, Soren casually gestured for her to begin. Ilya didn't waste words. She spread her feet, rooting herself firmly into the muddy earth. Her breathtaking face—marred by that glaring slave brand—instantly took on an aura of profound, sacred solemnity. Reaching back, she slowly drew a crude wooden arrow tipped only with chipped flint. Nock. Draw.

The absolute instant she pulled the recurve bow to a full moon, the howling mountain gale seemed to completely cease flowing around her body. Her [Nature Magic Affinity] activated silently. Threads of pale emerald mana bled from her pale fingertips, rapidly coiling around the wooden shaft like living vines. In her mental perception web, the trajectory of every single falling raindrop became impossibly clear.

"The wind guides the way," Ilya whispered, slowly closing her eyes. She had completely abandoned her physical sight. A few seconds of absolute stillness. THWANG! The bowstring detonated, letting out a sharp, ear-piercing shriek. The mana-infused wooden arrow tore through the curtain of rain in a bizarre, spiraling trajectory. It actually carved a breathtaking arc through the gale, using the wind's own momentum to violently accelerate! Two hundred meters out, a dead, yellow leaf had just been ripped from a branch.

Tumbling erratically in the storm, it plummeted toward the muck. SQUELCH! The emerald-glowing arrow tracked the target flawlessly. Striking with the force of a thunderbolt, it punched dead-center straight through the tumbling leaf! Carrying its terrifying residual kinetic energy, it slammed heavily into a massive tree trunk behind it, pinning the shredded leaf securely to the bark!

"A HIT!" Several Half-Elf rangers acting as spotters in the distance let out frantic, disbelieving roars. They sprinted forward, yanking the arrow from the wood and hoisting it high into the air. Threaded perfectly onto the flint arrowhead was the dead leaf. A flawless, dead-center bullseye!

"HURRAH FOR THE LEADER!"

"The marksmanship of an Elven King!" The Half-Elf camp instantly erupted into deafening, fanatical cheers. This god-like display of magical archery was the absolute foundation of their survival in this brutal world. Farness and the other elites looked at Soren with faces brimming with fierce pride. So what if your close-quarters combat is monstrous? Under these hellish conditions, absolutely no human alive can elevate archery to the realm of the gods!

Now, every single gaze in the camp converged entirely upon Soren. It was his turn.

"An absolutely flawless application of Nature Magic. You truly live up to your reputation." Soren didn't hold back his praise, slowly clapping his hands in genuine admiration. And then, he drew his own longbow. An exquisite warbow, intricately inlaid with triple-layered wind-elemental runes, was suddenly exposed to the flickering light of the campfires. It was a flawless masterpiece of art. Its mere presence actually caused microscopic mana vortices to spiral in the damp air! The [Windwhisper Bow]!

"That's..." Several of the elderly Half-Elf elders, who had been cheering just a second prior, completely froze. The color instantly drained from their faces as they stared at the weapon in absolute, unadulterated horror.

"A bowstring woven from Azure-Wood Mana Vines... Limbs carved from the roots of the World Tree... That is an artifact forged from the absolute highest honors of the Elven Royal Court! An Epic-tier royal treasure!"

"Gods above! Is that... the Windwhisper?!"

"Legend says only a Grand God of War who saved the entire elven race from extinction holds the qualifications to wield that holy relic! How... how the hell did it fall into the hands of a human?!" A massive, violent wave of commotion ripped through the Half-Elves. Even Ilya's expression drastically shifted. She had never expected Soren's trump card to be this terrifying.

But she also knew something else: if Soren used the [Windwhisper Bow] to hit the target, every single Half-Elf would attribute the victory to the bow's legendary runes, not his personal skill. Even if he won, they would refuse to submit. Soren knew this perfectly well. He let out a soft chuckle. Under the utterly dumbfounded gazes of the entire camp, he casually flipped his wrist and tossed the divine bow—a weapon that even the King of the Silvermoon Kingdom would kill for—straight onto a wet, muddy tree stump!

Amidst a collective gasp of sheer horror, Soren took long strides toward a completely paralyzed Half-Elf guard standing by the barricades. Before the stunned warrior could even react, Soren violently snatched the crude, short horn-bow right out of his hands. Because it had been exposed to the freezing rain year-round, the bowstring was slack and fraying, and the balance of the limbs was catastrophically warped! The maximum draw weight of this garbage couldn't have been more than thirty pounds.

Let alone fighting against hurricane-force winds, it wouldn't even be accurate enough to shoot a wild pheasant fifty meters away! Stolen novel; please report.

"I'll use this." Soren casually plucked the mud-caked bowstring. It let out a pathetic, twanging groan. Using this literal piece of garbage to challenge a two-hundred-meter shot through a hurricane at a falling leaf?! Is he out of his fucking mind?! This perceived act of sheer arrogance caused Ilya's expression to turn freezing cold.

"Lord Soren. Archery is not a child's game. If you let arrogance cloud your judgment, this entire bet becomes a pathetic joke."

"I am never arrogant, Ilya." Soren turned his back to her. There was no flashy aura of swirling mana. There were no grand prayers to the elements. He didn't even bother test-drawing the string to gauge the warped tension. In that exact microsecond. HUM! Within the freezing rain, a bizarre, invisible pulse of spiritual energy violently expanded outward from Soren's closed eyes! [Eagle Eye]! What?!

As an apex ranger intimately attuned to Nature Magic, Ilya was far too familiar with—and far too sensitive to—this exact frequency of energy. Her slender body involuntarily took a half-step backward in pure, unadulterated terror! His eyes! That is the Eagle Eye! A perception domain that can only be awakened by elves through decades of agonizing, ascetic meditation! No... this level of all-encompassing, omniscient clairvoyance... That isn't just an ordinary Eagle Eye!

That is the evolution above it—the Eye of Nature! In that moment, Ilya's entire cognitive worldview suffered a catastrophic collapse. How could a pure-blooded human possibly master the absolute highest-tier racial talent of the elves?! And his perception... it's even purer than mine, a former top-prodigy of the Royal Court! Soren nocked a crooked, poorly fletched wooden arrow. Within Soren's [Eagle Eye] perception, two hundred meters out...

The pitch-black, stormy night transformed into a crystal-clear, dynamic holographic grid. The micro-currents of the wind speed per second. The terminal velocity and trajectory of the falling raindrops. The exact three-second parabolic descent of every single tumbling leaf. Even the exact two-percent ballistic drift caused by the warped left limb of this garbage shortbow. Every single variable, every single piece of data, was instantly and flawlessly calculated in his brain! CRACK!

The garbage shortbow groaned as it was drawn to its absolute limit! Devoid of a single shred of protective mana, the crudely crafted arrow launched into the darkness in a seemingly crooked, off-axis trajectory!

"The wind pushed it off course! He didn't use enough draw strength!" an elderly Half-Elf archer roared instinctively. However, the very next second... That seemingly unstable, wobbling arrow collided flawlessly into the precise cutting angle of a cyclonic updraft! Instead of blowing the arrow out of the sky, the wind miraculously corrected its crooked posture! And then, utilizing the back-half of the gale, the updraft bestowed the arrow with a terrifying, secondary acceleration!

The wooden shaft carved an impossible, zig-zagging ballistic trajectory through the pitch-black night! Deep within the curtain of rain. A torn, yellow leaf had just been ripped from a high branch, tumbling violently in the hurricane winds. SQUELCH! With absolute, zero-deviation precision, the exact millisecond that yellow leaf flipped over in mid-air... it collided directly against the rusted iron arrowhead! Without an ounce of suspense, the rusted iron punched clean through the center vein of the leaf.

Erupting with staggering penetrative force, the arrow carried the shredded leaf forward with a sharp thwack, burying itself deeply into the narrow crevice of a massive boulder a hundred paces out. The crooked fletching vibrated violently! At that exact moment... Even the howling of the wind and rain felt entirely superfluous. Dead silence.

"Retrieve... retrieve the arrow." It took a very long time before Ilya finally issued the command. Her voice was audibly trembling. When the spotter returned to the camp—his face looking as if he had just seen a literal ghost—hoisting the garbage arrow perfectly skewering the shredded leaf... Every single Half-Elf, including the arrogant Farness, stared at the human Lord standing before them with profound, unadulterated reverence. Soren was casually shaking the rainwater off his hands.

Using a literal piece of trash, relying on nothing but raw physical kinetic vision and a god-like pre-calculation of wind vectors and ballistic drift... he had just executed a long-range shot worthy of being inscribed into mythological epics! If he had actually fired that Windwhisper Bow... is there a single throat in this world he couldn't pierce from fifty paces away? Ilya was completely, utterly convinced.

Her proud Nature Magic archery—when compared to this level of absolute, raw tactical calculation—felt incredibly flashy and pathetically fragile. She stared at Soren. In her mind's eye, she could already envision the terrifying future. This man, armed with monstrous physical martial prowess, transcendental strategic intellect, and an arsenal of unfathomable trump cards that not even elves could comprehend...

in the years to come, he was destined to violently, tyrannically conquer this rotting, degenerate continent of Aeresia! But... the crushing, suffocating responsibility of leading her entire race's migration still warred violently within her heart. She lowered her eyes, biting her lower lip hard enough to draw blood. The ultimate fate of the entire Half-Elf race... can I truly, completely entrust it into the hands of this human warlord?