Chương 314: 314：Ten Thousand Arrows, Zero Kills

Soren fell into a deep silence. He realized the brutal truth: the real battle—an apocalyptic meat grinder of a bloodbath—was about to commence right here in this rotting mire. Just at that moment... Ding! [System Notification: Enemy Legion of 10, 000 has successfully established a forward staging ground.] [Quest Objective: Defend the Greywater Village frontline to the death, and utterly annihilate the 10, 000-strong Centaur army!] [Quest Reward 1: One fully tamed siege beast equipped with heavy cavalry tack: [Armored War Elephant]! (Note: A heavy terrestrial siege beast used throughout human history for breaching fortifications. Eight meters in length, draped in heavy plate armor, completely immune to conventional arrows and spears.)] [Quest Reward 2: [Mid-Tier Life Restoration Potion Recipe]] Hearing the system's prompt, Soren's breath hitched. Beneath his stoic, unreadable facade, his heart began to hammer violently against his ribs.

What an absolutely staggering reward! What an apocalyptic injection of war resources! That [Mid-Tier Life Restoration Potion Recipe] was an absolute godsend. It was the exact strategic resource Greywater Village was desperately bleeding for. Up until now, treating the critically wounded relied entirely on [Battlefield First-Aid Potions] and [Low-Tier Life Restoration Potions]. The former was strictly for emergency clotting, while the latter was the true lifeline that stimulated actual cellular recovery.

Even the Low-Tier potions had maintained Greywater Village's miraculously low casualty rate. If they could mass-produce the Mid-Tier variant? It practically meant that as long as a soldier wasn't instantly decapitated or physically blown to pieces on the spot, they could be dragged back from the brink of hell! And that [Armored War Elephant]... Soren's breathing grew ragged.

Within the military doctrines of the Aeresia Continent, the Orc Alliance relied on the terrifying Ironclad Earth Dragons as their ultimate line-breakers. The human faction also had a history of taming war beasts, but an ultimate destroyer like the Armored War Elephant—a gargantuan behemoth draped in heavy steel plate—was a mythical entity that usually only existed in the legends surrounding the Holy Halycon Empire's Royal Guard!

As long as they survived this apocalyptic battle and claimed this war beast, Greywater Village wouldn't just possess a heavy unit capable of going toe-to-toe with an Ironclad Earth Dragon. On future battlefields, this elephant would become a supreme, unstoppable force of destruction, capable of trampling any enemy phalanx into bloody mud!

"Accept Quest." He didn't lock in this quest solely because of the mouth-watering system rewards.

"Defend to the death? Just drive them away? No. Taking a passive beating has never been my style." Soren glared at the tactical map, a chilling, murderous intent bleeding into his gaze as he coldly resolved himself.

"In this brutal, rotting world where human life is utterly worthless and alien races slaughter with impunity, mercy and compromise only invite more violent exploitation and butchery."

"If I merely repel the Centaurs, Warchief Blackstone will simply view me as a slightly tougher nail to hammer. Tomorrow, he'll send ten thousand Tauren. The day after, he'll march ten thousand heavily armored Pigmen to my doorstep!"

"If I'm going to fight, I'm going to beat an absolute, paralyzing terror directly into their souls! I want them waking up screaming from their nightmares the second they hear the name 'Greywater Village'!" Soren violently gripped the hilt of his refined steel longsword. He intended to utterly annihilate this Centaur main force—an arrogant horde that usually trampled the plains unopposed—to send a shockwave across the entire continent of Aeresia!

He would use ten thousand gargantuan Centaur corpses to deliver a visceral, blood-soaked warning to the entire Orc Alliance: Anyone who dares to invade Greywater Village will die! However many you send, I will slaughter them all! Time crawled forward. 6: 00 AM the next morning. The sky had barely begun to bleed a sickly, pale gray, and the freezing wind tearing across the wasteland was agonizingly bitter.

Two kilometers outside the Greywater Village northern slope defensive line, the earth began to shudder with a terrifying, rhythmic intensity.

"Blow the war horns! Let those pathetic humans cowering in the mud taste the apocalyptic wrath of the Centaurs!" Centaur Chieftain Heka rode at the absolute forefront of the formation. After a night of restructuring, his eyes were entirely consumed by a rabid, bloodthirsty killing intent. Hoisting his massive spiked flail high into the air, he unleashed an earth-shattering roar to the endless, sprawling army behind him, officially declaring the onset of the slaughter. Woooooooo!

The mournful, desolate blast of massive beast-horn war trumpets violently shattered the morning silence. However, the ten thousand Centaur warriors did not launch a frenzied charge. Instead, flawlessly executing the war of attrition tactic finalized the day before, they spread out into a massive, miles-long line across the vanguard, forming an incredibly wide, overlapping volley-fire formation.

"Draw!" Following the synchronized roars of the Centurions, ten thousand gargantuan Centaur arms flexed simultaneously, erupting with monstrous, brute strength. Creaaak! Creaaak! Creaaak! Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Ten thousand heavy longbows, strung with the taut, unyielding sinew of magical beasts, were forcefully drawn to a full moon.

The dense, collective groaning of tens of thousands of tension-loaded bowstrings merged into a single, terrifying cacophony that radiated an absolutely suffocating aura of oppression.

"Loose!" THWUUUM! Ten thousand thick, raw-iron Orcish heavy arrows were violently released from their strings in the exact same microsecond. The sheer, apocalyptic volume of the volley instantly blotted out the pale morning light. Carving a massive, dark parabola through the sky, the storm of arrows emitted a piercing, mournful shriek as it tore through the wind. Carrying a terrifying, seemingly unstoppable kinetic force, the barrage ruthlessly plummeted directly toward Greywater Village!

In the era of cold-weapon warfare, the kinetic impact of a ten-thousand-man concentrated volley was enough to completely flatten any village lacking towering stone walls, instantly turning every single living creature inside into a bloodied pincushion! Yet, when this suffocating cloud of black, death-bringing arrows actually crashed into Greywater Village... the anticipated scene of splintering bone, spraying blood, and agonizing screams simply never happened. Thwack! Thwack! Thud! Thud!

The impossibly dense rain of arrows slammed violently into the muddy ground, hammered into the roofs of the stilted longhouses, and wedged themselves deeply between the wooden planks. But the village itself was eerily, terrifyingly silent. There was no panicked stampede. There were no wails of the dying. Because Soren had prepared for this exact scenario days in advance!

Deep underground, within the incredibly complex, zigzagging network of anti-siege tunnels excavated by the engineering corps in the hardened earth... The fourth-echelon logistical personnel—the Half-Elf women, human veterans, and children—were sitting quietly and safely on dry, woven straw mats. From directly above them came the constant, muffled thud-thud-thud of heavy arrows burying themselves into the dirt.

A faint shower of loose soil trickled down through the cracks of the heavy log-reinforced ceiling, dusting their shoulders. Yet, not a single person felt an ounce of fear.

"Don't be scared, lad. The tunnels the Lord ordered built are so sturdy a trebuchet boulder couldn't cave them in, let alone a few rusted twigs," a grizzled human veteran chuckled, leisurely chewing on a piece of cured wyvern meat as he reassuringly patted the head of a Half-Elf boy beside him. The entire logistical echelon had been flawlessly evacuated. The ten thousand heavy arrows raining down upon the village interior did absolutely nothing but leave a dense array of holes in the mud and timber.

They caused zero strategic damage! Meanwhile, at the absolute vanguard of the defensive line—the exceptionally perilous northern slope zone. The second-line regulars of the Macedonian Phalanx and the Longbow Squad were currently crouching in perfect, disciplined rows behind trench bunkers excavated over six feet deep.

"Keep your heads down! Press yourselves flat against the trench walls!" Talon roared furiously from within the earthworks. A violently dense storm of arrows swept directly over their heads. However, even with the protection of the deep trenches, the sheer, apocalyptic volume of the barrage meant that several hundred arrows still managed to clear the lip of the bunkers at exceptionally steep, sinister angles, plunging violently directly into the trenches! CLANG!

A thick, raw iron arrow, carrying the terrifying terminal velocity of its descent, slammed viciously right into the back of a young pikeman! Terrified out of his mind, the young soldier let out a short shriek, his body instinctively collapsing forward into the mud. Yet, as he scrambled back up in a blind panic and desperately felt his back, he completely froze.

That raw iron heavy arrow—capable of cleanly skewering a wild boar—had instantly erupted in a blinding shower of sparks the microsecond it struck the [Dark Silver Half-Plate] he wore. The ultra-high hardness born from the flawless fusion of Mithril and Black Steel had brutally, effortlessly warped and crushed the iron arrowhead, causing it to bounce off harmlessly into the dirt! As for the residual blunt-force kinetic trauma?

By the time it bypassed the plate armor, it was perfectly absorbed and completely neutralized by the incredibly thick [Padded Cotton Armor]—stuffed with dense wood ash—that he wore beneath it. Aside from feeling a mild, dull thud against his spine, the young soldier hadn't even suffered a scratch!

"Hahahaha! I'm alive! This garbage can't even scratch me!" The young soldier held up the warped, ruined arrow, laughing excitedly from the bottom of the trench. Witnessing this, the surrounding soldiers felt their dread of the apocalyptic arrow storm instantly vanish. It was entirely replaced by an unshakable, absolute trust in the gear they wore, and an infinite, burning reverence for their Lord!

"Let those beasts shoot! Even if they exhaust themselves to death, they won't harm a single hair on our heads!" Instead of being suppressed, the morale across the entire defensive line skyrocketed to an absolute fever pitch amidst this zero-casualty miracle! Ultimately, this grandiose, ten-thousand-man saturation bombardment achieved absolutely nothing.

Aside from severely draining the Centaurs' physical stamina and drastically depleting their arrow reserves, it failed to inflict a single ounce of substantive lethal damage!