Chương 326: 326： Execution by Firelight

SQUELCH! The sickening sound of tearing flesh and shattering bone abruptly ruptured the deathly silence of the encampment. The Centurion, who had been roaring furiously just a microsecond prior, was instantly silenced. The arrow, packing a terrifying kinetic force, blew cleanly through the back of his skull! It dragged out a massive, gruesome spray of dark blood and pulverized brain matter, blossoming into a horrifying crimson mist beneath the glaring illumination of the campfire.

The gargantuan Centurion's body went completely rigid for a split second before crashing heavily face-first into the blazing bonfire, violently kicking up a massive shower of blinding sparks and swirling ash!

"E-Enemy attack! Protect the Centurion!" The dozen-odd Centaur warriors clustered around the fire froze in sheer, mind-shattering disbelief for two full seconds before finally erupting into terrified, panicked shrieks. They scrambled frantically to snatch up their dropped weapons, spinning around wildly in absolute chaos. Yet, in every single direction, there was absolutely nothing but the howling blizzard and the suffocating, pitch-black darkness! There were no bloodthirsty battle cries.

There was no thunder of charging hooves. They hadn't even heard the piercing shriek of the incoming arrow! Just as the encampment plunged into total, paralyzing panic... Thwip! Thwip! Two incredibly faint, muffled snaps echoed in rapid succession. Ilya's arrow, deeply infused with wind mana, didn't trigger even the slightest microscopic disturbance in the air currents.

Gliding through the night sky like a lethal phantom, it buried itself flawlessly into the throat of a Centaur officer desperately attempting to raise a wooden shield. The officer violently clutched his spurting neck, collapsing into the mud with a harrowing, wet gurgle. Immediately after, Ein's hyper-violent, heavy arrow arrived! The Imperial Military Longbow, combined with the devastating [Tri-Edged Armor-Piercing Broadhead], unleashed an apocalyptic kinetic impact!

The broadhead effortlessly pulverized the crude breastplate of a Centaur elite, violently shredding his heart on contact! The sheer stopping force actually lifted the beast's gargantuan frame completely off his hooves, launching him backward through the air before he crashed heavily against a wooden supply wagon!

"Where?! Where in the ancestors' name are the shooters?!" The encampment dissolved into absolute, hyper-ventilating chaos. A suffocating dread spread like a plague through the Centaur army. In the deeply ingrained military doctrine of this alien race—a race that worshipped nothing but brute force and mass charges—archers were supposed to line up in dense, highly visible formations, executing volley fire accompanied by deafening war cries. But now?

These lethal, armor-piercing arrows were manifesting out of thin air! They had absolutely zero clue which direction the enemy was hiding in, how far away they were, or how many shooters there were!

"Shields! Raise every damn shield you have! Form a defensive perimeter!" A Centaur Myriarch burst violently from his command tent. Relying on the exquisite, plundered human heavy plate armor he wore, he arrogantly stepped directly into the glaring firelight, desperately attempting to anchor the rapidly collapsing morale of his troops.

"You'll do," Soren whispered coldly from the pitch-black shadows, locking onto the high-value target. He knew the absolute, golden rule of a master sniper: the ultimate objective was never just to rack up a body count, but to completely obliterate the enemy's psychological defenses! Effortlessly slaughtering a supreme, seemingly invincible commander right in front of his own troops was the absolute fastest way to completely shatter an army's will to fight! This time, Soren did not aim for a lethal kill.

Drawing the [Windwhisper Bow] to an absolute full moon, he locked his sights onto the Myriarch's exposed right knee joint—a spot entirely unprotected by the stolen human plate armor! Thrum! The silver arrow tore across the void! CRUNCH!

"AGHHHH!" The Myriarch unleashed a harrowing, blood-curdling howl. The broadhead brutally pulverized his kneecap into bone fragments! Stripped of his balance, the beast's gargantuan frame violently collapsed, crashing heavily to his knees in the rotting muck. And in the exact microsecond his body hit the ground, Ein and Ilya—operating with flawlessly synchronized, pre-calculated precision—unleashed their follow-up strikes!

Ilya's cyan wind-blade arrow executed a hyper-precise, surgical strike, cleanly amputating the Myriarch's right arm just as he attempted to push himself back up! Simultaneously, Ein's heavy broadhead capitalized on the beast throwing his head back in agony. It viciously pierced straight through his exposed throat, forcefully pinning the gargantuan commander directly to the freezing earth! A flawless, three-arrow execution sequence!

An incredibly revered, heavily armored Centaur Myriarch was brutally, methodically butchered right in front of hundreds of his own warriors—and they still hadn't seen so much as a single shadow of the enemy!

"G-Ghosts... they're phantom soldiers! The humans' phantom snipers have come to drag us to hell!" This visceral, inescapable slaughter became the absolute final straw that completely pulverized the Centaur warriors' psychological defenses. The sheer, suffocating dread of the unknown violently hijacked their minds. The sprawling Centaur encampment plunged into an apocalyptic mass panic. As long as any warrior dared to stand near a campfire, as long as anyone dared to even straighten their spine...

in the very next microsecond, a lethal arrow would manifest out of the absolute darkness, flawlessly blowing out their brains or piercing their hearts!

"Get away from the fires! Fall back! Retreat into the shadows!" This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. From within the main command tent, Vice-Chieftain Luke stumbled out in a complete panic. Having just witnessed his own Myriarch brutally decapitated by a sniper, his heart was hammering against his ribs like a war drum. Relying on the razor-sharp instincts of a seasoned commander, Luke instantly decoded the cold logic behind the massacre.

"They possess the ability to see through the pitch-black night! It's the fires! These godforsaken campfires we lit for warmth have turned every single one of us into glaring, high-contrast targets!" Completely losing control of his emotions in the freezing gale, Luke let out a harrowing, agonizing roar: "Extinguish the torches! Put out every single campfire immediately! I want absolute, pitch-black darkness! Do not leave a single spark!"

"But Commander!" a Centurion vehemently protested, his teeth chattering violently.

"It is the dead of a sub-zero winter night! If we extinguish the fires, the critically wounded, along with the elders and the young, will freeze to death before dawn!"

"If we do not extinguish these fires, we will all be executed by snipers right here and now!!" Luke violently drew his cavalry saber, viciously kicking apart a blazing pile of firewood. He shrieked with absolute desperation, "Execute my command! Put them out!" To counter this utterly unblockable, phantom sniper fire, the Centaur army was brutally forced into a horrific, agonizing ultimatum.

Thousands of Centaur warriors frantically scooped up freezing muck, packed snow, and even used their own thin, pathetic tunics to violently smother the very campfires that were their only source of survival in the blizzard. A mere fifteen minutes later. The sprawling, fiercely illuminated Centaur encampment was forcibly dragged into an abyss of absolute, freezing, pitch-black darkness.

"Cease fire." Three hundred meters away, deep within the petrified grove, Soren slowly lowered the [Windwhisper Bow]. Through the thermal lens of his [Eagle Eye Perception], the Centaur staging ground had completely devolved into a paralyzed, suffocating dead zone. Every single surviving Centaur warrior had entirely lost the innate, arrogant pride of their race. Shivering uncontrollably in pure terror, they curled their massive bodies into tight balls.

They scrambled under supply wagons, hid behind the freezing corpses of their fallen kin, and even pressed themselves flat into the highly acidic, freezing muck of the drainage ditches. Huddling against the sub-zero blizzard, their teeth chattered violently and their lips turned a sickly, necrotic purple. Yet, not a single one of them dared to so much as stand up, let alone ignite even a microscopic spark of fire!

Through this brutal, psychological night-sniping operation, not only had Soren flawlessly assassinated over thirty high-ranking Centaur commanders and apex elites in under an hour... More importantly, he had viciously carved a terrifying, unbreakable conditioned reflex directly into the psyches of thousands of Centaur warriors: In this freezing, pitch-black abyss, if you dare to step out of cover... if you dare to crave even the slightest sliver of warmth or light...

in the very next microsecond, your skull will be flawlessly, violently blown apart!

"My Lord, they are freezing to death. By dawn, their combat effectiveness won't even retain a tenth of its original strength," Ilya murmured, her eyes brimming with profound reverence as she surveyed the apocalyptic misery of the enemy camp.

"This is the absolute, true essence of asymmetrical night warfare. Body count is never the primary metric; the ultimate goal is the complete and total obliteration of the enemy's psychological will and physical endurance." Soren cast one final, chilling glance at the shivering shadows below, fluidly slinging the longbow across his back.

"Let's head back and rest. Let these arrogant fools stew in the suffocating darkness and freezing cold, and thoroughly digest the absolute terror of this long, agonizing night." Meanwhile, in the northern reaches of the Misty Swamp. The howling gale violently whipped razor-sharp sleet and snow across the endless, sprawling expanse of rotting mire. This was the staging ground for the absolute main force of the Orc Alliance, commanded by Warchief Blackstone.

Exactly ten thousand towering, fiercely muscled Tauren heavy shock troopers were currently slogging through knee-deep, foul-smelling acidic muck. Their heavy, synchronized panting merged into a deafening, thunderous rumble, yet their sluggish, agonizingly slow steps betrayed a profound, bone-deep exhaustion. At the absolute epicenter of the massive horde, inside a sprawling, mobile command pavilion hauled by eight heavily armored Kodo Beasts... CRASH!

Warchief Blackstone violently swept his massive arm outward, brutally flipping a solid oak war table. Scalding liquor and dried wyvern meat scattered haphazardly across the rugs, yet not a single elite guard dared to step forward and clean up the mess.

"Two thousand... over two thousand prime Centaur elites! And against a pathetic human village possessing a total population of barely two thousand... not only did they fail to breach a single godforsaken barricade, they were slaughtered to the absolute last man?!" Warchief Blackstone glared at the [Orcish Communication Slate] clutched in his gargantuan grip, his eyes bulging with sheer, unadulterated disbelief.

His massive chest heaved violently, his heart consumed by a suffocating, entirely unprecedented sense of catastrophic defeat. As the supreme overlord of a hundred-thousand-strong Orcish army, he absolutely shouldn't have ever felt such profound dread toward a microscopic human border Lord. But reality had just delivered an apocalyptic, sledgehammer blow directly to his skull.

"Abysswater Keep was burned to the ground by that bastard Soren. My entire logistical hub is ashes!" Warchief Blackstone paced furiously within the command pavilion, his massive tusks grinding together so hard they threatened to crack.