Chương 33: 33：Sunken Bone Shallows

Ein grabbed the corpse by the ankles and dragged it backward into a deep pool of water. Nearby, Gary ripped the belt off a captive Orc scout, used it to bind the creature's hands behind its back, and hauled it all the way back to their formation. Faint moonlight pierced the thin mist. Soren stood concealed behind a tree. Seeing Gary approach with the prisoner, he flashed a tactical hand signal. Immediately, the entire squad lowered their halberds, sweeping their eyes over the surrounding high ground on high alert.

Gary hurled the captive at Soren's feet. The Orc scout's jaw was dislocated and its mouth was packed with mud, yet its slitted yellow eyes glared venomously at Soren. A threatening, guttural growl rumbled from its throat, radiating an unyielding, fanatical defiance. Soren crouched down.

"Gut'ama, Bloodfang?"(Orcish: For the Bloodfang?) The words rolled off Soren's tongue with flawless trills, capturing the exact, grating harshness of the Blackstone Warband's dialect. The Orc's pupils contracted violently. It stared at the human before it in absolute disbelief. Soren drew his dagger. Sparing no words, he drove the tip directly into the crux of the Orc's thigh, scraping the blade agonizingly slow along the very edge of the femoral artery.

"Dulon'ha. Priest, or chieftain?" Soren interrogated in Orcish, his tone so chillingly calm it made the skin crawl. The excruciating physical pain, compounded by the severe psychological blow of hearing his native tongue spoken so masterfully, instantly shattered the scout's mental defenses. Ten minutes later, Soren stood back up. Having extracted the necessary intel, he waved his hand dismissively.

Gary stepped forward, planted his boot firmly on the Orc's back, gripped its head with both hands, and gave a vicious twist. With a sickening crack, the lifeless body went limp.

"My Lord?" Kyle approached from the shadows.

"The situation has changed, " Soren replied, wiping the blood from his dagger before sliding it back into its sheath."Zagar, a High Shadow Priest serving under Warchief Blackstone. He's leading ten heavily modified monsters known as the Sons of Titan. They just leveled the Ironwood Camp up ahead, slaughtered dozens of our shielded spearmen, and then rapidly withdrew." The surrounding soldiers caught their breath.

"Judging by the fact that this priest didn't press the attack, he isn't here for a war of attrition, " Soren said, looking up at the night sky."He's conducting a sweep. He's hunting for the force that wiped out their Shaman squad half a month ago. He's hunting us."

"This pack of wolf riders was nothing but an advance scout element. Zagar's main force is currently pushing northeast, making a beeline for the next human outpost: Lone Cliff." If it were a traditional general of the Silvermoon Kingdom, they would immediately choose to fall back and defend their main base, or barricade themselves in a fortified chokepoint. But Soren simply unfurled his map and took a single glance.

"Forced march. We're going to beat them there. We set up a targeted ambush at Sunken Bone Shallows, three kilometers to the northeast." Half an hour later. The sixty-five men arrived at the designated coordinates. Under the faint gleam of the night sky, Kyle finally got a clear look at the terrain before them. He couldn't help but speak up.

"My Lord... we're setting up a blocking position here?" Stretching out before them was a sprawling, flooded marshland roughly three hundred paces across. The water was shallow, barely reaching past the knees, with a bed of sticky, viscous mud and putrid, rotting waterweeds. There wasn't a single tree. There wasn't a single rock taller than a man's ankle. It was an endless, flat expanse with absolutely zero cover. In the military topography manuals of any nation, this was classified as a textbook "Death Zone."

You couldn't build defensive emplacements, and you couldn't conceal troops. Once engaged, they would inevitably become sitting ducks for enemy archers and spellcasters. Kyle tightened his grip on his heavy halberd.

"There is zero cover here, my Lord!" Kyle urged."Even if we initiate a volley of throwing spears from fifty paces out, the enemy will spot our entire force with a single glance. Against a Shadow Priest's magic on such open terrain, we won't even have a place to dive for cover." Soren turned around and stepped firmly into the freezing, murky water.

"Shadow Priests possess terrifyingly high perception. If we were in a dense forest or a jagged, rocky canyon, he would cast Shadow Detection from two kilometers away, sweeping the shadow of every single tree and the back of every boulder." Soren met Kyle's gaze."But in a wide-open shallow like this? Put yourself in his shoes. Would you waste precious mana scanning a puddle that couldn't even conceal a rabbit?" Kyle stood stunned.

"A Death Zone is the greatest cover of all, " Soren continued."The more a location defies conventional military logic, the more it becomes a blind spot where the enemy lowers their guard." Soren pulled two hollow, rigid reed stalks from his belt.

"All men! Strip the protective wrappings from your halberd shafts and hold your weapons horizontally. Slather your faces and any reflective surfaces on your weapons with the muck from the bottom of the pool. Bite down on these reeds to breathe." Soren swept a cold, calculating gaze over the sixty-five death-sworn soldiers before him.

"The water current will wash away all scent. The mud will mask your body heat. Take a deep breath, and sink to the bottom."

"Until you hear my whistle, you do not breach the surface. I don't care if a leech bites through your eyelid. I don't care if a Son of Titan crushes your finger bones beneath its heel. Nobody breaks the water."

"Consider this the final exam of your graduation. Fail here, and we restart all your previous training from scratch." The muddy water churned. Not a single one of the sixty-five men hesitated. Gary was the first to crouch. He scooped up handfuls of the foul-smelling, pitch-black bottom sludge and smeared it completely over his head and face. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Gripping his two-and-a-half-meter heavy halberd parallel to the ground, he bit down on his reed tube, leaned back, and laid completely flat in the thirty-centimeter-deep muck. The filthy water washed over his chest, his throat, his nose, until his visage was completely swallowed by the swamp. Immediately after, the second man followed suit. Then the third. Splash. Splash. A continuous staccato of bodies submerging into the shallows.

Beneath the surface, the water was bone-chillingly cold, teeming with rotting vegetation and blood-sucking parasites. However, the Troll Serum had fundamentally altered their constitutions. Boiling-hot blood pumped through their veins and extremities, violently neutralizing the otherwise lethal chill. Within two short minutes, Sunken Bone Shallows returned to absolute tranquility. The occasional bubble drifted to the surface, popping to form tiny ripples. A gentle breeze brushed over the waterweeds.

The area looked exactly as it had for the past thousand years in the Misty Marsh: lonely, desolate, and devoid of all life. The only difference was the sixty-five pairs of hands hidden beneath the sludge, knuckles white as they gripped armor-piercing heavy halberds, waiting in deathly silence for their prey. Half an hour later. SPLASH! Water sprayed into the air. A massive, calloused foot stomped heavily into the muddy shallows, snapping a submerged branch with a loud crack.

The towering, three-meter-tall behemoths known as the Sons of Titan trudged into the shallows one after another, resembling walking mountains of flesh. Yellowish-brown earthen rock shields rippled across their skin, displacing massive waves of water with every step. The ten Sons of Titan fanned out into a wedge formation, using their bare hands to casually bulldoze through dense thickets of reeds that stood twice as tall as a normal man. High Shadow Priest Zagar walked in the absolute center of the formation.

The hem of his cloak dragged across the water's surface, heavily caked in black mud. With every tap of his bone staff, the murky water naturally parted to either side. He raised his head, his eerie, sickly-green eyes scanning the terrain ahead. It was an endlessly flat expanse. Aside from knee-deep water and rotting weeds, there wasn't a single rock large enough to hide a scrawny Goblin, let alone an ambush. The thin mist hanging over the swamp was completely insufficient to conceal the tracks of a human army.

His vanguard of Direwolf Scouts hadn't sent back any warning signals, which meant this zone was clean.

"A textbook stretch of open ground. You couldn't even hide a rabbit out here." The corners of Zagar's deeply wrinkled mouth twitched upward in a dismissive sneer. He abandoned the thought of casting the mana-intensive [Shadow Detection], letting the gathered magical energy settle back into the base of his staff. The ten monstrous behemoths churned up massive torrents of water as they marched straight past the midpoint of the shallows. Exactly two hundred and forty paces away from them...

Beneath the surface of the sludge, a piece of "sunken driftwood" that had perfectly blended into the lakebed suddenly shifted. Soren spat out his reed tube. His left hand subtly parted the water's surface while his right hand inch-by-inch drew back the Elven-crafted weapon: the Windwhisper Bow. Three wind-element runes etched along the bow's lit up in sequence, though the intensely compressed, azure glow was utterly smothered by the surrounding black mud. [Eagle Eye Perception] activated.

The world seemed to grind to a halt in that very instant. Droplets of water hung suspended in mid-air. Soren's visual range zoomed in drastically, even the pores on the neck of a Son of Titan thirty paces away became vividly clear. Full draw. Release. The twang of the bowstring was muted underwater, but the instant the projectile breached the surface, it shattered the sound barrier! The arrow transformed into an azure afterimage, violently parting the mist. The lead Son of Titan was just bringing its foot down.

Before its hundreds of pounds of brute kinetic force could even settle into the lakebed, the azure streak arrived. BOOM! The arrowhead drove dead center into the immensely thick earthen rock shield protecting the monster's chest. Sparks showered in all directions. The Elven-inscribed wind magic detonated violently upon impact, exploding into a maelstrom of razor-sharp wind blades. The three-meter-tall giant convulsed.

Its massive feet plowed two deep trenches into the mud as it was blasted backward, crashing onto its back and sending geysers of water rocketing into the sky. The rock armor on its chest shattered in a massive spiderweb pattern, its ribs forcefully inverted and blown outward as thick, black blood erupted from the wound. A sudden ambush! Zagar's pupils shrank to pinpricks. He slammed his bone staff against the water's surface, desperately scanning the area to pinpoint the shooter's location.

But he couldn't find a single standing target. In the exact moment the lead behemoth crashed into the muck, the shallows absolutely boiled. KRA-KOOM! Curtains of water exploded upwards. Sixty-five humanoid figures, completely caked head-to-toe in black sludge, surged up from the rotten mud in perfect unison. Hands raised. Arms drawn back. Spines arching like drawn bows.

"THROW!" Soren's ice-cold roar pierced through the chaos of splashing water. SWISH! SWISH! SWISH! Sixty-five thickly muscled right arms snapped forward with explosive synchronization. The superhuman musculature granted by the Troll Serum tore through the air resistance with terrifying ease. Volley one. Sixty-five dark-grey short spears launched into the air. Draw. Step. Volley two. Volley three. In the blink of an eye, one hundred and ninety-five barbed, refined-iron javelins sailed through a lethal parabolic arc.

Launched from point-blank range—a mere thirty paces away—they formed a dense, suffocating cloud of black rain, crashing down relentlessly over the heads of the towering behemoths!