Chapter 491: Despair
"Exactly," Sol muttered, starting a steady, long-striding trot in the swaying grassland. "The grand ceremony in the square wasn’t just theater for any remaining eyes inside our walls. It was the signal.
While I dragged the three hundred green recruits out through the front gates to act as the visible bait, Veylara was already moving the true force of the tribe through the deep jungle to the plain."
He didn’t need to look with his eyes; the newly evolved golden-silver pool in his chest was humming beautifully, its expanded sensory dominion faintly sensing the cold, heavy vibrations of the Veynar veterans waiting miles ahead.
"The remaining Zerith scouts think they are escaping a trap by running back to the treeline," Sol’s voice carried a chilling, mechanical certainty through the rustling stalks. "They don’t know that the treeline is already a solid wall of bone-spears.
Warchief Veylara’s squad is sitting in the deep shadow right now, specifically waiting for the grass to move. T
he moment those bugs break the reeds to warn their chieftains... they’ll be running straight onto the points of our sharpest spears without ever seeing the hands that hold them."
Thauren’s grin widened into a savage, predatory line as he bounded right beside Sol’s black-armored flank, his own blade seeming to be vibrating with a hungry light.
"They think they are the hunters tracking a dying litter," the Lion Commander bellowed through his teeth, his Wind-Lion traits pushing his stride into a blurred glide across the hard clay. "But you’ve turned the entire outer plain into a double-layered slaughter chute."
He was right, from the start, Sol wasn’t about to let a single soul escape his harvest, especially these high layer ones.
The two ran with long, ground-eating strides, their bodies slicing through the high, emerald green stalks of the grassland like two heavy iron wedges.
The wind whistled sharply against the sharp edges of Sol’s black Rockhorn carapace, carrying away the lingering, copper tang of the dead scouts they had left behind in the mud.
For a long while, the plain around them remained completely quiet.
The vast fields of wild-grass rolled endlessly under the pale sky, the massive herds of six-horned grass-eaters moving lazily in the distance, entirely indifferent to the silent war creeping through their borders.
They didn’t find any more Zerith scouts along the immediate trails. A less experienced leader might have assumed that the perimeter was entirely clear, that the three high-tier shadow stalkers they had dismantled were the only eyes the Coalition had deployed across the plains.
But Sol knew better.
His cold, calculating mind never allowed room for lazy assumptions.
The primitive ecology of the Great Orrath was too vast, and the stakes of this territorial clash were too high for the Coalition commanders to rely on a single line of scouts.
There were definitely more of those lanky bastards hiding in the deep brush, crouched beneath the high leaves, or tucked inside the dry stone hollows, waiting for them to turn around and leave and provide crucial intel to their tribe.
Beneath his ribs, the newly evolved pool of Golden Silver liquid hummed with a heavy, steady vibration.
It felt different from the old, stagnant silver pool; it was warmer, thicker, circulating through his body like liquid starlight forged with warm gold.
With every breath he took, the expanded senses mapped the surrounding landscape in his mind, tracing the subtle shifts in the air currents and the tiny, distant heartbeats of the forest creatures.
And indeed, after a short while of rapid, silent travel, Sol’s eyes narrowed as his senses caught a sudden, massive movement up ahead.
The thick, weeping reeds at the edge of the jungle were thrashing violently. The distinctive clicking of dozens of Zerith’s joints and the sharp, panicked hisses were loud and clear.
Through the parting stalks, a brutal skirmish was already unfolding.
A cluster of seven high-tier Zerith scouts were completely engaged with a tight, disciplined wall of Veynar veterans. These weren’t the green recruits; these were the heavy, scarred hunters of the main vanguard, their leather tunics caked in old mud, their bone-spears held with iron grips.
The Zerith scouts were fighting with a wild, manic desperation.
They had clearly been trying to sprint back to warn their main army after hearing the distant echo of the warning whistle, but they had run straight into the invisible net Veylara had set up along the treeline.
Now they were trapped, caught between the veterans in front and the dangers in the back, which forced the previous scout to warn them using the death whistle, a whistle they blew only at the time of their certain death to warn others.
Despair was visible in every single one of their twitching movements.
Their multi-jointed limbs shifted erratically as they tried to slowly fall back, attempting to circumvent the heavy stone-headed axes of the veterans and break back into the safety of the tall grassland where their superior agility could save them.
Right then, the grass at their rear exploded.
Sol and Thauren arrived like two falling boulders, skidding into the muddy clay patch and completely blocking their only path of retreat back into the open plain. Dust and grass flew up in a violent cloud around them as they came to a sudden, powerful stop.
Sol stepped into the center of the gap, his black armor glistening with the dried crust of his previous kills, his hand resting calmly on the hilt of the Dreadwing Blade.
He swept his sharp silver-crimson eyes across the immediate clearing, scanning the deep shadows of the ironwood trunks. He didn’t find Warchief Veylara anywhere in the open lines.
It seemed like she was still lurking deep within the black brush, keeping herself hidden to act as the ultimate reserve if a Layer 4 captain suddenly broke through the fog.
The moment the trapped Zerith scouts sensed the arrival of the two human apex predators at their backs, their internal tension reached the absolute peak of despair.