Chapter 33: Ambush

Whoosh!

An arrow that any race would have called crude shot out of the depths of the forest.

It moved like a viper’s tongue; dark, sinister, and deadly.

It hit before its target could even react.

Thud!

The next moment, it punched through a Lesser Imp’s skull and pinned its body to the trunk of the giant tree it had been about to set on fire.

The arrow didn’t just send the Imp back into Hell’s embrace. It left its corpse in a horrific state.

The force of the shot had lifted the Imp’s whole body thirty centimeters off the ground, the arrow buried in the back of its head.

It looked like a battered old doll nailed to a tree.

But before its companions could start mocking it, more arrows came flying at them from behind.

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

The other three Imps met the same fate, their bodies pinned to the trees.

In less than two seconds, the four Imps Koda had sent to scout and gather in that part of the forest had silently died.

On the throne, Koda felt that whole stretch of forest go blank in his mind, as if a fog had rolled over it.

And that was only the beginning.

Elsewhere, another of his squads ran into the same thing.

This mixed group of Lesser Demons and Imps was heading toward a vein of rare metal where Fine Gold could be dug out.

But they weren’t going there to mine it.

With fewer than twenty of them, they couldn’t possibly work a whole mine.

Koda had sent them for something simpler: to kill a few metal slimes near the vein and haul their bodies back to the Third Layer.

But just as the squad neared the Fine Gold vein along a road they had already cleared, something unexpected happened.

"Wa-hoo-hoo!"

Dozens of centaur warriors burst out of hiding in the thick woods nearby.

Powerful and heavily muscled, painted like raiders from some faraway plain, they howled strange war cries and swung sharp curved blades as they charged the unsuspecting demons from both sides of the road.

"Clack! Clack! Clack!"

Before the Imps could even react, bloody heads were spinning through the air.

When those heads hit the ground, the Imps still hadn’t quite died. A trace of confusion lingered in their scarlet eyes.

It had all happened too fast!

Against grown centaur warriors, Imps and Lesser Demons didn’t stand a chance.

The gap wasn’t only in their weapons. They were in completely different leagues.

A typical centaur warrior was half again as strong as the strongest Imp Koda had, and nearly three times as quick as the fastest one.

The chaos of the Third Layer made every Imp different, but even the best of them were nowhere close.

Add the gap in weapons, and the demon squad looked slow and fragile under the centaurs’ charge.

"Wa-hoo-hoo!"

Once the squad was wiped out, the centaurs didn’t stay.

Their powerful horse legs carried them off with astonishing speed, leaving nothing behind but a field of corpses.

It was a little different from how they usually fought, since they normally always took their spoils with them. Still, their reasons made sense.

In the centaurs’ eyes, these evil monsters weren’t spoils.

Creatures that poisoned the land and defiled Mother Nature belonged to Mother Nature herself.

Since the centaurs were fighting in her name, the demons’ bodies had to stay in the forest, left to the wind and sun, picked apart by insects and birds, their souls condemned to eternal torment.

Because of that, the centaurs missed something.

As they vanished into the distance, deep in a hidden corner of the forest, a dying Imp watched them go.

Boundless hatred and refusal to accept its fate were brewing in its eyes.

It, and the Third Layer behind it, had been provoked!

’Well done! They actually pulled off every single ambush!’ Mirela thought.

Riding her sparrow elsewhere, she watched one squad of Imps after another get wiped out, and couldn’t help marveling.

’I thought these half-man, half-horse brutes would just smash those monsters to pieces. I never expected them to use such clever tactics.’

’Expert archers on horseback, and strong up close too. What an excellent kind of soldier!’

As she thought about her own future, a new idea began to take shape.

She had already paid a lot to get the centaurs moving. Now she was thinking about how to make them hers.

Once she raised a gate, she planned to bring these warriors, and Ursok Windstride himself, into her territory as her followers.

The warriors would greatly boost her fighting strength in these early days.

As for Ursok, he had what it took to become a champion of his race.

Put together, it was incredibly tempting.

When Mirela shared her idea with Ursok, the centaur chieftain was, in fact, somewhat interested.

After all, serving a lord who was a Spirit of Nature, a druid, would carry some risk. But it would also guarantee the Windstride Clan a steady supply of food for a long time.

On these grasslands, where more than six in ten children died every year, steady food was an extraordinarily tempting prospect.

Still, Ursok didn’t rush to accept.

Cunning as he was, he knew the Spirit of Nature in front of him was no kind-hearted saint.

Even if he truly meant to bring his tribe into her territory, he needed to show off as much of his worth as he could first.

Only then would he have enough leverage to bargain for better terms.

"Spirit of Nature who has traveled from afar, there’s no need to rush..."

Ursok brushed back his glossy black mane and spoke to Mirela, perched on his shoulder.

"We can set aside the matter of our clan joining your territory for now."

"Shouldn’t our most important task be to wipe out the rest of the monsters gathered in this forest?"

"And not just the monsters. We should destroy the passage that brought them here too, shouldn’t we?"

Looking toward the distant gate, which gave off an aura of pure wickedness, Ursok smiled confidently.