Chapter 307: Sneak Attack

The suffocating stillness that settled over the ruined, dust-filled courtyard of the Faith Family estate was suddenly cut by a sharp, microscopic ripple in the air.

Tony Clark stood perfectly still near the bow of his obsidian chariot. His hands were casually tucked into the pockets of his dark hunting cloak. His standard, lazy posture was fully intact, and his dark eyes were locked onto the pale, trembling figures of the remaining Faith elders scrambling out of the grand ancestral hall.

Beside his leather boots, the massive Crimson Shadow Griffin kept its eagle-like head lowered in serene devotion, its purple galaxy eyes blinking softly as the dust settled over the rubble.

High up on the roof of a towering marble pavilion overlooking the central plaza, a hidden shadow was crouching in the dense, defensive foliage. It was a elite, high-level hidden elder from the Vance clan. He had spent the last hour tracking Tony’s explosive aerial march through his long-range spiritual tracking arrays, his heart burning with an intense, psychotic fury over the total annihilation of his inner peak brothers back at the Cloud-Mist Pavilion.

The old assassin knew with absolute certainty that trying to trade open martial blows or launch a standard elemental spell against Tony’s Homing Abyssal Strike was an absolute suicide mission. If he wanted to survive this grand chessboard and save the Vance lineage from total destruction, he had to execute a highly specialized, alternative sneak attack designed entirely to neutralize the young master’s primary weapon.

With absolute, supernatural silence, the Vance elder pulled a miniature, spring-loaded steel wrist crossbow from his dark spatial storage ornament. The weapon was a rare, high-tier mechanical artifact of the previous era, engineered strictly for short-range silent assassinations. He carefully loaded three tiny, needle-thin short arrows into the silver slots, their iron tips coated in an ancient, forbidden cosmic tendon-paralyzing fluid.

The old thief’s plan was exceptionally cunning and ruthlessly precise. He didn’t aim for Tony’s chest, nor did he try to pierce his skull, knowing that the Academy Grand Elder’s supreme protection amulet would instantly deploy an unbreakable celestial shield to block any lethal, large-scale impact. Instead, his alignment was locked entirely onto the exposed, lean fingers of Tony’s right hand, which were currently resting just outside the edge of his dark cloak pocket as he prepared to grasp his bow string.

If those three tiny short arrows could pierce cleanly into his finger joints, the forbidden paralyzing fluid would instantly freeze his tendons within a fraction of a millisecond, causing him to permanently lose his iron grip on the Void Dragon’s Shadow Bow forever, turning him into a defenseless cripple on the spot.

Twang!

A faint, almost imperceptible click echoed through the whistling wind as the old elder violently released the spring mechanism. The three needle-thin short arrows shot forward through the cold air like three ghostly, invisible streaks of silver light, their silent trajectory slicing through the space with an absolute, shocking speed that bypassed the standard visual senses of the surrounding guards.

However, the old assassin had completely underestimated the terrifying, world-suppressing power of Tony’s active Truth Eye. Even though his head was turned toward the ancestral hall, Tony’s supreme vision had already perceived the sudden, distorted energy flow on the distant rooftop, tracking the exact trajectory and forbidden composition of the incoming poison needles long before they ever crossed the boundary lines of the courtyard.

Tony didn’t show even a fraction of panic or internal distress. A slow, deeply amused grin curled the corners of his lips as he decided to play along with the old thief’s script just enough to make his final absolute execution much sweeter.

Just as the three silent short arrows were mere inches away from piercing his fingers, Tony’s right hand suddenly became completely blurred. He didn’t utilize his system interface or his master’s protection talisman; he relied entirely on the rapid, fluid muscle memory of his waterfall-conditioned 7th Class Elder Disciple magus body.

Executing a minimal, lightning-fast micro-movement with his fingers, he didn’t run away from the needles—he casually caught all three incoming short arrows directly between his knuckles with an absolute, iron-like grip, his skin’s pearlescent hardness easily deflecting the sharp iron tips before the poison fluid could even touch a single fraction of his blood.

The hidden Vance elder on the roof completely froze in utter, unadulterated shock, his face turning an incredibly beautiful shade of pale as his jaw dropped to his absolute chest. He had spent his entire life mastering this short-arrow sneak attack, and watching a teenager casually catch his invisible, high-speed poison needles between his bare fingers like common twigs completely shattered his remaining sanity.

"Your little acupuncture show was moderately amusing, old dog," Tony’s deep baritone voice suddenly bounced across the empty air, carrying a chilling, razor-sharp edge that echoed directly inside the assassin’s soul from a mile away.

Before the terrified elder could even attempt to reload his mechanical wrist bow or flash backward into the spatial void, Tony’s lazy demeanor vanished entirely, replaced by the explosive, predatory aura of a true supreme conqueror.

With a sudden, fluid sweep of his right arm, he tightly grabbed the sleek riser of the Void Dragon bow and violently drew the void-spider silk string back until it was completely taut, executing his newly synchronized Homing Abyssal Strike methodology without a single microsecond of delay.

He didn’t use a standard iron arrow; he placed the three plundered, poison-coated short arrows directly onto the string, manually infusing them with a dense, concentrated mixture of spatial void and shadow elements from his griffin’s secondary soul. The ancient Mighty Dragon Cry violently boomed across the entire central district as he released the string with a sharp, crisp resonance.

THWACK!

The three short arrows shot back toward the roof at an absolute, hyper-sonic speed that completely shattered the sound barrier multiple times over, their tracking trajectory locking onto the core life force of the hidden elder with a mathematical certainty. The invisible shadow projectiles sliced through the distant foliage, and before the old assassin could even let out a scream of agonizing horror, all three needles pierced cleanly through his own wrists and shoulder joints with a terrifying POP.

The absolute, raw kinetic force of the dragon bow violently lifted his physical-body off the tiles, throwing him backward across the roof like a broken ragdoll before he crashed heavily onto the hard cobblestone floor of the plaza below, his primary meridian junctions completely shattered, his tendons frozen by his own forbidden fluid, permanently crippled, and defeated in a single, absolute exchange.

The entire city district fell into a state of shocked, paralyzed stillness so intense that the frantic murmuring of the watching crowd completely vanished into thin-air.

Tony casually slung his magnificent dragon-bone bow back over his shoulder, a slow, villainous grin returning to his face as he turned his dark eyes back onto the kneeling, trembling figures of the Faith Family heads inside the ruined courtyard, his absolute dominance over the entire realm officially cemented without a single scratch on his-fingers.