Chapter 529: Still a Slaughter

Chapter 529: Chapter 342: Still a Slaughter

Their actions were so amateurish, they looked like a bunch of fresh-faced recruits.

“Hahaha, maybe they’re trying to stay out of our range?” someone cracked a lame joke.

There were more than a thousand of them. A single volley would wipe out more than half of those few hundred archers.

The joke sent the archers on deck into roaring laughter.

“Honestly, if I were their commander, I can’t say I’d have a better idea in this situation,” the captain of the slave archers began to hold court, certain of his advantage. “Those lumps of iron and their wolf-cub allies can’t reach us. If they force their way closer, they’ll just sink to the bottom of the sea. And the second their archers step into range, we’ll give them a good thrashing.”

“No, there’s one other good option,” someone else laughed. “These Debei sheep-people, with brains as ancient as Goblins, can always run back to their mothers for a drink of milk.”

The men erupted into another round of boisterous laughter.

Unfortunately, their laughter was short-lived.

SWOOSH SWOOSH SWOOSH!

The enemy really did begin to draw their bows. Their movements were so synchronized they might as well have been a single person. In an instant, countless arrows rose into the sky, a sun-blotting cloud descending upon them.

The slave archers were startled at first but quickly forced themselves to calm down. ‘The distance between us is a full two hundred paces,’ they thought. ‘There’s no way those arrows will reach us!’

As if to preserve their dignity, they refused to scramble for cover in the ship’s cabins. Instead, they stared intently at the rain of arrows, trying to track their trajectory.

But it was too difficult. Straining their eyes, they could barely make out streaks of black light, thin as hairs, hurtling toward them.

Two hundred paces… one hundred fifty…

As the arrows drew closer, they swallowed hard, fighting the urge to flinch—the body’s instinct to dodge imminent danger.

One hundred paces… fifty!

When the rain of arrows was fifty paces away, they were no longer hair-thin. Now they looked like chopsticks that had reached their apex and were plunging straight down.

The thought of escape finally occurred to them, but it was too late.

“AHH!”

A series of screams rang out.

In an instant, over a hundred slave archers were struck down, left writhing and wailing on the ground.

What drove them to further despair was the horrifying discovery that the arrowheads were all coated in some unknown, vicious poison.

This meant that even a minor graze left little to no chance of survival.

The Feder Archers unleashed volley after methodical volley, like tireless Fasting Demon Statues, coldly watching their enemies fall on the distant deck.

‘Their Archery is as bad as a three-year-old’s, their discipline as chaotic as a ragtag Militia.’

To the Feder Archers, these men were worse than Demons, and couldn’t even compare to the elite Southern Border Garrison Army at Black Stone Castle.

They weren’t even worthy of being taken seriously.

It was a rout. A complete and utter rout. His own fifteen hundred elite archers were being suppressed to the point of suffocation by a mere two or three hundred men.

It wasn’t that no one tried to fight back. A man would pop up and loose an arrow with all his might, only for it to fall short, landing silently ten paces in front of the enemy. It was as if a line had been drawn in the sand—a line between life and death.

One Slave Archer, refusing to accept it, tried to loose another arrow, but he was struck in the chest by a wickedly aimed shaft the moment he drew his bow.

Kemish watched in disbelief, but he had no time to process it. The enemy’s Heavy Armored Infantry—burly as brown bears and carrying Steel Shields—were now less than sixty paces away.

You couldn’t appreciate the oppressive presence of those steel-clad Giant Beasts until they were close. There were only a little over two hundred of them, yet Kemish felt immense pressure. He wondered if his mind was simply rattled from the defeat in the archer duel.

“Prepare defenses! Front-rank infantry, volley your javelins, then fall back in formation!”

This was Kemish’s standard tactic: first a baptism of arrows, then a massed javelin volley once the enemy closed to within fifty paces.

Most armies would suffer catastrophic losses from this one-two punch, if not break completely.

But to Kemish’s dismay, the results were disappointing. His usually-invincible javelins only left white marks on their door-sized shields. On the rare occasion an absurdly lucky throw found a gap, it was still defeated by their Three-Layered Heavy Armor, clattering uselessly to the ground.

Helpless, he waved his hand to call it off. Continuing was a pointless waste of energy.

But just then, he saw the enemy’s formation shift. The front-rank infantry raised their large shields, then slammed them into the ground. The two hundred men braced themselves, took a step back, and the sharp tips of their spears glinted with a cold light.

“Damn it! Shields up!” Kemish’s pupils contracted. He hadn’t expected these Heavy Armored Infantry to be equipped with javelins.

‘Holding a heavy Shield, wearing thick Iron Armor… the weight must be at least two hundred pounds,’ Kemish thought frantically. ‘Adding so much as a single straw to that load would be a burden, yet they’re also carrying a full set of standard-issue Fine Steel Javelins? What kind of inhuman constitution do they have?!’

SWOOSH SWOOSH SWOOSH!

Countless javelins whistled through the air, arriving in the blink of an eye.

The same beginning, a different result.

The Round Shields held before them seemed indestructible, but against the enemy javelins, they were flimsier than paper. Backed by immense force, the Fine Steel Javelins easily punched through the shields and into the chests of the horrified Slave Warriors. The impact sent them flying backward as if struck by a charging warhorse, crashing into the men behind and knocking down entire groups.

Pinned to the ground by a quick-thinking Guard, Kemish wished this was all just a bad dream.

All he could do was watch as the javelins screamed overhead, each one taking a life. His elite Slave Warriors were as helpless as wooden targets, mown down in droves like stalks of sugarcane.

When the whistling overhead finally stopped, he looked up, and his heart nearly stopped.

The ground was littered with severed limbs and screaming, wailing soldiers. It was a slaughterhouse. Even a graze from one of those javelins was enough to tear away a huge chunk of flesh.

It was as if the enemy hadn’t thrown javelins, but fired heavy Crossbow Arrows.

If not for the sloping platform, which meant only the men at the very top were exposed, this single volley might have cost them a thousand men.

None of this was how he’d envisioned it. In the space of a few hundred heartbeats, they had gone from certain victory to the brink of a pathetic defeat.

“Hahaha! My great axe has been thirsting for battle!”

Just then, he saw a Heavy Armor Warrior in an ostentatious Horned Helmet leap onto the rocky platform, laughing maniacally as he brandished two enormous axes.

The man was built like a small Giant. He swung his two axes with a roar of wind, dicing the charging Slave Warriors into mincemeat as if they were nothing more than melons and vegetables.

The other burly, Black-Armored Infantry also appeared, one by one.

“Master, we can’t hold this position! We need to fall back to the Heavy Cavalry!” his personal black Guard shouted, his face a mask of terror.

“Yes! That’s right, I still have my Heavy Cavalry!” To the Guard’s surprise, his words made Kemish’s eyes light up. “No matter how strong they are, they’re still flesh and blood! My cavalry will grind them into paste!”

‘Master, those things aren’t human! We can’t win! We have to run now, or we’ll all be captured and sold to a brothel to have our asses fucked!’ But the black Guard couldn’t bring himself to say it.

He knew that a man in the throes of such wild emotional swings, no matter how rational he had been moments before, would now be as stubborn as a shit-stained rock in a latrine. No one could talk him down.

Besides, he knew that the Blood Wolf Wind Legion represented all of Kemish’s hopes and dreams. Frankly, his master could not afford to accept the consequences of defeat.

Fortunately, they still had the advantage in numbers. Though it wasn’t worth a damn in a real fight, they could use those bodies as a buffer to buy time to withdraw from the main battle.

“Heavy Cavalry, crush them!” Unwilling to let the feeling of powerlessness from watching his soldiers be slaughtered grow any further, Kemish’s hoarse voice roared across the entire coast.