Chapter 768: Kicking The Hornet’s Nest

His team turned to him, waiting for the plan that Moon seemed to be brewing in his mind.

"A ruler this careful won’t come out for a few dead Stalkers in some outer den. But it can’t ignore a direct threat to its heart. This valley is everything to it, its core population, food supply, and much more. If we start tearing that apart, if we make enough noise and do enough damage right here at the center of its power, it won’t be able to sit back and hide.

It’ll have to respond. Either it comes out to deal with us personally, or it sends its inner circle, the ones who know where it is." He gestured toward the valley. "Either way, it reveals itself. We provoke it, and we watch what answers."

Garrett grinned, hefting his greatsword. "So we kick the hornet’s nest and wait to see what flies out. I can get behind that."

"Yes," Moon nodded.

But Dmitri frowned, studying the valley with a sharp gaze. "Hold on, though. Isn’t there too many of them to fight all at once? I count close to a hundred down there, and these aren’t the weak outer-den Stalkers. Every one of them hits like a peak B-Rank beast." He gestured to the basin. "Why not hit them and pull back? Draw out the ruler bit by bit without committing to the whole valley. Chip away until something reveals itself."

Moon shook his head.

"It sounds good in theory. But you need to remember what’s behind us."

The team turned and looked, and their eyes rose to the fearsome mountain towering into the sky behind them, its peak lost in the fog and clouds far above.

"We just spent a full day descending that," Moon said. "And it’s crawling with Stalker dens the entire way up. If we start a hit-and-run fight down here and try to retreat, we don’t have anywhere safe to pull back to. We’d be caught between the valley in front of us and the mountain behind us, and the moment the packs up there catch the sound and smell of battle, they’ll come down on our backs. We’d get sandwiched, pinned between a hundred Stalkers in the valley and however many descend from above. A drawn-out fight is exactly what gets us killed here."

He turned back to the valley.

"So if we’re going to end this, we end it fast. Clean and efficient. We don’t give the mountain time to reinforce, and we don’t give the ruler time to rally its whole population in waves. We hit the valley hard, break it quickly, and force the ruler out before anything can come down behind us." A confident smile crossed his face. "And a hundred isn’t as bad as it sounds. I believe we can take them."

Dmitri, Priya, and Garrett stared at him in bewilderment.

A hundred body-refiner beasts, each one as strong as a peak B-Rank creature, roughly equivalent to a Five-Star fighter in raw combat power, and Moon was talking about taking them all on at once as casually as if he were discussing the weather. The sheer confidence of it was staggering. Just what did he have hidden that made him so certain?

They’d seen glimpses of his combat prowess, lightning, his sword, his beasts. But to face a hundred of these creatures head-on and expect to win quickly? That spoke to capabilities far beyond what he’d shown them so far.

Still, the team chose to believe him. Over the past day, Moon had proven himself careful, and not reckless.

He didn’t take insane risks. If he said they could do it, then either he was right, or he had something in reserve they hadn’t seen yet. And given everything they’d witnessed, betting against him seemed the far greater risk.

Garrett let out a breath and rolled his shoulders. "You know what? Fine. You’ve been right about everything else. I’m not going to start doubting you now."

Priya and Dmitri nodded, setting aside their reservations, trusting their leader.

"Okay," Dmitri said, nocking an arrow. "If we’re doing this, we’re doing this. How do we start the fight?"

Moon’s smile widened as he looked out over the valley, Cryothunder beginning to crackle and frost along his blade, his two beasts growing serious at his sides.

"Simple," he said. "I will start the battle. You follow my lead and clean up."

Moon moved first, and he made an entrance.

He vaulted onto Mirage’s back, and the white steed exploded forward, charging straight toward the valley full of golden Stalkers.

As they ran, Mirage’s eye flared purple, and a second identical steed materialized beside the first, the two of them thundering into the valley side by side, splitting the beasts’ attention, drawing a chaos of heads turning toward the sudden charge.

Then, at the edge of the nearest pack, Moon leapt.

He launched himself off Mirage’s back, soaring over the gathered Stalkers, and in midair he cast an elemental spell.

A massive sphere of water condensed and hurled down into the pack below, exploding on impact and drenching the beasts in a drowning splash, the sudden deluge momentarily dazing them.

Moon landed in the center of the dazed pack, both swords already summoned, Cryothunder blazing along both blades, frost and purple lightning threading through the steel.

He unleashed Tempest Symphony.

The twin blades became a storm.

Dual Wielding, Tempest Symphony, and Cryothunder all layered together into a whirlwind of death.

Phantom Strikes blurred among the real cuts, filling the air with illusory blades, and every true strike that landed caused irreversible damage.

Lightning seared through the beasts’ nervous systems while the cold crystallized inside their flesh and ruptured them from within. The water he’d splashed them with conducted the lightning further, chaining the current from beast to beast.

Stalkers died in droves.

Moon moved through the pack like death, both swords never stopping, carving down everything that crossed his path.

The golden-streaked predators, strong as peak B-Rank beasts, couldn’t withstand a his attacks.

They fell in frozen, crackling heaps, three and four at a time, the dazing water and the chaining lightning and the storm of blades combining to devastate the pack faster than they could react or regroup.