Chapter 70: the surprise attack

To the side of Velvet’s group, they were fighting the snake men head-on and had successfully halted their pincers together with Valeria’s side; the two ends of the formation were brought to a complete stop. However, as they continued fighting under the heavy pressure, they noticed that the middle of the enemy formation was still moving. The snake men who were not actively engaged in combat were slowly trying to encircle them from the other side, attempting to engulf their small group in a crushing vice.

​Fortunately, because Velvet and her group had not penetrated too deeply into the enemy lines, they were able to fight while slowly retreating backwards, carefully maneuvering to avoid being surrounded and isolated.

​As the battle dragged on, the enemy formation continued to push forward slowly and because as the enemy formation move forward the lenth of the formation was shortening causing the formation growing thicker, increasing the number of snake men ranks .and it was as if they were doing nothing in reducing them but the still remained calm because they were not in a desperate situation just yet and they had their own plans so they continued to fight.

​On Valeria’s side, it was a similar case. Although the enemy’s momentum was not as fast as before, they were still slowly pressing forward together, utilizing their collective weight to force the defenders back inch by inch.

​Suddenly, there was a decisive shift in the enemy’s tactics. A small detachment of about fifty snake men separated directly from the very center of the formation. Putting down their heavy shields, they directly charged toward Astra and Smith at maximum speed.this really caught the two groups off guard. They kicked up dust as they hurtled across the floor with a suicidal velocity.

​To ensure this surprise attack succeeded, the snake men on Velvet’s and Valeria’s sides became aggressive,they abandoned their defensive tactics and went on a full attack, Some even abandoned their shields entirely and threw themselves into the fight with no regard to their lives. This was clearly a delay tactic meant to keep Valeria and the other girls fully engaged, preventing them from going to assist Astra and Smith.

​And this strategy was very effective it had made the girls tied down, and seeing it unfold, the black snake man smiled—this was the exact plan he had devised to eliminate those two individuals who were left behind. He leaned back slightly, already anticipating the sight of his victims being swarmed and torn apart and the other helplessly watching them with nothing they could do.

​However, he failed to account for the fact that the people in front of him were far from ordinary.

​When Astra saw the group charging toward her, she didn’t panic. She calmly activated her title and summoned her pawns, who immediately stepped forward to shield Smith. The distance between the two groups was short—it would take the charging snake men couple of seconds to reach them—but for Astra, a few seconds was more than enough time to turn the tide of battle.

​When the enemy was more than a dozen meters away, Astra and her pawns immediately took action and because the snake men were charging head-on without their tower shields, Astra’s group switched to short arrows meant for close-quarters combat. They drew and released their bowstrings with terrifying speed, firing roughly one arrow per second. Their hands moved so fast it felt as if they were firing from repeating crossbows, but this was pure, unadulterated skill born of relentless training and their supernatural strength.

​Astra was the most formidable of them all. With a single volley, she unleashed a stream of lethal fire. Given the close distance, she didn’t waste time aiming; she simply loosed the arrows into the dense charging snakemen.

​The first wave caught the charging snake men completely hed on and without proper protection it instantly killed the front ranks of snakemen as the arrows buried deep into their chests and throats. But the barrage didn’t stop there. Over the next five seconds, Astra and her pawns released more than twenty arrows, creating an unbroken sheet of black feathers and lethal iron.

​They didn’t remain stationary while firing; instead, they slowly moved backward and to the side in synchronized rhythm. Moving away created more maneuvering space and crucial distance. As the lead snake men were struck down, their fallen bodies created a severe physical obstacle. Because of their unique anatomy, the legless snake men struggled immensely to navigate over their dead allies’ tangled tails, which slowed down the charge and delayed them even further.

​As she fought, Astra noticed something very unusual about these opponents. Despite taking heavy casualties, the snake men showed zero hesitation in their charge. Even when an arrow was flying straight at them, they made no attempt to dodge or protect themselves. Instead, they ran directly into the incoming arrows with vacant, bloodshot eyes. They fought like mindless death-bound soldiers, driven by a single directive: charge forward and eliminate the target.

​Still, this strange behavior did not slow Astra down for a heartbeat. She steadily whittled their numbers until the fifty-man surprise squad was completely wiped out. It was like the saying goes: When you rise to bait a chicken, you might just find the chicken took the rice and ran away.

​The black snake man was dumbfounded, his face was full of disbelief. He never expected his strike force to be annihilated in such a ridiculously short window of time. Although it was only fifty soldiers, losing them so pointlessly made his heart bleed. It was a costly, embarrassing mistake born from underestimating the enemy’s martial prowess.

​Defeated in his attempt, he decided against sending any more advance groups. Sending another squad with their shields would be far too slow, and he feared the other enemy groups might detach a fighter to flank the exposed rear of his shield-bearers. The first attempt had already cost him many soldiers just to buy time, and now that the other two groups are fully alert, the same trick wouldn’t never work twice.

​Instead, he chose to advance steadily, trusting that his formation would eventually close the encirclement so he will just play it safe and relied on numbers to win.

​His logic was sound under normal circumstances. Velvet and Valeria had been briefly caught off guard by the suicidal distraction tactics, but they quickly stabilized their positions and now they even freed up one member of their group so that if another surprise detachment was sent, they could immediately send her and flank the enemy where by eliminate them. Seeing that no further advance was coming, they resumed fighting at their own pace, even as the space between the opposing lines continued to shrink.

​but as the battle dragged on the black snake man was visibly tense, his tongue flicking nervously. These intruders were terrifying; in this brief exchange alone, he had lost more than two hundred snake men. Yet, he drew a small sigh of relief as he noticed the intruders were finally showing signs of fatigue, their fierce initial momentum beginning to wane as sweat glistened on their brows. He told himself that the staggering casualties were a small, necessary sacrifice for the bigger picture.

​Then, the battlefield shifted once again.

​Astra—the reaper who had just wiped out fifty of his men—had remained quiet after the clash. And apon seeing that the prolonged battle was taking a toll on her allies’ endurance, she knew it was time to make a major move.

​Astra and her pawns raised their bows high into the air at nearly a 90-degree angle and began unleashing arrows directly toward the ceiling of the carven.

​At first, the black snake man was confused. Why were they wasting precious arrows firing straight up into empty air? But a second later, his heart tightened in instinctual dread.

​Because the cavern ceiling was exceptionally high, the arrows traveled deep into the air before gravity pulled them to a stop. At the peak of their trajectory, they flipped downward in a sharp, graceful arc, plunging back toward the crowded battlefield below.

​As the arrows fell, they rapidly gathered gravitational momentum. At that exact moment, Astra and her pawns activated two skills in tandem: Arrow Acceleration and Arrow Correction.

​The falling arrows accelerated to insane, screeching speeds, adjusting mid-air with uncanny precision to lock onto their targets. The snake men below, who were holding their shields forward to block front attacks, had no protection whatsoever from above. The rain of high-velocity arrows pierced straight through their heads with out any resistance, killing them instantly.

​Though it didn’t wipe out a large number of snakemen,but this lethal volley threw the enemy’s advancing lines into absolute chaos, severing their cohesion and creating a dense wall of corpses to stall their march. More importantly, it served as the pre-arranged signal for the other two groups to initiate their next move—and they acted immediately, launching into their prepared assault without a single second of hesitation.