Chapter 663: Moon’s Plan

Moon slowly began to approach the snow beasts with Camouflage active.

He had borrowed Theo’s armor for exactly this, to stack every advantage he could on top of his own skill, because he knew that staying hidden from this many beasts was going to be very, very difficult.

There were more than a hundred of them clustered together, and among the unfamiliar ones there could easily be a beast with senses sharp enough to catch what the others missed.

One slip where a beast spots his camouflage, and the whole horde would come down on him at once.

Moon closed the distance carefully.

Two hundred meters. One hundred fifty.

Moon stopped when the distance between him and the closest beast was a hundred meters.

Then, he moved east, staying parallel to the horde instead of closing further, walking roughly a hundred meters along the perimeter without letting himself drift any nearer to the spire.

When he judged the position was right, he stopped, decided this would do, and took a rune from his storage ring, setting it down on the frozen ground.

Then he backtracked to his previous line and resumed his slow approach toward the cluster.

Slowly but surely, he crept closer, and his heart hammered against his ribs the whole way. To say he wasn’t worried would have been a lie. Against a hundred Five Star beasts, even he would die, torn apart before he could burn through a quarter of them. This wasn’t a joke, and he didn’t treat it like one. He couldn’t beat this horde, despite his prowess, at least not in a convention way.

He could only beat it using his shrewd, questionable methods.

By the time he reached fifty meters from the nearest beast, Moon stopped in his tracks.

Any closer was a risk he wasn’t willing to take, not with unknown beasts in the mix, not with his life resting on a skill that had a threshold he couldn’t perfectly predict.

He focused hard on suppressing his mana, tightening the Camouflage against any leak, and then he activated the rune he had placed a hundred meters east.

Suddenly, a pillar of ice erupted from the snow where the rune had been.

The sudden appearance drew attention immediately. Heads turned across the horde, and within seconds nearly every beast had its eyes fixed on the pillar, the unexpected disturbance pulling their focus toward the east.

A group of seven Frost Stalkers peeled away from the mass and began moving toward it, drawn by the noise and the movement.

The rest of the horde ignored the pillar itself, but the disturbance had stirred them, and some began to shift and mill about restlessly. That restlessness was exactly what Moon wanted, beasts moving out of the tight cluster, spreading apart, becoming a reachable target for him.

He watched a lone Snow Creeper drift slowly in his direction while the seven Frost Stalkers closed on the pillar.

Come on...Move Faster, please.

His heartbeat climbed with every second.

The timing had to line up. He needed the Snow Creeper close enough to reach just before the Frost Stalkers hit the pillar, so that the commotion of the pillar’s attack would mask whatever happened with the Creeper. Everything depended on those two events overlapping.

Seconds crawled by like hours.

Just when Moon thought the Snow Creeper was finally about to come within range, the beast suddenly changed course, its dull mind losing interest, and it began lumbering away from him instead.

No, no. You dumb beast, where you going!

Moon began to panic. His eyes darted towards the Frost Stalkers that were only seconds from reaching the pillar, and if the two events fell out of sync his whole window would collapse and his plan would fail.

Once his plan failed, there was no guarantee that the same conditions would be available to him once again.

With almost no time left, Moon took a risk. He broke his careful distance and moved toward the Snow Creeper himself, closing the gap faster, cutting it to fifteen meters.

At that range, the Snow Creeper’s head snapped towards his direction.

Clearly, it had felt something that wasn’t supposed to be there, forcing it to make the turn.

Moon didn’t give it the chance to do anything with that awareness. He hurled a rune toward the beast in the same instant, and the rune crossed the short distance in less than a second before activating, releasing Curse directly onto the Snow Creeper.

At the same moment, the commotion erupted towards the east, the Frost Pillar taking action and firing ice spears into the seven Frost Stalkers that approached it.

The beasts began to howl, and the noise pulled every nearby head toward the sudden commotion.

Moon almost released a sigh of relief, but he managed to hold it in. The timing had almost failed him.

Moon began backing off the moment Curse landed, slow and controlled, while the horde stirred and more Stalkers broke from the cluster to investigate the pillar attacking their own.

Please work...

Moon watched the Snow Creeper struggle against the mind control, its body twitching, its head jerking, fighting the thread trying to sink into its mind and take control.

And just like Moon planned, nobody paid it any attention, because it barely made a sound, and every eye in the horde was on the Frost Stalkers being skewered by the pillar and the growing chaos around it.

Unfortunately, no plan was ever perfect. Despite his precautions, another Snow Creeper had apparently sensed something wrong with its fellow.

Moon watched it approach with a heavy expression. Then, the thread clicked into place.

The Snow Creeper went still for a moment, the resistance draining out of it, and the connection settled firmly into Moon’s mind.

It worked.

Moon grinned behind his camouflage, and he kept backing away into the snow, one apex predator already his, the seed of the horde’s collapse already planted.

Moon gave the Snow Creeper a command, and it immediately complied. Upon seeing its fellow Snow Creeper acting normally again, the Snow Creeper returned its attention towards the Frost Pillar.