Chapter 665: The Lesser Elf

~Skreeeee~

A high, piercing cry tore out of the lesser elf, a sound closer to a war horn than anything.

The fighting beasts stopped dead in their tracks.

Every Frost Stalker, every Snow Creeper, all of them froze mid-motion, jaws still locked on flanks, claws still raised, blood still steaming in the churned snow. The brawl that had consumed dozens of Five Star beasts halted in an instant, the lesser elf’s voice pulling them out of their frenzy and back under control.

The lesser elf stood at the base of the spire with an angry expression, and it began to speak.

The language was foreign, nothing that Moon or the others could understand.

Judging by the mouth motions, it contained sharp syllables, and long vowels.

The beasts remained quiet, heads lowered, simply listening in fear.

Whatever the lesser elf was saying, it was reasserting its authority over the horde.

Then it reached for the bow across its back.

It nocked a single arrow, and its movements made even Elsa’s eyes narrow.

The arrow crossed the battlefield in a blur, and it took the head clean off the Snow Creeper Moon had been controlling, the beast that had started the whole collapse.

The beast’s body dropped where it stood, and the Curse thread snapped instantly, the connection severing the moment its mind died.

Moon felt the break, the same clean cut he had felt when his subordinate Cragbrute had died in the colony chamber.

"Hide. Now!"

Immediately, his team complied, dropping to ground level, and using the snow around them to cover their bodies from the north.

Moon’s eyes remained on the lesser elf.

Out of a hundred beasts tearing each other apart, it had walked out, silenced the chaos, and gone straight for the one beast that didn’t belong to it anymore. It had identified the source of the discord in seconds and killed it with a single arrow.

So it can sense the control.

At that moment, Moon immediately understood a weakness of his Curse technique. It was rather easy for really powerful leaders of enemy faction to feel a difference in their subordinates.

The lesser elf lowered its bow, and its head began to turn, sweeping across the battlefield, across the ruined snow and the bodies of its beasts, searching for whatever had reached in and turned its horde against itself.

Searching for the intruders.

This is going to be a problem.

Moon’s expression turned grim as he watched the lesser elf sweep its gaze across the battlefield. The war he had triggered had killed maybe a dozen beasts, give or take, thinning the horde by a small margin, but plenty remained, and now they were back under the elf’s control, which made them far more dangerous than the disorganized cluster they had been minutes ago.

He needed a new plan, and the obvious tool was already off the table.

His Curse had worked once, but the elf had felt it, had traced it back to the exact beast carrying his thread and killed it on sight. Using the same technique again would draw the elf’s attention immediately.

Worse, the elf clearly held full command over the horde, the way it had frozen the entire brawl with a single cry proved that, and a coordinated hundred was worth many times a chaotic hundred.

He watched the lesser elf’s head finish its sweep across the snow, finding nothing in the end.

It’s powerful senses weren’t strong enough to pick their team out from hundreds of meters away, hidden under the snow at ground level. After a long moment, the elf gave up the search. It turned back toward the spire, spoke a final string of foreign syllables to the horde, some last order, and walked back through the gate at the spire’s base.

The massive iced door closed shut behind it.

Moon and his team stayed low.

They waited roughly ten minutes, motionless, watching the horde settle back into its restless vigil around the spire, making certain the elf wasn’t going to reappear and that nothing had caught them. Only when Moon was satisfied did he give the signal, and the team slowly rose from where they had pressed themselves into the snow, drifts sliding off their clothes.

"Let’s leave. We have no business here."

He was already turning, switching their heading back toward the ground they had crossed to get here.

Kayn frowned.

"But that’s the objective of this gate. We’re supposed to clear it. Walking away from the boss goes against the whole reason we’re here."

Moon turned to face him, his own frown answering Kayn’s.

"Can you take on a hundred Five Star beasts and the elf commanding them, right now, with the seven of us?"

Kayn’s jaw tightened, his fists clenched at his sides. He held Moon’s gaze for a moment, then let out a slow breath and shook his head.

"No."

"Then we have no business here. We come back when we can actually win. Throwing ourselves at that horde today doesn’t clear the gate, it just adds seven more bodies to the snow, right next to the last team that tried."

Kayn had no answer to Moon’s response.

The others exchanged glances, and then they fell in behind Moon, Kayn included. Nobody argued further.

Somewhere between the frozen wasteland’s first ambush and this retreat, without any announcement or vote, Moon had assumed the leadership of the team and most of them didn’t mind.

He had already proved himself worthy of the position through his various actions during the exploration, saving them time, energy and figuring out plans that only he could pull off.

Leadership had simply settled onto him because he had earned it.

Nina was the first to catch up to his side as they moved.

"So. What’s your next plan? How do we deal with the horde if there’s real intelligence behind it? We can’t just brute-force our way through if that elf can freeze the whole pack with one sound and control it."

Moon kept walking, his eyes on the horizon where the spire shrank behind them.

"You deal with the horde with a stronger one."