Ch. 18
Chapter 18. The Black Crow Knights
The darkness before dawn was always at its thickest. At the edge of the Obsidian Territory camp, several figures were silently adjusting saddles and checking weapons.
Buck and the five members of the Black Crow Knights he had brought with him were clad from head to toe in finely crafted black light armor, with only their cold, sharp eyes exposed.
Their movements were swift and silent, like blades on the verge of leaving their sheaths.
“Young Master, are you really going as well?” Buck looked at Eli, who was similarly fully equipped and was now slinging his longbow across his back.
“Of course.” Eli swung himself onto his horse in one smooth motion.
“It is a rare chance to witness the style of the Black Crow Knights. And besides...” He patted the several large empty burlap sacks hanging from the saddle and grinned.
“Someone has to help you collect the spoils and count the gold, does he not?
“Bol, Aika, Orlando, the rest of you—come along as well.”
Bol and the others had already been barely restraining themselves. The moment they heard this, they immediately mounted up in excitement.
Getting to witness a Gold Tier knight in action was the kind of experience they would be able to brag about for years!
Buck said nothing more and merely gave a slight nod.
He pressed his heels lightly into his horse’s flanks, and the powerful black steed beneath him shot forward like an arrow loosed from the string!
The other five Black Crow Knights followed close behind, their movements perfectly uniform.
With a wave of his hand, Eli led Bol and the others—ten riders in total—as they spurred their horses and followed after them.
The pounding of hooves shattered the silence of the wasteland before dawn as they charged straight toward the northwest.
At full gallop, the thirty-li journey passed in the blink of an eye.
By the time the eastern horizon had begun to pale with first light, an abandoned mine, eroded by the years, came into view.
The mine had been built against a bare, reddish low hill, its entrance deep and shadowy.
Within it, one could vaguely make out a number of crude wooden sheds and tents, while several wisps of gray-white cooking smoke drifted lazily upward.
A few sand bandits on sentry duty were hugging their shoddy spears and dozing against the broken stone walls near the mine entrance.
“Enemy attack—!!!”
A shrill howl suddenly tore through the quiet of the morning!
One sharp-eyed sand bandit had spotted the plume of dust rolling up from the horizon and the black riders racing toward them!
The mine instantly exploded into chaos, like a kicked-over hornet’s nest!
Half-dressed sand bandits came scrambling out of the shacks and tents in panic.
Some were still holding up their trousers, while others were clutching their weapons, cursing wildly as the whole place descended into disorder.
A burly bald man carrying a heavy battle axe rushed to the front, roaring himself hoarse as he tried to organize a defense.
“Grab your weapons! Block the entrance! Archers! Where the hell are the archers?!”
But it was too late!
The Black Crow Knights under Buck’s command had not the slightest intention of slowing down!
Facing the several dozen sand bandits who had gathered in haste at the mine entrance, along with the few feeble arrows shot at them in confusion, their speed instead rose to its absolute peak!
HUM—!
Six pale golden flares of battle aura blazed up from Buck and the five knights like torches igniting in an instant!
Buck’s immense Gold Tier pressure crashed outward like an invisible tidal wave.
The faces of the front-rank sand bandits who tried to raise their spears to block them immediately turned deathly pale. Their legs went weak, and they could barely even hold on to their weapons!
“Charge.”
That single cold word was all Buck uttered.
In the next instant, six black bolts of lightning smashed viciously into the sand bandits’ chaotic formation.
There were no flashy techniques, only the simplest and deadliest cuts, thrusts, and shield charges.
The knightly swords and long spears, coated in pale golden battle aura, sliced through them like blades through tofu.
SLASH! CRACK! AHHH—!
The sounds of flesh being torn apart, bones shattering, and dying screams instantly merged into one horrifying chorus.
Severed limbs and scalding blood flew in every direction!
The defensive line the sand bandits had thrown together in haste was ripped open and punched through in an instant, as fragile as paper.
Buck rode at the front. The seemingly ordinary fine steel sword in his hand now spat out a pale golden sword aura more than a foot long.
Wherever he passed, whether it was flesh, weapons, or rotting wooden shields, everything was split clean in two!
The five knights behind him were like the most precise killing machines, working in flawless coordination as they struck left and right. Every swing took one or several lives with it.
Their movements were as fast as specters as they wove through the chaos, cutting through the crowd and leaving bloody paths in their wake.
They broke straight through!
In a single clash, those six men and six horses had already torn through the sand bandits’ densest defensive ring at the entrance.
What they left behind was a ground strewn with corpses and shrieking wounded.
“Monsters! They are monsters!”
“Run! Run!”
The sand bandits completely collapsed. Terror spread among them like a plague!
Their leader, resistance, all of it had become a joke in the face of absolute power.
The survivors cried for their fathers and mothers, throwing away their helmets and weapons, wanting only to flee from those six incarnations of death.
“Roar! Hold the line, damn you!”
The bald bandit chief’s eyes were splitting with fury as he swung his axe at one of the Black Crow Knights who had fallen slightly behind.
That knight did not even turn his head. He merely lifted the kite shield in his left hand and blocked casually behind him.
CLANG—!!!
A deafening explosion rang out.
The heavy axe, reinforced with Silver-tier battle aura, came crashing down onto the shield, yet it did nothing more than send out a spray of sparks.
That seemingly ordinary shield did not budge in the slightest!
Instead, the bald bandit chief was shaken numb by the tremendous recoil. The web of his hand split open, and his battle axe nearly flew from his grasp!
His eyes filled with utter disbelief and horror.
“Mithril!”
At that moment, a cold voice rang out like a death sentence.
“You are noisy.”
It was Buck.
At some point, he had already turned his horse around, and a long spear had formed in his hand.
SHHK—!
A condensed black bolt, as tangible as a real thing, shot silently through the air!
BANG—!
The bald brute did not even have time to react before he was nailed brutally to the wall.
The horror on the bald bandit chief’s face froze instantly.
He instinctively raised a hand, as though he wanted to pull the weapon out, but the motion stiffened halfway before his arm dropped limply.
The chief was dead!
That sight shattered the last sliver of the sand bandits’ will to resist!
The remaining dozen or so men scattered like ants from a broken nest, wailing as they fled in all directions, desperate to crawl deeper into the mine or escape into the wasteland.
“Captain Buck! Leave a few alive for questioning!”
Only then did Eli, who had been stunned by the overwhelming, crushing speed of the battle, finally come back to himself and shout loudly.
At his words, Buck made a hand signal to the knights beside him.
The five Black Crow Knights immediately split apart and pounced forward, intercepting several sand bandits who looked like lesser leaders.
With the flat of their swords, they knocked them unconscious and subdued them.
Eli was not idle either.
He took down his longbow, his gaze as sharp as an eagle’s, and nocked an arrow before drawing the bowstring.
WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!
Several arrows infused with battle aura seemed to grow eyes of their own as they shot after the bandits trying to flee deep into the wasteland, piercing clean through their backs with ease!
Their screams stopped abruptly, and their bodies pitched forward onto the ground.
From beginning to end, the battle had lasted less than a quarter of an hour.
The entrance to the mine fell into utter silence.
The ground was littered with the corpses of sand bandits lying every which way, numbering no fewer than forty by rough estimate.
Only a handful of unconscious prisoners and a few scattered bandits who had been frightened out of their wits and were now sprawled weakly on the ground remained alive.
Buck seized the prisoners and tossed them in front of Eli as casually as if he were throwing out trash.
“Young Master.”
Eli swung down from his horse and walked over to the trembling captive.
Bol immediately stepped forward, kicked the man’s knees out from under him, and planted a foot against his back while pressing his knight’s sword to the prisoner’s neck.
“Who are you people? Where did you come from?” Eli’s calm voice rang out.
He needed intelligence.
The captive had long since been scared witless. Tears and snot ran down his face as he wailed incoherently.
“Mercy, my lord! Mercy! I will talk! I will tell you everything! We are... we are the ‘Vulture Gang’... no, no, we used to be the city garrison of Falei!”
“Falei?” Eli frowned. It was a name he had never heard before.
“Yes... yes, from the Free City-State Alliance! A coalition army made up of seven great city-states and twelve small ones!
“Last year... last year, we captured many places in the Western Frontier! Storm City was one of the cities we took!”
Desperate to save his life, the prisoner spilled everything like beans from a broken bamboo tube.
“But later... later, the main force fell into conflict and withdrew. They said they were heading back west... but Falei is poor!
“Falei’s territory is small and broken... Our chief, the one just now... and one of Falei’s nobles, a lord named Baron Grum...
“They did not want to go back, so they took... they took us brothers who did not want to leave either and stayed behind... They seized a place called Lucerne City as our main base...
“I heard... I heard that other small city-states left men behind as well... but I do not know anything about that...”
“Lucerne City?” Eli’s eyes sharpened. He remembered that place on the map.
It was not too far from the Obsidian Territory, a town of moderate size in the Western Frontier.
“How many men do you have? Is that Baron Grum in Lucerne City?”
“More... more than a thousand,” the prisoner answered at once.
“Baron Grum took more than five hundred men and occupied Lucerne City. He said he wanted to turn it into territory for us people of Falei!
“As for the rest... the rest, like us, were split into several groups and scattered around the area...
“We were responsible for... for ‘finding’ some grain and supplies... and also... also keeping watch on the movements of the Western Frontier Army...”
The quieter his voice became, the more obvious it was that this so-called “finding” meant looting and pillaging.
“More than a thousand men... occupying Lucerne City...” Eli’s heart turned grave.
This was no longer a mere band of roaming brigands. It was an organized military force with a stronghold.
“My lord... I... I have told you everything... Mercy... mercy...” Seeing Eli’s darkening face, the prisoner was scared out of his mind and kowtowed frantically, begging for his life.
Eli had obtained the key information he wanted. He no longer even looked at the man and merely flicked a glance at Bol.
Bol understood at once. Twisting his waist into the motion, he brought his sword down in a merciless slash.
SHHK!
The pleading stopped abruptly.
“Clean the battlefield. Seize all supplies.”
Eli no longer looked at the corpse on the ground as he gave the order in a low voice.
Everyone moved at once.
There were also some frightened women and children deeper inside the mine. Under the intimidation of Buck and the others, they were all driven out and gathered together under guard.
The spoils were quickly counted.
Several large wooden crates were filled with enough grain and dried meat to feed a hundred men for more than a month.
There was also a small sack of mixed silver and copper coins worth roughly two hundred gold.
There were dozens of rust-covered, poor-quality swords, spears, and other weapons.
And, most importantly of all—
In a relatively dry tunnel deep within the mine, they found more than a dozen heavy wooden chests.
Inside them were neatly stacked more than one hundred refined iron ingots that gave off a cold metallic sheen.
In addition, inside the shack where the bandit chief had lived, Eli discovered a parchment map rolled up inside a copper tube.
The map was drawn with remarkable precision. It marked most of the major towns, roads, and rivers of the Western Frontier, and even included the major city-states of the Free City-State Alliance.
“A fine thing indeed!”
Eli was overjoyed and immediately put the map away.
“Take them with us and bring them back to the Obsidian Territory for resettlement,” Eli ordered.
These people were labor, and they were also potential future residents.
Once the counting was complete, the heavy goods, including the refined iron ingots and grain, were loaded onto several broken carts left behind by the sand bandits, while the rescued female slaves were settled onto the carts as well.
Escorting their abundant spoils, the group set out on the road back to the Obsidian Territory.
Baron Grum... Falei... the thousand-plus rebel troops occupying Lucerne City...
Beneath the surface of this seemingly peaceful wasteland, the undercurrents were indeed running deep.