226：One Arrow, One Kill
"Ignore the ballistas! Scatter while they're reloading!" the Orc Captain roared furiously.
"Target their structures directly! Low-altitude drops! Flatten this village to the ground! Slaughter any human civilians who didn't have time to run!"
SWOOSH! SWOOSH! SWOOSH!
The remaining six Wyverns instantly broke formation, transforming into six scattering black shadows. Evading the anti-air battery with highly cunning flight paths, they mercilessly exploited the fatal thirty-second reload window of the heavy ballistas.
Bypassing the northern high ground entirely, they launched a second round of unrestrained, indiscriminate bombardment directly into the heart of Greywater Village's residential sector.
In an instant, a dense barrage of massive boulders and sharpened raw iron plunged from the sky above the village.
BOOM! CRACK-CRACK!
Solid rock ruthlessly smashed through the roofs of the moisture-proof stilted cabins. Meticulously constructed crossbeams snapped like fragile twigs under the terrifying kinetic impact. Boulders rolled violently through the interiors, pulverizing wooden beds and crude furniture into splinters.
Long iron spikes emitted piercing, demonic shrieks as they plummeted, instantly pinning a firewood storage shed into a heavily perforated ruin.
Thick, choking dust and smoke shot into the sky, entirely obscuring all vision. Massive amounts of wood splinters rained down as mud splattered everywhere. The once orderly, thriving heart of Greywater Village was instantaneously reduced to a scarred, devastated wasteland.
The Wyverns swooped arrogantly over the ruins. The Orc riders let out manic, hysterical laughter, intoxicated by their successful revenge. They almost fancied they could hear the agonized wails of human civilians being crushed beneath the rubble.
But in reality...
Standing upon the anti-air battery, Soren's expression was chillingly stern, utterly unmoved.
Greywater Village had indeed suffered severe structural damage; the wooden cabins he had spent endless effort planning and building were nearly destroyed.
But in the completely empty village, only dead objects had been destroyed.
Thanks to his decisive early-warning evacuation, at this exact moment, there were absolutely zero civilians and zero wounded in the village. Every single person was safely hidden in the primeval forest to the south, utilizing the dense, overlapping canopy as a natural, impenetrable anti-air bunker.
Houses destroyed? Chop more trees and rebuild.
As long as his people survived, Greywater Village's foundation was entirely unharmed! Trading a few dilapidated wooden shacks to create the perfect firing bait for his anti-air battery—in Soren's eyes, this decision was an absolute, undisputed bargain!
Just then, a violent shockwave from the bombardment reached the high ground. A ricocheting stone grazed the wooden fence right beside them.
"My Lord! It's too dangerous here! The ballistas are still reloading; we are in a massive firepower vacuum!"
Monk Renn hunched his back and sprinted frantically to Soren's side. Benefitting from the passive defense of his [Hardened Skin] trait, he didn't fear the flying shrapnel, but he was consumed by profound anxiety for his Lord's safety.
Renn firmly grabbed Soren's gauntlet, shouting his plea over the howling wind: "Please retreat into the command bunker immediately! The Wyverns are continuously circling above! If they spot you standing out in the open..."
"Shut up. Step back."
Soren issued a brief, icy command.
Not only did he ignore the advice to retreat, but he forcefully shook off Renn's hand. To a commander possessing modern special forces experience, running away with your back to the enemy while occupying an advantageous firing position was an act of pure idiocy. It was voluntarily exposing your back to a lethal blind spot.
Soren took a deep breath of the freezing wind, slowly standing fully upright amidst the thick cordite smoke.
He locked onto his prey above, his expression completely tranquil, yet his entire body radiated an absolutely suffocating killing intent. He slowly reached behind his back.
Hanging there was a wondrous artifact, entirely coursing with a brilliant azure magical radiance: The [Windwhisper Bow].
When Soren gripped the bow riser, enchanted by High Elven magic, it felt warm to the touch. The howling gales around him seemed to instantaneously fall silent. The three sets of azure wind-element runes were immediately activated, pulsing rhythmically with a piercing, spectral glow.
And at that exact same moment.
"[Eagle-Eye Perception], active," Soren murmured in his heart.
VMMM!
The rotational speed of the entire world instantly slowed to a crawl in Soren's eyes.
The Orc Wyverns frantically beating their wings in the sky, swooping low, preparing to pull up. Every single microscopic twitch of their flight muscles. The exact trajectory of the gale blowing through the smoke.
Even the minute air current fluctuations completely invisible to the naked eye... Under Soren's ultra-long-range visual lock, everything was brutally deconstructed into the most fundamental flight parameters and physical variables!
Soren's feet were firmly nailed to the ground like roots.
His right hand drew a specially equipped, armor-piercing heavy arrow from his quiver, nocking it flawlessly onto the bowstring.
CREAAAK!
The [Faint Titan Bloodline] coursing through his veins granted him astonishing, monstrous strength. That Elven longbow—a weapon that even the most heavily muscled Imperial Knight would need to exhaust their entire body's strength to barely draw—was smoothly pulled to its absolute, maximum extension in Soren's hands.
The bow's inherent wind-element mana instantly poured violently into the arrow, forming a high-speed, azure micro-tornado directly over the heavy steel arrowhead!
Soren didn't even aim at the Wyvern's current position. His eyes were locked dead onto an entirely empty point in its flight path, twenty paces ahead of the beast.
Wind speed correction.
Anticipatory lead.
Drop compensation.
Penetration calculation.
"Die," Soren whispered softly.
His fingers violently released the fully drawn bowstring.
BOOM-THWACK!
The fine-steel heavy arrow, brimming to the absolute limit with violent wind mana, erupted with a blinding azure light. With brutal, tyrannical velocity, it instantaneously pierced through a hundred meters of airspace!
It was entirely silent, yet impossibly fast.
Up in the sky, the Wyvern that was spreading its wings to pull up hadn't detected a single trace of danger. Its flight posture had only just tilted halfway to the left.
That streak of azure light had already appeared flawlessly on its exact flight path, pointing directly at the most vulnerable spot on its massive body!
SQUELCH-BOOM!
The extreme penetrative power of the Windwhisper Bow was displayed to its absolute, horrifying limits.
The arrow effortlessly punched straight through the Wyvern's thick neck. In the split second of impact, the attached wind spell violently detonated into a miniature mana storm directly inside the beast's trachea!
Dark green blood violently geysered from the gruesome, gaping hole!
After punching entirely through the massive dragon, the arrow grazed right past the war-painted face of the Orc rider, slicing cleanly off one of his ears before disappearing into the clouds!
The doomed Wyvern let out a hoarse, shattered shriek of agony. With its throat completely pulverized, it only managed to thrash its wings twice before stiffening. Carrying its utterly terrified rider, it plummeted headfirst from the sky, slamming brutally into the edge of the ruins just outside Greywater Village!
Clatter.
Renn's jaw dropped so wide it nearly unhinged.
He had witnessed the entire process, from the drawing of the bow to the felling of the giant beast. Cold sweat rapidly beaded on his bald head as he stood frozen like a wooden statue.
He looked at the massive corpse that had plummeted in the distance, then slowly turned his head to stare in absolute, world-shattering shock at Soren, who was calmly lowering the Windwhisper Bow.
Relying purely on his own naked eyesight and sheer physical strength to draw a bow... he had just instantly one-shotted a high-speed, evasive Wyvern straight out of the sky from the ground?!
"Is that... is that a fucking arrow shot by a human?!" Renn gasped, his worldview entirely collapsing.
The agonizing shriek of the beast still echoed in mid-air as the newly slain Wyvern plummeted rapidly amidst a shower of blood.
Standing on the ground, Soren kept his eyes glued to the sky. He didn't drop his jaw in awe of his own combat record like the soldiers around him. In the combat doctrines of modern special forces, as long as the aerial threats weren't reduced to zero, the battle was absolutely not over.
"Target two," Soren's lips parted slightly, spitting out two cold words.
His right hand reached back smoothly to his quiver, his fingers flawlessly extracting a second armor-piercing heavy arrow.
The [Windwhisper Bow], radiating its azure halo, was once again drawn to a perfectly full arc by his terrifying strength.
Up in the sky, an Orc rider preparing to dive-bomb personally witnessed the horrifying spectacle of his comrade being instantly slaughtered by a single arrow.
That was an apex predator of the clouds! And it had been shot cleanly out of the sky by a single human on the ground using a bow?!
Absolute terror instantly crushed the Orc rider's sanity. He violently yanked on the thick leather reins, roaring hysterically: "Pull up! Pull up now! Get away from that monster with the bow!"
Sensing its master's terror, the Wyvern let out a frantic shriek. Beating its massive wings wildly, it desperately tried to catch a strong updraft, sharply and rigidly banking up and to the right to escape.
To hit an aerial target executing a high-speed, evasive maneuver in such extreme conditions was an absolutely impossible task for the vast majority of archers on the continent.
But in Soren's eyes, [Eagle-Eye Perception] was operating at maximum capacity.
"Distance: one hundred and twenty meters. Target is cutting into high-altitude crosswinds. Wind velocity increasing..."
Soren stood rooted to the spot, entirely motionless, his posture as steady as a mountain.
In a mere three seconds, he rapidly completed the high-altitude wind correction and calculated the complex ballistic lead.
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