Another World: Building an Empire from Zero

One second.

He slightly elevated the bow.

Two seconds.

The wind runes etched into the bowstring resonated with the arrow, forming a miniature, highly-compressed azure cyclone right at the arrowhead.

Three seconds.

Soren’s gaze pre-locked onto a high-altitude trajectory—the exact path the Wyvern was about to cross. A fatal flaw was exposed in his vision: the root joint of the Wyvern's right wing. In order to forcefully pull up, the beast had to fully extend that joint. It was the absolute core fulcrum supporting its massive, multi-ton frame.

"It's over."

SWOOSH!

Soren’s fingers violently released the string. The bowstring snapped with a deafening crack.

Coated in pure wind magic, the second arrow erupted in a blinding azure light. Reaching an extreme, terrifying velocity, it instantaneously pierced the grey, freezing mist, shooting straight into the high heavens with lethal intent!

High in the sky, the Orc rider had just felt his mount's body angling upward. A spark of thankful relief bloomed in his heart as he prepared to escape.

But at that exact microsecond...

SQUELCH-CRACK!

The agonizing sound of violently shattering bone exploded in the high altitude.

Soren's heavy arrow struck the connective joint of the Wyvern's right wing with absolute, pinpoint precision. The attached wind mana detonated upon impact, instantly shredding the hardened bone and the thick, leathery wing-membrane into a gruesome, bloody pulp!

"ROAAAR!"

The Wyvern, its right wing entirely severed, let out a blood-curdling shriek of agony. Losing the aerodynamic support on one side, its colossal, multi-ton frame instantly lost all balance.

"No! Warchief, save me!"

Hundreds of meters in the air, the once-proud apex predator of the skies plummeted completely out of control. The Orc rider strapped to its back screamed hysterically in absolute despair.

Beast and rider violently spun and tumbled through the air, ultimately slamming brutally into the muddy outer perimeter of Greywater Village. The impact kicked up a fountain of putrid mud over ten meters high. The Wyvern twitched twice in the muck before losing all signs of life.

Two arrows. Two kills.

Just as Soren calmly lowered the Elven longbow, the anti-air battery on the northern high ground ushered in its moment of furious retribution.

That agonizing thirty-second firepower vacuum had finally ended!

"Winches locked! Strings drawn! Launch grooves are clear!"

"Follow the Lord Commander's tactical doctrine! Do not blindly chase their tails! Predict! Calculate their escape vectors!"

Beside the six heavy siege ballistas, the goblin technicians were dripping with sweat. Their faces were smeared with black mechanical grease, but every single one of them wore an expression of manic, feverish excitement.

Having undergone Soren's grueling training in modern mathematics and ballistics, these technicians had long since abandoned the primitive, brainless "aim where they are" firing methods of the native armies.

They locked their eyes onto the panic-stricken Wyvern flock. Affected by profound terror, the beasts had broken formation and were desperately scrambling to climb in the same general direction.

The six crews didn't fire blindly or independently. Under the goblin Captain's hoarse roars, they rapidly adjusted the elevation angles and horizontal deflection dials of the six ballistas. They synchronized their crosshairs onto the absolute guaranteed intersection of the Wyverns' escape paths—an area directly beneath the clouds that currently looked completely empty!

"Fire!"

THOOM! THOOM! THOOM! THOOM! THOOM! THOOM!

Six massive, solid-steel heavy bolts launched into the heavens. They crisscrossed in mid-air, instantly forming an inescapable, dense anti-air suppression grid that violently locked down that entire airspace.

The panic-stricken Wyverns were flapping wildly, fleeing upward. One particularly massive Wyvern, terrified of being locked onto by Soren's bow from below, instinctively chose a steep, diagonal flight path—the absolute fastest route to gain altitude.

And in doing so, it flew directly, headfirst, into the pre-calculated kill-zone established by the goblins!

By the time the Orc rider heard the deafening shriek of tearing air and looked up, the massive steel bolts were already inches from his face. The threat was absolute. Evasion was impossible; there was zero room to retreat.

SHLUCK-BOOM!

Two thick heavy bolts violently slammed head-on into the doomed Wyvern!

The first bolt cleanly cored straight through the heavily armored Wyvern's broad chest. The horrifying kinetic force punched entirely through its back, dragging out a massive, gruesome trail of pulverized internal organs.

The second bolt flawlessly sheared off the entire upper half of the Orc rider sitting on its back!

A torrential downpour of blood cascaded from the sky. The Wyvern's body, now reduced to mangled wreckage, plummeted tragically from the heavens.

At this moment, even the howling winds in the sky seemed to freeze.

The Orc Captain lay paralyzed against his Wyvern's back. The gale whipped against his face, smearing his bloody war-paint, yet it couldn't blow away the absolute, freezing terror completely consuming his heart.

Trembling violently, he turned his head to count the remaining shadows. One, two, three... including himself, only four were left.

Ten elite Wyverns—the absolute apex of the Blood Province's aerial supremacy—had suffered catastrophic casualties in a mere handful of minutes. A total of six Wyverns lost! Of those, multiple had been ripped apart by that terrifying heavy ballista battery, and two had been personally slaughtered by that single human commander wielding the Elven longbow below!

"This is impossible... How could a miserable human village possess such firepower..."

Beside him, a surviving Orc rider let out a hoarse roar that bordered on a sob.

They used to be the absolute, dominant masters of the sky. They treated human knights like defenseless prey trapped in the dirt, entirely accustomed to hovering at a hundred meters, casually dropping boulders, and reveling in the tragic wails of humanity below.

But now... after witnessing the heavily interwoven, low-altitude anti-air slaughter-zone established by Greywater Village's ballistas and that monstrous archer, these four surviving Wyvern riders entirely lost the courage to ever attempt a dive-bomb again.

Profound, bone-deep terror completely pulverized their sense of honor. They didn't dare to lower their heads. They didn't even dare to steal a single glance back at that supposedly "dilapidated" village that bristled with such lethal retaliation.

"Abort low altitude! Prioritize survival! Climb to maximum altitude! Dump all the rocks! Shed weight and retreat!"

Biting his lip until it bled, the Orc Captain issued this utterly humiliating command.

Desperate to live, the four Wyverns beat their wings with frenzied energy, pulling up sharply. Driven by an intense thirst for survival, they rapidly climbed to the absolute edge of the dense cloud layer, approaching an extreme altitude of nearly four hundred meters.

At this immense height, Greywater Village was reduced to a microscopic, blurry black dot. Combined with the perennial grey miasma of the Misty Swamp blocking their vision, it was completely impossible to visually acquire any ground targets.

"Dump it! Drop everything!"

Panicking wildly, the Orcs drew their waist-cleavers. Without even looking down, they blindly hacked through the thick ropes holding the final massive payload nets beneath the Wyverns' bellies.

WHOOSH!

Hundreds of pounds of granite boulders and venom-coated raw iron spikes rained down densely, pouring from hundreds of meters in the sky like a chaotic waterfall.

Down on the ground, the Monk Renn, responsible for Soren's protection, shouted: "My Lord, look out for falling debris!"

Soren, however, casually slung the [Windwhisper Bow] back over his shoulder. He didn't even bother to glance up at the plummeting hazards, his voice dripping with icy mockery:

"Relax, Renn. That is nothing but them venting their own impotent panic."

Without the aid of modern targeting optics, executing a blind drop from several hundred meters was a completely threatless gesture. The fierce monsoons and high-altitude turbulence over the Misty Swamp would exert massive horizontal shear forces on those free-falling projectiles.

Exactly as Soren calculated.

Devoid of aiming and severely warped by the high-altitude winds, these massive, inherently destructive granite blocks and iron spikes were blown completely off course, scattering wildly through the air.

BOOM! SQUELCH!

The vast majority of the rocks and iron spikes ended up overshooting Greywater Village's walls entirely, plummeting miles away into the desolate wilderness, murky swamps, and highly toxic acid mud pits outside the territory.

Aside from obliterating a few ancient, massive mushrooms and severely startling some resting two-headed crocodiles in the muck, the actual damage inflicted upon the core structures and personnel of Greywater Village was virtually zero. Only two stray boulders managed to land on the village perimeter, thudding into the mud-reinforced chevaux de frise barricades without even kicking up a decent splash of mud.

"Those brainless beasts!" A logistics soldier poked his head out from a bunker, staring at the rocks sinking into the distant mud, unable to hold back a burst of mocking laughter.

High above the clouds, having shed all their excess weight, the four surviving Orc riders felt their mounts instantly lighten, their flight velocity surging.

Panting heavily in lingering terror, they didn't dare linger for a single microsecond longer. Urging their Wyverns into a frantic turn, they fled like beaten dogs, retreating deep into the thick, southern cloud banks. They desperately sought the cover of the clouds, scurrying to escape this incredibly lethal airspace.

This aerial raid had fundamentally, violently shattered the Orc Wyvern riders' understanding of human border settlements.

For many years to come, whenever these surviving riders closed their eyes, their minds would instantly conjure the terrifying image of an azure-glowing longbow, and the ruthless, massive bolts that had brutally butchered their comrades.

As the remaining Wyverns scrambled to escape, the dense cloud layer parted. Cold, pale sunlight finally spilled back into Greywater Village. Though the land was visibly scarred from the brief bombardment, it pulsed with an undeniable, fierce, and unyielding vitality.

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/cw/Smiling123