Chapter 469: Chapter 469: Zerith Morale Shattered
The Zerith at the front tried to stop, but the ones behind kept pushing, creating a chaotic pile-up in the narrow ravine.
But the Veynar didn’t stop.
BOOM!
The shield wall slammed into the front line of stalkers with crushing force.
The angled shields acted like a plow, lifting the first few Zerith off their feet and throwing them backward into their comrades. And almost immediately, bones snapped and screams erupted.
The sheer momentum of sixty elite warriors in perfect formation was overwhelming.
Spears thrust out from between the shields like deadly thorns, impaling the trapped Zerith.
Blood sprayed freely across the bone wall as the Veynar kept pushing forward, trampling the fallen under their boots.
"Push! Push, you bastards!" a warrior shouted, his voice filled with savage joy.
The Zerith were panicking now.
They couldn’t understand what was happening, they were sleeping peacefully after roasting and devouring a small group of captured humans.
And suddenly the chaos erupted and they somehow ended up here, thinking they were gonna be safe, but now facing the ambush, their usual ambush tactics had been completely reversed.
They were the ones being ambushed, crushed, and slaughtered in a tight space with nowhere to run.
A desperate Layer 2 Stalker tried to escape the slaughter.
With a wild screech, he leaped high into the air, claws extended, aiming to clear the top of the shield wall and flee into the trees.
But it was all just a pipe dream, before he could even reach the peak of his jump, three heavy spears shot upward from behind the shields like striking pythons.
SHLUCK! SHLUCK! SHLUCK!
The first spear punched straight through his stomach. The second pierced his chest. The third went through his throat. The stalker hung in the air, impaled like a hunted boar being roasted over a fire ... exactly the way he and his kin had done to countless humans.
The Zerith’s body jerked violently as it was turned into a bleeding pincushion. With a coordinated heave, the Veynar warriors flung the corpse backward into the horde. It crashed into its comrades, spraying green blood and viscera everywhere.
The Zerith lines broke further.
They were completely terrified now.
The tight confines of the ravine had turned their greatest advantage... speed and agility... into a death sentence. They couldn’t dodge. They couldn’t swarm. They couldn’t use their usual hit-and-run tactics.
Every time one tried to leap over the advancing shield wall, they were met with a forest of spears and thrown back as broken meat.
They kept trying to run.
But there was nowhere to run.
A particularly large Zerith, covered in battle scars, roared and charged directly at the shield wall, trying to break it through brute force.
He slammed into the angled shields with all his strength.
CRACK!
The formation didn’t even budge. Instead, the angled shields absorbed the impact and redirected it, throwing him off balance.
Before he could recover, six spears thrust out from between the gaps and impaled him at once.
He screamed as he was lifted off the ground, then thrown back like garbage.
The Veynar kept pushing forward with grim determination, their bone shields dripping with green blood.
Instead of stopping their weight head-on, the Veynar warriors let the charging momentum of the monsters glide right off their sloped bone surfaces, throwing the stalkers off balance and sending them stumbling sideways into the rocky walls of the ravine.
Before they could recover their feet in the muck, the second row of human fighters executed their low spear plunges, brutally shattering the stalkers’ lower joint membranes and snapping their thin ankles with sharp cracks.
"Keep going! Don’t let them climb!" the squad leader barked.
The monsters let out high-pitched chokes as they collapsed into the dirt in single mass, their balance entirely ruined.
The rear rows of the Veynar line followed through immediately, driving their heavy knives and stone axes straight into the stalkers’ spines, sealing the vault in total silence.
A monster with a broken leg couldn’t chase, and it couldn’t fight; it just became a wet log that tripped up the other fleeing warriors running behind it.
The Zerith morale shattered completely.
They started climbing over each other in blind panic, clawing and trampling their own kind just to get away from the advancing wall of death.
The ravine had become a slaughterhouse. Green blood flowed like water between the rocks. The air was filled with wet screams, the crunch of breaking bones, and the relentless advance of the Veynar shield wall.
"Push! Push harder!" a Veynara leader roared, his voice filled with savage excitement. "Make them feel what they did to our people!"
The Veynar answered with a unified battle cry as they drove the formation forward, crushing more Zerith under their shields and spears.
Within minutes, the narrow ravine had turned into a graveyard of broken bodies. What was supposed to be a safe retreat path for the Zerith had become their tomb.
...
Meanwhile, Sol walked through the burning camp, his sapphire blade drawing small, concentrated crescents of kinetic force whenever a stray guard tried to break through the smoke. He didn’t rush his steps; he moved like a manager checking the lines of a factory, his senses tracking every single pocket of resistance.
The silver liquid was now pulsing with a cold, heavy rhythm now.
Having absorbed over a dozen high-tier souls within twenty minutes, the pool had completely doubled in size, settling deep into his chest cavity like a dense sheet of ice.
Suddenly his senses tingled, as he looked towards the back of camp.
"Hmmm? What is this?" He muttered as he without hesitation, started walking towards it, while continuing hacking any Zeriths he found along the way.
Soon, he reached the back of the camp where a small, isolated mud longhouse stood, marked with ceremonial bone-strings and dried snake skins.
Two high-tier Layer 2 elite guards were posted outside the hide flap, their bodies trembling as they watched the rest of their camp burn down around them, but still refused to leave this place. Which was definitely very intriguing.
