The de facto commander sent the lindwyrms to handle the attacking Swarms and had the rest of the soldiers move back.
“Won’t the lindwyrms be in danger?” one soldier asked him.
“Still, we can’t move through this rain of stingers. Shouldn’t we have the lindwyrms shield some of our units?”
“Should we?”
The lindwyrms have avoided advancing without infantry support. A few of the infantry units followed closely behind the lindwyrms, jogging under the pelting rain of stingers and using the gigantic lizards as living shields.
And so they marched ahead, forming two lines behind the lindwyrms as they knocked down trees in their way, seeking the Swarms. The enemy might have been falling back; while the soldiers could hear faint footsteps, the Arachnea was nowhere in sight. Was the enemy even ahead? The soldiers couldn’t help but doubt themselves. Suddenly, the lindwyrms’ footing collapsed, and the gigantic reptiles fell, as if sucked into the ground.
“Wh-What?!”
“What just happened?!”
The confused soldiers lost sight of the lindwyrms, and more bewildered lindwyrms kept going, stepping over their kin and then toppling into pits in front of them. Before long, all eighty lindwyrms were stuck in the ground, struggling to get out. But the holes they’d fallen into were too deep.
“That’s far enough, Nyrnal soldiers.”
Sérignan, Lysa, and countless Genocide Swarms stood in their way.
“This place is your graveyard. Perish,” Sérignan said coldly and dashed toward the Nyrnal soldiers.
Her targets weren’t the soldiers, but the non-commissioned officers and others leading the army. It was easy to tell them apart, since the high-ranking soldiers had unique embellishments on their armor. In the Vietnam War, officers would fake their rank insignias so as to fool snipers, but in this case they garnished their armor to signify their higher status.
“Oh no!”
“Haaah!” Sérignan bellowed a battle cry as she severed an officer’s head.
Blood spurted out as the officer’s body crumpled to the ground.
“A trap, this is a trap! Run!” a soldier called out.
“You’re not getting away,” Lysa said as she shot him through the back.
The fleeing soldiers were all shot down, and they collapsed one after the next. All the arrows fired their way are painstakingly laced with Chemical Swarm venom.
“Don’t let any of them get away, Lysa,” Sérignan told her.
She nodded. “I won’t.”
Lysa’s expression was ghastly. Seeing her fellow elves being killed had hardened Lysa’s heart and imbued it with a thirst for vengeance. She mercilessly slaughtered any soldiers who dared to run.
“Can you take out the enemy infantry, Lysa?” came another voice.
“Yes, Your Majesty. We just need to kill the trapped soldiers with Chemical Swarm and Toxic Swarm fire.”
An odd figure entered this bloodstained battlefield. It was a girl—the Arachnea’s queen, Grevillea. With cold eyes, she watched Nyrnal’s soldiers die and the lindwyrms flounder in the pits.
The holes had been dug by the Digger Swarms, who burrowed beneath the earth and crumbled it to the point where the surface just barely remained intact. Normally, these Swarms were used to dig under the enemy’s walls, but now their tunnels had been used to ensnare the enemy. The lindwyrms had fallen for the Arachnea’s provocation and stumbled right into their trap.
“Kill the lindwyrms,” Grevillea said. “Give those ugly reptiles the deaths they deserve.”
At her order, the Chemical Swarms gathered around the lindwyrm pits and stabbed them with their stingers. Even the lindwyrms, who’d boasted some of the highest defense in the game, died from multiple stabs from the Chemical Swarms. The creatures spasmed as they melted into pools of flesh. Within minutes, they were all dead.
“That just leaves the soldiers. They’re pitiable, but they don’t deserve mercy. Make them pay, my Swarm,” the queen ordered.
“Understood, your Majesty.” Sérignan and Lysa obliged.
♱
Eighty enemy lindwyrms had been wiped out in a flash. Without them, Nyrnal’s army only had rank and file soldiers. The heavy infantry couldn’t stop the Genocide Swarms’ fangs or the Chemical Swarms’ stingers. Either way, they would die.
“Genocide Swarms, split up from the Toxic and Chemical Swarms and pincer them. Cut off their avenue of escape. They won’t get away from here. We don’t know which of them raided Baumfetter.”
I didn’t intend to let any of them get away after they attacked the elven village. After all the havoc they’d wreaked here, they needed to pay. If it had just been trampling the trees the elves cherished, I might have found it in me to forgive them. But killing Baumfetter’s villagers, non-combatants, was something I couldn’t overlook.
My force of Genocide Swarms, Toxic Swarms, and Chemical Swarms ran through the forest in an attempt to catch up to the enemy. Nyrnal’s soldiers stopped running, noticing that the lindwyrms’ footsteps had abruptly ceased. Suspicious, the officers debated sending out scouts.
“All right. Figure out what’s going on ahead,” I heard an officer say through the Genocide Swarms’ senses.
“Send out a scout!”
Soon, a scout on horseback galloped across the path made by the lindwyrms and approached us.
“Lysa, kill him,” I ordered.
“Got it.” Without hesitation, Lysa loosed an arrow.
Her arrow pierced the scout through the head, sending him flying off his horse in a splatter of blood. He then lay on the ground, twitching as his life ended. With that as the signal, my Swarm commenced their attack.
The Chemical and Toxic Swarms rained stingers as the Genocide Swarms lunged and chomped on the soldiers and their horses. The soldiers desperately fought back, but unfortunately for them, this wasn’t the game. In the game, heavy infantry had high defense and good attack, but here in the real world, they were sluggish and slow-moving, fell to fatal blows, and all too frequently fled in terror.
This wasn’t a game. It was a real world. The sight before me burned that fact into my mind.
As roughly half the soldiers died, something else came onto the scene—something that might change the outcome of this battle.
“Wyverns coming in from above!” Sérignan called out.
A formation of over one hundred wyverns was swooping down toward us.
Oh, crap. This is bad news.
The wyverns went into a nosedive, blowing their fire onto the woods where my ranged Swarm units were hiding. The trees shielded some of them from the fire, but any Chemical and Toxic Swarms consumed by the flames burned alive until they perished.
Right away, the Swarms switched their targets to the wyverns. The wyverns ascended, accelerating and moving in irregular directions to throw off the Swarms’ aim.
I didn’t have a countermeasure. My only airborne units were three Griffin Swarms, which simply weren’t enough to stop all these wyverns. We were basically at their mercy. For now, I had my Swarms fire their barrage of stingers toward the sky, basically hoping they’d land lucky hits. They shot down five or six wyverns, which crashed to the ground and melted, but those that remained breathed fire on the ground again.
As the carnage ensued, Sérignan approached me. “Your Majesty.”
“What is it?” I replied, shooting her a dubious glance.
“There’s something incredibly dangerous hiding among the wyverns. We must be wary. From what I can tell, it is even more powerful than the Seraph Metatron.”
Something stronger than the Marianne faction’s hero unit is hiding among the wyverns?
I couldn’t spot any dragons or great dragons flying in the wyverns’ formation. That only left one plausible option.
“The Gregoria’s hero unit...?”
I squinted as I looked up at the wyverns again. Each wyvern carried a rider, and I tried my best to see if any of them seemed out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, the wyverns were moving too fast for me to see properly.
All the while, the forest floor was on fire. Both flanks of the road the lindwyrms had carved burned, and the Genocide Swarms were still finishing off the Nyrnal foot soldiers. Their numbers had whittled down to a third of their original size.
Then, a single wyvern landed.