With three consecutive silver flashes of slash and an annoyed hiss, the undead chimera on the right flank of Zarba's group reeled back as its severed arm hit the dirt from Nadia's rapid combo of triple spinning slashes that cut through the undead's dense bone and muscles with ease when it was busy with the legionary soldiers.
The fingers on its severed arm were still twitching when the stitched-up undead monster whipped its skull head to glare at the muscular woman with glowing green eyes while Nadia's greatsword hummed through the air in a reverse arc from spinning before she suddenly did a roundhouse kick that planted her boot on the monstrosity's stomach, shoving it backward into a tree trunk behind it.
"Heal from that, you ugly bastard," she taunted, watching with satisfaction as the undead creature's empty shoulder socket gushed dark blood slightly before the wound started to close slowly.
The undead chimera has now taken quite a lot of damage, as there are many slash and stab wounds that keep accumulating all over its body as the fight goes on since the legionary soldiers keep swarming it and also Nadia, who is taking advantage of the moment it's distracted to give it some serious damage.
The undead chimera doesn't even have any limbs to use as weapons anymore since its remaining handless arm is heavily mutilated to the point that it is just hanging limply, while its serpentine tail has also been cut off since it got swarmed by the summoned units before its arm was cut off later by Nadia.
With its current state, it can't really do much other than spitting acid and biting, but in return, the damage that the chimera did to the summoned units in retaliation was also high, as only three of them were left standing while Nadia's cuirass sizzled from the corrosive black liquid that was spit on her before she cut its arm off, as the black metal armor is currently smoking with a foul odor.
Despite doing her best, Nadia was not able to dodge all of the acid attacks completely, as some of the black liquid droplets splashed on her armor, slowly melting it.
Fortunately she has armor on because Zarba insists; otherwise, with her revealing bikini armor, she would have taken serious damage.
"Hmph…!" With a grunt, Nadia grabbed the smoking armor pieces and ripped them free from her body, tossing the melting scraps aside to reveal the scaled bikini armor beneath as her large breasts jingled slightly.
The chimera growled, the stump of its serpentine tail twitching as it tried to get up while the three legionary soldiers charged at it with their shields crashing into the undead and pinning it to the tree before they started hacking and stabbing as the undead chimera struggled to push them off with only its skull head.
"Let's finish it off…" Nadia muttered with a grin, rolling her shoulders before she lunged at the undead chimera, her greatsword carving a silver arc through the air downward at the monster's head as the undead roared with defiance, still trying to fight to the bitter end.
Its defiant roar was short-lived, though, as the greatsword edge mercilessly crushed its skull and destroyed its magic core of reanimation spell hidden inside, making its stitched-up dead bodies instantly go limp and return to just a corpse once again.
Meanwhile on the left flank, Zarba and his summoned units' arrows whistled through the air—each arrow shaft glowing slightly as they made contact with the remaining chimera, which flinched when the enchanted arrows embedded deep in its rotting flesh and cracked its bone.
The Zar-Bros already fanned out to surround the monster in a circle, their bowstrings cracking repeatedly as they shot the undead chimera from all sides, forcing it to stop attacking the legionary soldiers and focus on evasion instead.
It's not helping much, though, as no matter how fast it's trying to move its large body, the arrows will always hit it.
Seeing how futile the action is, the monster decided to stop trying to dodge and just charged at one of the Zar-Bros with a high-pitched roar, but that one Zar-Bro just quickly sidestepped the monster arms that were swinging at him and moved out of the way.
Seeing the monster immediately get up from its failed lunge and turn its head to look at him, the Zar-Bro, who was already nocking his arrow, quickly released a non-enchanted arrow into the monster's eye socket, making the undead recoil as it seemed to be panicking while one of its arms rose up to protect its skull face.
Taking advantage of the undead chimera's faltering state, Zarba mentally commands his remaining dozen legionary soldiers to charge at it while he and the Zar-Bros turn it into a pincushion with arrows.
The legionaries charge in silence as they begin to swarm the undead chimera on all sides, trying to restrict its movement.
The monster cries out with a high-pitched voice while it is thrashing around, sending some of the summons flying away or crushing them with its heavy body, but Zarba just summons more units when the number of the legionary soldiers is low so the undead monster can't get itself out from the swarm mob of legionaries surrounding it.
The legionary soldiers' shields buckled under the chimera's frenzied thrashing; splinters of shields went flying as the creature's claws swung in their ranks.
Zarba observed the creature with the patience of a hunter as he nocked another arrow until he found the perfect moment when the undead lifted its two bawling fists up and was about to bring them down on the legionary soldiers.
The line of fire to its skull head is clear as Zarba releases the enchanted arrow from his bow.
Zarba watched as the arrow traveled through the air unimpeded until it punctured the undead chimera's skull in its nasal cavity and went through its entire skull with a resounding crack, leaving a see-through jagged hole as a result.
The undead chimera body immediately became frozen still for a second before it just collapsed like a puppet with strings cut as its core was damaged and the magic spell that held it together was dispelled.
"That's taken care of..." Zarba sighed in relief before he took a look around.
On Nadia's side, she has already defeated the undead chimera, and she is now going to the front, where the lines of legionary soldiers are holding off the burning zombies that are still banging on the shield wall but with visible weakened strength and intensity.
And on Xin's side, the half-elf is still riding on the skeleton horse as she looks around for the hiding necromancer while she casts some clairvoyance spells.
"Hahahaha!" But Xin's searching was interrupted as the necromancer's sudden cackle echoed from nowhere and everywhere at the same time before her shadowy silhouette flickered between the trees on both sides of the road.
Then four green magic circles materialized in four directions of Zarba's group from inside the jungle before four swarms of orange locusts shot out from the magic circles towards their position, with the buzzing of their wings burying all sounds in the jungle.
"Annoying pests…!" Xin quickly swiped her staff upward as magic circles materialized under the non-summoned members of Zarba's group before a blue-hued barrier materialized and covered Xin, Zarba, and Nadia just as the locust swarms impacted the barriers before they exploded in flames at the half-elf conjured barriers while the summoned units and zombies without any protection got swallowed up by the inferno, leaving only ashes and shimmering particles behind.
Xin could feel the necromancer watching—tasting her reactions—and it was honestly irritating.
"You better hope you can hide forever, you hag…" Xin muttered as she resumed searching for the old witch, while the said witch wondered if she should retreat now, as her undead were all gone, but the enemy seemed to be able to summon some kind of constructs out to help them without visible cost.
The jungle is quiet as the locusts' bombing now ran out while the fire around the three dried down outside of the barriers.
But then, with rustling leaves, another green magic circle materialized from behind the treeline on their left flank as green smoke spread out from the jungle, the same poisonous smoke the witch had used before.
This time Xin didn't bother countering the smoke, as the barrier was enough to defend against it. Her finger tapped on the glowing staff as she cast another spell before more than a dozen small magic circles materialized around the half-elf.
"You've wasted my time enough," Xin huffs, her pointed ears twitching at the faintest of sounds around her, and then a leaf crunched from her right, ten meters away inside the jungle. Xin could guess that the necromancer is watching them from behind a tree as the half-elf's lips curled slightly at the corner. "Shall I burn down this entire forest to smoke you out?"
With just a thought, the dozen of magic circles around Xin begin to glow bright, ready to activate whatever spell she has prepared...