Translator: AnubisTL
Days of relentless travel through the wilderness had left the survivors of Golden Harbor utterly exhausted.
The caravan trudged along the dusty earth road, each step heavy with numbness.
The nobles had long abandoned their initial dignity. Their once-splendid robes were now stained with mud, their elaborate hairstyles disheveled, yet a faint glimmer of hope had begun to ignite in their eyes.
For on the horizon, the silhouette of a human city had come into view!
It was a mid-sized kingdom city named Orsay.
Unlike Golden Harbor, Orsay wasn't a coastal city, but its strategic location at the intersection of several major trade routes made it a bustling hub of activity.
The towering city walls gleamed gray-white under the sun, and the gates stood wide open, revealing glimpses of the buildings and bustling crowds within.
All signs pointed to one undeniable truth: this place was safe!
"Look! It's Orsay!" Baron Fabio nearly leaped from his carriage in excitement, his plump face overflowing with unrestrained joy. His voice trembled, as if he had glimpsed salvation itself.
"Finally... finally, we've reached a safe place!" Earl Reinhardt exhaled deeply, the tension that had gripped his heart for days finally easing.
After days of relentless travel, the very existence of this city was an irresistible temptation.
The private soldiers and guards perked up, their weary faces breaking into relieved smiles.
The city's taverns, inns, clean beds, and steaming food all beckoned them.
Jieming stood at the head of the column, halting his advance as he calmly surveyed the city ahead.
"My lord, may we enter the city to rest and resupply?" Earl Reinhardt approached Jieming cautiously, his voice tinged with pleading. "The horses need feeding, and our rations are dwindling..."
Jieming nodded silently, acknowledging the nobles' need for rest and supplies.
"You may," Jieming replied tersely. "But the entire column cannot enter. Leave your carriages and most of your men outside the walls. Send an elite guard detachment into the city to procure supplies. The rest of you will remain here, rest, and maintain vigilance."
Though the nobles didn't understand Jieming's caution, they were cowed by his demonstrated power and readily agreed—after all, they were certain they'd still get to enjoy the city's pleasures.
Soon, the nobles had assembled a massive group of nearly a hundred, leaving behind most of their guards, and marched triumphantly toward the distant city.
The moment they stepped into the city, a cacophony of sounds assaulted their ears, bringing tears to the eyes of the nobles who had been trekking through the wilderness for days. They longed to find a decent inn and rest.
But suddenly, chaos erupted!
"Kill them!"
A murderous roar exploded from the city gate!
Immediately afterward, more than a dozen black figures surged out like phantoms, moving with lightning speed.
They wore uniform, close-fitting armor and wielded not the usual swords and blades, but daggers and short spears faintly tinged with green poison.
This assassination squad had a clear target: the nobles' carriages at the center of the procession.
Their movements were agile, dodging the guards' attempts to intercept them like venomous snakes striking vital points.
"Assassins! Protect the carriages!" General Brandon roared.
The guards around him reacted swiftly. Though they might be no match for orcs in open battle, they were highly trained in countering assassinations.
Unfortunately, the number of guards accompanying the nobles into the city was far too few, while the assassins' numbers far exceeded expectations. Soon, many assassins had breached the guards' defenses and were closing in.
Earl Reinhardt and Baron Fabio screamed in terror from inside their carriages, while the women huddled together, weeping silently in fear.
An assassin had already charged toward Earl Reinhardt's carriage, his poisoned dagger gleaming with a cold light as he thrust it toward the carriage curtains.
"You're asking for death!" Jieming's voice rang out from the side.
He had long anticipated this ambush, having detected the assassins lurking near the city gate. In the blink of an eye, he surged to the front of the procession.
Before the first assassin could even touch the carriage curtains, Jieming had already materialized behind him.
With a swift motion, he seized the assassin's head with his left hand.
Crack!
A crisp bone-breaking sound echoed as the assassin's head twisted at an unnatural angle. His body went limp, collapsing into a puddle of flesh, and the poisoned dagger clattered to the ground.
Without so much as a glance, Jieming's figure flickered again, transforming into a blurred black shadow that darted through the crowd.
"Aaaah!!"
Agonized screams erupted in waves.
These professional assassins, before Jieming, proved as fragile as paper dolls.
This one-sided slaughter lasted less than a minute.
By the time Jieming tossed the last assassin to the ground like a discarded rag doll, every black-clad figure lay in a pool of blood, none spared.
Their eyes remained wide open in death, filled with bewilderment and terror.
Jieming calmly approached an assassin who was still barely clinging to life. Blood gurgled from the man's mouth, his pupils dilated, clearly on the verge of death.
Jieming crouched down, seemingly to check the assassin's condition.
A faint light flickered in his eyes as his powerful mental power surged through his fingertips, directly invading the assassin's mind.
"Soul Search," he muttered, forcibly extracting fragmented memories from the dying man's consciousness.
Scenes flashed before Jieming's eyes like shards of broken glass:
The grand noble estate in the royal capital, its banquet hall alive with clinking glasses and forced smiles. A group of lavishly dressed men and women, their faces masks of false courtesy, were secretly plotting.
Judging by the crests on their garments and their formal titles, these were relatives of Earl Reinhardt, Baron Fabio, and other exiled nobles.
Greed glinted in their eyes as they discussed how to "legally" inherit the titles and wealth of these exiled nobles.
This assassination squad had been dispatched by these relatives in the royal capital. After confirming the exiled nobles' movements, they had ambushed them, intending to stage an "accident" that would allow the relatives to claim the entire inheritance under the guise of legitimacy.
As the assassin breathed his last, Jieming rose to his feet, his expression impassive.
He wasn't surprised by the intelligence he had just seen; he had anticipated this possibility before leaving the city.
In fact, Jieming wasn't the only one. The moment the nobles saw the assassins, they immediately considered this scenario.
"We can't enter the city anymore! No city at all!" Earl Reinhardt grabbed Jieming's sleeve, his aged face contorted with despair, his voice trembling and hoarse. "Those jackals in the royal capital will devour us alive! They know our location, they know everything about us! We must avoid all towns and head straight for the royal capital!"
The other nobles echoed his sentiments, preferring to endure the hardships of the wilderness—sleeping under the open sky, enduring hunger and exhaustion—rather than risk stepping into another city that might be a trap.
Jieming nodded. "Then you should return first. Have the guards purchase supplies."
"Good! Good! Let's go quickly!"
The nobles hastily abandoned the chaotic scene, leaving a few stewards to negotiate with the city's nobles before retreating to their main party outside the city walls.
Forced to abandon their plans to rest and resupply in the city, the atmosphere within the noble procession grew oppressively tense.
As the first rays of dawn struggled to pierce the dense fog, Jieming's party had already ventured deep into a region where the misty wetlands met the dense forest.
The air here was oppressively humid, thick with the cloying scent of decaying leaves and damp earth, mingled with an unnervingly sweet floral fragrance that made one's stomach churn.
Towering trees with gnarled branches blotted out the sky, casting the advancing party into perpetual twilight. Only dappled patches of dim light flickered through the canopy, offering no warmth.
"Halt!" Jieming raised his hand sharply.
The party behind him froze instantly. Horses whinnied nervously, carriage wheels ground to a halt, leaving only the heavy breathing and pounding hearts of the guards to break the silence.
An inexplicable sense of dread hung in the air, as if some monstrous entity lurked behind the fog, watching them.
In that deathly still moment...
Splash!
A deafening roar shattered the silence.
The tranquil surface of the nearby swamp erupted violently, sending mud and water flying.
A colossal beast, so massive it seemed to suffocate the senses, rose from the depths like a living mountain, bursting through the water's surface!
It was a giant python!
Its dark green scales glistened with a repulsive slime, reflecting a chilling, sinister light in the dimness.
Its torso was abnormally thick, its head larger than a carriage, and its amber-colored reptilian eyes burned with bloodthirsty ferocity.
Foul-smelling saliva dripped from its fangs, corroding the ground it touched and emitting hissing white smoke.
The moment it emerged, it lunged without hesitation, its massive jaws snapping shut on the nearest noble's carriage. Its venomous fangs could tear a horse and carriage to shreds in an instant.
The guards raised their swords in terror, their bodies trembling slightly as they faced the colossal beast, feeling utterly insignificant and powerless.
Just as the giant python's massive head was about to strike the carriage, Jieming materialized beside it like a phantom.
He channeled all his strength into his right leg, focusing his entire body's power into a single point. With the force of a thunderbolt, he delivered a devastating kick to the side of the python's massive skull!
BANG!
A deafening roar erupted, like a thunderclap in the swamp.
The python's massive body convulsed violently. The impact of Jieming's kick visibly dented its thick skull.
Thick blood mixed with brain matter gushed from the wound like a fountain, staining the surrounding muddy water a horrifying crimson.
The python let out a piercing, anguished hiss, its massive body thrashing wildly, churning the swamp water into a frenzy and shaking the surrounding trees.
Its massive tail swept across the swamp like a whip, snapping trees in half with a series of sharp cracks.
Yet Jieming remained unshaken, as if glued to the giant python's body.
Giving the creature no chance to breathe, Jieming thrust both hands into the python's neck.
"Open!"
He strained with all his might, his muscles bulging, his arms swelling like steel bars.
Riiiip!
Under the horrified gazes of everyone present, Jieming tore the python's head—larger than a carriage—clean off its body!
With a gush of foul-smelling blood and viscous fluids, he then violently ripped the severed head in half.
The massive, headless corpse thrashed wildly for a moment before collapsing with a thunderous crash, sending mud and debris flying and crushing nearby bushes and trees.
The nobles and guards stood pale-faced, their eyes wide with disbelief, terror, and awe.
Just as the python's death brought a collective sigh of relief and the sense that danger had passed, Jieming's smile vanished as he turned sharply in one direction.
"Not good!" he barked. "Defense!"
Swish! Swish! Swish!
The air crackled with the sound of arrows piercing the sky.
A rapid, dense rain of arrows, glinting with cold light, streaked toward the noble carriages at the center of the procession.
"An ambush!" General Brandon roared.
Though Jieming had warned them, several unlucky nobles were shot dead on the spot.
Immediately afterward, a flurry of footsteps and bestial growls erupted from the depths of the forest.
A small elite orc squad of about fifty warriors, clad in simple yet sturdy leather armor and wielding short spears and battle axes, launched a surprise attack from the swamp's depths and the dense forest flanks, targeting the core nobles' carriages.
Unlike the wolf riders they had encountered earlier, these orcs moved with greater stealth and employed more deliberate tactics.
They bypassed the ordinary guards, focusing their assault directly on the carriages of Earl Reinhardt, Baron Fabio, and General Brandon.
"Fabio! Protect the Earl!" General Brandon bellowed, drawing his longsword and charging toward the orcs.
The guards and adventurers fought valiantly, but against this well-trained and tactically astute elite orc squad, they were quickly overwhelmed.
The tips of the orcs' spears glowed with an eerie green light. Any strike caused immediate convulsions, foaming at the mouth, and collapse.
Inside the carriages, the nobles trembled, their faces ashen with terror. Baron Fabio shrieked, "How is this possible?! How did they know our exact location? How did they know which carriages to target?!"
Earl Reinhardt gripped the carriage wall tightly, his aged face contorted with terror, his eyes gleaming with a terrifying light as he stared toward the distant royal capital.
"This can't be a coincidence... These beasts know our every move! Someone in this group is betraying us!"
Fortunately, Jieming, who had just dealt with the giant beast, had already rushed back. He instantly charged into the elite orc squad.
Boom!
With a single punch, Jieming shattered the skull of an orc vanguard attempting to leap onto the carriage. Crimson and white matter splattered across the ground.
Blood sprayed through the dense forest, limbs flew through the air, and screams and howls echoed through the trees.
In moments, Jieming had slaughtered the entire elite orc squad of over fifty warriors.
As the last orc collapsed with a snapped neck, the forest fell into an eerie silence once more.
General Brandon reacted the quickest. Ignoring his injuries, he meticulously examined the orcs.
He soon pulled a blood-soaked parchment scroll from an orc's waist.
The scroll's drawing style was unmistakably human!
It clearly marked their route and detailed subtle features of several carriages!
"This..." Earl Reinhardt's expression darkened. "There's a traitor in our ranks!"
"Damn it! Who could it be?!"
"We need to move faster! If the orcs catch up again, it'll be even worse!"
News of the traitor spread quickly through the caravan. Watching the nobles descend into chaos, Jieming leaned against a tree, arms crossed, his face impassive.
No one noticed the slight upward twitch of his lips as he glanced at the parchment scroll.
(End of the Chapter)
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