Chapter 246: Vespera’s Strength [Bonus - ]
Seeing the awkward pause, one of the two wind mages... Lyra stepped forward with a bright, eager smile, raising her hand high into the air.
"I’ll ride with you, Lord Vespera!" Lyra volunteered happily.
She ran over to Valkyrie, placing her boot on the stirrup and scrambling up onto the wolf’s broad back, settling directly behind Vespera and wrapping her arms firmly around the Lords slender waist.
Vespera turned her head slightly, offering the wind mage a grateful, warm smile. "Thank you, Lyra. Hold on tight."
"Yes, My Lord!" Lyra beamed, blushing slightly at how incredible Vespera smelled like a crisp refreshing scent of autumn rain.
Vespera turned her attention toward Tasmin, who was sitting upright and composed atop Luna’s saddle with Thora clinging to her back.
"Tasmin," Vespera commanded clearly, her raspy voice echoing across the clearing. "I need you to lead us deep into the western basin... Take us to a hunting ground where we can find high-density game... something big enough and meaty enough to feed Lord Sky’s two-hundred-man army for the night."
Tasmin’s dark eyes flashed with sharp readiness.
She gripped Luna’s leather reins firmly with her left hand, her right hand resting casually on the hilt of her shortsword.
"Don’t worry, My Lord," Tasmin answered confidently with a fearless smirk touching her lips. "I know the exact coordinates. I’ll lead the way."
Tasmin leaned forward, pressing her heels gently into the direwolf’s flanks. "Let’s run, Luna!"
HOWL!
Luna let out a piercing hunting howl that shattered the forest silence.
The massive Blessed Wolf exploded forward with terrifying acceleration with her paws tearing through the dark mud as she shot into the dense purple tree line like a silver missile.
FWOOSH!
Valkyrie surged forward a split second later, matching Luna’s supersonic pace stride for stride.
As the wind whipped violently against their faces, Lyra pressed her chest tightly against Vespera’s back, wrapping her arms securely around the Lord’s waist.
"Whoa...!" Lyra gasped out in genuine wonder with her eyes shining as she squeezed Vespera tighter. "You’re so warm, Lord Vespera! And your mount’s acceleration is incredible!"
Vespera chuckled softly over the roaring wind, keeping her single right hand steady on the harness as Valkyrie leaped effortlessly over a twenty-foot fallen log, plunging deeper into the Umbral Basin.
Right behind the two thunderous direwolves, the remaining three members of the hunting party launched into motion on foot!
Lord Sky, the demonic Hero Morrighan, and the silver-haired Demi-Human surged forward across the muddy ground, channeling their high-tier physical mana to maintain a steady high-speed dash right on the heels of the wolves.
Beside them, the second wind mage... Gale didn’t run on the ground at all.
She raised her wooden focus wand, casting an advanced aerodynamic buoyancy spell around her boots.
SWISH!
A swirling cyclone of compressed green wind wrapped around Gale’s legs, lifting her body three feet into the air.
She hovered effortlessly above the muddy roots and thorny briars, shooting forward through the forest canopy like a flying arrow, keeping perfect pace with the running direwolves and her commander.
...
As the hunting party plunged deeper and deeper into the western reaches of the Umbral Basin, the environment around them underwent a drastic chilling transformation.
’This truly is a grimy, wretched place... an absolute place of nightmares,’ Lord Sky thought grimly to himself as his mythril-reinforced boots crunched against the forest floor.
The bright scorching afternoon sunlight that had bathed the outer border clearing only ten minutes ago had completely vanished.
As they crossed an invisible regional threshold inside the basin, the dense twisted canopy of black-and-purple trees overhead thickened so violently that it blotted out the sky entirely, casting the forest floor into a perpetual suffocating twilight.
Even stranger was the sudden, violent drop in temperature.
Without warning, the humid swampy air turned freezing cold.
Thick, white snow began falling from the dark branches overhead, swirling erratically through the gloomy shadows.
Snowflakes landed on the damp mud, freezing the swampwater into jagged patches of black ice.
A freezing winter blizzard in the middle of a dark swamp forest? It was an absolute ecological contradiction that defied all standard laws of nature!
Sky pulled his tactical leather cloak tighter around his shoulders to ward off the biting chill with his eyes narrowing behind his alloy mask as he looked ahead at Vespera.
Riding atop Valkyrie’s back, Vespera looked completely relaxed, unfazed by the sudden blizzard or the terrifying dark mana hanging in the air.
Her empty left sleeve flapped wildly in the freezing wind, yet her posture remained upright and radiating rock-solid confidence.
’Does she actually handle this nightmarish environment by herself all the time?’ Sky wondered in genuine awe with his respect for the female Lord skyrocketing. ’I’ve driven my mobile fortress through dozens of changing regional weather lands during my travels across the continent... but never anything as volatile, aggressive, and hostile as this! To establish a thriving top-ranked territory in the middle of a literal frozen hell-swamp... her willpower must be made of pure iron!’
Up ahead, leading the formation atop Luna, Tasmin’s dark eyes suddenly narrowed into lethal slits.
Her sensory perception picked up a massive chaotic disturbance of mana echoing through the snowy trees just three hundred meters ahead.
"Up ahead!" Tasmin shouted over the howling blizzard, pointing her shortsword forward. "We’ve reached the hunting coordinates!"
CRASH!
The two direwolves and the four running hunters burst through a dense thicket of frozen, thorny briars, sliding to a sudden, dramatic halt at the edge of a massive, snow-covered forest clearing.
This clearing was a known established Umbral Wolf pack colony... a high-density nesting ground where dozens of Tier 2 beasts usually congregated.
Tasmin had led them here knowing that even if they slaughtered the entire colony to feed Sky’s army, the basin’s rapid respawn rate meant it wouldn’t make any permanent difference to the local ecosystem.
However... the moment their eyes swept across the snowy clearing, everyone froze in utter horror.
They didn’t need to hunt the Umbral Wolves at all as most of the entire colony was already dead.
Scattered across the frozen, blood-stained snow were the mangled, half-eaten carcasses of over thirty massive Umbral Wolves.
Their black fur was ripped to shreds with their ribcages cracked wide open, and their high-tier cores forcibly ripped from their chests!
And standing right in the dead center of the bloody carnage, feasting greedily upon the pile of dead wolves, was the colossal culprit responsible for the massacre!
It wasn’t a bear, a wolf, or a swamp reptile...
It was a gigantic bird monster!
The beast stood over twenty-five feet tall, its massive muscular avian frame covered in razor-sharp metallic feathers that gleamed like polished obsidian in the dim twilight.
Its head was a terrifying fusion of a prehistoric raptor and a demonic dragon, featuring a massive six-foot-long curved hooked beak dripping with wolf blood, and four glowing multi-faceted crimson eyes that burned with pure malice.
Sensing the arrival of intruders, the colossal bird monster violently tore its bloody beak out of a wolf carcass.
It threw its massive head back and spread its gigantic fifty-foot wingspan wide into the freezing air!
SCREEEEEECH KRRAAAAH!
The monster unleashed a deafening sonic screech that generated a visible destructive shockwave.
The sonic blast shattered the surrounding snow-covered trees, blowing away the blizzard drifts and sending freezing wind whipping violently across the clearing.
Lord Sky, Morrighan, the Demi-Human, and the two wind mages instinctively shrank back with their hands flying to cover their ears as the terrifying sonic pressure rattled their eardrums.
A crimson system inspection window violently materialized directly over the monster’s towering head, broadcasting its terrifying stats to the two Lords.
[Monster]: Abyssal Iron-Weave Roc
[Rank]: Tier 3 Mini-Boss
[Description]: A primordial avian predator native to the deepest frozen chasms of the Umbral Basin. Its entire skeletal structure and plumage are reinforced with natural iron-weave plating that completely negates low-tier elemental magic and reflects heavy physical strikes. Possesses supersonic aerial velocity and generates destructive sonic shockwaves. It is very aggressive!
"HOLY SHIT!" Lord Sky shouted over the roaring wind, his eyes wide behind his mask as he gripped his sword hilt. "That’s a mutated Tier 3 Mini-Boss! Its iron-weave feathers will bounce off standard attacks! We need to pull back immediately into the tree line to avoid losing people! Set up a defensive perimeter before it takes flight!"
Before Sky could even issue the retreat order to his team—
FWOOSH!
Valkyrie didn’t retreat an inch.
With a ferocious growl, the Blessed Wolf exploded forward, launching herself straight into the clearing toward the twenty-five-foot tall apex monster.
As Valkyrie leaped into the air, Vespera reached behind her waist with her single right hand, firmly grabbing Lyra’s leather belt.
"Whoa—?!" Lyra yelped in surprise.
With a smooth, effortless flex of her strength, Vespera gently detached the wind mage from her back, tossing Lyra safely through the air to land softly in a snowdrift right beside Lord Sky and Tasmin.
"Don’t worry about retreating, Lord Sky!" Vespera called out over her shoulder, her voice ringing with bone-chilling confidence as her purple eyes locked onto the towering bird monster. "I’ll handle this one myself!"
SLIDE... CLANG!
While still riding atop the charging direwolf, Vespera reached down to her hip with her single right hand, drawing her Tier 2 silver longsword from its sheath.
The polished steel blade flashed under the twilight sky.
The Abyssal Iron-Weave Roc locked its four glowing crimson eyes onto the charging woman, opening its massive hooked beak to unleash another lethal sonic blast.
SCREEE!
Vespera didn’t wait for the soundwave to hit her.
When Valkyrie reached the edge of the blood-stained crater, Vespera planted her right boot firmly against the wolf’s saddle and vaulted straight into the freezing air.
She launched herself fifteen feet high, soaring directly toward the monster’s gaping beak.
Inside her mind, Silas was grinning with ecstatic excitement.
’Heh... This is the perfect time to test out one of those batch-upgraded Tier 3 elemental spell scrolls I upgraded!’ Silas cheered internally, channeling his mana reserves directly into his single right arm! ’Let’s see what a Tier 3 Wind destruction spell looks like in action! Hehe~!’
While suspended mid-air in front of the towering Mini-Boss, Vespera raised her one-handed longsword high above her head!
Her glowing purple eyes flared with blinding emerald-green wind magic and the atmospheric pressure inside the clearing collapsed instantly as thousands of cubic feet of air were violently sucked directly into the flat of her silver blade!
"Cyclone... Slipstream!"
BOOOOOM KRA-THOOM!
The moment Vespera swung her longsword downward, a cataclysmic compressed hurricane of emerald wind erupted from the steel edge.
It wasn’t just a simple wind slash... the spell generated a vacuum slipstream that warped space itself as the air molecules compressed into a spinning microscopic razor blade running at Mach 5 velocity.
The glowing emerald cyclone shot forward, bypassing the monster’s hyper-dense iron-weave feathers by cutting directly through the molecular space between the plates.
SLICK!
There was no sound of clashing metal and there was no explosion of sparks.
The [Cyclone Slipstream] sliced cleanly through the twenty-five-foot-tall Abyssal Iron-Weave Roc from the top of its skull straight down to the base of its claws in less than a tenth of a millisecond.
For one silent heartbeat, the massive bird monster stood completely frozen in the snow.
Then...
SPLIT... CRASH!
The entire twenty-five-foot-tall Tier 3 Mini-Boss cleanly split into two exact vertical halves.
A massive fountain of boiling hot bird blood, steaming internal organs, and hundreds of pounds of dense prime avian meat erupted violently into the freezing air, raining down over the snowy clearing like a crimson shower.
FLap... THUD!
Vespera landed lightly on her boots in the center of the clearing with her single right arm holding the longsword extended to her side.
Around her, a lingering, swirling emerald vortex of [Cyclone Slipstream] wind continued to orbit her body like a protective planetary shield.
As the massive shower of blood, guts, and heavy bird meat rained down from the sky, the spinning wind vortex cleanly deflected every single drop and carcass away from her.
SPLAT! PLOP! THUD!
Hundreds of pounds of prime high-tier meat and organs crashed heavily into the snow all around her in a neat ten-foot circle, leaving Vespera’s black button-down shirt, her trousers, and her long black hair completely spotless, untouched by a single speck of blood or grime!
She slowly straightened her posture, flipping her sword with a stylish spin before sheathing it.
SHLICK!
The blizzard wind died down as total silence gripped the forest clearing.
Lord Sky, Morrighan, the Demi-Human, the two wind mages, and the entire live-stream broadcast sitting at thirty million concurrent viewers were frozen in mind-shattering shock!
She had just one-shot a Tier 3 mutated Mini-Boss with a single one-handed sword swing?!
Vespera turned around, stepping over a massive steaming six-hundred-pound bird thigh resting in the snow.
She looked across the clearing at Lord Sky’s frozen masked face, her deep purple eyes twinkling with a cheerful hospitable smile.
"So, Lord Sky..." Vespera asked lightly, gesturing toward the mountains of fresh, steaming poultry piled across the snow. "Do you and your troops like bird meat? Or should we go hunt some more wolves to add variety to the stew?"