Chapter 49
When Arraelia cast a meaningful glance, Jade turned toward the children and said.
He understood that they were fascinated by the elf’s appearance, but this was practically a wartime situation.
With war just around the corner, Jade looked sternly at the ten children one after another.
Everyone then focused on their training again.
“Is Lord Jade teaching them personally?”
“Yes. I’m trying to make up for our lack of troops with spirit mages.”
“I think I overheard that you were short on knights.”
“That’s why I’m considering spirit knights. Fortunately, spirit mages don’t suffer mana backlash the way mages do.”
“Indeed. Above all, there’s already a clear precedent.”
Arraelia nodded.
Jade, who was right beside her, was a high-level spirit mage with skills rivaling those of a knight.
“Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone can do it just by working hard.”
“I think you could do it, Lord Jade. Because you’re Lord Jade, not just anyone else.”
Arraelia looked at Jade with warm eyes.
The kind of gaze that was unbearably difficult to meet.
So he quietly turned his head away.
“All right, everyone, focus! Keep giving instructions to your contracted spirits so they can carry out your commands perfectly!”
“Yes!”
A contract with a spirit was only the beginning.
What mattered was how one handled the contracted spirit.
Even spirits of the same rank could display vastly different power depending on the spirit mage’s ability, so Jade paid particular attention to this point.
But that did not mean he taught them by rote.
He believed that, like magic, spirit arts were a field in which creativity was extremely important.
“Oh?”
Arraelia watched Jade with interest.
She, too, had a great deal to learn from this new approach.
So at some point, she began silently attending Jade’s lessons as well.
A silver-haired man appeared on a hill overlooking both Baden Village and the beastkin village.
He had revealed himself at some point without making a sound.
Ten middle-aged men who appeared to be guards stood beside him, and every one of them had a murderous air about them.
Their eyes glinted with vicious killing intent.
“Are they all gathered there?”
“Yes. They say the Elephant Tribe, along with the Tiger, Lion, Fox, and Monkey Tribes, have gathered there.”
“When I told them to come under my command, they wouldn’t even listen. And the best they could do was choose a human?”
The silver-haired man let out a derisive chuckle.
He wondered if the pride they had shouted about so fervently amounted to so little.
At the same time, his pride had been wounded.
The fact that they had clung to nothing more than a human had offended him.
“As the Lord said, I don’t think they’re worth keeping alive.”
“They want to die like cowards, so we should oblige them, shouldn’t we?”
“That’s right.”
“Begin.”
“Yes.”
The black-haired middle-aged man who had answered vanished like the wind.
He had gone to deliver the man’s command.
Soon, the entire forest began to stir.
The wolfkin warriors waiting nearby all began to move at once.
“Today, I will unify all the beastkin and become the king of the western forest. And before long, I will take the Great Forest in my grasp as well.”
The silver-haired man spoke as if proclaiming his destiny.
After awakening the power of the legendary Silver Tribe, he had conceived an ambition.
He dreamed of becoming the first to unify the beastkin and then rule the Great Forest.
Of course, the Great Forest was home to countless top-tier monsters, including drakes, but he was confident.
He believed that if he advanced one step at a time, he would eventually be able to rule the Great Forest.
That beginning was now.
“It will surely happen as the Lord wishes.”
“Sweep them all away. They will serve as an example of what happens to those who refuse to follow me.”
“Yes!”
Fwoosh!
No sooner had the man finished speaking than beastified werewolves appeared.
In an instant, an enormous number of them blackened the forest as they charged down the mountain all at once.
Their numbers seemed endless.
The sight brought a bloodthirsty smile to the silver-haired man’s lips.
“Kwoeok!”
But then the werewolves charging at the front sank into the ground.
They had fallen into traps prepared by the beastkin alliance.
“A futile effort.”
The agonized screams revealed that these were no ordinary traps, but the silver-haired man did not even blink.
A few traps were not enough to stop his army.
Thud thud thud!
As if to prove it, the werewolves covered the traps in an instant.
They simply overwhelmed them with their sheer numbers.
Ssssss!
“Hm?”
As he watched the wolfkin cover the area through overwhelming numbers, the silver-haired man noticed something strange.
Hundreds of pale, indistinct objects had appeared before a shallow rampart that should have been meaningless to the wolfkin.
At the same time, the atmosphere changed completely.
Step. Step.
Despite the heavy tension pressing down on everything before the battle, Jade’s footsteps were exactly as they always were.
He walked calmly toward the place where Pent and the other leaders had gathered, showing no particular sign of tension.
Arraelia was walking beside him.
“Lord Jade.”
At the sound of someone approaching, Pent turned from the wolfkin racing madly across the ground and blackening it.
He recognized the familiar presence without even needing to look.
“I was worried that the traps might not do their job, but fortunately, they came at us with a human-wave attack just as expected.”
“There are so many of them that it doesn’t look like they’ve suffered much damage to the naked eye.”
“That was expected, wasn’t it? We prepared thoroughly, but there are simply too many of them.”
The traps they had made together with the Monkey Tribe, renowned for their dexterity, were no ordinary traps.
They were not only deep, but also filled with fragments of old spears and swords, along with poison.
Even so, the wolfkin’s advance did not slow down in the slightest.
There were simply so many of them that they were forcing their way forward through sheer numbers.
“We’re ready.”
“So are we.”
Although the wolfkin were pouring out of the mountains and forest, the beastkin had not advanced because of Jade’s orders.
He had told them to wait no matter what until he arrived, so they merely burned with fighting spirit without rashly responding.
“We’ll charge after my attack is over.”
“Understood.”
Jade glanced over the chiefs who answered in unison and turned his head.
He saw thousands of werewolves charging recklessly toward them with savage howls.
Every one of them made no effort to hide their fierce cries or killing intent.
“Sylph.”
Looking at them with indifferent eyes, Jade summoned sylphs.
He had summoned low-grade sylphs—not even intermediate wind spirits.
At his words, Arraelia and the chiefs all wore bewildered expressions.
But when they saw the swarm of sylphs appearing in the air, their mouths fell open.
“Huh!”
Seeing the swarm of sylphs filling the air around Jade, Arraelia let out an involuntary hollow laugh.
Even she, an elf, had never seen so many sylphs before.
But at the same time, Arraelia was puzzled.
There were certainly a lot of them, but she wondered if there was really any need to summon sylphs specifically.
Werewolves possessed considerable magic resistance by nature, so an attack from sylphs would have no effect.
However, at the scene that followed, Arraelia’s eyes widened until they could widen no further.
“Form Transformation (形態變換). Rotation (回轉). Launch (出).”
Screeeech!
The nearly one thousand sylphs all transformed into arrowheads and spun at terrifying speed.
He had gone beyond merely changing their forms and added rotational force as well.
Jade then fired them straight at the werewolves.
Thud-thud-thud-thud!
Nearly a thousand sylphs bombarded the werewolves charging at the front.
But as Arraelia had expected, the damage was not particularly great.
No matter how impressive Jade’s technique was, the destructive power inherent in low-grade spirits had clear limits.
Of course, werewolves unlucky enough to be struck in the eyes died instantly, but there weren’t many of them.
“Kraaaah!”
Most of them merely found it irritating.
It hurt, but it was not enough to inflict a fatal wound.
But that was not the end of Jade’s attack.
“Salamander. Form Transformation. Launch.”
No sooner had the sylphs finished their bombardment than Jade summoned salamanders.
Once again, nearly a thousand salamanders were summoned.
Then a wave of fire rose.
Rather than simply breathing fire, the thousand salamanders merged into a single entity and created a massive wave of flames.
‘But that alone isn’t enough. What is he thinking?’
Arraelia, watching Jade from beside him, furrowed her brow.
There was no doubt that the technique and control Jade was displaying were at an astonishing level.
So much so that even she, an elf, could not imagine trying to imitate him.
However, although it might look spectacular on the surface, its power was not as impressive as its appearance suggested.
With the mana required to summon that many sylphs and salamanders, it would have been better to summon one or two high-level spirits instead.
Jade surely knew that as well, yet Arraelia could not understand why he was summoning them like this.
Whoooosh!
As her doubts grew deeper, a change took place on the battlefield.
The sylphs that had transformed into arrowheads and bombarded the werewolves while spinning all began forming a single current.
The salamanders’ wave of flames joined it.
Rumble!
Flames overlaid the vortex created by a thousand sylphs.
The vortex then doubled in both size and power.
The enormous vortex mercilessly swallowed the werewolves.
“Aaaagh!”
The werewolves sucked into the vortex were shredded not only by the flames, but also by the terrifying pressure of the wind.
They smashed into one another and were pulverized by the monstrous rotational force.
“Scatter! Get as far away from the vortex as possible!”
“Get out of my way, bastard!”
Seeing dozens of their kin swallowed at once, the werewolves scattered as if their frenzy had never existed.
Terrified by the attack, which was practically a calamity, they fled in every direction.
Arraelia, the chiefs, and all the domain soldiers waiting nearby wore the exact same expression at the sight.
They had been stunned speechless by the incredible spectacle.
-Wahaha! So this is the power of a wind spirit!
-Rather than that, Jade simply handled them very well.
Meanwhile, Celestin and Elestra watched the battlefield as if it were only natural.
This much was merely the basics for Jade.
Kkyuuu! Kkyuuu!
Whid also looked extremely excited, perhaps because he had never seen such a large-scale attack before.
He even wiggled his rear as if he wanted to fight too.
“Attack!”
“The time for revenge has come! Kill them all!”
“Kheong-heong-heong!”
Pent, who had briefly lost himself in the face of the fearsome spirit arts, suddenly came to his senses and shouted.
Raul and Tyler roared and charged out after him.
With the werewolves’ morale thoroughly broken, they charged at them, unleashing all the killing intent they had suppressed until now.
“We’re going too!”
“Kill every last one of them!”
Moike and Fenil also led the Monkey and Fox Tribes into the battlefield.
The Monkey Tribe’s numbers were especially enormous.
Several times more numerous than the other four tribes combined, the Monkey Tribe’s members all beastified at once and descended upon the werewolves.
“We can’t lose either. Right, Noim?”
Thud-thud-thud-thud!
Arraelia joined the battle as well.
She summoned Noim, an intermediate earth spirit, and attacked the feet of the werewolves who had yet to recover their senses.
But the real attack was still to come.
“Undine.”
An intermediate water spirit in the form of a mermaid appeared on the battlefield.
Jade dismissed Noim and summoned Undine instead.
But no sooner had Undine been summoned than its form gradually turned red.
Rooooar!