Chapter Seventy-Eight: Guarding Against Attack
The Lizardmen were completely stunned. They now resembled the initial ambushed human villagers, with warriors inside the village being slaughtered in batches, while the remaining old, weak, women, and children let out a chorus of terrified wails. Some of the Lizardmen, driven by animalistic urges, recklessly rushed in, but before they could get close, they were shot down by crossbow bolts halfway. The White Horse Guards were a well-trained regular army; although their profession levels might not be very high and they could not stand up to adversaries of the same rank in a one-on-one fight, their strength multiplied when formed into a long-trained battle array.
It was conservatively estimated that over 100 warriors were using shield and shortsword in defensive counterattacks, advancing bit by bit through the village. Behind them, the dispersed light infantry dealt with the few Lizardmen that managed to escape, killing all the old, weak, women, and children without any shred of mercy. Just like how the Lizardmen showed no sympathy for human women and children when they first ambushed, inter-species wars did not allow for any compassion, even though mass killings among kin might spare the old, weak, and children.
If these Lizardmen children were not killed, they would grow up harboring hatred. If those women and children were not exterminated, they would only produce more offspring.
The clash between ethnic groups was a competition for living space. Humans in this world were nowhere near as strong as they imagined; they still retained the primitive tradition of dealing with foreign creatures by killing them as much as possible, driving them away from human settlements, instilling fear of retribution should they attempt to ambush ordinary people. Otherwise, villages on the outskirts of White Horse City would struggle to survive, constantly facing incursions from other monsters.
After all, humans are the wisest beings in this world that excel in cultivating food!
………………
Soren and Yas circled around to the back of the village.
Unexpectedly, they did not find the leader of the Lizardmen. Soren suddenly recalled the Druid he had taken down; could it be that the fallen Druid was the leader of this group of Lizardmen?
This was highly likely, as the status of spellcasters was quite high.
If that fallen Druid, the Withering One, was indeed the leader, then it was very possible that the group of Lizardmen had not yet chosen a new leader, because without a powerful spellcaster to suppress them, their clan would go through a contest of kin for the leadership, eventually being inherited by the strongest and smartest one.
“This way!” Yas’s search skill seemed quite high. Although there was no leader for them to ambush, he found the leader’s house.
Soren silently followed him in, using his curved blade to slit the throat of a Lizardman. Inside the room, they discovered a chest filled with various coins of differing value, along with some emerald jewels; these were the spoils obtained by the Lizardmen from attacking other creatures. They rarely had channels to spend these items, so they often stored them up, and occasionally, some daring merchants would trade with them—if they were not afraid of being swallowed whole.
Yas opened the chest, took a glance, and quietly signaled to Soren behind him, saying in a low voice, “Half for each.”
Soren nodded, taking out the items. The two quickly split the loot, placing the treasures into their dimensional bags. The battle was led by the White Horse Guards, who did not take everything for themselves; they only shared the most valuable items inside and casually took some less valuable ones. Adventurers are naturally more greedy, so they equally divided the most valuable gems and Gind, leaving some Silver along with a few random things.
As for the White Horse Guards cleaning up the battlefield later, they would only think that these Lizardmen were quite poor.
There were still other places where they could scrounge up some valuable items. Both of them managed to acquire a fair amount of good items. While there were no extraordinary items, splitting the haul meant each of them walked away with three to five hundred Gind. Perhaps due to having shared the spoils, both smiled at each other after collecting the items, feeling a bit closer in relation.
They circled back from the other side and began hunting Lizardmen in a show of bravado, though they did not join the main battlefield.
Soren was gaining Killing Experience by clearing out the Lizardmen while observing the combat style of the White Horse Guards. Half of them mastered defensive warrior specialties, a more advanced counter-attack technique, using shields to block while also launching thrusting counterattacks with medium weapons. If the trained techniques were executed properly, they could also use long weapons for counterattacks, similar to Captain Hanks, who was fully armored.
Soren shot down the scattering Lizardmen one by one. The Killing Experience from ordinary Lizardmen was not high; the adults only gave around a hundred points, while the old, weak, and children merely provided thirty to fifty points. However, he showed no mercy whatsoever; those Lizardmen had slaughtered human women, children, and infants right before him, so how could he possibly feel compassion for these monsters? In a short while, more than ten had died under his hands. The fighting ahead was about to end, and some of the Lizardmen warriors were surrendering out of despair, but the White Horse Guards had no intention of capturing prisoners; they simply pierced their hearts with shortswords.
Near the seaside area, some popular arenas might need such captive slaves, but over here in White Horse City, there wasn’t such a tradition, and dealing with foreign captives usually meant killing them outright. White Horse City was a relatively ancient human city and had managed to maintain its existence surrounded by various races, retaining many important traditions.
It took less than half an hour to defeat the Lizardmen, but it took a long time to clean up the battlefield.
Although most of the advanced Lizardmen warriors were killed, many still successfully escaped, leaving behind over two hundred Lizardmen corpses on the ground; roughly a third of the Lizardmen had fled the village. After such a painful lesson, they would likely take at least three to five years to recover, and even if they launched attacks in the future, it would only be small-scale ambushes.
“Captain!” One of the White Horse Guards kicked open a barn door and shouted, “There’s a barn here!”
Hanks pulled out his bloodied longsword, walked over, and said, “They must have recently attacked human villages. These guys moved into the wilderness to escape taxes, but in doing so, have lost their lives here.”
“How foolish!”
Clearly, he already believed the original villagers had been slaughtered by the Lizardmen and were even digested inside them.
The barn contained quite a bit of grain; if they had moved in advance, it was unlikely they would have left so much food behind. It seemed that after Soren left, those villagers had either hastily evacuated or had been killed by the Lizardmen. He felt the first possibility was more likely; they wouldn’t have stayed after being attacked, perhaps fleeing in such haste that they couldn’t take everything with them. If that were the case, the Lizardmen launched a second attack before the villagers could leave.
That night, the Lizardmen were repelled by spells, but their true strength was still largely intact.
Looking at the corpses on the ground, it was clear that these Lizardmen still had at least one or two hundred warriors left to fight.
There were distant sounds of slaughter still echoing.
The White Horse Guards split into teams of three to scour the battlefield, mainly to avoid getting ambushed. Their combat tradition was to leave one person as a guard.
The wizard had already put away the stone golem at some point; such alchemical constructs consumed an astonishing amount of energy and were rarely used as regular combat forces outside the Wizard Tower. If moving an army was burning money, then moving a golem was burning gemstones; their operational principles were based on equivalent exchange alchemy. Due to the loss of certain advanced magical energy techniques, the golems remained in a state of dormancy most of the time.
Soldiers gathered spoils from various locations; according to army protocol, they secretly kept half of the spoils while the other half presented would be rewarded to them after the end. Hanks allocated the spoils to Soren, Yas, and the gray-robed wizard, and none of them refused, naturally accepting their shares. They then distributed the miscellaneous items; each soldier received a decent profit, which counted as spoils beyond their military pay.
A string of data floated before Soren’s eyes:
“Battle Ended.”
“Your skills improved during the battle! … You learned some techniques from others’ fights! …”
“Block +5, Parry +1.”
“You have gained a faint understanding of combat specialties! …”
………………
He actually received a prompt about combat specialties?
Soren was quite surprised and paused for a moment; although it was a relatively basic defensive specialty, it shouldn’t have been so easy to receive the prompt.
Could it be because of Photographic Memory?
Soren tried to recall and realized that he had indeed remembered the defensive counterattack techniques of those warriors.
It was a basic specialty that could be trained through conventional means, serving the function of defensive counterattacks by using moments of parrying and blocking to divert the opponent’s attack in a manner similar to using strength to deflect force, then simultaneously launching a counterattack. This specialty had prerequisites for blocking and parrying; without over 100 points in those, one wouldn’t get the information prompt to train it out. Because even if you remembered the combat techniques, lacking the corresponding blocking and parrying abilities would hinder comprehension.
There were similar specialties, with even higher requirements for parrying, needing above 150 points in parrying skill.
“Where is there still time to practice parrying? We’ll have to wait for another opportunity in the future.” Soren glanced at others, nodded toward Yas not far away, and the two nonchalantly began to return.
They were likely to approach the Ogre’s territory by tomorrow.
The battles in the plains were crucial; only by driving out these Ogres could the trade routes of White Horse City be opened.
A frontal showdown.
These adventurers were also there to support the army in battle.
………………
