Chapter 779: Kill Them
The Grand Elder of the Dark Elves remained composed, raising a hand to signal. Instantly, furious roars erupted throughout the Dark Elf Enclave.
"Engage!"
Six piercing signal arrows shot into the sky in quick succession, their shrill alarms echoing across the entire Dark Elf Enclave.
Leon Merlin’s heart skipped a beat. He hurriedly flew into the air to survey the situation.
From above, he saw that the Dark Elf Enclave was already surrounded by a massive horde of Ashen Orcs. Instinctively, Leon glanced toward Guridan, chieftain of the Ashen Orc Tribe, but the three Sky Rank powerhouses merely wore grim expressions, showing no reaction.
Even Gary made no move to accuse Guridan. He simply walked to the grand hall’s entrance, his gaze fixed outside the enclave.
Leon scrutinized the scene and immediately noticed something different about these Ashen Orcs.
These Ashen Orcs were unlike the usual ones. Every single one wore crude black iron armor—heavy, rough, and constantly emitting wisps of black smoke. A shroud of black mist swirled around their bodies, distinct from the thick abyssal fumes; it was faint, yet somehow unfathomable.
What’s more, every Ashen Orc’s eyes glowed with a chilling blue light. Whether knight or warlock, their eyes had turned an icy blue, radiating a cold that sent shivers down the spine. Even the dire wolves ridden by the Ashen Orc Wolf Riders now had eyes that shifted from green to ghostly blue.
Once the Ashen Orcs encircled the Dark Elf Enclave, they launched a frenzied assault. The orc thralls whose eyes had turned blue and whose bodies were shrouded in black mist charged recklessly, heedless of the enclave’s defenses.
Leon frowned slightly, unable to help recalling the Forgefire Dwarves he’d encountered before. Those dwarves, once easy to communicate with, had become a horde of destruction-driven madmen—eerily similar to the Ashen Orcs before him.
It seemed as though some sinister force had affected them all. Last time, Leon hadn’t had the chance to observe closely, but now he realized that not only the Forgefire Dwarves, but also so many Ashen Orcs had fallen under its sway.
The Ashen Orcs were utterly crazed, willing to throw away their lives just to breach the Dark Elf Enclave.
At the front, not only were the thrall orcs wielding crude weapons, but also elite Ashen Orc warriors in armor, brandishing massive weapons. Together, they charged relentlessly with the slaves.
The War Ancient Oaks, reawakened for defense, all roused to life. They formed the first line of resistance against the rampaging Ashen Orcs.
Hundreds of War Ancient Oaks and Thorn Guardian Trees shaped their branches into gigantic hands. Each swing of a ten-meter-long arm sent a dozen or so orc thralls flying skyward; many had their bones shattered and died before even hitting the ground.
Further back, the War Ancient Oaks plucked enormous fruits from their branches and hurled them mercilessly at the Ashen Orcs’ charging ranks.
Each fruit was over a meter wide, its green skin gleaming with a metallic sheen. Under the War Ancient Oaks’ immense strength, they flew at terrifying speed—exploding on impact within the Ashen Orc ranks, coating the ground in sticky, burning azure-green sap.
A single fruit could crush four or five orc thralls to death, and the burning sap that splattered from the explosion ignited everything within a dozen meters.
Leon’s brow furrowed. Things weren’t looking good.
The War Ancient Oaks were now hurling those sticky, fuel-laden azure-green fruits—signaling that they had entered a phase of all-out counterattack. If the defense could hold, they would never resort to this move; those burning fruits were limited in number, and only overwhelming pressure would force their use.
One after another, the azure-green burning fruits were hurled, turning the battlefield ahead into a sea of fire. For a moment, the Ashen Orcs’ assault was slowed, but the effect was already waning.
The orc thralls cared nothing for life or death. Howling, they charged into the flames, their bodies drenched in sticky burning fuel and set ablaze. Yet even as they screamed in agony, they pressed forward, their eyes void of reason, filled only with a crazed lust for slaughter.
At the rear of the Ashen Orcs, endless clouds of smoke billowed forth. Demon warlocks, their eyes aglow with blue light, stood grinning wickedly as the stench of the abyss spread—black smoke swirling, the acrid scent of sulfur detectable even a thousand meters away.
Magical runes lit up one after another across the demon warlocks’ bodies. Instantly, countless streams of black smoke surged skyward, converging into a colossal vortex, forty or fifty meters across.
The churning black smoke twisted and roiled. At the heart of the vortex, a membrane of shadow appeared, and in that moment, abyssal energy erupted from the swirling maelstrom like a geyser.
Alongside the thick abyssal fumes, spheres cloaked in swirling black smoke plummeted toward the ground.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
A string of muffled impacts resounded as the black smoke cleared, revealing sinister water elementals, their bodies composed of swirling black-blue liquid. As they emerged, the air temperature plummeted.
A layer of frost spread across the ground from the bodies of these evil water elementals, instantly extinguishing vast swathes of the burning sea created by the War Ancient Oaks.
As jets of black water sprayed forth, the sticky fuel on the ground was forcibly frozen—even the burning orc thralls were turned into blocks of ice.
But the orc thralls behind cared nothing for their frozen kin. In their violent charge, every iced-over thrall was shattered into fragments...
The demon warlocks, working in concert, unleashed a mass summoning spell—calling forth a horde of sinister water elementals. The War Ancient Oaks’ resistance began to falter.
Thousands of orc thralls and Ashen Orc warriors surged to the front, swarming the War Ancient Oaks. For every dozen flung aside, another thirty or forty charged forward to take their place.
The crazed orc thralls swung their crude weapons at the War Ancient Oaks, howling as they hacked at the branches. Their strength, however, couldn’t even dent the trees’ bark. Soon, scores of Ashen Orc warriors began climbing onto the branches, their axes hacking away at swathes of leaves and limbs.
Under the effect of the Thorn Aura, every orc thrall attacking the War Ancient Oaks was left battered and bleeding; nearly half had already been gravely wounded by the reflected damage.
Blood only drove the frenzied Ashen Orcs onward; like a swarm of locusts, they surged forward relentlessly.
In less than half a minute, the front line of War Ancient Oaks had collapsed. Over a dozen towering trees were stripped bare—nothing left but their trunks, not a single branch remaining. Though they would not die quickly, they had lost all power to defend or retaliate...