273 The Archer
“Houhko tomo lak!?” One Orc said to the other.
The other Orc understood everything the other said, after all, that was their language. “Goka-nomi y boda.”
“HAHAHAHA!”
These two were the last Orc’s in that group of ten monsters who were in the courtyard of the snowy village. They were not paying attention to what the person in front was saying, as they could hardly hear her.
“Hey, you two there! What are you laughing at!?” The man walked through the Orc’s to these last two. “You do know that this is very important here, don’t you? You are part of the first attack on a major city, so you need to pay attention!”
The man’s stern tone didn’t even come close to being enough to make the Orc’s intimidated.
Seeing that he had no choice, the man with the black overcoat, white hair, black eyes, and flaky skin simply gave up being peaceful. A shadow appeared over his gaze, and he slowly raised his right hand. In the same minute, the Orcs stopped laughing, because they felt that something had changed. They looked at their right hand, and saw it slowly rise, until suddenly they punched themselves.
“Don’t forget that I still have control over your bodies.” The man spoke, and the two Orc’s fell knocked out as he turned on his back. “Now all listen well, when your brothers arrive, we can no longer rest, we will descend the mountains and enter the forests of Broteforge.”
Watching this scene from afar, and from a slightly higher place, Meredith was a little surprised by the power of the white-haired man, but she did not hesitate in what she had to do.
The half-fox summoned her Arch of Panspermia, a gift given by Ayumi Yamazaki for her bravery in wanting to accompany Luke.
‘I almost forgot how light that bow is.’ She thought.
Meredith used bows a few times during her childhood and adolescence, mostly when Luke was teaching her to hunt and use her instincts. However, the time she spent with Yoelona was when she began to learn the basic fundamentals as well as the art of archery.
After summoning the bow, she positioned it in front of her breasts, using her left arm to hold it. With her right hand she pulled an arrow from a small sheath in her pants, and placed it on the string. Then she sighed deeply, aimed at her target once more, tensed the bowstring as much as she could, and finally shot the arrow.
The loud sound of the gale obscured the whirring of the arrow, and that same gale caused a disturbance in the arrow’s course that Meredith had not expected, because she was not used to shooting in such extreme environments. Because of this disruption, the arrow did not hit the skull of the first Orc as the half-fox had intended, but rather the back of the Orc.
The monster didn’t even feel pain when the arrow dug deep into his skin, for that reason also he didn’t react.
‘Shit, this wind makes everything even colder and on top of that it hinders my attack…. Lucky for me the freak isn’t feeling the arrow, so I can try one more time. Luke, rest assured, this time you’ll get the signal you’ve been waiting for. Meredith spoke internally.
The half-fox this time took two arrows and put them in the string. She was still not confident that she could fight the wind being so inexperienced, however, she had an idea in her mind. As she positioned the arrows, she sighed deeply once again, as if her life was depending on it, and shot the two arrows at the same time.
Something different happened the moment the two arrows were launched. One was faster than the other, and the arrow that was lagging behind began to be pulled by the first arrow.
A little way off, Luke noticed that the second arrow lined up with the first, as if it was following the same route.
So when the first arrow felt the wind disturbance and changed course, the second arrow was protected from this by being in the vacuum of the first, and when this vacuum was broken, the second arrow started its ignition point again, getting even faster.
The first arrow hit one of the shoulders of the last Orc in the row, who already had an arrow stuck in his back. The second arrow hit his skull with such a high speed that it went through him like it was nothing.
‘Yesss! I got it right!’ Meredith celebrated that her idea had worked out better than she had expected.
Hearing the gooey noise, and the thud of the Orc on his back, the white-haired man turned back. At first he thought that maybe the monster had fainted from sleep, after all, Orc’s did that sometimes. Still, the pool of blood quickly generated by the open skull made him realize that it wasn’t just a nap.
“GET READY! WE ARE UNDER ATTACK!” he shouted, and immediately began to look around for the person who had shot the arrows that were in the back and skull of the dead Orc.
His eyes danced across the pure white of the outskirts of the settlement, and all he found was snow and more snow. The snowflakes were blown by the intense wind that cut through the mountain ranges, and this created something like a mist, but made only of pure cold. Thanks to this mist, anyone’s vision was made at least ten times more difficult.
The man did not give up when he did not find the archer within the first second. He raised his right hand, causing four of the Orcs to stop acting confused and form a shield around him. In this way, he was able to keep holding on while searching for the archer.
However, killing the scaly-skinned man was not Meredith’s goal. She just wanted to attract attention, and to achieve this she shot another arrow, revealing her position.
As the arrow was shot, a unique glow appeared in the midst of the flakes, and it flew across the courtyard at top speed until it stopped at the chest of one of the Orcs protecting the man.
Upon seeing this glow, the man gathered all the focus and hatred he had, ordering the monsters to attack anyone who was in the direction from which the arrow came.
This was the opportunity Luke had been waiting for, as the Orc’s moved away from the man, he had his chance to act. From a building near the courtyard, the half-wolf whispered low:
“<Yggdrasil>.”
A thirty-foot tree blew the roof off the building, and the roots tore through the courtyard. Luke was mastering this powerful ability more and more each day, and each day his power grew greater.