I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1413: Mockery [Part 2]

’They’re not stopping. The arrows aren’t stopping.’

Pyrrhus watched an arrow bury itself in a soldier’s chest, pass through, emerge from his back trailing red mist, and continue into the man behind him. When that man fell, the arrow pulled itself free, hung in the air for a fraction of a breath, and drove itself into a third soldier who had been trying to crawl away.

These were not arrows. These were hounds!

”Retaliate! Archers, return fire! Target the ridge!”

The Imperial archers who were still alive nocked and fired upward. Their arrows flew true, climbing toward the figures on the ridge. Pyrrhus watched them rise, expecting to see the enemy scatter or shield.

The arrows slowed.

About twenty meters from the archers on the ridge, every Imperial arrow began to drag as though the air had thickened into mud. They lost speed, lost trajectory, tumbled, and fell short. Some barely reached the lip of the canyon before clattering uselessly against stone.

Pyrrhus stared.

Something around each archer was bending the air. A field, invisible but present, that pulled at anything coming toward them. Their own arrows flew out of it freely, but anything coming in lost a fifth of its momentum. For arrows fired uphill, against gravity, into wind, that twenty percent was the difference between a kill shot and a stone’s throw.

’We can’t hit them. We can’t reach them. We can’t even get close.’

”Charge the ridge! Get up there and kill them with blades!”

Soldiers broke from the column and scrambled up the canyon walls. The stone was rough enough for handholds, and Imperial soldiers were trained for difficult terrain. A hundred men began climbing on both sides, hauling themselves upward with desperate strength.

The archers above didn’t retreat. They didn’t even look concerned.

They simply angled their bows downward at the climbers and drew.

The arrows that struck the climbing soldiers didn’t just kill them. The multiplied shafts hit in clusters, and the force of the impact tore men from the canyon wall and sent them tumbling back down into the column below. Bodies fell on bodies. Soldiers who had been climbing were crushed by soldiers who had been shot off the wall above them.

One archer, a man who stood slightly apart from the others on the eastern ridge, fired differently from the rest. He didn’t draw across multiple strings. He drew a single arrow across a single string, took aim, and fired with a precision that made Pyrrhus’s blood go cold.

The arrow split into one.

One arrow. One target. A Blue Orchid cavalryman who had been trying to organize a mounted charge toward the canyon’s exit.

The arrow struck him in the chest and the force of it lifted him off his horse and carried him fifteen meters backward into the ranks behind him.

The man on the ridge drew again with the same calm efficiency, firing into the chaos below as though he were picking targets at a range. There was no urgency in his movements. No fear. Each draw was measured, each release clean, and each arrow ended a soldier with mechanical certainty.

’That one. He’s the leader.’

Pyrrhus could see it in his posture, the way the others oriented around him, the way his positioning on the ridge gave him a commanding view of the entire kill zone. A man who fought like he was solving a problem rather than waging a war.

But knowing who the leader was changed nothing. Pyrrhus couldn’t reach him. Couldn’t hit him. The field around the man ate the speed of everything thrown at him, and the canyon walls were a graveyard for anyone trying to climb.

A cluster of soldiers managed to reach the western ridge. Ten men pulled themselves over the lip, swords drawn, and charged the nearest archer.

The archer swung the lower limb of his bow in a horizontal arc.

An essence sweep erupted from the crescent edge, a wave of cutting force that scythed across all ten soldiers simultaneously. Three were bisected. Four were thrown from the ridge. The remaining three staggered, and the archer beside the first one put arrows through each of them before they recovered their footing.

Close range. The bows worked at close range too.

Pyrrhus felt something cold settle into his chest. Not fear. He didn’t allow himself fear. But recognition. The recognition of a man who had walked into something designed for him.

This wasn’t an ambush. This was a demonstration.

Five hundred archers with weapons that multiplied their arrows, hunted their targets, stored their own energy, defended their wielders, and cut down anyone who got close. Five hundred identical weapons, mass-produced, each one carrying abilities that would have made a single Heroic-rank item the pride of an Imperial armory.

And someone had made five hundred of them for a purpose.

The word rose in Pyrrhus’s mind before he understood why.

Mockery.

He didn’t know how he knew. Maybe it was etched on the bows. Maybe one of the dying soldiers had screamed it. Maybe the word simply formed itself in the recognition of what this was, of what it meant, of what it said about him and his campaign and every decision he had made since setting foot on this continent.

This was not a war. It had never been a war.

Zebelon and his undead legions, crushed. Colak and three thousand infiltrators, erased. The barbarian and Adelaide, swallowed. And now eight thousand soldiers funneled into a canyon and fed to archers carrying weapons that a single man had forged in a furnace in a single night, because that man had the luxury of treating warfare as craftsmanship.

Pyrrhus had marched his entire remaining force into a kill box, and the enemy hadn’t even sent their best. They’d sent archers. Common soldiers with uncommon bows.

That was the mockery.

It wasn’t the arrows or the ambush. Not even the people dying.

The mockery was that Lord Pyrrhus of the Blue Orchid Clan, retainer to the Sixth Prince and leader of the Imperial Conquest of Ryugan, was not important enough to fight.

He gripped the reins of his hell horse and pulled the beast around, scanning for a way out. The canyon’s exit was ahead. The entrance was behind. Both were choked with soldiers pressing against each other in panic, nowhere to go, arrows falling like a silver rain that would not end.

The man on the eastern ridge drew again, unhurried.

Pyrrhus watched the arrow multiply, watched the shafts spread and curve and hunt, watched three more of his soldiers fall, and for the first time in his career, he did not have an order to give.

He had nothing left to spend.

The blue gem ring on his finger caught the light of the falling arrows, and Pyrrhus closed his hand around it, hiding it from the carnage.

He would not die here. He refused.

But the word followed him as he rode, desperate and furious, toward the canyon’s mouth, searching for the gap in the slaughter that would let him survive long enough to face what came after.

Mockery.

It wasn’t just the name of the weapon.

It was the name of everything he had done.