Their eyes locked onto the fallen body of their kin.
Their nostrils flared.
Before they could react, multiple arrows adorned the sky.
Moon’s second arrow, already nocked and drawn, released into the largest Cragbrute in the cluster. Falcon’s Focus helped guide the shot to the beast’s throat.
The powerful arrow opened its neck in a burst of exploding blood that gushed out without restraint, painting the ground red.
The creature dropped almost instantaneously.
Rowan’s double-arrow release followed a heartbeat later. Both arrows arced through the air and converged on a Cragbrute at the edge of the cluster, striking its left eye. The beast reared back with a ground-shaking bellow of pain. Its other eye rolled wildly, blood pouring down its face.
Rowan had no time to be surprised at Moon’s archery proficiency.
It was something Rowan would process later. For now, he could only follow through and execute his part of the plan.
He nocked another two arrows.
His approach was different from Moon’s. He was weaker than every Cragbrute they were fighting. His raw output couldn’t kill them cleanly the way Moon could. So he had to play dirty. He had to hit the weak points that would maximize the damage output of each shot relative to his lower personal strength.
Eyes. Throats. The soft flesh at the base of the horns. The exposed joints at the front shoulders where a well-placed arrow could sever tendons and lame the beast.
His arrows struck a fresh Cragbrute in both eyes.
The beast bellowed in agony, blinded, its head swinging wildly in every direction.
Rowan’s next volley followed immediately, aimed at the throat of the same beast to finish it while it was disoriented.
The Cragbrute went down.
Moon’s third arrow was already flying by the time Rowan’s fourth arrow left the string.
The two of them fell into a rhythm.
Moon dropping targets with clean, high-output shots. Rowan crippling and finishing wounded targets that Moon’s first strikes had softened.
The Cragbrutes didn’t take long to spot the direction the arrows were coming from.
The moment they identified the tree line as the source of the assault, their destructive instincts kicked in.
Massive bodies rushed toward the thick trunks where Moon and Rowan had positioned themselves.
The trees shook violently.
Within a few strikes, Moon’s tree began to tip.
The trunk groaned as the wood splintered along the base.
Moon didn’t panic.
His eyes landed on the next thick tree, twelve meters away, and he leapt cleanly across the gap.
His boots caught the new branch and settled into stance. His bow came right back up and his fingers found the next arrow.
~Whoosh~ ~Whoosh~
Two arrows tore out of his bow, striking two of the charging Cragbrutes. Killing one, and injuring the other severely.
Rowan mirrored the movement at a slower pace, leaping to a fresh tree of his own before continuing to fire. His shots were still striking weak points. His coordination with Moon had become better over the past thirty minutes.
The colony erupted into chaos.
Alarm cries rippled through the Cragbrute territory, deep bellowing calls that traveled through the lair and out across the surrounding terrain.
Through the Curse connection, Moon’s subordinate Cragbrute deep inside the lair sent him a fresh signal.
’Many rushing outward...’
Moon reached back through the thread with a simple directive.
’Slow them down by tripping, and bumping into them.’
The instruction was simple enough for the beast’s mind to understand. It didn’t require sophisticated deception. Cragbrutes charging in a crowded tunnel would jostle each other naturally as they pushed toward the exits. His subordinate simply needed to be a little slower, a little more in the way, a little more prone to shoving its shoulder into a sibling’s flank at exactly the wrong moment.
The Curse-controlled Cragbrute acknowledged the instruction and began executing it.
The exit flow from the caves slowed subtly.
[You have killed a Level 50 C-Rank Cragbrute]
[You have gained 25 Lives]
The notification flashed across Moon’s vision alongside dozens of others from the past thirty minutes.
The Life gains stayed low due to the power differential between them. Killing all fifty in the colony would net him barely over a thousand Lives total.
Still, he wasn’t disappointed. The Lives weren’t the point of this hunt. Rowan’s growth was.
Every kill Rowan participated in fed his subordinate a share of the experience and lives. At Rowan’s current rank, a Cragbrute kill provided a significant amount of resources for his personal progression.
As the battle progressed, Rowan would become more effective due to his power gains.
Moon watched it happen with satisfaction.
Ten minutes later, the pair had eliminated approximately half of the estimated colony population.
The Cragbrutes had learned from watching their kin die. They no longer just charged the trees without thinking.
They pummeled every trunk in the area down to splinters, denying Moon and Rowan any high-ground option within the entire immediate perimeter.
Trees fell in overlapping cascades. The forest canopy Moon and Rowan had been jumping across began to disappear one section at a time.
Moon’s current tree began to lean.
He glanced across the remaining canopy. Only a few trees in the area still stood upright, and they were being surrounded by Cragbrutes right now and would soon follow the rest.
"Alright, it’s time."
Moon leapt off the branch and dropped cleanly to the ground.
He landed in a soft crouch on the packed dirt of the colony’s outer territory, roughly two meters from the nearest Cragbrute.
He stored his bow in his ring before drawing his sword.
Purple lightning immediately began crackling along its length, threading through the runes Master Veylin had etched into the metal.
He glanced up briefly at Rowan.
"Stay in the trees as long as you can. When the last one falls, drop down and stay behind me. I’ll open the corridor."
Rowan nodded from his branch and nocked another two arrows.
Moon turned to face the incoming charge.
Six Cragbrutes broke from the pack and thundered toward him.
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