The Transcendent Godslayer

Everything had played out just the way he expected.

Chaos raged across the battlefield, exactly as he had wanted. The archer was nowhere in sight, no longer there to mount pressure on his neck from behind.

To Kallen, she had been the greatest obstacle... someone capable of operating and influencing the field from far beyond his own range with her skillset.

But now that she was gone…

He drew a longbow and a quiver of arrows from the corpse of the kobold sentinel in his storage ring, strapping the latter across his back as he crouched low on a thick tree branch.

Nocking an arrow to the bow, he trained it on the head of the trapped younger kobold chieftain and pulled.

The draw weight was immense, enough to strain even his improved physique. Yet, judging by his expressionless face and perfectly steady arms, no one would ever suspect how much effort and tension on his muscles it took to hold the bow taut as he waited for the perfect moment.

The seed of his machinations had ripened. Now it was time to pluck the fruits... or in this case, their lives. Otherwise, everything he had endured would be for nothing.

He wasn't going to keep playing a passive game of cat-and-mouse survival.

Though he wasn't in a position to act recklessly, he had no choice. Without taking risks, how would he gain anything from this place? And to him, this wasn't really risky in any way, they were all just too predictable.

However, if he didn't improve, let alone surviving Zephyrus when he finally conquered this rift... Something he even needed to improve drastically to do, truth be told, with his current strength, he might not even survive the next few hours.

And although he wasn't certain whether Essence Plunder worked only on those he personally killed, as the description had said plunder the Essence of the dead, not those you slay... he wasn't willing to gamble on assumptions.

Besides, testing it would be pointless. Even if he could plunder others' kills, there was a deeper problem: unlike him, who deliberately rejected digesting the Essence of his kills, others absorbed it instantly, sometimes without even realizing, simply by choosing [YES] consciously or unconsciously.

For him to gain anything from his hard work, every kill needed to be his own. Otherwise, he would walk away with nothing, and everything he did would be just like feeding his enemies to kill him.

Taking a deep breath, his eyes chilled as what he was waiting for happened. Under his gaze, the red haired female orc, used a spell that disoriented the senses of the immobile chieftain.

He released the arrow in the same second, perfectly in sync with his exhale, almost as though the bow itself was breathing with him.

The instant it left his fingers, he was already drawing another, loosing it toward a different target and moving to a new location, without so much as glancing to confirm his first strike.

His confidence wasn't born of pride or arrogance, but of a hard-earned well of experience... the kind forged in the unforgiving crucible of his life on Earth.

True to his calculations, the first arrow cut through the air with lethal precision, piercing the kobold clean through the back of the skull and bursting out the front with brutal force, accompanied by a spray of blood and bone.

The hearts of those who saw it quaked at the suddenness. But the shock didn't end there. A heartbeat later, another kobold collapsed, his throat skewered by a second arrow.

The momentum of the kobolds faltered almost instantly, while the morale of the orcs surged, each of them realizing the unseen archer was on their side.

Another arrow was narrowly deflected at the last second, but the act left its target wide open, and the kobold was promptly slashed across the chest by his opponent.

Moving swiftly through the trees, Kallen loosed arrow after arrow, his movements sharp, fluid, and relentless. Each shot forced the kobolds to block or evade, leaving them increasingly exposed.

The orcs weren't entirely spared either; some of his arrows deliberately clipped close enough to wound, the injuries minor but enough to hinder their combat strength. He didn't care.

The orcs, assuming it was their own archer positioned behind them, gritted their teeth in anger at the frequent friendly fire, yet none dared waste the advantage the arrows gave them.

Pressure was pressure, but there was another reason to why Kallen did so as well. While it injured them, it ironically pulled them into a false lull of "security", where they believed that it was necessary, so the kobolds never saw the line of the arrows trajectory.

Naturally, it made them angrier that they couldn't do anything about it, thus, the already suffering kobolds were forced to take the brunt of it. However, they couldn't have been more oblivious to what was actually happening.

Keeping his presence hidden was quickly becoming more difficult. Now that the element of surprise had worn off, the trajectory of his shots was easily traceable now, and his position was even caught often.

This was why Kallen had targeted the kobold chieftain first. The creature was far too dangerous to leave for later. He could feel the constant powerful streams of dynamis the red-haired orc was funneling into her spell just to keep the chieftain restrained.

Killing him not only shattered the kobolds' morale but also removed a towering obstacle from Kallen's path.

Should he have killed anyone else in the first strike, the chieftain he would have torn through the red-haired orc the instant her shock set in, and by now, he would already be hunting Kallen.

Although Kallen did not have dynamis yet due to being unawakened, he had an insane aptitude for it (dynisis). And thus, while he had been waiting, he had felt the young chieftain gathering dynamis into its body for one explosive attack, waiting for a slight slip up on the red haired's part.

An arrow finally brought down a third kobold, ripping through his skull like a bullet, just seconds before a sword-wielding orc would have sliced off his head.

The orc's annoyance boiled close to fury at the stolen kill. But it was only the first of several to follow.

In less than a minute, three kobolds had already fallen, a stark display of the power and influence a skilled archer or sniper, could have on the battlefield.