Reincarnated as the favorite of an obsessive goddess: gave me a system-Chapter 46: The ambush.
The air in the gorge was a static mass of heat and dust that clung to the throat. Limestone walls rose on both sides of the caravan, vertical and severe, narrowing the path until there was barely enough room for two wagons to pass in parallel. Kai, leading the march atop Valira, felt a tightness in his chest that wasn’t due to the altitude.
"It’s too quiet, Kai," Allice whispered. "I scouted the lower ridges before entering as you told me. There’s no visible movement."
Kai nodded, fully concentrated on observing the terrain and ready to react to anything.
"Lint, bring the wagons closer! Don’t leave a single meter of space!" he ordered, his voice cutting through the air with authority.
The caravan compacted under his command. In the center, Lint’s salt wagon was closely guarded by Nick and Thorne. Lyla, sitting next to Roshia in the second wagon, maintained an expression of serenity, but Kai noticed her knuckles were white as she gripped the wooden edge.
Just as the gorge made a sharp turn where visibility dropped to barely twenty meters, disaster struck with clockwork precision. A sharp crack, like lightning splitting an oak, echoed from the heights. Kai looked up, his pupils dilating.
[ SYSTEM MESSAGE ]
Enemy detected.
Type: Human.
Approximate Threat Level: B.
Distance: 50 meters above.
"ROCKS! TO THE WALLS! NOW!" he roared.
Enormous boulders, some the size of wine barrels and others much larger, began to plummet from the upper ledges. It wasn’t a natural landslide, the angle of the fall was too perfect.
The din was deafening, a continuous thunder that made the ground vibrate beneath Valira’s hooves. A rock struck the path right in front of Kai, shattering into thousands of sharp fragments. Valira neighed, rearing up, but Kai held her steady, calming her.
"Keep the formation!" Kai shouted over the roar. "Press the wagons against the left wall! The slant of the stone will give us a blind spot against their volleys!"
However, the Silver Crows didn’t rely solely on gravity. Seconds later, the heat in the area rose significantly, as if something large was being prepared. At that moment, Lyla recognized what was happening, this time they hadn’t just brought fighters, they had brought high level mages. "They’re going to burn us alive!" she screamed.
Several sizable fireballs fell at great speed, accompanied by bursts of pure fire cutting the caravan in half. Smoke from burning wood began to fill the gorge, reducing visibility to little more than a meter.
Panic, the invisible enemy Kai had tried to tame in the forest clearing, began to sprout among the refugees. "Don’t run! If you separate, you’ll die!" Kai shouted, but his voice was drowned out by the roar of flames and screams of terror.
Kai closed his eyes for an instant, he knew it was time to use all the perception he had been improving whenever points were available. As he concentrated, he began to sense things around him, it wasn’t perfect, but it was better than seeing nothing at all. To his right, he sensed the tension of a crossbow string. To his left, the movement of a man.
"Mira!" Kai called out, locating her through the smoke. "With me, fast!"
Mira reached Kai with difficulty, covering her mouth with a damp rag, her eyes fixed on him. "I can’t see anything! The smoke burns my eyes and the heat from the flames distorts everything."
"You don’t need to see," Kai declared with a coldness that chilled Mira’s blood. "I will be your eyes. Take the cover off the bow. Now."
Mira didn’t hesitate.
"Tell me where"
"Up, two o’clock. Fifty meters. There’s someone," Kai instructed, placing his hand on Mira’s shoulder to transfer the stability of his own stance.
Mira released the string. The sonic snap of the compound bow pierced the roar of the gorge like a whip. Fifty meters up, a sharp scream preceded the impact of a body falling into the void, hitting the ground with a dull thud.
"Eleven o’clock. Eighty meters," Kai continued, ignoring the sweat stinging his eyes. "Fire!"
Mira’s arrow hit the other person exactly in the head. They were managing to defend themselves in an almost impossible situation.
However, the chaos at the rear was becoming desperate. One of the large rocks had struck the edge of the path, causing part of the roadway to crumble. One of the wagons, carrying children and blankets, skidded toward the precipice.
"The wagon! It’s falling!" Keram’s cry was a lament of pure terror.
Thorne, who was struggling to calm the horses and oxen, saw the scene. The wagon’s rear axle was already in the air, and the weight of the load was dragging it inexorably toward the void opening to the right.
"Shit!" Thorne roared. He lunged toward the wagon, ignoring the flames. He dug his claws into the wood and pulled the wagon with all his might. "Help me!" he shouted to Keram’s men as the children in the wagon cried loudly.
Inspired by Thorne’s brutal strength, Keram and Hans threw themselves into the effort, using their wooden spears as improvised levers under the axle. Thorne let out a roar that made the gorge walls vibrate, a sound of pure protective will. With a monumental effort, Thorne dragged the wagon back to firm ground just before the edge of the road gave way completely.
Kai, seeing the threat from above being neutralized by Mira’s surgical precision, decided they couldn’t remain static targets. The only way out was to break the encirclement from the front.
"Roshia, clear the tunnel! Allice, with me! Lyla, try to put out as much fire as you can!" Kai shouted. Roshia stepped forward, her hands glowing with a frigid blue light that seemed to absorb the heat of the fire. "Absolute zero!" she recited urgently.
The ice tried to contain the fire, but it was being constantly fed by the mages from above. "CHARGE!" Kai ordered.
Kai dismounted Valira and leapt through the flames. On the other side, a dozen Silver Crow mercenaries had descended by ropes, hoping to finish the job by massacring the survivors. Seeing only Kai, the mercenaries grew overconfident.
"Look at this! They send us a pup! Cut off his head and take the "
He couldn’t finish. The steel of Kai’s dagger had already pierced his throat. Kai didn’t stop, he used the leader’s body as a human shield to protect himself from two arrows coming from the front and then threw it at another attacker. Allice emerged from the smoke and began to attack alongside Kai, killing all the mercenaries present.
The battle on the ground was brief but of absolute brutality. Keram’s men, seeing their protectors fight with such ferocity, remembered the training from the clearing.
They formed a circle of spears around the women and children, holding off two mercenaries who had tried to flank them through the rubble. Han, the youth who had trembled the most during training, drove his wooden spear into the thigh of a mercenary trying to climb onto Lyla’s wagon. It wasn’t a mortal blow, but it was enough to make the enemy retreat, surprised by the resistance of simple peasants.
When the last of the mercenaries on the ground fell under Thorne’s axe, who had joined the fray after securing the wagon, silence descended once again over the gorge, broken only by the muffled sobbing of children.
[ SYSTEM MESSAGE ]
All enemies have been defeated.
+225 XP.
Level: 30 (775/800)
Kai stopped, his breathing heavy. He looked up. Mira was still aiming at the ridges, but the survivors of the Silver Crows were fleeing in terror. They had seen their perfect ambush dismantled by a group that seemed straight out of a nightmare.
"It’s over," Kai said, storing his daggers in his inventory. "Allice, check the bodies." Lyla ran toward him, checking his shoulders and hands with an urgency bordering on desperation. "You’re okay... tell me you’re okay."
"I’m fine, Lyla. Thanks to everyone," Kai replied, looking at his team. "Thorne, if you hadn’t held that wagon, we would have lost the supplies and half of Keram’s family."
Thorne let out a hoarse laugh, his voice still vibrating with adrenaline. "That wagon weighed more than a fat ox in armor, boss. But I wasn’t going to let it fall. These people have started to believe in us, I couldn’t let gravity take what little they have left."
Kai walked toward the refugees. They were trembling, but their eyes no longer reflected the defeat of before. "Listen well," Kai said, his voice echoing off the canyon walls. "They tried to burn us, they tried to crush us, and they failed. They failed because we stayed together. Heads up! We’re alive! We’re almost there!"
"YES, KAI!" several men responded, thumping the base of their spears against the ground.
Finally, the caravan began to move again, navigating the rocks scattered across the road. After a couple more hours, they managed to exit the site where they had been ambushed. The first stars were beginning to appear. The danger hadn’t disappeared, but the group was no longer the same. They were a great team that was gradually consolidating more with each passing day of this terrible journey.
