Shepherd Wizard-Chapter 167.2

Translator: Pai_

The Great Sea Serpent Mermaids who landed at the port near Ophen City, along with the elite forces of the House Carmine, immediately advanced southwest at a swift pace.

The key to this operation was speed.

The objective was to inflict maximum damage before Turan and the elite of the House Parsha could detect the crisis at their main base and return.

While on the move, the commander from the Carmine wizards handed out several portraits to the mermaid royals.

“Here, memorize the faces of these bastards. They’re from the House Berk. They’re the core of the magic artifact production, so we need to eliminate them all.”

“So these ones won’t be the ones dispatched to the east?”

“Right. No idiot would send their Enchanters to a battlefield unless the entire family was on the verge of collapse. And here, this woman, she’s quite likely to remain behind, but she’s as strong as a family head, so be especially careful...”

Jemel Carmine, was that his name?

The mermaid royals exchanged glances as they looked at the portrait offered by Carmine’s representative.

Though it was in black and white and the colors wasn't there, the beautiful face with her voluminous hair was familiar.

“That’s her, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Seems like it.”

“She was damn strong, that’s for sure.”

At the mermaids’ reactions, Jemel twitched his eyebrows and asked,

“What? You already know who she is? Have you met her before?”

“Well...”

"It's none of your business, stupid devil."

The mermaids scoffed at Jemel’s question.

Even if they had formed a strategic alliance out of necessity, the accumulated grudges didn’t simply vanish.

More than anything, they had already been strictly warned by their father, the Mermaid King, before departing.

Never let the House Carmine catch even a hint of anything that could become a weakness.

From that standpoint, even letting slip the nuance that they had met Meisa before was already a mistake, but the mermaids decided on their own that it was acceptable enough.

Jemel looked visibly irritated, but soon forced his expression to relax and changed the subject.

“Fine, whatever... You brought quite the army with you.”

“They’re the kind that breed and spawn endlessly even after being killed. They were already too many, so we needed to thin them out anyway.”

A mermaid royal replied to Jemel’s comment with a casual yawn.

Just as he said, behind them followed a mermaid army of well over several thousand strong.

Most were of the commoner class and weak individually, but gathered in numbers, even a single knight could be taken down, making it a formidable force.

At the front, there were over a hundred Carmine wizards, three mermaid royals capable of transforming into Great Sea Serpents, and dozens of mermaid nobles to command the army.

With such power, it was a force capable of confronting even a fully intact Parsha, let alone one missing its main forces.

Though winning might still be difficult.

Thus, the army of mermaids mixed with Carmine wizards continued their rapid march southwest for the third day.

Though their speed slowed somewhat since they had to avoid several cities and cross fully evacuated coastal zones, they managed to infiltrate deep into the Gray Zone with considerable stealth.

This was thanks to Jemel having obtained maps of the House Parsha’s territory.

It wasn’t just a terrain map, it was a military map that detailed major cities and villages as well as the watch range of beacons monitoring for foreign invasions.

But no matter how well they knew the locations of every beacon, the reality was that their force was far too large to move completely undetected.

Eventually, as they reached a point roughly a day's distance from Kalamaf, someone noticed their presence and lit a beacon.

"Huh, is that a forest fire?"

“No, that’s a beacon. The news will be sent soon. We’d better pick up the pace. We’re almost at Kalamaf anyway.”

Unusual-colored flames and smoke briefly flickered and disappeared, seemingly used to transmit coded signals.

Probably conveying the size or type of the approaching enemy.

“Move faster!”

The mermaids of the commoner class screeched, only to scream louder as their noble commanders whipped them.

The hardest part over the past few days had been stopping these creatures from sniffing out the humans and trying to bite the Carmine wizards or straying from the formation to hunt other humans.

Had Carmine not prepared a massive amount of food in advance, it would’ve been impossible to control the rampaging, starving creatures.

After the beacon was lit, the allied forces advanced even faster than before.

There was no longer any need to avoid the beacon watchers’ surveillance range or detour around cities and towns.

Having devoured a small village along the way to satiate their hunger, the mermaid army reached the outskirts of Kalamaf. There, they saw a human army approaching, clearly intending to block their path.

Their numbers were no more than about three hundred.

Jemel looked at them with an incredulous smirk.

“What, they think they can stop us with that many? They would’ve been better off trying to defend the city or just fleeing…”

Coming out from the base to confront an enemy made sense only if their own side was stronger, if they wanted to avoid damage to the base by keeping the battle outside.

If they were lacking in power, the best response would be to flee entirely, as was done during the Aravion attack, or to rely on the defensive advantages of their base’s terrain.

Yet here was Parsha, who should have deployed a large force to Varaha, taking this aggressive defensive stance?

Just three days earlier, Jemel had received word via the fastest pigeon-type Magical Beast that Varaha’s large force was facing off with Ruvan, this made the current situation completely baffling.

“Attack. Just trample them immediately…”

He was about to give the command casually when he paused in shock upon seeing the people standing in front of him.

The first person who caught his eye was Meisa Aravion.

It wasn’t unexpected to leave behind one of the strongest wizards to defend the capital, so her presence wasn’t outside the realm of expectation.

With three Great Sea Serpents and four possessed bodies including Jemel, they could certainly go head-to-head with her.

What Jemel couldn’t understand, however, was the presence of the young man standing next to Meisa.

Short silver hair, a small but muscular frame, clad in silver armor.

“Solif Varaha?”

“Have we met before? Ah, come to think of it, I do recall seeing you once.”

Solif answered nonchalantly, and a massive halo rose behind his back.

From the sheer size and intensity of its energy, it was evident this was no decoy, this was truly the head of the House Varaha himself.

“How is this possible?”

Did Turan go east while he came here? 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

As Jemel reeled in disbelief, halos of light suddenly appeared behind the nobles standing behind Solif.

The nobles of Varaha, who were supposed to be facing off against Ruvan in the East, were here.

‘Don’t tell me… the army in Varaha…’

As if to confirm the chilling thought that flashed through Jemel’s mind, the mermaid royals behind her gasped in shock and immediately transformed into Great Sea Serpents.

In the scramble to avoid being crushed by the sudden transformation, Jemel hastily created an ice platform to leap into the air, at the same moment, a long silver flash cut through the allied army.