Chapter 341: Chapter 313: Stop Holding Back

In an instant, a deluge of golden blades, scorching fireballs, lightning, and gale-force winds rained down, erupting into clouds of blood mist across the alliance’s front line.

In comparison, the alliance army’s firepower was far weaker.

Most of their attacks were blocked by the Yellow Turban Warriors.

The remaining shockwaves couldn’t even penetrate the defenses of the Elf soldiers.

The alliance army’s casualties began to mount rapidly.

The faces of the watching lords turned green.

The enemy’s tactics were incredibly simple, yet brutally effective.

The Yellow Turban Warriors served as the vanguard, their iron formation completely blocking the alliance’s path. The rear ranks, meanwhile, unleashed a saturated barrage of Talismans and Magic. Their offense and defense left almost no openings.

Unless the alliance army could break through the Yellow Turban Warriors’ interception and directly threaten the main Elf formation in the rear, they would be pinned down, forced to endure the enemy’s bombardment.

But that was far easier said than done.

Although the alliance army had superior numbers, they lacked the elite assault force needed to tear through that iron defensive line.

Against the Yellow Turban Warriors, ordinary soldiers often had to sacrifice several, or even a dozen, of their own just to take down one.

Even the elite Dark Elves couldn’t quickly tear open a breach amid such a dense frontal assault.

The entire alliance formation was like a great beast with its front claws chained. It possessed immense size and strength but couldn’t truly charge, forced to stand in place and be carved up, piece by piece.

The only way forward was to grind them down with their numerical advantage.

Even if it cost a dozen, or even dozens, of soldiers’ lives to destroy a single Yellow Turban Warrior, it was all they could do.

As time went on, the alliance army’s casualty count climbed at a terrifying rate.

The lords felt as if their hearts were bleeding with every loss.

Even Marais and the other Dark Elf Queens furrowed their brows.

They had already secretly instructed their frontline soldiers to preserve their strength and not to push too far forward.

But the intensity of the melee far exceeded their expectations. No matter how carefully they tried to avoid battle, they still lost a considerable number of troops in the meat grinder-like attrition.

On the Water Curtain, the number of Yellow Turban Warriors at the alliance’s front had been cut by nearly half, and the ground was littered with the wreckage of shattered iron armor.

The army had finally pushed its line forward to within about two hundred meters of the Elf formation, on the verge of engaging in close-quarters combat.

Just then, a short horn blast sounded from behind the Elf formation.

The next moment, the Elf formation began an orderly retreat, their ranks remaining perfectly intact.

At the same time, another army moved up to take their place.

It was the army of Nine Nether City’s Vassal Races.

Their formation was relatively loose and their equipment wasn’t as polished as the Elves’, but their strength lay in their vast numbers, forming layer after layer between the remaining Yellow Turban Warriors and the Elf formation.

The defensive line, which had been thinning, instantly became thick once more.

Having re-established their distance, the Elf soldiers began to unleash their ranged firepower again under the cover of the Vassal Races.

Flames and lightning once again exploded on the front line, sowing a new round of despair throughout the alliance formation.

"Damn it!"

The Di Luo Dwarven lord slammed his fist on the table, his expression a mask of fury and shock.

They had struggled so hard to advance this far, and now they had to start all over again.

Those Vassal Race armies might not be as elite, but they had numbers on their side.

To break through that thick wall of bodies and once again approach the Elf line, there was no telling how many more lives would have to be fed into the grinder.

The alliance army’s morale was ground to dust by this back-and-forth struggle.

When casualties finally mounted to a number that could no longer be ignored, the front line began to waver.

The first to break were the Vassal Race soldiers from the various city-states.

They had little fighting spirit to begin with and quickly lost their will to fight in the face of such heavy losses.

Someone dropped their weapon and retreated, and the panic quickly snowballed.

Officers desperately shouted orders, cutting down deserters to try and stabilize the line, but to little effect.

Just as the entire front began to buckle, a sudden commotion erupted in the alliance army’s rear.

The lords looked on in astonishment, just in time to see a large group of Elves in cyan robes emerge from the ground, appearing at the weakest point of the alliance’s rear formation.

The moment they appeared, they sliced into the ranks with incredible speed. Working in well-coordinated groups of three to five, they unleashed a storm of blood and gore among the panicking rear-guard soldiers.

After quickly dispatching the surrounding soldiers, they all took out jet-black banners and waved them fiercely.

A grayish-white mist surged from the banners like a bursting dam, instantly blanketing a large area.

Within the mist, hundreds, even thousands, of Shadow Soldiers materialized like a tide, silently pouncing on the soldiers who had already lost their nerve.

The already wavering rear line completely collapsed at that moment.

The soldiers still fighting at the front heard the chaos and screams from behind them. When they turned to see the tide of grayish-white phantoms surging forward, the last thread of their strained resolve snapped.

"M-Monsters!"

"Run!"

"I don’t want to die!"

Cries of terror erupted within the army, spreading along the lines like a plague.

Soldiers dropped their weapons and fled, trampling each other in a desperate stampede. The formation disintegrated completely.

The lords stared intently at the Water Curtain, their faces as white as sheets.

It’s over.

It’s all over.

"Damn it!"

The Di Luo Dwarven lord smashed the low table in front of him with a furious punch, sending splinters of stone and wood flying.

He shot his head up, and out of the corner of his eye, he caught the grave yet unflustered expressions of the Dark Elf Queens. A realization struck him like a bolt of lightning.

"It was you!"

Kazimo’s single eye instantly became bloodshot as he fixed his glare on Marais.

"Marais, I knew something was wrong! You and Vion City have been preserving your strength from the very beginning, and now you have that look on your faces... Have you been colluding with Nine Nether City all along?"

As soon as he said this, the other lords also cast suspicious glances toward the Dark Elf Queens.

In the Dark Nether Realm, the Dark Elves were infamous for backstabbing their allies.

Besides, their current reactions were indeed strange.

In a situation like this, even the smallest suspicious detail would be magnified infinitely.

"Idiot."

Marais said coldly.

"Idiot. If we were colluding with Nine Nether City, we wouldn’t have needed to go to all this trouble. We could have just joined forces and crushed you. Do you really think you would have stood a chance?"

The Di Luo Dwarven lord’s expression froze.

The other lords also gradually calmed down, forced to admit that Marais had a point.

The strength of Vion City alone was no less than that of their twelve combined city-states.

If they teamed up with Nine Nether City, there would be no need for schemes or tricks; they could have just steamrolled everyone from the start.

The Kuo-toa Fishman lord, however, seemed to see through it. He said in a low voice, "Marais, from the look of you, you must have another card up your sleeve. We’ve already reached this point, so stop holding back."

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