Pestilence: Rise Of The Pure Undead
Chapter 835 - 835: Hit And Run

Though, when Ilona spoke of long ranged attacks, she clearly was not speaking of projectiles like bolts and arrows, because all knights of Loimos were equipped with a longbow on top of their weapon of choice, and although they had not seen any actually fire an arrow so far, no one doubted that it would pack quite the punch.

There also the soldiers with crossbows to worry about, they definitely wouldn't be using regular crossbows and bolts, undeads, even of the lowest rank, were equipped with state of the art weaponry and armour.

It would definitely hurt to get pelted by their projectiles, but the whole purpose of being here was to be seen and show the undead that they weren't remaining passive and just allowing them to do whatever they wanted, the three women had gotten pretty lucky by running into that group of undead first as well, the rank and file or black knights did not wield powers that could not be fathomed, all in all, they were simplistic warriors overall, and thus, much less prone to pulling something unexpected out of nowhere, especially wit Toby's assistance, they would know if any of them was actually stronger than average, or just a high-ranking undead in disguise.

Milo had already mentioned to them that a rather powerful undead warrior was dressed exactly like a regular soldier, with only a longer cloak, that fellow could easily just be standing amidst the ranks before them and go unnoticed, they would have to be very careful if not for Toby just revealing everything to them.

"What are they doing here anyways? They should have collected all the samples they could possibly want from the area by now" Defoim'nocle frowned, she guessed that it could just be them demonstrating that they held control over the area, but then why even bother to pretend to be looking for something then?

"Placing traps perhaps?" Hoffnu muttered, but that didn't seem to be the case either.

Unless the whole point was just to mess with them, the undeads had to be attempting to accomplish something here, it did not make sense otherwise.

"I think they are just trying to confuse anyone who might be looking, they are doing this in a clearing after all, they probably know that we observe them up from the towers, so they are just doing random crap so that we waste time trying to figure things out" Ilona didn't really believe that they were doing anything of importance.

"Let's just get this over with, how do we proceed?" she then added, and Defoim'nocle sharply exhaled, slowly beginning to form a powerful spell, doing her best to keep the flow and spark of mana concealed.

"We do as we said before, no need to actively engage them, we'll just hit and run" the water champion kept her spell under wraps magnificently, but once she began to pull it out from within herself, the undeads immediately noticed it and poised themselves for a fight, right as a large bubble of water manifest about ten meters above the ground, sound exploding into a tidal stream of water that flowed across the land, sweeping soldiers off their feet and spinning them around as the spell was more than just a whole bunch of water, creating a sort of miniature sea and a vortex that brought disarray to the ranks, all the while, the three livings simply made their exit.

Rushing amidst trees and zigzagging through them, the plants and the sun's very light seemed to bend to allow for them to move more easily, but amidst the raging waters, both of the knights were less easily taken off their feet than the soldiers they accompanied, the one bearing a mace dropped it to pull out his bow, nocking an arrow and taking aim, the other would have done the same, but his position put the soldiers in the way, and they couldn't really get out of the way when being flung around by a torrential vortex.

The mace-wielding knight let go of the string.

Piercing through the air without receiving any resistance, the heavy arrow was aimed at the center of Defoim'nocle's back, which he had swiftly decided was the least abled physical combatant, and thus, was the most likely one that could be hit, as soon as the arrow was gone, the knight was already nocking another, pulling on the bowstring right as the first arrow was promptly deflected by Hoffnu just kicking at it.

Using this occasion as one of her feet was not on the ground, he fired at the swordswoman's side, barely managing to fire the arrow before multiple blades of water and wind flew right toward him, blocking them using his bow, he was pushed back, and by the time the onslaught was over, the three livings were no longer within sight, and probably no longer within reach as well.

"Any losses?"

"None"

The two knights only exchanged a few words, and then alongside the soldiers simply assumed the formation again like nothing happened, and headed back to base to report on what had just happened.

"Are they giving chase?"

"No, they just turned around and went away"

"Well, that first hit and run went fairly well, what do you guys think?" Hoffnu asked as they reached a large tree.

"One of the knights was still able to take a few shots at us, what do you say, Defoim'nocle?" Ilona looked around just in case.

"I didn't pour that much mana into this spell, so I'll just use a stronger version next time, I wasn't expecting the knight to just maintain their posture, but maybe I should have seen it coming, considering who they are named after…"

"The composition of their group was to our advantage, if there had been even a single mage amongst them, they could have interfered with Defoim'nocle's spell and we would have had to zigzag even harder"

"I agree, we should probably just go hard from the get-go, mess them up with full offence before retreating instead of just trying to destabilise them" as she spoke, Ilona casually slid the grip on her halberd lower, and swung past her allies, the sound of ice breaking resounding through the area as red shards flew all over the place.

"I suppose I am not as slick as I thought… A living copper knight, in this day and age?" emerged from behind a tree was an undead that the livings had seen a few times when observing from behind the safety of the barrier.

"All copper knights are living, the rest are just pale imitation, pretenders"

"Oh, is that so? You are soooo cute, Ilona… But a young flower like you shouldn't be so attached to the past, the only false copper knight nowadays-Is you"