Strongest Among the Heavens
Chapter 290: Night 3

Chapter 290: Night 3

Kazi’s plan was detailed and meticulous as he was. He leveraged their strengths and the natural behaviours of their enemies. He also needed everyone to wake up early. At eight o’clock, the Yumboes banged the pots and woke everyone up, with Kazi standing beside them. Sylvia groaned and asked for a drink. Sarah wished for an extra hour. Kazi was not in the mood for complaints and push-backs. He wasn’t cruel but he pointedly told them, "If we fail today, we won’t be able to recover. Wake up, wash your faces, eat, and meet me outside. I cooked something great. It will be fun."

He didn’t care that some of them didn’t understand. Once they believed, they would follow him. That was how the respect of leadership was earned.

The discussion outside was full of silent questions. No one but Sylvia asked and pushed back.

"How is this even going to work; there’s like a hundred of them every night and ten of us."

"Ambushes can render multiple enemies ineffective."

"We don’t know how to make traps," Sylvia pointed out.

Kazi didn’t so much as hesitate, charming them with a smile. "Don’t worry, these will be simple enough so that even a civilian can make them."

He kept an eye out for Pauline, making sure she was watching. Making sure she saw him help Remmy and Jackson with the traps. His directions were to the point and he always offered necessary praise. The entire day was spent working.

In the afternoon, Kazi assigned Kibiwott, Jackson, and Remmy a special mission: find and destroy the homes of the stone partridges. Their nests were on the ground and regularly hidden close to trees.

Initially, after an hour of nest hunting, they returned abruptly. Kibiwott had gone too close and received an injury to the arm.

Kazi healed him with ease. "Divine Miracle Water." Then, he looked straight at Kibiwott, then Remmy, and said, "You’re an archer. A hunter. You should always be leading and Kibiwott should be your back-up."

"And me?" Jackson asked.

"Be flexible. Use your judgement. Sometimes, you have to adapt."

After that, they did not return early. They returned when the sun was setting, exhausted. The trap setters had come back early, with Sylvia drinking away.

Kazi agreed to let them fool off and drink before the night, albeit with a special clause that they did not know of. While working, he asked the Yumboes where they kept their alcohol and secretly slipped a small portion of Divine Miracle Water inside. It was something of a test but also a way to dilute the alcohol contents.

Drinks were emptied and bellies were filled up. Kazi, Remmy, Jackson, Emma, and ten Yumboes were chosen to fight in the dark woodlands and conduct the ambushes. The remaining six players and Yumboes were responsible for protecting the village.

"Night is coming," Kazi announced once everyone was gathered again. "Those that were selected for trap activation, bring your torches. I’ll light them up."

One by one, the trap activators lined up and offered their torches to him. Kazi offered a bit of advice to each person too.

"Emma," Kazi said. "Don’t be afraid of wasting mana. Just blast them as hard as you can."

"That’s the plan."

Kibiwott wasn’t a part of the expedition. Even so, as Kazi walked, he offered him a piece of advice anyway. "Don’t get hasty. You’re fast. Against a smaller pack, you’ll be fine."

Night fell and the fire of the torches reacted in kind. The darkness needed to be eroded. The monsters needed to be slayed.

Akihiko and Kenzo were responsible for constructing a series of false trails using strong-smelling herbs and bait, aiming to target the Booas. The key was to break their cohesion, make them enter choke-points, and force them into individual traps. At these chokepoints, they set up pitfall traps camouflaged with natural foliage.

This was set-up for Emma. Because once the hyenas fell—

"Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!"

The woodlands echoed with the shrieks of the hunted and the smoke of their ashes.

And the Booas that were cautious and tried to attack Emma were picked off by Remmy. That was what Kazi meant—trust Remmy. At the beginning of the night, the words rang hollow. She limited herself and often didn’t deliver sufficient damage to kill the Booas. Slowly but surely, their teamwork worked. Emma, whenever she was threatened by the one Booa that broke from the path, was deftly saved.

Their accumulated Booa kill count exceeded thirty with Emma holding twenty-five of those kills.

As for the stone partridges, it was difficult to fight them due to their high defence and their flight. They didn’t always attack from tree-level. Often when up against spells, they went sky-high. The only person capable of shooting them off at that point was Kazi and maybe Remmy if he was lucky. Everyone else had to pray that their spells would land. That was why the players were often surprised by the Booas. Both land and air were on the side of the monsters. The combination of the two monster types made the situation hard to deflect.

But Kazi and Remmy noticed that the stone partridges only climbed altitude when they were attacked. Normally, they stuck to the woodlands, never going above the trees. Kazi suspected it was because of their weight. Their stone bodies incidentally put a burden on their bodies.

So to defeat them, Kazi set-up two types of traps: wooden tripwires and the Yumboes. The Yumboes were blessed with night-vision and regularly went out to fish at one of the two rivers in the area. so navigation was like second nature. Their jobs were to cast their wind magic and disturb the flight path of the stone patridges. After that, Kazi and Jackson would swoop in and kill them with their metal swords.

The wooden tripwires were the same in principle. The stone patridges would fly like they usually did and bam! Their wings would hit the wooden tripwire and their balance would send them crashing. Both strategies worked. Kazi didn’t seek out overly complicated strategies because he was aware of the smiles and excitement that erupted from simple, effective victories like this.

Kazi also sat as the mediator in the woodlands, his magical senses stretching out to everything around him. Normally, he couldn’t do something like this but whenever he entered a meditative state, it was within his grasp. The sheer skill that it took to accomplish what he was doing was beyond that of an amateur. He very easily could have sprinted like a maniac and killed everyone monster in the region.

But that wasn’t the point here, so he supported like an ordinary player. Just waiting for his true power to be necessary. If there was ever a chance for the players in the woodlands to get overwhelmed, Kazi interfered. The confidence, the smiles, the notion of victory, that was what mattered here.

After an hour, he told Jackson to halt, sensing a large disturbance at the village. He sensed the stone partridges entering the scene. He sensed blasts of magic. He sensed...

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