Perhaps it was the glint of a sword, but something caught Bruce’s eye, and he jolted awake. He was, after all, an experienced warrior with plenty of battle experience.

“Enemy attack!” he shouted, his words sounding choppy to Richard and the others.

“Kill!”

Though they couldn’t understand what the enemy was yelling, it was clear that their presence had been discovered.

Without any hesitation, Richard stood up from the grass and charged, followed closely by Ronen and the others.

Bruce wasn’t afraid of this human attack, however, as he had already sounded the alarm. Some of the faster demons had already rushed out of their makeshift huts.

These huts were converted from the original houses of the villagers. As demons were much taller than humans, these dwellings had to be modified to accommodate them, lest they be unable to stand upright inside.

The modifications were shoddy, and the structures appeared dilapidated to Richard’s eyes, but compared to the animal skin tents in which the demons usually lived, these stone and wood houses were quite luxurious.

In the face of Richard’s charge, Bruce showed no sign of fear. Instead, he joined forces with the other demons emerging from the huts, ready to fight back.

Benefiting from good habits developed in the Wilderness, Bruce never parted with his wolf fang club, even when relieving himself. However, he had no time to don his armor.

Yet the thick skin of the demons served as natural armor, and Bruce, a warrior who had undergone further physical refinement, could fend off most human attacks even without clothing.

At thirty steps, the first to attack were the marksmen under Richard’s command, their rapid bolts covering a dozen charging demons, with special attention paid to Bruce.

However, Bruce held human arrows in contempt; short-range bolts like these merely tickled him when they struck. Aside from unlucky individuals who took bolts in the eyes, these weapons posed little threat.

Bruce flicked an arrow aimed at his head aside with his wolf fang club, paying no mind to the rest of the projectiles hurtling toward him.

However, the moment the arrow made contact with his weapon, he sensed something was off—the force behind it was too great.

The thought only flashed through his mind, but before he could react, he had already absorbed several more arrows into his body.

The arrows pierced through Bruce’s skin and flesh, stopping only when they were embedded in his tightly toned muscles.

Although Bruce remained unharmed, he felt uneasy. As a demon warrior, his defensive capabilities far exceeded those of ordinary demons. If even he could only just defend against these arrows, the same could not be said for the other, less-skilled demons who had charged alongside him.

A single volley from the sixty-some marksmen felled nearly half of the sixty-odd demons who had followed Bruce out into the fray.

The surviving demons were stunned by this attack, having never encountered arrows so lethal.

Yet, in the end, these were still fearsome foes. Even after suffering heavy casualties from the rain of arrows, the remaining demons showed no signs of retreating.

In Bruce’s mind, once he and his fellows breached the human line, they would no longer need to face such a terrifying storm of arrows.

Close combat was where the Ogres truly excelled. The human soldiers were already few in number; even if there were one or two human knights, Bruce wasn’t afraid.

It was perfectly reasonable for Ogres to be confident in their abilities. In terms of raw strength, a human quasi-knight, no matter how exceptional, was rarely a match for an Ogre warrior. At the very least, it typically took two human quasi-knights to stand against one Ogre warrior.

This racial advantage extended even to human knights. The natural size and strength of an Ogre warrior allowed them to hold their own against human knights, often beating them outright.

Even facing two or three human knights at once posed little threat.

“Bang!”

Richard engaged Bruce, who led the charge, in combat.

The marksmen had no time to prepare a second salvo. After all, this was not a game; even though the marksmen’s firing frequency was greater than that of a pre-upgrade archer,

However, thirty meters was too short a distance; even at top speed, there was no time for a second round of volleys. The crossbowmen could only retreat to the side of the main force and take aim at the ordinary cannibal warriors pouring from the nearby huts.

In their first exchange, Richard gave no thought to conserving his energy and pushed his swordplay to its limit, evenly matching Bruce. After reaching the intermediate level of the Green Qi-Attracting Technique, Richard’s strength had placed him in the upper echelons of the knight rank, allowing him to stand toe to toe with a cannibal warrior.

Clang.

After their weapons met, Bruce retreated half a step, yet before he could catch his breath, Ronen ignited his own energy and joined the fray alongside Richard.

Seeing this, Bruce began contemplating retreat. He had fought two knights before, but Richard and Ronen were clearly not ordinary knights. Neither could be dispatched easily, and facing them together was out of the question.

However, Bruce knew he couldn’t immediately turn tail. Even if the powerful arrows loosed from afar wouldn’t strike him down, the two knights could easily catch up and cut him down from behind. He needed to wait for more of his men to charge forth.

He could already see that this human army wasn’t large, and with numbers being equal, the Ogres under his command had a clear advantage. With other Ogre warriors to hold them off, he still had a chance.

With a fierce roar, Bruce swung his wolf fang club and charged once again. His idea was that even if he couldn’t defeat these two human knights, he could at least hold them off for a short time. Besides, seven or eight of his fellow Ogre warriors had closed in on the knights as well. Though they had been ambushed, he still had a chance.

Puh

By the time Bruce clashed with Richard again, the slower-moving Ogre warriors had engaged the crusaders behind him. Perhaps “engage” wasn’t the right word; the crusaders stopped their charge, ignited their fighting spirit, and slashed at the logs the Ogre warriors held, slicing them clean in half. Then, as if tearing through a ragged cloth, they cut down the obstructing Ogre warriors.

Without putting up so much as a ripple, eight Ogre warriors were annihilated by more than twenty crusaders. Bruce would never forget the sight of those humans igniting their energy, dispersing the darkness of night.

“Game over,” he thought as blades imbued with energy sliced toward him one after another. Struggling to block the blows, he attempted to flee, only to be hacked down by a merciless onslaught of crusader blades.

“Charge! Leave no survivors!”

Richard spared no attention to the fallen Ogre warrior, swinging his sword and leading his troops forward in another charge. The outcome of this night’s battle had long since been decided.