71: Chapter 71 Bloodbath with the Fishmen

The dwarven roaring battleaxe in Richard's right hand swung down immediately after.

The axe blade cleaved into the top of a fish-man's head and emerged from between its legs, splitting the entire fish-man vertically in two.

The light of the Anti-magic Rune exploded into a small cluster of dark red Mars the instant it touched the fish-man's body.

Something inside the fish-man's body emitted an extremely faint shriek under the burning of the rune, dissolving into a wisp of black smoke and dissipating into the air.

To be honest, the fish-men's strength was not small.

Although their stature was short, the muscles beneath their scales were very sturdy.

The bone clubs they swung carried a brute force, creating a dull thudding sound when they struck the shields of others.

A fish-man pounced onto his back, desperately stabbing at the gaps in his shoulder armor with a chipped short blade.

The blade scraped against the seams, producing a series of harsh metallic friction sounds, but it never managed to pierce through.

He threw a backhanded elbow strike against the head of the fish-man on his back, the steel armor on his elbow shattering the fish-man's skull.

The fish-man released the short blade and slid off his back, its skull caved in, and the dark red light points in its hollow eyes flickered twice before extinguishing.

Two more fish-men pounced from the right, and Richard sidestepped, kicking one of them in the chest.

The astonishing kick shattered both the fish-man's sternum and ribs instantly, causing its entire chest cavity to cave inward into a footprint-shaped crater.

The fish-man flew backward, knocking down several of its companions behind it without even managing to let out a scream.

Another fish-man seized the opportunity to strike his right leg with a whale-bone club, but the club bounced off his greaves.

He glanced down at the fish-man, then cleaved off the arm holding the club with a single swing of his axe.

The arm bounced in the mud, its fingers still twitching.

The fish-man looked down at the dark red blood spurting from its severed arm.

There was no reaction of pain in its hollow eyes; it just numbly reached out with its other hand to pick up the fallen club.

Until Richard cleaved off its head with another axe strike.

As he killed, he quickly calculated the increase in experience points in his mind.

The experience points for a single fish-man were very low, only two points, but the number of these fish-men was too high.

Every sweep of his halberd took out at least two to three fish-men, and every hack of his axe took out at least one.

From the start of the battle until now, he had killed no less than twenty or thirty fish-men, and the experience point notifications on his panel kept popping up like a screen scroll.

Cecilia guarded a position a few steps behind his left side.

She did not plunge deep into the enemy lines like Richard, but instead stood firmly in front of Morpheus, Selina, and the ranged units in the back row.

Her heater shield was very agile under her control, and every shield bash could knock a fish-man attempting to bypass her to attack the back row to the ground.

The rune of Enchantment for sturdiness constantly shimmered with a pale golden light on the shield's surface, and the fish-men's bone clubs and short blades could only leave a few shallow scratches upon impact.

A fish-man that had bypassed from the side attempted to slip past the outer edge of her shield to attack Morpheus.

Without looking back, she struck with a backhanded sword thrust, the tip piercing through the fish-man's eye socket and penetrating its skull.

The next second, she pulled it out rapidly, the blood droplets on the blade flung into a string of dark red arcs by the inertia of the swing.

Selina stood in the center of the back row, the eye of the storm holy emblem hovering between her outstretched palms, with silver-blue electric arcs leaping and flickering around it.

She continuously cast electric healing spells, using electric shocks to cauterize and stop the bleeding of shallow wounds inflicted on her teammates by the fish-men's weapons.

While simultaneously using Storm Sense to continuously track the distribution of living beings across the entire battlefield.

"Richard! There are five digging up from under the mud fifteen meters to your right!"

"Two have circled behind Jinbao ten meters to the left, watch out!" Her voice remained clear and resonant amidst the clamor of the melee.

Jinbao indeed had not noticed.

He was squatting next to the cart, throwing several Molotov cocktails while continuously rummaging through his tool kit.

The black cat had already appeared behind the two fish-men that had circled around.

A crossbow bolt silently pierced through the back of one fish-man's head.

She then drew a dagger and stabbed into the kidney area of the other fish-man from behind, twisting her wrist to shatter its spine, and the fish-man collapsed silently to the ground.

Morpheus's magic missiles fired in the air like a volley, each missile precisely striking a fish-man charging toward Cecilia's shield.

The amethyst on his staff was already burning hot, but he did not stop, his spell-chanting speed becoming faster and faster.

The missiles themselves were not very powerful, but his goal was to disrupt the rhythm of the fish-men's Charge.

Every fish-man hit by a missile would briefly lose its balance, only to be reaped by Cecilia's sword light.

On the side of the Silver Leaf Sentinels, the half-elf Selan and Vera simultaneously launched an Elven Sword Dance.

The twin siblings advanced, weaving through the tide of fish-men, their two longswords dancing to create two intertwined silver webs of sword light.

One attacked left, one attacked right; one thrust forward, one slashed backward, their rhythm fast and precise.

Like a dance of death.

The treant continued to output damage among the fish-men in front of them, every swing of its branch-like arms clearing a small area.

The dwarf scholar's Warhammer slammed into the fish-men's shields, smashing the shields along with the arms holding them into pieces.

The halfling scholar had no combat ability; he crouched behind the cart, holding a frying pan in his hand, watching nervously for any fish-man attempting to approach the cart.

The slaughter on the mudflat lasted for who knows how long.

When the last fish-man fell, the entire mudflat was already covered in corpses.

Hundreds of fish-man remains were piled haphazardly in the mud, dark red blood staining large swathes of the grayish-black sludge into a deep purple, and the air was filled with a nauseating stench of blood everywhere.

Some corpses were still twitching slightly, but not a single fish-man had fled.

From the moment the first fish-man crawled out of the mud until the last one fell, they had not let out a single meaningful cry, nor had any of them turned to try to escape.

This kind of pure Charge, devoid of any self-preservation instinct, was unlike any fish-man tribe they had ever encountered.

Richard pulled out the battleaxe embedded in a fish-man's skull and wiped the bloodstains and gore off the axe blade using a relatively clean fragment of coral armor from the fish-man.

His steel breastplate had several scratches of varying depths, and the armor on his left arm had a moderate dent from a bone club strike, but he was overall unscathed.

A new notification popped up on his panel: a total of over one hundred experience points gained.

He allocated the experience points to his Mage class as usual.

[Level 6 Brand Warrior (0/3200) / Level 4 Mage (350/800) Blacksmith Level 2 / Beast Tamer Level 1]

He did not intend to expose his spellcasting ability in front of outsiders for the time being, especially with two other teams present.

Spells were one of his most important trump cards at this stage.

Blink and Spell Counter can reverse the tide of battle at critical moments; exposing them when not needed would only cause him to lose the initiative.