Arknights: The Scarlet Devil of Terra — Chapter 92

Chapter 92: Sneak Attack and Counter-Ambush

The caravan moved under a suffocating blanket of paranoia. Terrified of stumbling into an Ursus patrol or a wandering band of Sarkaz mercenaries, the caravan leader had enforced a strict set of nighttime protocols. No fires were to be lit. Everyone was ordered to sleep inside the cramped, freezing vehicles. Even a simple trip to relieve oneself required moving in heavily armed groups.

Flandre thought these measures might offer a tiny bit of safety, but not by much.

After all, throughout the entire day’s journey, she had felt the prickling sensation of eyes watching them from the desolate ridges bordering the road. With so many heavy transports churning up the dirt, their tracks were impossible to hide. If a predator truly had their sights set on the caravan, this pathetic attempt at concealment was entirely useless.

But she didn’t bother to care. She could detect anyone long before they became a threat anyway.

The first half of the night crawled by in suffocating silence. Flandre leaned comfortably against Ch’en Hui-chieh’s shoulder inside their transport, idly flipping through a picture book in the dark. For a vampire like her, the distinction between night and day was utterly meaningless. Besides, she had spent the daylight hours dozing off and on while the vehicle rattled along the uneven terrain. She wasn’t the least bit sleepy.

However, shortly after the guards rotated for the second half of the night shift, Flandre paused. She slowly lifted her head, her crimson eyes piercing through the gloom toward the north.

She reached out and poked Ch’en’s shoulder.

“Sister Ch’en, wake up. Sister Ch’en!”

The first to react wasn’t Ch’en, but the Shadow Guards sharing their transport. The elite operatives snapped awake with terrifying synchronization, their hands instantly closing around their concealed weapons as their eyes scanned the shadows.

Ch’en stirred a moment later, blinking away the heavy fog of sleep. “What’s wrong?”

“A group of people is sneaking in from the north,” Flandre whispered, pointing a pale finger toward a dark rise in the terrain. “About fifty or sixty of them. They’re four or five hundred meters away, right behind that little hill.”

Hearing Flandre’s precise assessment, Ch’en was instantly wide awake. She exchanged a sharp look with the Shadow Guards. Without a word, one of the cloaked figures slipped out of the vehicle, melting into the night to verify the threat.

Minutes later, the low, rhythmic call of a nightbird drifted from the darkness. Another Shadow Guard inside the transport tilted his head, decoding the signal.

“Miss Flandre is correct,” the guard reported, his voice a low, mechanical rasp. “Ursus infantry. Roughly fifty hostiles, fully armed.”

“Their target is obvious,” Ch’en muttered, her hand dropping to the hilt of her sword. “It’s us.”

She moved to sit up completely. “I need to notify the caravan leader—”

A black-gloved hand caught her arm.

“Negative,” the Shadow Guard interrupted. “At this proximity, the civilian element will not be able to mount a coordinated response.”

“Even if we wake them now, starting the engines and organizing a formation will take several minutes.” The guard’s tone remained flat, devoid of emotion. “If panic sets in, it will only create vulnerabilities.”

The Shadow Guard coldly outlined the reality of human nature. In the face of sudden, lethal danger, ordinary people could not be trusted to act rationally. Instinct would drive them to flee. Fear would twist their actions into chaos. A caravan that might have escaped under calm conditions would instead tear itself apart, with drivers ramming into each other in a desperate bid to secure the safest escape route.

“Then what do we do?” Ch’en asked, her grip tightening on her scabbard. She already knew the answer. They had to intercept and annihilate the Ursus force before they could breach the perimeter. If those soldiers charged into the clustered civilians, it would be a massacre.

“Don’t be afraid! Let’s go together!” Flandre chimed in, stretching her arms high above her head. A sweet, innocent smile graced her lips. “Flandre has been sitting for so long, she can finally move around!”

Ch’en’s initial tension broke, replaced by a faint, confident smile. “Alright. Let’s move.”

The strike team slipped out of the transport like phantoms, leaving the rest of the oblivious caravan behind. Ch’en, Flandre, and the detachment of five Shadow Guards glided across the frozen earth, converging at the base of the hill to rendezvous with their scout.

“They are advancing,” the scout whispered from the brush. “It appears they intend to launch a downward charge from this high ground.”

“Are all fifty of them up there?” Ch’en asked.

“Negative. Only a vanguard of ten is ascending the slope. The remaining forces have split to blockade the front and rear of our convoy.”

Ch’en nodded, her tactical mind instantly dissecting the enemy’s doctrine. “A classic pressure tactic. They plan to use the hilltop vanguard to create noise and panic, making the caravan overestimate their numbers. Once chaos erupts, they can fish in troubled waters.”

It was a brutally effective strategy. The physical and martial quality of an Ursus soldier far exceeded that of a civilian guard. By striking from multiple angles, they ensured that even if the caravan possessed armed defenders, the defenders would be blinded by the dark and the panic of their own people. The Ursus troops could simply sweep in, slaughter the resistance, and seize the supplies with minimal effort.

Unfortunately for the Ursus soldiers, they had no idea what kind of monster was resting in this particular caravan.

Flandre had tracked their movements from hundreds of meters away. And waiting for them in the dark were the Shadow Guards—the absolute apex of Yan’s covert military might.

Since only ten enemies were cresting the hill, the numbers were perfectly matched. While the Ursus military boasted some of the finest infantry in Terra, they were still just ordinary men. Every single member of Ch’en’s strike team possessed the lethal capacity to slaughter a ten-man squad solo.

The clash on the hilltop lasted mere seconds. Blades flashed in the moonlight. Throats were opened before a single cry could be raised. The ten Ursus vanguard troops were wiped from existence without even realizing they were under attack.

With the high ground secured, the team prepared to divide.

“Flandre will go handle the ones at the back!” the little vampire volunteered, her eyes gleaming. “Sister Ch’en and the scary misters can take the front.”

Ch’en frowned. “Are you sure? You’d be facing twenty armed men alone.”

“Flandre can wipe them all out at once,” she explained cheerfully. “But Flandre’s magic doesn’t know how to turn off friendly fire! If you come with me, you might get hurt.”

It was an obvious, terrifying point. Reluctantly, Ch’en agreed to the split, leading the Shadow Guards toward the vanguard blockade.

Once they were gone, Flandre stood alone among the fresh corpses on the hill. She gently rubbed her stomach.

“Just right. It’s been a long time since I had a proper meal…” Her innocent smile twisted into something ancient and predatory. “Flandre is hungry!”

Her physical form dissolved, shifting instantly into a dense, creeping cloud of crimson mist that rolled silently down the slope.

Meanwhile, at the rear of the caravan, two dozen Ursus soldiers crouched in the freezing brush, waiting for the signal from the hilltop. The moment the screams started, they were to push forward and slaughter anyone trying to flee.

“What is taking Pavlov and the others so long?” one soldier muttered, shivering. “They couldn’t have fallen asleep up there, could they?”

Minutes ticked by. The hilltop remained dead silent.

“Don’t be in such a hurry,” a veteran grunted. “I scouted this convoy during the day. They’re just ordinary merchants. Their security is nothing but cheap thugs. They won’t last a minute against us.”

“Then why are we freezing our asses off out here?” another complained. “What if the transports are empty? We’d be risking our necks for nothing.”

“We won’t lose out. Even if the cargo is light, driving those heavy transports back across the border will fetch a massive bounty.”

“True. One of those rigs is worth years of our standard pay.”

A younger soldier sighed, his breath pluming in the cold air. “Just in time, too. My service term is almost up. When we get back, I’m submitting my discharge papers. I’m finally going to marry my beloved Natalia.”

“Yeah, yeah! My wife sent a message last week asking when I’d be home. With this payout, I can retire right alongside you.”

“Haha, damn right we will!”

“Look here,” an older man whispered, pulling a crumpled photograph from his coat. “My wife sent this a week ago. Look how cute my youngest daughter is…”

As the Ursus men traded their hopes and dreams, the creeping blood mist silently engulfed their position, swallowing the moonlight.

“Hey… is it getting foggy?”

“Winter is coming. This damn weather always brings fog,” the veteran dismissed. “It’s better for us anyway. The thicker the mist, the more those merchant bastards will panic when they can’t see us coming…”

The veteran stopped talking.

The younger soldier blinked, suddenly realizing that the quiet banter and the heavy breathing of his comrades had vanished. A deep, unnatural silence had fallen over the brush.

Sensing something horribly wrong, he tried to stand up and draw his blade.

His legs refused to move. A sudden, overwhelming lethargy crushed his muscles.

‘What’s going on?’

Panic seized his chest. He rolled his eyes wildly, trying to peer through the thick, metallic-smelling fog.

Then, a flash of brilliant blonde hair appeared in his field of vision.

A small, delicate figure crouched beside him. A hand, as cold as the grave, gently caressed his jawline. Before he could scream, a single, agonizing slit opened across his throat.

He couldn’t breathe. He watched in muted horror as the hot red blood gushing from his own neck defied gravity, spiraling upward to gather into a perfect, floating crimson orb in the little girl’s palm.

His body grew colder. The fatigue pulled him down into the dark. He knew this feeling from the battlefield; it was the sensation of life slipping away.

As his eyes fluttered shut, a single, crushing regret echoed in his fading mind.

‘Natalia… I’m sorry. I can’t come home to marry you.’

Twenty men died in absolute silence.

Weaving her blood mist with a potent Weakening Spell, Flandre had paralyzed the entire squad. She moved through the fog with the casual grace of a butcher picking out cuts in a market, harvesting their lives one by one.

Absorbing the fresh, vital blood of twenty trained soldiers brought a radiant flush to Flandre’s pale cheeks. She licked a stray drop of crimson from her lips, her eyes glowing with absolute satisfaction.

She turned to the scattered, drained husks and offered a flawless, elegant curtsy.

“Thank you for the treat!”

With a gentle press of her hand toward the ground, the earth softened like liquid. The twenty Ursus corpses sank silently into the dirt, swallowed by the soil until no trace of their existence remained.

Her meal finished, Flandre drifted quietly back toward the transport vehicle. Her heightened senses rippled; the battle at the front of the convoy had just ignited.

Ch’en and the Shadow Guards had swiftly located the remaining Ursus detachment blocking the vanguard path. However, unlike the rear guard, these enemies were tightly clustered together, their weapons drawn and eyes locked on the road.

The enemy formation shattered any hope of a silent, divided assassination.

Ch’en made a split-second tactical decision. She drew her blade. A direct assault.

The Ursus soldiers’attention was entirely fixated on the sleeping caravan. They never fathomed that their ambush had been compromised, let alone that the’helpless merchants’ possessed the teeth to launch a preemptive strike.

Coupled with the overwhelming, top-tier lethality of the Shadow Guards, the result was a slaughter.

In the opening second of the clash, half of the twenty Ursus soldiers were decapitated or impaled.

The surviving half broke from their shock, desperately raising their heavy weapons to counterattack. But the disparity in raw combat power was an impossible chasm. In less than two minutes, Ch’en and the Shadow Guards systematically dismantled the remaining resistance, leaving the frozen road slick with blood.

Despite their efficiency, the clash of steel and the dying screams were too loud to conceal.

A caravan guard on night duty heard the commotion and rushed toward the vanguard. When his flashlight swept over the mangled, bleeding corpses of twenty elite Ursus infantrymen, the guard nearly lost his mind from sheer terror.

He sprinted back to the center of the camp, screaming at the top of his lungs to wake the caravan leader.

And upon seeing the aftermath of the massacre, the caravan leader instantly lost his wits as well.