No matter how much confidence Qian Weining had accumulated prior to this moment, he also understood this arrow was totally off target and could not have hit any of the bandits.
However, after the arrow disappeared into the darkness of the night, a scream still rang out on the opposite slope where the bandits were.
Immediately, Qian Weining asked the guards next to him, “Was that bandit shot by one of
you?”
A guard beside him said, “Vice President Qian, we were all taking cover just now and couldn’t even lift our heads. None of us fired an arrow at the enemy.”
Qian Weining’s expression turned strange. What was going on?
But before he could deliberate further, another group of bandits who had found their way over from the foot of the mountain were closing in. When Qian Weining saw the moving figures, he hurriedly shouted, “Don’t get distracted. Hurry up and stop the enemy!”
When Ren Xiaosu saw Qian Weining stunned, he knew it was bad.
Earlier, Ren Xiaosu had controlled “Old Xu” to take out the bandits the moment Qian Weining fired his arrow. He was doing everything reflexively, so he did not notice Qian Weining had slipped up and fired off an arrow at a wrong angle.
What a miscalculation it was by Ren Xiaosu!
But it did not matter. He knew how to remedy the situation.
At this moment, everything seemed to have returned to normal. Qian Weining was still on his “one shot, one kill” rate while the number of bandits rapidly decreased.
In just half an hour, only about a dozen bandits remained from the 100-odd bandits who attacked. Furthermore, they were still unable to get close to the carriage walls of the trade caravan.
The leader of the bandits was filled with hatred. He really wanted to kill the guards of the trade caravan to avenge his comrades, but he understood he had been rendered powerless.
“Retreat!”
With his command, the dozen-odd surviving bandits turned around and ran into the mountains.
Some of the guards wanted to give chase, but Qian Weining stopped them. “Don’t pursue them. Let’s seize their bows and arrows first. After that, split up into teams and follow my lead. We’re going to inspect their bodies!”
With that, Qian Weining leaped out through a gap in the wagon fort and headed straight for the slope the bandits were previously holding. He did not care if there were any more ambushes waiting outside.
The guards looked at each other and followed close behind. Everyone could not understand why the usually calm Vice President Qian would suddenly get so impatient. When they all climbed up the slope, they saw the bandits’ corpses strewn all over the ground with arrows impaled between the eyes. The guards praised, “Wonderful archery, Vice President Qian!”
“That’s right, how did you train your archery to be able to hit so precisely between the eyes?”
Although they were partly trying to flatter him, most of their praise was sincere. In the entire royal army of the Kingdom of Sorcerers, how many people could master archery to this level?
However, Qian Weining ignored the guards’ flattery. Instead, he looked around for any suspicious corpses.
A second later, he saw a corpse that did not seem quite right. Almost all of the bandits were shot directly between the eyes, but this person… had an arrow sticking out from the top of his head.
It was as though the arrow had fallen out of the sky and landed squarely on this bandit’s head.
One of the guards praised, “Vice President Qian is really godlike. I thought that missed shot totally missed its mark. I didn’t expect Vice President Qian’s archery to be so amazing. It looked like you misfired that arrow, but it was actually a very astute shot.”
These words left Qian Weining dumbfounded. Listening to everyone’s praise, he became a little unsure of the situation. However, he felt the odds of this shot were ridiculous.
While the guards were flattering him, the dozen-odd bandits who escaped had fled into the depths of the mountains. The pathetic-looking bandits did not even notice there was a black figure quietly following them. Suddenly, the leader of the bandits slowly stopped in his tracks. He drew a saber from his belt and looked straight ahead. “Who’s there?!”
A figure wearing the attire of a bounty hunter appeared at the end of the mountain path in a flash with an orange Eye of True Sight held tightly in his hand. “You people are really disappointing.” In the dark of the night, the violet sigil on his orange Eye of True Sight pulsed, like it was breathing. The bandits all looked at the bounty hunter in fear and tensed up. “You didn’t say there was a sharpshooter in their group.” The bandit leader roared angrily, “Dozens of my men have been killed by him. I’ve never seen anyone whose archery was so precise before. Who on earth did you ask us to kill!? They have such a powerful expert protecting them!”
The bounty hunter sighed. “You’re weak, yet you claim that your opponent is strong. There aren’t any ‘sharpshooters’ in that group at all.”
“How is that possible? Are you saying I’m lying when I say that my comrades were shot between the eyes?” the bandit leader said.
“Never mind, there’s no need for me to waste my time with you people.” The bounty hunter asked, “Where’s my gold coins? Since the mission was not completed, I can’t let you leave with the payment.” The bandit leader sneered, “Then wouldn’t my comrades have died in vain? I won’t tell you where the gold coins are. Furthermore, you’d better think it over carefully. I know what you look like. If the fact that you tried to assassinate a sorcerer today gets leaked, you know very well what the consequences will be.”
ass
Bounty hunters were backed by the sorcerer clans, but they were also chess pieces that could be abandoned at will by the same clans. The magus order’s laws stated that whoever attempted to assassinate sorcerers would become a public enemy.
This was a rule everyone had to abide by. You could find a loophole around it, but you could not go directly against it.
Therefore, even if they wanted to kill a measly sorcerer like Melgor, the mastermind would still have to find a scapegoat.
The bounty hunter smiled calmly. “Are you threatening me? No wonder you all ended up here in these remote mountains and turned to banditry.” After that, the Eye of True Sight in the bounty hunter’s hand glowed. He even started chanting a faint incantation.
When the bandits saw that the situation had turned unfavorable, they tried to escape. But before they could get far, a blue streak of ice burst out from under the feet of the bounty hunter. The icy streak emitted dense cold air, and the meandering shape on the ground resembled an irregular crack splitting a glacier.
The line of ice moved extremely fast. When it caught up to the bandits, they stopped in their tracks in an instant.
Cold air spread upwards from under the bandits’ feet as white frost covered their bodies at visible speed. The bandits turned into ice statues with their backs facing the bounty hunter as their skin turned an icy blue.
It was early summer. With more than a dozen ice statues suddenly appearing in the warm climate, it was an extremely terrifying sight.
The bounty hunter did not stop there. He further recited the incantation for Wind Bind and used an invisible stream of air to shatter the ice statues, turning them into powder.
However, when the bounty hunter cast Wind Bind on the last frozen bandit, he realized his spell had no effect on him.
The bounty hunter was stunned. “What’s going on? How could it not have shattered?”
After three seconds of silence, Old Xu, who was wearing the white mask, turned around and picked up a branch. It kneeled on the ground and wrote, “Why don’t you… try again?”