Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 44
“Ha! The yokels walked right into it!”
The young man calling himself Villis laughed as he spurred his horse forward, ready to cut Lannor’s head off.
There was not the slightest trace of warmth left in his smile, only naked cruelty and a feverish eagerness to see blood.
No caution. No care.
He truly could not imagine what power his prey had to threaten him.
Two crossbowmen hidden in the dark, and himself mounted. Against one lone man ... what suspense could there possibly be?
Cavalry. The king of all arms in war.
In the age of cold steel, no matter how strong an infantryman was, before cavalry he was only a rabbit beneath an eagle’s claws.
Modern folk do not always grasp this, but anyone who has seen Spanish bullfighting may have some notion.
Those gaudily dressed knights sit atop sleek steeds with braided manes.
They dare stand almost nose to nose with an enraged bull, then the instant it charges, they start the horse moving and deliberately keep just one step ahead of it, toying with the beast as they go.
A knight with true mastery of the reins can even draw a javelin, drive it into the bull’s back, and still spare a wave to the crowd.
A bull that ten grown men could not hold down becomes a lump of meat before one rider and one horse working together.
A footman cannot match the start. Cannot match the speed. So what if I ride right up into your face?
And against men, that advantage is even more terrifying.
An infantryman gets only one chance to hurt a rider, the instant they close. A rider has chances from beginning to end.
So to Villis, his ease and arrogance were only natural.
That belief lasted until Lannor turned around.
A pair of amber cat eyes came away from the man lying in the mud and fixed on Villis.
The pupils in those cat eyes had shrunk to slits.
Villis could not have said what the feeling was, not exactly. If he had to describe it ... it was like a great hunting cat inside his chest, breathing once against his heart.
The instant Villis began his mounted charge, Lannor had already formed the Sign.
A footman could not touch a rider ... but a Witcher had Signs.
“Alder.”
The air compressed under a sudden force, and just as Villis’s horse’s hoof was about to touch down, it was knocked out of line.
The full weight of the landing fell upon a hoof set wrong.
There was a crack, and pale bone punched through the flesh of the fine horse’s foreleg.
The beast screamed and rolled, thrashing its several hundred kilograms of flesh through the mudflats.
By the time it stopped, the human knight tangled in that rolling mass could no longer feel his lower body.
Villis’s spine was broken.
In truth, had this not been mudflat but hard ground, he would already have been dead.
Lannor’s face remained blank as he crossed the mud toward that heap of shattered flesh and bone.
“W, wait, sir, this is a misundersta...”
Thud.
A fist wrapped in a studded leather glove smashed into Villis’s face.
The once well-dressed young man had been trying to speak, but after that punch, half his face was torn away by the triangular iron studs on Lannor’s glove.
The pain was so violent that the body flooded itself with dulling humors. Their effect would not last long, but for now it was enough to leave Villis reeling and half senseless.
After that one punch, two more bolts cut through the air, but Lannor dodged both with ease.
Now that he was alert, with no one able to hinder his movement, such things could not touch him.
One rider, two crossbowmen. On its face, it was a deadlier setup than the ambush laid for Bordon.
But Bordon had had no retreat left at all, and so had been forced to fight straight on.
And he had died for it.
Now, by crippling Villis while the man was still careless, Lannor had turned the battle from climax to ending in a single instant.
An ordinary Witcher would never have had the precision to catch the exact instant a hoof touched down, then strike it aside with an Alder Sign.
Their Alder Signs were too diffuse. Even if they hit a rider, they likely would not do more than make the horse hesitate.
Only Lannor, with Mentos sharpening his perception and control, could manage such a first-strike kill.
The Witcher cast a long look toward the distant road, the place from which the bolts had come.
But he had no time to hunt them down.
Bernie was already bleeding heavily.
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