Elven cultivators

A thin mist, like gauze, flowed slowly across the wasteland, blurring the distant hills and ravines into silhouettes of varying shades.

Finn lay prone behind a low earthen slope, his body pressed very low. His dark brown cloak was covered with withered grass and leaves he had gathered from the wasteland, almost blending into the surrounding withered vegetation.

About twenty meters behind, a dry ditch meandered like a snake, and the earthen walls on both sides of the ditch were covered with dead vines, which provided natural cover.

More than forty elven warriors were scattered on both sides of the river, holding their breath and focusing intently.

Their leather armor was also covered in camouflage, and from a distance, they looked like a few clumps of slightly regular-shaped bushes and rocks.

He heard a soft rustling sound behind him, but Finn didn't turn around until the person stopped half a meter to his side. Only then did he turn his head slightly and catch a glimpse of Rosalyn's dark red short hair out of the corner of his eye.

"I've scouted the area," Rosalyn said in a low voice. "There are very few signs of animal activity around here, so the reptiles of the Molten Thorn tribe shouldn't be coming here to forage."

Finn frowned slightly: "That's strange... Could it be that what we saw earlier were wandering lizardmen who had been driven out of their tribe?"

Having suffered repeated losses at the hands of the Silvermoon Clan, the Molten Thorn Tribe is now increasingly wary.

Not only did they change hunting areas every so often, but they also expanded the size of their hunting teams, even sending silver-rank dragon lizardmen to lead them, greatly increasing the difficulty of ambushes by the forest guards.

During this time, the forest guards played hide-and-seek with the lizardmen quite often on the wasteland.

Just three days ago, a spellcaster's avian pet in the Forest Guard discovered traces of lizardmen in the vicinity. Cedric suspected it might be a hunting party from the Molten Thorn tribe, so he sent out the first and second squads to investigate.

They had been squatting there for almost half a day, but hadn't seen a single person.

"Wait a little longer," Finn said after thinking for a moment. "If we haven't found it by dusk, we'll leave."

Rosalyn nodded and continued to lie in wait.

In a wind-eroded crater at the edge of a ditch, Roman rested his battle axe on his lap, stroking the patterns on its surface.

Eleanor sat down next to her, shoulder to shoulder, looking completely at ease.

After fighting side by side many times, the two had become very close and had become close friends who could rely on each other.

"Where did you get this weapon?" Eleanor asked curiously.

She had noticed it earlier; Roman had switched to a battle axe, which looked extremely well-made.

The patterns on the axe surface, in particular, gave her a vaguely familiar feeling.

"This is a weapon that Anton specially made for me," Roman boasted proudly.

Eleanor was taken aback by his words, a look of surprise flashing in her eyes.

Weapons created by Anton?

When did he learn forging?

and many more!

Eleanor suddenly realized why the patterns on the axe looked somewhat familiar.

The direction of those lines is clearly very similar to the runes on magical items.

"This is... a magical item?"

"That's right." Roman nodded, a bright smile on his face.

Eleanor was stunned.

Creating magical items, even the lowest-grade lesser magical items, requires an extremely high level of alchemy skill from the caster.

She has been studying alchemy for over forty years, yet she can only barely create magical items.

But what about Anton?

He's only been studying alchemy for less than two years, yet he's already caught up with her.

This talent is simply too exaggerated!

Eleanor recalled that when she first heard that Anton had started studying alchemy, she secretly thought that it was impossible for him to have such a talent for it.

In retrospect, that idea was far too naive.

A monster like Anton is simply beyond the comprehension of common sense.

"Target spotted! Everyone, get ready!"

Finn's low voice suddenly broke Eleanor's thoughts.

She immediately composed herself and, together with Roman, leaned forward to look into the depths of the wasteland.

In the morning mist, a group of gray-green figures were slowly moving in this direction.

As the distance closed, the figure's face gradually became visible.

They are undoubtedly lizardmen.

There are at least seventy or eighty of them, I estimate.

Surprisingly, these lizardmen were pushing carts, their wheels making a dull thud on the uneven ground. The carts were piled high with bulging animal skin bags, the contents of which were unknown, and they swayed slightly with each bump of the wheels.

Finn's gaze fell on the end of the line, and his pupils suddenly contracted.

"Humans?"

At the very back of the lizardman line were three humans.

Finn initially thought it was a lizardman attack on human prisoners captured by a caravan, but after a closer look, he dismissed the idea.

The three humans were clean-cut, with no bloodstains or wounds on their bodies, and their expressions were very calm. They even had smiles on their lips when they talked with their heads down. They didn't look like prisoners at all.

Rosalyn also noticed the three people, a hint of surprise and uncertainty flashing in her eyes.

"How did humans end up mixed up with lizardmen?"

The lizardmen don't just attack Silvermoon Forest; they also prey on human caravans passing through the wasteland.

Among humans, lizardmen are synonymous with cruelty and plunder.

It's hard to imagine that these two would be mixed together, and yet they seem to blend quite well.

Finn and Rosalyn exchanged a glance, both reading the same conclusion in each other's eyes—something was amiss.

"...Take care of the lizardmen first, leave the three humans alive for interrogation later."

Finn made a quick decision and raised his hand to make a gesture.

On both sides of the river, all the Pokémon tensed up, ready for battle.

The lizardmen are getting closer.

As the lizardman at the front stepped over a protruding rock, Finn suddenly let out a low shout.

"Let's do it!"

In an instant, dozens of arrows shot out from the ditch like a torrential rain, hurtling towards the lizardman ranks with a sharp whooshing sound.

At the same time, the spellcasters, who had been waiting in ambush, unleashed a barrage of spells like a shower of flowers, raining down on the lizardmen. Explosions rang out one after another, and fire and ice shards intertwined to create a chaotic curtain of death.

Caught off guard, more than a dozen lizardmen in the front row fell instantly, their screams and roars mingling together.

But the remaining lizardmen quickly reacted, rapidly shrinking their formation, raising their shields to block the arrows, and simultaneously launching a charge towards the ditch.

Leading them were several exceptionally large lizardmen.

They stand over 2.5 meters tall, covered in rough, dark red scales, and the row of bony spikes on their backs is thicker than those of ordinary lizardmen.

These are dragon lizard people, the nobles among the lizard people.

They possess a more concentrated dragon bloodline than ordinary lizardmen, and upon reaching adulthood, they possess the power of a silver-ranked individual.

"kill!"

Finn leaped out from behind the earthen mound, his longsword unsheathed, its blade wreathed in a pale blue aura, and slashed fiercely at a dragon-lizardman.

The elven warriors followed closely behind, leaping out of the ditch and surging towards the lizardmen like a tide.

Roman rushed to the front, and a lizardman raised a bone spear to stab at her, but she dodged it to the side and swung her axe at the opponent's chest.

The moment the axe blade fell, a burst of blue and white light erupted.

A thick layer of frost visibly formed on the lizardman's chest, and ice crystals spread outwards along the gaps in its scales, freezing its entire body into a block of ice in the blink of an eye, preventing it from even letting out a scream.

Roman kicked the ice sculpture over, and the ice block fell to the ground, shattering into several pieces. The cut surfaces were filled with dark red frozen flesh and ice shards.

"Good heavens!"

Roman himself was stunned for a moment, then grinned and laughed, his eyes filled with even more excitement.

She turned and pounced on another lizardman, the frost-patterned axe spreading cold air and frost wherever it passed.

Lizardmen are not Ridgeosaurus and still have the weakness of being afraid of low temperatures and cold. The frost attribute of the Frostweave Axe is exactly their nemesis.

Those lizardmen who would normally require several axe blows to defeat can now be frozen and killed with a single strike.

A dragon-man noticed Roman, roared, and pounced on her, its claws tearing through the air as it attacked her neck.

Roman remained unfazed, gripping the axe with both hands and bringing it down on his head.

The moment the axe blade collided with the claws, the runes on the Frostweave Axe suddenly shone brightly, and a blue-white icy tide surged out like a raging torrent, spreading upwards along the dragon-lizardman's claws.

The dragon lizard-man groaned as the scales on his arms cracked in the extreme cold, freezing into dark red ice shards before the blood could even flow.

It abruptly pulled its arm back and looked down. Its entire forearm was numb, and the purplish-black color of frostbite was faintly visible beneath the scales.

A flicker of horror flashed in the dragon-lizard man's vertical pupils, and he subconsciously took a half-step back.

Roman gave it no chance to catch its breath, strode after it, and swung his axe down again.

The axe struck the dragon-lizardman squarely on the shoulder, the blade cutting into his scales, and a chill surged into his body from the wound.

The dragon-lizard man shuddered violently, spitting out a mouthful of blood mist mixed with ice shards, and staggered backward.

Eleanor, who was standing nearby, witnessed the whole thing and stared wide-eyed in disbelief.

"A faint-light level magical item!"

At this point, she could clearly see that the Frost Axe in Roman's hand was not some inferior magical item at all, but a genuine luminous magical item!

Anton actually created a luminous level magical item!

Eleanor felt her worldview being challenged once again.

The boost to combat power from luminous magical items is immediate, especially when the item happens to be a perfect counter to the enemy.

Wielding the Frost-Patterned Axe, Roman overwhelmingly dominated the Dragon Lizardman, who was also a lower-ranking Silver-ranked individual, leaving his opponent in a sorry state and struggling to defend himself.

After struggling for four or five minutes, Roman chopped off the head of the dragon-lizard man with an axe.

Roman didn't stop, turning around and attacking the other lizardmen.

The girl's wild and unrestrained fighting style seemed even more savage and ferocious than the lizardmen. Coupled with the restraint of the Frostweave Axe, the lizardmen were routed wherever she went. She seemed to have the potential to single-handedly cut through the entire lizardmen's ranks, which made all the elven guards take notice.

The elves were already stronger than the lizardmen, and they had the advantage of launching a surprise attack. In addition, Roman's sudden rise to prominence made the outcome of the battle a foregone conclusion from the very beginning.

More than ten minutes later, as the last dragon lizardman was cut down by Finn's sword and completely lost his fighting ability, the remaining lizardmen finally collapsed, dropped their weapons and fled in all directions.

The elven warriors caught up with him, knocked him unconscious, and tied him up with ropes.

After the battle, dozens of lizardmen corpses lay scattered across the wasteland, their blood soaking the parched earth, and the air thick with the stench of blood.

The three humans huddled behind the cart, their faces filled with terror. When they saw the elves looking at them, they knelt down and begged for mercy.

Finn ignored them and turned to look at Roman, his gaze falling on the Frostweave Axe in the latter's hand, a look of surprise in his eyes.

"A faint-light level magical item?"

Roman's performance in the battle just now was evident to all. The power displayed by that battle axe was clearly the kind of power that only a low-level magical item could possess.

"That's right." Roman puffed out his chest proudly. "This is a custom weapon that Anton made for me."

Finn and Rosalyn were both taken aback by what they heard.

Anton actually knows this?

The remaining elven guards looked at each other in disbelief, their faces filled with shock.

Even though they all knew Anton was a genius, they were still shocked by the news.

Finn opened his mouth as if to ask something, but in the end he just shook his head and swallowed his question.

It is foreseeable that this news will cause a huge uproar when it reaches the clan.

At that moment, a guard quickly walked over and reported to the captain: "Captain, the contents of the vehicle have been checked, and it's all food."

food?

Finn frowned, his sharp gaze fixed on the three humans.