Silent Battle Charge

"Hey…you're not actually a 2-Star shaman…right?" Shi shot Deon a weird look as they moved away from the 51st unit, heading back towards the more central units along the camp line, where the battle against the Fan Kingdom would be the most fierce.

Deon, Shi, and everyone else travelling with them from the 37th unit, were all running due to the lack of time.

Everyone behind them struggled to catch their breath as their lungs burned and their muscles ached, but Deon and Shi were able to have a casual conversation. Of course, they kept their voices lowered so that others did not overhear them.

Naturally, General Senlin was also fine jogging at this pace as a 2-Star shaman, though he was surprised to see that Lieutenant Shi's fitness was so incredible!

"You know that I'm not really a 2-Star shaman." Deon rolled his eyes. "You were the one who came up with that lie for your employer in the first place."

"Then why are you rapidly becoming even more formidable?" She narrowed her eyes, staring at him intensely, as if trying to see through his secrets.

Deon laughed, but he didn't answer her question.

Shi was extremely curious about Deon's rapid improvement in strength following every battle. No matter how hard she racked her brains, she could not understand how he was achieving this. She would never guess that it was thanks to Deon's core spirit being above mythril class!

Any spirit at holy class and above was different in terms of its rank ascension compared to lower class spirits. Those lower class spirits had a simple single step ascension. For holy class and above spirits, the ascension was more drawn out. It wasn't a single step, nor was it multiple steps, but a continual process.

At first, even Deon hadn't realised that this continual progress in his core spirit's ascension would actually correlate to an ongoing rise in his strength!

The peak stage of a rank meant that a shaman's origin energy had reached its limit and they could no longer improve until reaching 2-Star. Whilst Deon's origin energy wasn't increasing, his core spirit was becoming more formidable with every kill, slowly but surely.

Progress was slow, though. He had killed so many 1-Star shamans, so many at the peak stage even, yet he was still only 75% of the way through the ascension, and his progress was slowing down.

'It seems that it will reach the point that 1-Star shamans are no longer able to help the ancient demon spirit's ascension, only 2-Star shaman's will be of use! This should happen at around 80% completion, but the current rate of progress is already basically negligible.'

For now, Deon shook his head, pushing all other thoughts aside and focussing on his plans for the coming battle.

The difficulty in this battle all depended on the false king and how he reacted to the messages sent by General Senlin, Deon and Shi.

In this battle, Lieutenant Reana's 9 camps would be coming under a joint attack against the Restari rebel troops and the Fan Kingdom troops. If the false king ignored Deon's message and did not withdraw his own troops from attacking the 9 camps, then this battle would definitely be multiple times more difficult.

Deon's men spread out across the 9 camps under the organised plan agreed upon by Deon, Lieutenant Reana and General Senlin. Deon and Shi stayed together after convincing General Senlin that Deon would be able to lead the battle at what was predicted to be the most heated battleground, the 46th unit.

Travelling between each of the 9 units would take a competent shaman around 10 minutes, so if anyone suddenly fell into a worrisome predicament, it would take some time to send across reinforcements. As such, General Senlin still felt uneasy about leaving Deon in the central camp, only feeling somewhat better after Deon agreed to take a larger proportion of the higher ranked shamans with him.

And so, Deon was set to lead the battle at the 46th unit.

As for the others, General Senlin led the 44th and Lieutenant Reana the 48th. These 3 battlegrounds would certainly be key, and also by far the most difficult and bloody battles.

According to the intel extracted from the interrogated rebel soldiers, each of the Fan Kingdom armies assaulting these 3 units would be led by 2-Star shamans!

The Fan Kingdom was really going all out in this battle and leaving nothing to chance. Whilst the Kingdom of Restari had assured them that their own rebel military might, the Fan King wouldn't rely on such a baseless promise. As such, he sent out enough military strength that the Fan Kingdom army should have originally been able to topple these 9 units even without any additional assistance from the false king.

Of course, they did not account for a certain extreme variable in all this…a variable called Deon.

"Will the camps aside from ours, Reana's and Senlin's really be alright?" Shi turned to Deon and asked doubtfully.

They were about to pre-emptively attack the enemy. Their campsite could be seen in the not-too-far distance, but it was not even fully built yet. In fact, some of the enemy troops were still marching towards their 'hidden' partially formed campsite!

Even though they were preparing to attack within the next minute, neither Deon nor Shi seemed anxious.

They had a massive assurance in this battle; Shi was a mid stage 2-Star shaman!

If nothing else, they had absolute confidence that the battle in this one camp would be concluded swiftly. This was good, since it would allow them to quickly make their way to the other camps and provide assistance.

Deon glanced at the masked girl besides him and shook his head.

"Aside from the 44th, 46th and 48th units, there are only 2 other units where there is a small chance of a 2-Star enemy appearing. I left behind 25 shamans with the golden suppression spirit to support each of those camps."

He was referring to the 45th unit and 47th unit, the units between the 3 crucial battlegrounds.

"Oh." Shi nodded. "Then it should be fine, so long as they use the formation properly. That formation is a real pain, even for me. I still can't believe that you actually refined so many golden suppression spirits you know…hey, are you sure you don't want to sell some of those spirits too?"

"Not for now, they're far too useful for improving the strength of my unit."

Before Shi could respond, Deon nodded ahead, quickly saying:

"Look, the enemy has finally stopped marching. Focus on the battle, we can talk about this later."

"Fine, fine…"

"Hey, remember to let me kill the 2-Star shaman leader!" Deon called out after Shi as she ran off ahead into the darkness. He heard a muffled 'I know' called back towards him, before she vanished into the quiet night.

"Hmm…well, I guess I should get going too, otherwise Shi will kill everyone and leave nothing to nourish my ancient demon spirit." Deon smiled and shook his head, then turned back and roared out loud towards his men.

"Men, charge out, silently and with haste! We will cut down the Fan dogs and the rebel scum in one fell swoop, victory is in sight!"

The men of the 46th unit took Deon's commands without any complaints. They had all been thoroughly convinced of his capabilities after everything that transpired earlier.

It was not hidden from the men across Lieutenant Reana's platoon that the plan to liberate these units was successful due to Deon's efforts. Even though he was merely a single commander of one of these units, his status had already elevated far beyond this in the minds of everyone present.

Deon used the 1-Star howling wind spirit, a spirit that allowed a shaman to amplify and direct their voice. With this method, he was able to easily convey his orders to the men in the 46th unit, without the enemy hearing so much as a single word.

After using this spirit, Deon passed it along to a random soldier. Deon already had 9 other spirits in his soul space, he obviously wouldn't keep this hindrance and limit his origin energy recovery speed.

Whoosh…

The 46th unit remained eerily silent as they ran out. The soldiers were all highly alert and on guard, not only against the enemy, but also against one another. They were aware that rebel soldiers could potentially be hiding amongst their ranks, even now…

However, Deon wasn't anxious. He had confirmed earlier that most of these so called rebels weren't particularly loyal to the false king, they were just following the orders issued by their captains and commanders, whilst benefiting from the additional payment passed down by the new king.

After brutally executing all of the publicly discovered rebels, Deon created an environment where the rebels were too afraid to continue being rebels…they just wanted to silently hide. They even hoped that they could integrate back into this unit as 'loyal' soldiers without anyone noticing…

Well, that worked for Deon right now. He couldn't care less where their loyalties lay, so long as they fought hard under his lead.

It seemed that his deterrent was effective enough, because not a single man amongst the 500 plus soldiers spoke out as they rushed forwards as a group.

Deon could already smell the blood before he even reached the enemy, letting him know that Shi had begun her preparations for their arrival. She planned to kill off as many captains and elites as possible, but as per their agreement, she would leave any 2-Star shamans alive for Deon.

The soldiers charging behind him prayed that the intel was wrong and that the enemy wasn't led by a 2-Star shaman powerhouse, but Deon hoped for the opposite!

He was close to reaching 2-Star, and perhaps, in this battle with multiple 2-Star shamans, he might find the right opportunity to ascend…