"Group around fifty, two hundred steps that way," Syie proved to be true to her words, not overestimating her ability even by the slightest.
From the very second she got to the front of the group, she confidently led the entire unit between the trees. Not even for a second did the determined and focused look in her eyes wavered.
And in less than an hour, we found ourselves pretty deep into the forest, with a track of seventeen separate human groups left to rot throughout our path.
"I wonder how many died so far," Fay muttered when she kicked aside the corpse of a man belonging to the last, eighteenth group we slaughtered while on our way towards the nearest of the places where humans already started to concentrate.
"With those guys, it makes about three hundred?" I muttered, throwing out a rough guess of how many have died since we set out of Madam's camp.
A total of eighteen groups, ranging from five to six people to small units numbering as many as forty.
I didn't even bother employing my brainpower to scour my memories and come up with an accurate number. I couldn't be bothered to do a run through my battle log to count the entries either... Because between me and Fay, we only killed what, every tenth soldier out of the total count?
"Unless you are asking about their army as a whole, then about..." I took some time to come up with several guesses, and slapped pretty much random numbers in some places of the equation I quickly developed... "I would say, around two thousand of them."
There was something called an educated guess... And what I did, couldn't be any further away from what an educated guess was.
"That leaves only eight thousand more, right?" Fay grinned, as if happy that her prey wasn't about to run dry anytime yet.
Watching her jump out of the small depression she was in so that she wouldn't dirty her naked feet with all the blood and guts scattered around the place where the last skirmish took place...
I gulped my saliva down.
"Fay, I'm sorry to remind you again, but we really need to make sure to hold our bond in a choke," I muttered, torn between the endless desire to keep gawking at the girl and the rational urge to look away.
"You know, I can't help but feel sympathetic if those are the standards you know," I called back in response, rolling my eyes over all the teasing this group was strangely happy to indulge in.
And judging by the sharp stare Syie gave me that quickly mellowed down when she no longer hid her amusement...
'Right, in a forest like this, they would have hardly any other ways to kill time but to talk with others,' I thought, suddenly embarrassed of the sense of supremacy I felt for a mere instant over the locals.
"Anyway," Syie's face changed. All the amusement vanished, replaced by an unadulterated focus. "Huge group, about five hundred strong, half a mile away," she reported in a calm, collected voice while pointing her long, slender arm to the left of our path so far.
"I guess that means we should begin phase two of our job," I thought out loud, only to feel Fay tug at the sleeve of my shirt.
"We are going all in?" Fay asked, her eyes glittering with sparks of excitement.
"That's right, we are going to slaughter roughly half of them," I nodded my head while reaching out to pat Fay's hair. "I think this is the right time to start sweeping them around. Right, Syie?"
Raising my eyes back to Loraz's companion, I waited until she nodded her head.
.net
"We are now further into the forest than most of the humans," she reported back.
"Good," I replied before pushing Fay away only to grab her hand and pull her to the very front of the group yet again. "We are going to split up into two groups and sweep them all towards the edge!"
Shouting out loud with all my might definitely felt weird when, up until this moment, we tried to maintain a relatively silent, stealthy approach.
"May we celebrate victory and the glorious slaughter of the escaping cowards a few hours from now!"