779 Phantom Oath: Guardian Pact (Monthly Ticket Bonus Chapter 1230)

Before the line Murphy had drawn across the battlefield, blood had already flowed like a river. The bodies of the slain gnolls piled up, even blocking the advance of the troops behind them. The gnolls in the rear had no choice but to throw their kin's corpses into the deep ravine beside the shattered mountain so they could keep moving forward. Murphy and the clan chief's bodyguards held their position, killing until the early hours of the morning. Only after the Nords and the Carnations had withdrawn did Murphy lead the vampires slowly back into the valley.

By then, the wounded and civilian staff in the valley had already evacuated through the tunnels. With fierce battles raging both inside and outside the valley that night, even the gnolls, who were never short of manpower, couldn't spare more troops to pursue those retreating toward Baphomet Canyon while they were under attack from all sides.

Hugheson quickly caught on. It realized that the Transians hadn't launched this astonishing counterattack to rout the gnolls.

They had only wanted to buy an undisturbed window of time for their evacuation.

But knowing that did no good. The tunnels leading to Baphomet Canyon were firmly in the enemy's hands, and no matter how hard the gnolls and kobolds tried, they couldn't break in, let alone figure out the layout inside.

The labyrinthine tunnel system was practically a challenge to the limits of gnoll intelligence. Hugheson had gone inside to look for itself, and it doubted the gnolls could make sense of the tunnels even if the enemy laid the plans right in front of them.

The Transians had taken the kobolds' underground tunneling tactics to a whole new level. But once Shadowvale was theirs, the gnolls would control those tunnels.

They could send large numbers of