"Wooooo!"
A shrill, wailing sound like a ghost crying in the dead of night rang out from the blackened sky. Then a meteor wrapped in flames of psionic energy came hurtling down, trailing a long tail.
Like a torch streaking across the sky, it slammed into the ground with devastating force. The violent impact heralded the final moments of the outpost ahead, where soldiers were organizing a counterattack.
The meteor spell had been cast with vicious precision. Apart from a squad of Pioneer Legion hunters who had already charged into the position and begun fighting the skeleton army, nearly all the guards stationed there were wiped out by the boulder and its flames.
It wasn't because they'd let their guard down.
After all, who could have expected a pack of gnolls to wield such a complex psionic spell?
East Prussia was close to Transia, and gnolls were a local menace there as well. But until they saw the difference between the gnolls of the Dark Mountains and the local ones with their own eyes, even the elite troops personally trained by Marshal Loren had little experience dealing with such savage outsiders.
The young soldiers weren't the only ones unfamiliar with the Black Calamity. Even Marshal Loren, a half-dwarf nearing seventy, had never experienced one. In theory, that left them with even less experience than the battered Blood Eagle Clan.
Plaguefang, the leader of the gnoll warlocks, sat astride his dire wolf and watched coldly as the distant outpost was destroyed and set ablaze.
The bloodthirsty scent had made the dire wolf beneath him restless, but Plaguefang himself had little interest in this small-scale skirmish.
If anything, the taciturn gnoll probably thought that humans from the plains were unbelievably weak. Even a mere low-level meteor spell, without any astral psionic enhancement,