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If they could capture her, break her, or force her to reveal how she had grown so strong, they would become unstoppable and could get out of this god forsaken death zone and aim for regions with greater essence and better resources.

The better hunting grounds were just the bonus.

The real prize was the power that allowed one woman to stand against three Layer 4 beasts.

That was why they had come with everything they had.

...

But the Veynar’s true deterrent wasn’t just their towering walls, nor was it the ruthless Warchief Veylara. It was actually someone else, the High Shaman Zephyra.

The Veynar were the only tribe in the entire surrounding Orrath region to possess a true Shaman.

While human Spirit Warriors cultivated their own internal Sun Cores... forging their bodies and spirits into personalized weapons of war, and even though other races don’t need to capture and use spirits, they still had to rely on their bloodline...But Shamans operated on an entirely different, far more terrifying axis.

They did not cultivate; they acted as Spirit vessels.

Through grueling rituals and deep, maddening communion with the spirits of nature and the Ancestors, a Shaman could bypass the internal core entirely.

They could reach out and directly command the Primal Essence already suspended in the air.

When a Spirit Warrior fought, they used the water in their own flask; when a Shaman fought, they redirected the entire river.

In a region saturated with ancient Primal essence as the Great Orrath, this made Zephyra a walking natural disaster.

On a battlefield, her control over ambient essence made her vastly more dangerous than even the feared Veylara.

For decades, she was the primary reason the surrounding enemies kept their blades sheathed. The enemy feared the Warchief’s brilliance, but they were absolutely terrified of the High Shaman’s wrath.

However, this god-like authority came with a fatal drawback.

Because Shamans borrowed their power instead of cultivating it within a fortified vessel, their human bodies were fundamentally unadapted to the strain.

They were fragile flesh-vessels trying to channel the wrath of gods.

Channeling low-level essence for daily rituals was manageable, but commanding massive, catastrophic amounts of power at once was like forcing a raging flood through a hollow reed.

The sheer power of the unrefined Primal Essence would literally scorch their nervous systems, rupture their blood vessels, and shatter their internal spiritual pathways.

A single massive overdraw could permanently cripple a Shaman, rendering them entirely useless... or in more extreme cases reduce them to ash on the spot.

The Coalition was fully aware of this limitation. They knew that a direct assault on the Veynar while Zephyra stood on the walls was suicide.

So, they didn’t attack. Instead, they orchestrated a masterpiece of absolute, cold-blooded sabotage.

That’s why using their background, the Zerith had smuggled something and deliberately provoked a massive horde of beasts, funneling the rabid stampede directly toward the Veynar.

It was an apocalypse meant to slaughter the whole tribe.

To prevent the total annihilation of her people, Zephyra was forced to step in.

She had drawn upon the deepest, most dangerous Ancestral blessings, forcefully pulling an unfathomable amount of ambient essence to crush the horde in a single, devastating elemental strike.

She saved the tribe, but the Zerith got exactly what they wanted.

The backlash of that borrowed power had ravaged Zephyra from the inside out. Her essence pathways were scorched, her body rendered so weak she could barely stand without coughing up black blood.

The greatest weapon in the Veynar arsenal was now bedridden, completely crippled, and entirely useless for the foreseeable future.

The invisible shield protecting the Veynar had finally shattered. And that was the only reason the Zerith and Marauder coalition finally dared to march on the Veynar walls.

They fully believed that after so much planning, it would definitely work out this time.

That’s why, they were completely relaxed at the back, letting their front lines do the initial walking while they saved their breath for the final burn.

And as for the massive amount of death happening inside the pass? The Marauder chief didn’t care about death at all.

Because according to their belief, dying in battle wasn’t a loss or an end.

It was just a new beginning... a glorious transition where their spirits would leave their heavy bodies, cross the world, and permanently reunite with the ancient ancestors inside the ever green pastures.

A warrior who died with his club in his hand was celebrated, not mourned.

They were entirely fearless, raised from their first winters to view the battlefield as a sacred place where their names were etched into legends.

The better and more fearless they were, the better the life would be in next beginning.

The only reason they had been so explosive and angry about the Veynar’s dawn raid last night wasn’t because they missed the dead companions or the burned mud huts.

It was because those weak Veynar human monkeys had actually dared to enter their territory.

It was a massive, unforgivable insult to their pride. To have a ”dying” tribe cross their border and carve war signs into their flesh was like a rat biting a lion’s paw while it slept.

Their bloated pride demanded that the Veynar be wiped from the face of the world to clean the stain off their ancestors’ bones.

The Zerith Chief clicked his jaw louder, stepping right in front of the Marauder Chief’s view. ”Listen to me! The front lines are stalling! The reports coming back through the runners say a single black monkey is holding the bottleneck! He has already cut down hundreds of our veterans! We are wasting our mass!”

”Shut your mouth, insect,” one of the Marauder commanders growled from the side, casually tossing a heavy bone into the dirt. ”The pass is narrow. It takes time for a thousand men to walk through a crack in the rock.

The monkey will run out of breath soon, and then our boys will trample his bones into grease. Sit down and eat your meat.”