Volume 9: From Green Leaves to the Undead Chapter 3: Decisive Battle in the Woods

Once Li Bin had made thorough preparations, Salbali’s Silver Moon banners finally appeared directly in front of his battle formation. Perhaps having grasped Li Bin’s intentions, she showed no reaction to the battlefield he had laid out, instead continuously calling up units of Battle Dwarves from the rear.

Li Bin watched Salbali’s every move from afar, unable to fathom what she was planning. Once the Battle Dwarves reached five squadrons, Salbali finally took action. She cast strengthening spells on the dwarves while having them drink a strange potion. Once finished, these Battle Dwarves transformed into monsters with reddened skin and bodies shimmering with white light. Salbali pointed toward Li Bin, and the first wave of battle began.

As soon as the fighting started, the enchanted Battle Dwarves charged recklessly at the skeleton soldiers guarding the entrance to the passage. Upon contact, these level two or three dwarves smashed the skeletons blocking their path into powder. The bodies of the Battle Dwarves killed by the skeletons turned a strange, ashen gray immediately.

The battle ended with Li Bin losing six squadrons of skeletons. However, it was not the loss ratio that made his expression sour, but the fact that the bodies of the Battle Dwarves could not be raised as undead. Li Bin realized that Salbali had cast a spell to prevent the reanimation of corpses, while the potion had significantly enhanced the dwarves’ combat prowess. Her goal was singular: to exhaust Li Bin’s "Sea of Bones" and force him into a head-on clash between elite units.

Li Bin, however, would not let them continue this way. Unable to summon new skeletons, he calculated how to conserve his existing troops. When the second wave arrived, Li Bin sent out his skeletons again, but this time, a hail of arrows rained down from both sides of the passage. With this, Li Bin consumed five squadrons of enemy dwarves while losing only two squadrons of his own.

Seeing this, Salbali nodded in satisfaction. The third wave was quickly prepared, but this time, the five squadrons of Battle Dwarves were followed by five small squads of Stone Giants. Without needing a reminder from San Nei, Li Bin understood what the giants were for. He had already made preparations. When the Battle Dwarves shielded the Stone Giants as they charged into the passage, they immediately clashed with the skeleton infantry, but the Stone Giants quickly moved to the sides and pulled up the large trees growing there.

The moment they pulled the trees, the ground shook violently. A massive fissure opened up, and all the Battle Dwarves, Stone Giants, and the skeletons fighting them fell in. Following a series of explosions, the ground slowly sealed shut again. Watching from afar, Li Bin was triumphant; this had been Bai Lingyu’s idea. Hearing from Almu that there were nature-aligned units capable of uprooting trees, he had anticipated that the enemy would deploy them once they realized Li Bin’s Phantom Undead Archers were hidden in the forests along the passage. He had set a trap: the moment a tree was pulled, it triggered a mechanism that caused the surface layer of the passage to split, sending the troops fighting on top plummeting into a pit rigged with numerous fire traps.

This single blow forced Salbali to abandon her current strategy, withdraw her troops, and pull back a distance. Seizing the opportunity, Li Bin cleared the passage, discarded the useless dwarf corpses, and recalled his depleted skeleton soldiers. In their place, he deployed his zombie infantry, spearheaded by Steel Zombies and mixed with low-level Ghost Soldiers.

By then, Salbali had devised a new way to counter Li Bin’s forces. She no longer deployed Battle Dwarves or Stone Giants; instead, she brought up ten log-battering rams and a group of Trebuchet Trees. Li Bin recognized these as nature-aligned siege engines. It seemed Salbali intended to use the immense impact of the rams to break through his defensive line and then use the Trebuchet Trees to strike the Phantom Undead Archers hidden in the woods.

Unfortunately for her, Salbali miscalculated again. Having grown protective of his skeletons, Li Bin had replaced the front-line troops with the more durable zombie infantry, rendering the log rams useless. While Salbali hesitated over whether to commit these siege engines, Li Bin shamelessly used his skill to hijack half of them. Her plan crumbled before it even began, and Salbali was forced to send her elite troops to protect the remaining engines, only for them to be slaughtered by the hijacked machines.

After losing all her siege engines and two squadrons of unicorns, Salbali’s expression finally turned grim. Behind her, over thirty Golden and Green Dragons rose slowly into the air; it appeared she intended to use the dragons’ raw power to force a breakthrough into Li Bin’s main formation. The more she acted this way, the happier Li Bin became. He knew that deploying dragons was an unwise choice; as long as he could drag them down, he could use his "Sea of Bones" tactic to wear them to death.

Perhaps realizing this as well, the Golden Dragons merely circled in the sky before returning to their original positions, leaving Li Bin, who had prepared all his dragon-slaying measures, deeply frustrated.

After that vent, Salbali became even more cautious. She ordered her troops to advance slowly into the passage, with Stone Giants holding massive steel shields on both flanks. Faced with her turtle-like approach, Li Bin struggled to find a good counter. He was forced to push up his Undead Ballistae—originally reserved for the dragons—and rain fire upon the Stone Giants, hoping that once they fell, his hidden archers would have a chance to finish the battle quickly. But Salbali had anticipated this too, embedding Dwarf Shield-bearers within her ranks. Although her losses remained significant, the force eventually pushed its way to the center of the passage.