Elite Mages’ Academy (Web Novel)

Chapter 254: Attack at Night

What disappointed Xiao Lin was that Captain Yu failed to give a clear answer, vaguely brushing the question aside. “You don’t have to worry about that. They can’t do anything with the resurrection tower even if they had it!”

He was very confident, but the answer was still quite vague. Xiao Lin could not question him any further either, since Xiao Lin did not understand much about the resurrection tower himself.

The resurrection tower needed to be used with the Law of Immortality in order to be effective, and the other class monitors felt like Xiao Lin was worrying needlessly. Even if the orcs obtained the resurrection tower, it did not concern them at all. Xiao Lin did not want to reveal those papers either, since he did not wish to expose the fact that Gu Xiaoyue knew Elvish.

The meeting was originally held to convince Captain Yu to assign more men to build the defensive towers, but in the end, everyone else was convinced by Captain Yu instead. The resurrection tower’s importance trumped everything, and with that in mind, not only did they decide not to increase their production of defensive towers, they had even agreed to assign more students to assisting the construction of the resurrection towers in order to hurry up the process.

There was still a puzzling question: if the resurrection tower was really completed, then the Law of Immortality would allow them to prevent themselves from dying, only needing to trade some of their lifespan to revive themselves.

There came the real problem–a simulated space which did not actually exist, would the Law of Immortality still apply here? Even if it was in effect, having their lifespans deducted was not something everyone could accept.

However, Cheng Ming and the others had a reasonable explanation as well: the resurrection tower would take two to three months to complete at the earliest. According to the missions, that was the longest they would have to defend the fortress. After that, if the fortress was still in their hands, Dawn Academy would send their reinforcements to attack the supply-starved orcs. If they failed to defend the fortress in that timeframe, then they had failed their missions anyway.

Basically, no matter how they considered it, the completion of the resurrection tower would mark the completion of their examination.

When they were not fighting, everyone was in a constant state of alert, but it was still more relaxed than during battle. After a few days of battle experience, they were all a lot more battle-ready and experienced than they had been before.

What they did not expect was for the peace to last for four whole days. As they entered the twelfth day of occupying the fortress, Chen Dao from Class Twelve finally gave his suggestion, “We should seize the initiative and launch an attack!”

The orcs had been too quiet. Even though the two days spent assaulting the fortress had left them with a lot of casualties, given the bloodlust on their faces, the losses were not the reason for them stopping.

Even though everyone wanted to believe that the orcs had been scared away by them, the majority of them knew there had to be some sort of trick being played. Their opponents might have been planning a larger scale war, or even waiting for reinforcements.

That was why going on the offensive was necessary. They could not afford to watch on as the orcs regrouped with reinforcements, which would make defending the fortress all that much harder.

Xiao Lin did not agree to that plan for a very simple reason: they were very likely to fail if the elvish warships decided to intervene, leading to unnecessary deaths.

However, there were even more of them who agreed. Thanks to the majority vote, the plan was quickly put into motion. The attack would be done at night to take advantage of the orcs’ poor eyesight.

Xiao Lin would participate in the attack himself. He did not do it to show off; his only intention was to help avoid any unnecessary casualties. The ambush would consist of four hundred of them, taking up basically half of their forces in the fortress. If they were to lose everyone from this attack, then there was no way they could continue defending the fortress.

The battle a few days ago had likely filled everyone with confidence, maybe even thinking that the orcs had lost the will to fight. At least eighty percent of the acting class monitors would be participating in the battle, which caused Xiao Lin a great deal of concern. He discussed the matter with Cheng Ming and concluded that Cheng Ming would have to stay behind.

They were all too idealistic, but even they understood that they could not put all their eggs in one basket. The students with talents were undoubtedly more important, so they could not afford to not have a few on defense.

Xiao Lin picked out about thirty students from Class Seven, including Zhou Feng. Qin Chuan had been forced to stay behind by Xiao Lin since Xiao Lin needed someone to maintain control over the class, which Qin Chuan was definitely more suited to than Gu Xiaoyue. Of course, Xiao Lin had also forced Gu Xiaoyue to stay behind.

The weather was not great that day, with torrential rains falling the whole day. Even during the evening, the sky was filled with dark clouds that covered up the two moons.

“It looks like God is on our side! I can’t believe anyone could disagree with the ambush!” Han Manman was very happy with the weather, and could not resist mocking Xiao Lin.

Xiao Lin shrugged, retorting, “I’m sorry, but this is Planet Norma. Your God probably can’t help you here.”

“You!”

“Alright alright, stop it. Everyone is after the same thing. There’s no difference between right and wrong. We should hurry up. The weather here is erratic, so we should stop delaying.” Sheng Guo of Class Eight said. He was a man with a very noble face, and his words often carried a noble air, which led everyone to suspect he held some sort of position of power back on Earth.

Xiao Lin eyed Sheng Guo, no longer saying anything. He had been interacting with the other acting class monitors more during this time, and Sheng Guo was very smooth when dealing with people. He would always play the mediator when anyone quarreled, being careful not to offend anyone. However, compared to Cheng Ming, Xiao Lin felt that Sheng Guo dealt with things a lot more slyly.

The team left under the cover of night. Considering the lack of vision, their movements were slow, and they moved extremely close to each other to prevent getting lost.

The entire way, Xiao Lin constantly looked toward the sea. Even though he could not see anything in those conditions, everyone understood what he was looking out for.

The mysterious silver warships remained unmoving. Ever since they made their alignments clear after the sudden attack that day, the ships once again fell into silence. If the warships really belonged to the elves, then Xiao Lin could still not figure out what their plan was.

They were only two hours away from the orc encampment. The orcs did not build any defensive towers, likely not expecting that the humans would attack them with their numbers.

The camp was quite open, lacking any form of defensive structures. They had simply pitched up dozens of tents on the plains and left two squads of orcs to keep patrol.

Xiao Lin and the others did not prepare any special tactics for the assault, and naturally were not very good at stealth either, which was why they were noticed by the patrols the moment they got within a few hundred meters.

With that, the battle erupted.