“The difficulty of finding a needle in a haystack is often greatly overrated. All it takes is a creative mind to figure out ways to separate them, one way or another.” - Saying attributed to the Silver Maiden.

The battle started without much fanfare.

All the boasting and cheering had been left behind to the previous days, as both armies instead faced one another with grim determination to prevail and emerge triumphant from the bloodshed. Drums were beaten once more, horns sounded, and battle cries rose to the heavens as the soldiers from both sides did what they could to raise their morale as they marched towards their foes once more.

Battle cries from the Imperial army almost formed a melody as one unit matched another at the top of their voice, intended to showcase their cohesiveness and intimidate the enemy. In return, the Coalition army’s human soldiers shouted back wild, nearly primal war cries that promised nothing but violent death to those on the receiving end.

Throughout all the yelling around them, the dwarven elite infantry marched forward in stoic silence. Instead of war cries, the rhythmic beat of their heavy boots treading upon the ground and the noise made from where they banged their weapons against their shields created a solemn, heavy pressure that set upon their enemies like a mountain.

It was to kill or be killed on the battlefield, and everybody knows that.

Long Jiangjun Leung Hua-Jeong always eschewed having a flagbearer follow him around, unlike other generals. He knew that on the battlefield, other than as a general, his role was that of an assassin, one who reaped lives from great distances. It was better for his targets to be unaware of his presence, his existence unseen, with only results to speak for itself instead.

His flagbearer remained at the rear of the formation where he had been the past few days, but the Dragon General himself, along with an escort around two hundred strong, was actually situated close to the frontlines, protected behind two layers of elites. One group was led by his most trusted subordinate, while the other was a contender for being some of the very best infantry in the Empire.

Even while the armies marched, he kept a low profile, his trusted bow in hand and a full quiver behind his back. His mind was focused, his eyes roaming over the enemy forces in the distance with the help of a spyglass to ensure that his target was who they proclaimed to be. Given the protection given to said targets, he was almost certain that his opponent actually had the guts to use their own high commander as bait, for some reason.

He knew all too well that it was most certainly a trap, yet it was a trap he had to tackle regardless. The potential benefits were just too great to even consider avoiding the trap.

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The front lines of both armies met and struck each other in a cacophony of noises, and the rest started to move as well. Hua-Jeong could see the enemy’s wings moving to strike his army’s flanks, and how his generals hunkered down into defensive positions in turn. He could see Zahira Al-Nairi leading the Imperial cavalry out on the offense, while the enemy’s own dreaded cavalry started deploying from where they stood at the rear of the enemy formation.

All of those passed through his mind and were ignored as his eyes locked on to his targets. The old general was situated around two hundred paces or so from the front lines, while his targets were around four hundred paces away from the same, on the other side. It would be at the edge of the range he was confident in, but it would have to do.

As he breathed out, Leung Hua-Jeong plucked an arrow with his fingers and nocked it onto the string of his bow. His old but well-trained body drew the bow to its full draw even as he took aim, wisps of wind controlled by his natural affinity swirling around the arrow’s shaft and fletchings as he did so. He held his breath for a brief moment, made one last minor adjustment to his aim, then loosed the arrow.

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When presented with the problem of identifying one potentially fatal arrow out of thousands, most would consider the endeavor no different than having to find a needle within a haystack.

Salicia Adenauer disagreed with that notion, especially when the arrow in question was noted in being able to traverse nearly double the distance most archers would typically be able to reach. That little bit of information alone was all she needed to be able to reliably identify a single, potentially fatal arrow out of thousands.

As a skilled archer herself, all Salicia needed was a glance from her eye to gain a rough judgment of where an arrow in flight would land. While there were thousands upon thousands of arrows being loosed by both sides of the battle in the air at any one time, it was trivial for her to simply dismiss any that would obviously fall far short from the people she was supposed to look out for.

For the first few minutes, nothing caught her eye, just projectiles raining down towards each other as normal, but eventually, her patience paid off. Her eye caught a glimpse of a single arrow that was different from the thousands of others. It flew at a different angle, at a notably higher speed, all of which was enough to potentially propel it towards the Coalition nobles and officers behind her.

Rather than call out a warning first or anything like that, Salicia instead moved into action. One hand drew an arrow from her quiver while the other raised her bow. She nocked the arrow in the same motion as the one where her left hand started to draw upon the bowstring. Her right arm pushed the bow forward as her left drew the string back, and she adjusted her aim in the brief moment it took to pull her enchanted bow to its full draw.

Then she loosed the arrow.

Salicia’s arrow was thicker and heavier than that of Leung Hua-Jeong’s. The enemy general used a bow that could be considered normal in most regards. A fine bow, but a normal one. It was his Wind affinity that allowed his arrows to reach such great ranges while maintaining their lethal precision. In contrast, Salicia’s heavily enchanted bow, made of rare Yew Heartwood, propelled her heavy arrows with such violent force that even strong orcish archers would look upon it with envy, for a mere quarter of the effort needed.

Their arrows met each other in mid-air, Salicia’s aim proven true as her arrow struck Hua-Jeong’s arrowhead to arrowhead. The metal of the arrowhead practically fused with one another from the sheer force of the impact, before the rest of the arrow’s shaft disintegrated into countless wooden slivers as the force traveled through them.

A sound akin to an explosion was audible over a long distance from the violence of the two arrows colliding, a sound that signaled a meeting between the two master archers from the opposite sides, now locked by fate to a duel to the death.