"They’re trying to pin us down!" Su Qinglan shouted, clutching Hu Yan’s fur. "They want us to be sitting ducks for the beast tide!"
Anger bubbled up in her chest. She saw a birdman try to snatch a bundle of hides from an elderly fox woman, nearly knocking the grandmother to the ground.
"You greedy, pathetic scavengers!" Su Qinglan screamed up at them.
The Bird Tribe didn’t care. They saw the Fox Tribe as a dying people, and they wanted to pick the bones clean before the "real" monsters arrived.
Su Qinglan couldn’t take it anymore.
Watching those birds dive down to snatch food from the elderly and terrify the children made her blood boil. She looked down at the dark, powerful form gliding beside Hu Yan.
"Xuan Long!" she shouted over the wind.
"Knock these useless birds out of the sky! Throw them as far as you can!"
Xuan Long didn’t need to be told twice. He had been quietly simmering in rage, his green scales blending perfectly with the forest floor.
He was so well camouflaged that the Bird Tribe hadn’t even realized a powerful beastman was right beneath them.
His long, muscular body suddenly coiled and then snapped like a whip. A massive tail lashed upward into the air with a sound like a thunderclap.
CRACK!
Two bird beastmen, who had been laughing as they dived for a bag of meat, didn’t even have time to scream.
The tail slammed into them, snapping their wings and sending them spinning through the air like broken toys.
The rest of the Bird Tribe froze in mid-air, their wings flapping frantically.
"What was that? Where did it come from?!" one of them shrieked, looking down in terror.
They still couldn’t see him clearly until Xuan Long let out a low, vibrating hiss that made the very trees tremble. He lashed out again, his tail moving faster than the eye could see.
Two more birdmen were knocked out of the sky, falling through the branches with heavy thuds.
The moment their feet touched the ground, their lives became a nightmare.
The Fox beastmen, who had been suppressed and frightened for the last twelve hours, finally found a way to vent their anger.
They didn’t stop running, but they didn’t miss the chance to strike. As the birds fell, the heavy paws of foxes trampled over them.
"This is for our home!" one fox warrior growled, his heavy paw crushing a birdman’s ribs as he ran past.
"And this is for our ancestors!" another yelled, kicking a fallen scout into the thick brambles.
The Bird Tribe members who were still in the air were absolutely stunned. Their arrogant laughter had turned into frantic chirps of fear.
They had thought the Fox Tribe was easy prey, but they hadn’t accounted for the "hidden monster" protecting the rear.
Xuan Long looked up, his cold, vertical pupils locked onto the remaining birds. "If you dive again," he hissed, his voice echoing with a deadly promise, "I will pull you from the sky and feed you to the tide myself."


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