Looking at the continent of Rigal, from the hot south to the cold north, a truly successful hunting operation, no matter how big or small, is actually quite similar to war.

From individual hunters with longbows and crossbows carefully lurking into the forest to carefully follow the trails of animals to hunt for their lives, to nobles and kings in fine costumes riding war horses surrounded by a large group of servants and guards bustling with hounds to send out hounds to chase their prey and then kill them with spears for fun, or these real professional experts in hunting large creatures, the professional teams sent by the major hunting mercenary groups with a large number of equipment and excellent manpower.

Although the scale of the hierarchy and the number of people vary, it is quite similar to the "activity" of war, which is also a kind of "activity" in which creatures take each other's lives and try to ensure their own survival, and the most important thing is actually the preparation before the operation, and all kinds of intelligence gathering, rather than the operation itself, as many people imagine.

Many creatures in nature, from large to small, are not weak and can be bullied, and the act of hunting them is not so much a unilateral plan of humans as a battle between two sides. Every seasoned hunter knows the dangers of hunting, and there are countless hunters from humble peasants to great knightly nobles every year, from humble peasants to great knightly nobles, not to mention other beasts that are far larger and more ferocious than boars.

In addition to the prey itself, humans have to wrestle with many other things in the natural environment, and there are hundreds of known poisonous insects and poisonous snakes in the tropics alone, some of which are the size of a palm, but the powerful fangs are enough to pierce the weak skin of humans and inject lethal venom into them. Although the clergy of the Church and some of the magicians had the ability to detoxify some of them, most of them did not make it back to the town and fell to the ground in convulsions in the pain of paralysis.

Add to this the variability of weather and road conditions, if you don't have enough supplies, you don't know the local edible plants and mushrooms, and you don't know where the easy prey is located - or if you swear that there is no need to carry drinking water in such a vegetated place, and you can just find a creek on the road to replenish it.

Because he had nothing to eat, he was so hungry that he fainted, and he frothed at the mouth and died when he ate poisonous mushrooms or other plants; Even if these accidents are not counted, the inexperienced people carry insufficient equipment, get lost in the forest, and cannot find water and food, and starve to death, or find the water source but do not notice that it is stagnant water, and after starving into it, they are exhausted and dehydrated due to dysentery and diarrhea, and can only be eaten by scavengers while they are still alive.

In this day and age, it is common to enter the forest and never return.

The self-sufficiency of human civilization developed over thousands of years, the convenience of living in a civilized society where everything can be bought with money, and most people have become accustomed to it, so they take the dangers of the wilderness lightly - but even if you have the ability to conquer the natural environment, and you can survive in the wilderness at least for a while, this is only the beginning.

As we mentioned earlier, searching for something in the middle of the wilderness is an extremely difficult thing in itself.

There are many people who do not have the corresponding knowledge as the basis for judgment, do not understand the habits of such and such creatures, what they like to eat, where they like to stay, when they are about to rest, when they are particularly active, and they should not be provoked, and they do not have the corresponding tools, and they want to conquer each other with brute force just by virtue of their blood, and there are many people who have slept in the soil under the feet of the giant beast along with their naïve ideas.

Truly professional hunting mercenaries spend far more on planning and preparation than on action.

Investigate, track, set traps, and divide people.

The members of this hunting mercenary group, who had already shown good qualities during the long journey before, when they came to the shore of the West Lake after a well-rested night and began to prepare for the real hunt of the Aya snake dragon, how professional they were, finally completely opened the eyes of the white-haired Luo'an girl.

A few days ago, the young mercenaries who wanted to tease her, Mira said that one of them was unable to beat her, and the group of people she despised quickly began to deal with the traps and tools placed around them, and a huge interception net made of thick tough hemp rope was set up around it, and the hunting expert Juan and the squad leader Jerónimo commanded these young mercenaries to beat the thick iron nails and fix them to the trunks of nearby trees, and then fixed the iron rings on them, and the ropes at both ends of the interception net were passed through the iron rings and fixed to the trunks of the two big trees, and then the net was placed on the ground at will。

The location was specially selected to be located on the shores of West Lake on what looks like a pocket bag. The end rope of the interceptor net was very long, and because of the thickness of the rope, the net was actually divided into two halves and carried by two mules, and it was only at the scene that it was reassembled and the strength of the junction was double-checked.

One side of it was fixed between the two large trees, and the long rope was pulled to the part behind the bushes that was hidden behind the bushes, and the strong squad leader Jerónimo and another orange mercenary who was no less in shape than him cut down two medium-sized trees with axes and greatswords, and from the bright red color of their crowns, Henry could tell that this was one of the tropical tree species, the phoenix tree, this tree had a very developed root system, and it was quite deep into the soil, although both trees were still young, it was enough to cut down the trunk and leave a stump。

The end of the long rope was placed near the stump, and it was only necessary to pull it through the iron ring attached to the trunk in front of it to hang the entire interception net, and then wrap the other end of the rope around the stump of the phoenix wood in a circle, the strong interceptor net was enough to stop even the Aya snake dragon weighing several tons - but this was only the first step in the plan, and Mira watched as the novice mercenaries quickly began to assemble the real killer weapons of the mission.

- Ballista. This is yet another great invention that stems from the great applied engineering skills of the Lamanites.

Most of Rigal's world's bows and crossbows, regardless of their material and shape, come from elastic blades. From the monolithic wooden carved straight-drawn longbow preferred by the Avenela people on the west coast, to the rapid-fire bow of the northern Stiman pirates with the same monolithic but recurved shape, to the exquisite composite recurve short bow that was commonly used by the steppe peoples and the southern city-state alliance to use animal glue, wood chips, bamboo chips, and animal tendons together - all of these bows are derived from their elastic blades.

That's why the performance of the blade determines the lethality of the bow itself - and the only way to enhance it is to increase and thicken it.

The weapons that were born along this line of thinking were the large bed crossbows, which were common on the West Coast and used spears as arrows, requiring several people to wind them up for more than a minute before firing them once. The weapon was powerful enough to pierce the giant wooden shields used to protect archers' positions, the scale armor of the flying wurm, and any armor that a human could wear, but its sheer size and slow movement had never been used only as a weapon for defending cities—and the Ballista, invented by the Lamanites, took a different route.

The structure of the ballista is quite simple, it consists of a sturdy wooden frame, abandoning the bow blades, but using the torque of the hemp rope as the source of lethality, twisting again and again the upper and lower ends of the frame on both sides of the fixed dead hemp rope, when reaching the apex, the two pieces of wood fixed with the bowstring are inserted into it, and then the huge crossbow is fixed in the middle to jam the bowstring, the moment the jam is unblocked, twisting I don't know how many turns of the hemp rope will release a huge torque in an instant, and the iron crossbow that is about the length of an arm shot out by this force with the momentum of this force is about the length of an arm, and the power is enough to penetrate the steel breastplate。

Although not as powerful as a bed crossbow, it has abandoned the huge bow blades and adopted a detachable construction of the ballista, which can be carried by mules and horses for long distances, and there is one thing that is far better than the bed crossbow - that is, its accuracy is extremely amazing.

Juan's team of hunting mercenaries carried a total of three ballistas, two of which were arranged diagonally to the left front and right front with the interception net for the final strike, and they formed a fan-shaped interception area together with the interception net, the two ballistas were located at the ends of the two hypotenuses of the fan, crossed and facing the front, and the temporary cover made of the leaves and trunks of the felled phoenix wood was blocked in front of the two ballistas. Although the Aya snake dragon is large, it is not stupid, and its slender neck is the size of a wolf, and its eyes on it are the size of a wild wolf, and its eyes are comparable to those of humans, so it is important to hide its weapons when it sees someone pointing at it.

In addition to the two ballistas used as killer moves, the remaining one was placed on a small hillside on the west side of Lake Lorena in front of the interception net, and not only that, but the mercenaries of the mercenary group also made other traps such as triplines and falling rocks along the way, in order to create enough noise to make the prey panic and run towards the interceptor net according to the human drive.

Just hunting an Aya snake dragon is already such a big effort. But despite all the preparations, all the mercenaries of the mercenary group could do at the moment was to wait patiently. After all, animals have their own personalities, and although the general habits can be speculated to a certain extent, there will be some differences in each individual.

Juan's mercenary group to which they belong has been hunting Aya snake dragons on the shore of West Lake in Lorena for more than a year or two, although this kind of hybrid dragon is not as smart as the dragon but also has the ability to learn and remember, although the snake dragons that come here every year are not necessarily the same batch, but some mature individuals who have experienced the previous hunt and survived will naturally be more wary of here.

As social animals, they usually try to prevent other young companions from going to this dangerous place, so only the chaotic breeding period and the fact that they fancy those who are still young as hunting objects have a higher success rate, these things are not known even to the young mercenaries in the team, but some habits that are customary in every organization must in fact have some practical meaning.

The difference between professional mercenaries and individual mercenaries with a lot of resources and experienced hunting experts with a lot of resources and old qualifications is about the same - but in any case, the trap is in place, the plan is perfected, and as time goes by, the young mercenaries are getting a little more and more complacent.

As the sun rises and sets, day after day, the unique call of the Aya Snake Dragon, which is entering the breeding season, can often be heard during the day and night, and the noise of the noisy giant animals moving in groups can be heard clearly from a long distance, but none of the Snake Dragons have ever reached the western lakeside.

Many of the young green-card mercenaries in the team, who were obviously hunting for the first time, were nervous and couldn't sleep, although on the one hand they knew that it was useless to be in a hurry here, and on the other hand, they were always concerned about the movement of the night, for fear that when they accidentally fell asleep, a snake dragon would suddenly break into the trap set by their group.

Excitement was mixed with nervousness, and for the first two or three days every young mercenary who came to do this kind of thing for the first time had big dark circles under their eyes, but as they began to adjust to life here during the period, their sleep became calm and steady - even the courtship cries of the Aya snake dragon like thunder could not disturb their peaceful sleep.

The recruits are like this, and the orange mercenaries of the veteran level of this group of mercenary groups, who are obviously more sophisticated, are even more calm, in order to prevent unexpected situations, they must not leave too far to hunt after coming here, so several mercenaries, including Juan, took out hemp fishing lines and iron hooks to form fishing rods from nearby bamboo branches and small trees, and then dug out earthworms and beetles from the mudflats by the lake as bait, but leisurely began to catch fish.

The freshwater fish in Lorenna Lake are very abundant, which is why the Aya snake dragon will choose to breed here, a nest of dragon eggs hatched out of the soil of a dozen juvenile individuals from the mudflats after running into the water can immediately start to prey on small fish and shrimp, they grow quickly in the lake for about half a year, after a little growth will swim out along the Shire River, run to other places to grow wantonly.

Naturally, many of these baby snakes will be the mouths of the crocodiles lurking in the lake and some of the large predatory fish, but when the surviving snakes grow up, they will return to this place to thrive.

All living things belong to the natural world, and even humans are no exception.

Time continued to pass unhurriedly, and the wrinkles on the face of the mercenary squad leader Jeronimo deepened day by day, as the novice mercenaries and the freelance mercenaries as escorts gradually adapted to the current environment, and the veteran mercenaries had already begun to enjoy the blessings of the lake.

Obviously, this kind of waiting day after day is a painful ordeal for him.

And none of this escaped the eyes of Henry and Juan. (To be continued.) )