My Goblin System : Levelling up with my SSS Class Devouring skill

"Withdraw," Sseth commanded. "Move fast before response teams arrive."

The twelve serpentfolk melted back into darkness, following their planned escape route through terrain they’d scouted earlier. They were a quarter-mile away, concealed in a rocky gulley, by the time human soldiers arrived at the burning supply dump.

Those soldiers found only eight corpses and flames consuming months of accumulated supplies.

"Supply Dump Alpha destroyed," Sseth reported through the network. "Eight guards killed. Zero casualties our side. Withdrawing to Second Line."

"Excellent work," Lyra responded. "That’s one major logistics hub Elric won’t have anymore."

Hour Nineteen, Twenty Minutes: Second Settlement Raid - Rest Camp Three

Twenty serpentfolk warriors under squad leader Kresh infiltrated Rest Camp Three—a designated area where off-duty human soldiers were sleeping after the brutal eastern wall assault earlier in the day.

The camp consisted of approximately fifty tents arranged in rough military order, with sentries posted at the perimeter and a few guards wandering between tent rows to prevent disturbances.

Kresh and his warriors approached the camp from the eastern side, where darkness was deepest and the sentries were facing outward to watch for threats from the settlement rather than looking behind themselves toward their own lines.

"Officers first," Kresh hissed mentally. "They sleep in larger tents with rank insignia markers. Kill the leadership. Create chaos in the command structure."

His warriors spread out, each identifying target tents by looking for officer insignia—pennants, banners, or better-quality tent fabric that marked higher ranks.

The serpentfolk didn’t attack the sentries. Killing guards would raise immediate alarm. Instead, they crept between tents, using the darkness and irregular spacing to approach their targets from blind angles.

Kresh himself reached a tent marked with a captain’s insignia—two silver bars on a pennant outside the entrance. He listened for a moment, heard heavy breathing of exhausted sleep.

With practiced silence, he sliced through the back of the tent with a razor-sharp blade, creating an entrance that bypassed the guarded front flap.

Inside, a human captain slept on a bedroll, still wearing his armor because the general alert meant soldiers were supposed to sleep ready for combat.

Kresh’s blade sliced across the captain’s throat in one smooth motion. The captain’s eyes snapped open in shock, hands moving to his throat, trying to scream through a severed windpipe. Blood bubbled instead of sound.

He died in seconds, eyes wide with the realization that he’d been killed without ever seeing his murderer.

Kresh withdrew through the sliced tent back, moving to the next target.

Across Rest Camp Three, similar assassinations were happening simultaneously. Twenty serpentfolk, eight officer tents identified, coordinated strikes.

Eight human officers died in their sleep within a three-minute window. Throats cut, silenced forever, command structure devastated.

But on the ninth tent, something went wrong.

A serpentfolk warrior named Vess cut through the tent back and found not one officer sleeping, but two—a captain and a lieutenant sharing the tent to save space.

Vess killed the captain silently with his opening strike. But the lieutenant woke as the captain’s body thrashed, saw the serpentfolk assassin, and screamed.

"RAID! INFILTRATORS IN THE CAMP!"

Alarm horns sounded immediately. Guards came running from all directions. Torches flared to life throughout the camp.

"Withdraw!" Kresh commanded through the network. "Mission accomplished. Eight officers dead. Get out before you’re surrounded."

The twenty serpentfolk scattered in different directions, using pre-planned escape routes. Chaos worked in their favor—with fifty tents and soldiers running everywhere in confused panic, it was hard to identify which shadows were fleeing serpentfolk and which were human soldiers responding to the alarm.

Seventeen serpentfolk made clean escapes, vanishing into darkness before organized pursuit could form.

Three were spotted and chased by alert human soldiers.

Two of those three fought running battles, killing pursuers and escaping into terrain too dangerous for humans to follow in darkness.

The third—a young warrior named Siss—was cornered by six human soldiers. He killed three in close combat before a spear took him through the back. He died fighting, taking a fourth human with him.

"Rest Camp Three raid complete," Kresh reported grimly. "Eight officers eliminated. One warrior lost—Siss died in combat. Nineteen returning to Second Line."

Lyra absorbed the report. The first casualty of the night’s raids. But eight officers dead for one serpentfolk warrior was still favorable mathematics.

"Acknowledged. Siss died well. His sacrifice damaged Elric’s command structure significantly."

Hour Twenty

Vex’ahlia led this raid personally—fifteen elite demon warriors targeting the human army’s battle mage corps.

Battle mages were critical force multipliers in siege warfare. They provided magical shields that made assault troops nearly invulnerable to arrows. They cast detection spells that identified traps and ambushes. They launched offensive spells that could break fortified positions.

Losing battle mages degraded the human army’s combat effectiveness far more than losing regular soldiers. That made them priority assassination targets worth the risk of deploying elite forces.

The mage quarters were located in a secured area of the human camp—better guarded than ordinary tents, with twenty soldiers providing security and multiple magical wards designed to detect intruders.

But Vex’ahlia’s elites were trained for exactly this kind of high-value target elimination. They’d been conducting assassinations behind enemy lines for centuries. Human guards and basic magical wards were obstacles, not barriers.

The elites approached the mage quarters from four different directions simultaneously, using maximum stealth enchantments on their armor to reduce detection.

They waited for a guard rotation change—the thirty seconds when old guards were leaving their posts and new guards were arriving. In that brief window of reduced alertness, overlapping watch zones had gaps.

The elites slipped through those gaps using mundane techniques that bypassed magical detection: climbing tent poles, hiding in shadows between torches, timing movements to coincide with guard blind spots as they turned to scan different directions.

Magical wards meant nothing against purely physical stealth. The wards were designed to detect magical intrusion—teleportation, invisibility spells, scrying attempts. They didn’t detect someone physically walking through a blind spot in guard coverage.

Five elites reached the mage quarters without triggering alarms.