Dex laughed, a short, rough laugh entirely devoid of amusement, and stepped close to Selin until their gazes met in a silent confrontation.
"The Imperial army that is crawling toward us this very moment to tear apart your forest and burn your women does not fight with open eyes, Selin, nor does it fly like falcons in the sky for you to strike between the eyes." Dex said, his words falling like hammer blows. "Do you believe for a single moment that General Vargas is stupid? Do you think he will lead his men bare-chested to face the finest archers on the continent? His soldiers, five thousand heavy infantry, wear enchanted steel helmets inscribed with reinforcement talismans, covering every inch of their faces save for narrow slits for vision. They wear chest armour of Rank B stellar steel, engineered specifically with rotating magical arrays designed to deflect, scatter, and absorb the kinetic energy of physical arrows."
Dex pressed his finger hard against Selin's chest. "If you fire your 'elegant' and 'perfect' arrow at a knight of the Falcons Legion, even if it strikes his heart with pinpoint accuracy, it will glance off his angled armour like a bird's feather that has fallen on him by accident. And that knight will laugh from the depths of his helmet as he raises his broadsword and splits your slender chest with a single blow you will have no time to answer. I do not want refined archers who hit the target to score points. I want savage killers who erase the target from existence."
Dex stepped back wide from Selin, distancing himself, and raised his right hand high toward the obscured sky. In a fraction of a second, the air around him became a blazing furnace.
Whoosh.
The air detonated with a sound resembling the tearing of cosmic fabric. A golden-crimson flame erupted in Dex's palm, dancing with demonic ferocity. This was no ordinary fire that fed on oxygen and wood, it was raw Phoenix Fire, the fire of immortality and destruction, a fire that pulsed with a savage life of its own. The temperature of the courtyard surged abruptly to suffocating levels, the nearby green leaves began curling and desiccating on the spot, emitting wisps of fine steam. The Elf, accustomed to the forest's coolness, felt a sudden and painful dryness in their throats and a heavy pressure smothering their chests, as though the air itself was burning before it could enter their lungs.
"If you want to pierce the chests of these armoured beasts," Dex roared, his eyes reflecting the flame's blazing light, "you must stop firing with nobility at once, and begin firing with blind hatred."
Dex did not fire at any target. Instead he lowered his hand and called for one of the soldiers to bring a large metal slab from a shattered human iron breastplate, and a plain wooden arrow from one of the archers' quivers. Dex concentrated the enormous mana into his fingertips with a terrifying surgical focus. He began compressing that large blazing flame, condensing it with the force of his will, until it transformed from an open fire into an extremely fine and blazing thread of liquid plasma: a filament glowing white-blue from the intensity of its heat, appearing to shred the fabric of the surrounding air as it emitted a sharp hissing sound.
Dex gripped the wooden arrow and passed this dense fire-thread slowly across the arrow's steel tip with terrifying precision and skill. What was strange, and deeply frightening to the Elf, was that the metal did not melt and run onto the floor as one would expect from such heat. Instead, it absorbed the fire. The arrowhead glowed a deep red edging into black, like a demonic ember wrenched from the very bottom of hell, as though the Phoenix Fire was no longer a coat upon the metal's surface but had permeated its molecular structure and become an inseparable part of its very being.
"This fire does not merely burn flesh and hair," said Dex, raising the arrow that now pulsed with a terrifying heat making the air around it tremble and warp, turning the courtyard into a shimmering heat mirage. "It does something far worse. It dissolves the flowing mana that protects armour. It is a living entity that devours magic, feeding on defensive enchantments and tearing through Imperial arrays as though they were dry paper burning in a hearth."
With his full physical strength merged with magic, Dex drove the arrow with his bare hand directly into the thick iron breastplate lying to the side. There was no familiar sharp metallic collision, instead there was a terrifying hiss, like a drop of water falling on a blazing skillet, but multiplied a thousandfold.
The arrow pierced the thick metal as though driving into a block of warm butter, sinking to its midpoint in a single second, leaving behind a completely molten cavity whose metal edges still boiled and frothed in a glowing orange, dripping to the ground like drops of lava.
The Elf stared at the pierced armour with a stupefaction that paralysed their movements and sealed their tongues. Their emerald eyes widened with a sacred dread. They understood in that decisive moment that this young human had not merely altered a military tactic, he had altered the laws of physical nature before their very eyes. He had transformed the arrow from a mechanical weapon that relied on penetration and the archer's physical force, into a weapon of total destructive fusion that bypassed and nullified every known law of defence and armour in the history of warfare.
"From today," declared Dex, his voice acquiring a terrifying metallic resonance that reverberated into the depths of the forest, "every arrow that leaves your bows must carry a piece of my own personal hell. I do not want you to strike your enemies so they die in peace. I want you to burn them from within. I want the arrows to melt their armour onto their skin while they are still alive, screaming inside their steel prisons."