by Eric Ugland
Maja was still in her hammock, doing her best to remain unnoticed. So far, she wasn’t being targeted. Not much was, to be honest. The mixture of blinding light, earthen spikes, and prinky hugs seemed to have tempered the assault. Time to go on the offensive.
“Bear, on me,” I shouted. “Skeld, Ragnar, spear up. Amber, cover fire. Tarryn, give me fire.”
Bear sprinted across the distance, clambered up my body, and stood on my shoulder.
“Ready to rock, boss,” she said.
“Highlight targets for me,” I said, “I’m going in. Skeld and Ragnar, keep me from getting surrounded!”
I snatched up the sword and charged, not waiting for my hirðmen. I knew they’d catch up.
Bear was whispering something, and I felt a jolt of power whizz by my face. Suddenly I could see outlines of goblins everywhere. Bright sparkling outlines of dark little bastards.
“Fairy fire,” Bear shouted. “Magic user to the rear!”
“Tarryn,” I shouted, “mage in back.”
Then I reached the first goblin. He was a crossbowman, though calling his weapon a crossbow was generous. It was clear what the thing was supposed to be, but it was also clear that the goblin engineers working on the problem were doing their best to make a crossbow based on something they’d seen but not necessarily gotten their grubby goblin hands on. The guy was in the middle of stabbing a prinky with a dagger, holding his crossbow up with his other hand. Which meant he didn’t even get a chance to try and block the greenskins’ bane as I brought it down, unevenly bisecting his torso.
One step later, I swung the blade in an upward angle, cutting across the next goblin. They were clustered together so closely, and were so distracted by prinkies that it was just a slaughter. I swung left, right, and center, causing a veritable fountain of blood to shoot into the air from a plethora of corpses. I noticed that most of their crossbows had failed to fire properly. There were busted bits of wood and snapped strings everywhere. Had their weapons actually worked, we would have been in a world of hurt.
A spear slipped by me, and I turned, ready to strike, but it was Ragnar. He winked at me, and continued to press forward.
It was such a rout, I didn’t feel the need to keep going.
Ragnar and Skeld, on the other hand, were eager and energetic. Skeld in particular. I had seen him fight several times before. He was quite skilled with the spear, and had always excelled in the more technical aspects of its use. Clean strikes with economy of motion. Now, though, he seemed to realize he had more power at his disposal, and there was this barely contained ferocity to him. He moved twice as fast as Ragnar, and his spear seemed to move at lightning speed, shooting out, hitting two targets at once. He was even swinging the spear and cutting with the spearhead, then getting another target with the back end of the spear for good measure. It was impressive, and Ragnar had to push himself to keep up.
Arrows whizzed behind me as Amber was putting down cover fire. Tarryn helped with literal cover fire, blanketing the forest area in small balls of fire that splashed down like water balloons filled with napalm.
The goblins were turning tail and running, and while that wasn’t exactly surprising, the manner in which they ran gave me pause. It was more like a tactical retreat. Like they wanted us to follow. They kept looking behind, and I caught several smiles, which I’d never seen on goblins running away before. It was always outright terror.
“Hold,” I shouted. “Back to camp!”
Ragnar stopped immediately, sliding and using his spear to blunt his forward momentum.
Skeld’s blood was up, and he wasn’t willing to give up the chase. He continued to slay the goblins on the run, moving faster through the forest than any of the grey-skinned greenskins.
“SKELD!” I yelled, putting on some of the hirð authority into my voice. “Retreat and reform, NOW!”
There was a hesitation in Skeld. I could see the rage still boiling over, but he stopped, and then sprinted back toward me.
I extricated myself from the forest, and got back to the fire.
“We had them on the run,” Ragnar said, looking at me. “Why--“
“They were smiling,” I said, “they wanted us to go that way.”
“They were running,” Skeld said, breathing hard and covered in goblin blood. Still wearing no pants. Or armor. It was a pretty badass look, all things considered.
“Who is this guy?” Ragnar asked, stepping closer to Skeld.
“Skeld,” I said.
“Back to keep you out of trouble,” Skeld said in Lutra.
Ragnar tilted his head to the side for a second, I think gauging the reality of this moment. But then he just reached out and grabbed Skeld in a tight hug. Which would have been a really sweet moment except for all the goblin blood they had drenching them. It made a gross, squelchy sort of a noise.
Bear jumped off my shoulder and joined in on the hug.
“Let’s save the reunion for a little later,” I said. “How are we doing? Injuries?”
“Kobolds,” Baltu called out from his tree. “Several are hurt.”
A howl sounded in the night. Something low and chilling. What made it worse was the hundreds of other voices that howled in response.
“Up the trees,” I said. “There’s something coming. Ragnar and Skeld, you help me with the kobolds. The rest of you, join Maja.”
Bear, Amber, and Tarryn went one way.
I sprinted the other, though I ran to Baltu first. I knew I should be trying to treat everyone equally, but the old snowbold felt more important to me than any of the others, so I grabbed him, threw him over my shoulder, and sprinted to Maja’s tree.
“Catch,” I shouted, and threw the little snowbold up.
More howls. Closer this time.
Fortunately, Amber was there and stable enough in the tree to grab Baltu, keeping him from crashing back down on top of me. Which was not the sort of look I wanted to go for.
I was trying to get the injured kobolds up. They seemed to have gotten the brunt of the crossbow bolts, as nearly every single one of them had an injury of some variety. It didn’t look good for them.
Ragnar and Skeld went into the tree at stages, and then we started passing the bodies up.
I was keeping one ‘eye’ on my tremorsense, seeing if whatever was still howling had gotten in range.
Yep.
Lots of feet thundering on the ground, following the dug out road we’d so nicely made for them.
Prinkies to the rescue once again.
I summoned them in droves, then ordered, “Go hug the doggies!”
I might have felt a little bad about sending them off to certain death, but they were also so happy about going that it made it all that much easier.
When all the kobolds were in the tree, I took off the knapsack and chucked that up as well.
“Get healing potions out,” I hissed.
Then I checked the strap holding my shield to my arm.
“You’re staying down there?” Tarryn asked.
“Bingo, baby. This is why they pay me the big bucks.”
I walked out into the ‘road,’ and stood there with the shield facing front, sword out behind me, ready for whatever was going to come. Which was awfully overconfident of me.
Chapter Forty-Seven
What came was a shitload of wolf-looking things. They were like if you decided that wolves didn’t look fierce enough as they were, and so decided to turn their savagery up to eleven.
Bear was close enough that she shot off some identification spells and shared the results with me.
Cave Vargr
Night Goblin Variant
Lvl 12 Beast
Trained battle mounts. Fantastic.
I began to rethink my decision to stay down on the ground. A literal swarm of furry bodies came toward me, their slavering jaws open wide, their unsettlingly white teeth gleaming in Bear’s conjured light.
“Move the light over here,” I shouted, dropping my sho
ulder to lean into the shield, ready to receive the charge.
The light zipped until it was right over my head, which made it difficult for the cave vargr to see me. But now I could see them just plowing over the prinkies in a great spray of glitter and prinky guts.
That just distracted the beasts more, so I charged their charge.
There was a great crash of flesh on wood and metal as shield hit vargr. But I kept my legs pumping like good ol’ Coach Miller taught me, and I bulldozed my way through the first few ranks of the beasts.
It was a sudden and unexpected move, and at first, the vargr didn’t realize I was in the middle of them. Which meant that they didn’t know to turn around my shield and attack my unprotected flank. I knew I didn’t have long before the vargr saw me, so I started swinging my sword like a madman. Not always the best strategy, but it can definitely do a lot of damage quickly to unsuspecting opponents.
Slash left, slash right. Push with the shield.
It was pandemonium. I don’t think the vargr understood what was going on, because they just started biting everything. Including each other.
I chopped my way free, and hauled ass toward the tree. I knew if I wanted any chance of making it out of this nonsense, I needed to get my back against something to keep them from surrounding me.
My back hit the trunk, and I had my shield up to block my left side. I was breathing hard, but my sword was ready.
But the vargr had devolved into a melée amongst themselves. Great spurts of blood shot up into the air as the beasts tore each other’s throats out. It was upsetting to watch, as some of the vargr on the edge were straight up chowing down on the corpses of their fallen brethren.
A shrill whistle rang out, and all the beasts froze.
Three blasts, and the vargr turned and burned, sprinting back the way they’d come.
I waited a few seconds, trying to get a grasp on what I’d just witnessed.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
“Second retreat of the night,” Tarryn said.
I looked up to see him standing in the tree, staring at the fleeing forms. He shook his head.
“Something’s not adding up,” I said.
“Yeah.”
I walked a little farther out into our construction project, and looked back down the way we’d dug. The vargr had turned off and disappeared into the forest, heading west. Likely back toward the Night Goblin enclave. Which was in a cave. Would that make it an encave? I was about to make a quip of that sort to my compatriots when something hit my neck, back, and head. Something squishy.
Which started to burn.
And started to crawl.
“What the fuck is on me?” I shouted.
“Oh balls,” Tarryn said.
“Not helpful!”
“This is going to feel worse before it feels better,” Tarryn said.
Then he lit me on fire.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Slimes.
Squishy, acidic creatures flew through the air, smacking into the trees and my shield. It was like being in a gelatin factory explosion. Everywhere I looked, there were slimes. Either soaring, crashing into things, or slithering across the ground trying to attack me. Or attach to me. Which was about the same thing, as attaching themselves to people was their primary form of attack.
The problem was, nothing really worked on the gelatinous little fuckers. If you cut them apart, they just reformed. You can’t stomp on them, because they just pop right back into shape. And anything organic got burned away by the acid they secreted. Which meant each time I picked one up and threw it back at the goblins, I lost a little more of my glove. After a short time in the fight, they’d burned a hole in my fucking shield. The only thing that worked was fire. Fire charred the slimes, making it impossible for them to change their shape.
That meant I yelled at Tarryn until he relit the fire I’d stomped out when I thought that was a good idea, then I grabbed sticks and got them burning in the remains of our fire, before beating on the slimes with the flaming end. But if I swung the branch too fast, the flame would go out. So I was swinging flaming sticks in slow motion, trying to burn things that looked like demented strawberry jam crawling after me.
As effective as I’m sure my fighting style sounds, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that Tarryn and Bear were doing the bulk of the work against the slimes. Tarryn sprayed fire out of his hands over and over again, while Bear worked a little more surgically with her strikes, shooting out little darts of fire at the slimes as they got closer to our comrades in the tree. The slimes were about as eager and simple as the prinkies. They didn’t seem to care what was happening to their brethren. Though they did seem to feel pain, as they’d flinch away when we burned them. At least a little.
The slime barrage slowed for a moment, then stopped.
I took a breath and saw the carnage all around us. I felt like shit. Tarryn hadn’t stopped burning the shit out of everything he saw. Ragnar and Skeld were getting everyone else out of the tree before it burned down.
No one thought the onslaught was over.
There was a weird noise, and then I was covered in shadow.
I looked up. It seemed like it all happened in slow motion: a massive red slime, easily twenty feet wide, came crashing down on me. I was immediately enveloped, and felt acid and burning everywhere. I could barely move — my arms were down by my side, and the burning branch I had been using as a weapon was now just a slowly-disintegrating stick floating next to me.
I felt a sort of give all around me, like the skin of the slime was parting to let me inside. I guess it was the slime’s way of eating me. The burning went up a whole new level. My skin was on fire, being literally eaten away by the acidic insides of the slime. I wanted to scream, but I was afraid to open my mouth up and wind up drinking down the horrific goop that was killing me.
But the next worst thing happened.
The acid dissolved my eyelids, and I got a good glimpse of the world through rose-colored slime before my eyes went pop, audibly so, and I lost all sight. The one minor gain was that I had a modicum of movement returned to me. I held out my hand, and the throwing axe came to me, zooming out of the dark forest, cutting through the slime and slapping into my hand. Even though my skin was sloughing off everywhere, I swung that damn axe as quickly as I could, cutting through the tough outer skin of the giant slime until I felt a breeze, and then I tried to power myself through the exit.
It didn’t really work.
I started to fall down, back into the slime.
But hands were there, pulling me out. Sure, they were mostly grabbing onto my bones, but my bones held together, and I was forcibly removed from the slime.
I couldn’t hear much, since my ears were kind of gone, but I still had tremorsense, and I could sense several people moving around me, plus someone casting powerful spells toward the big slime.
Cool water, or a liquid of some variety, that managed to stop the burns. Or, you know, I had just fried all my nerves so I couldn’t feel the burning any more. Either case was equally possible.
They left me on the ground, and I just existed in that darkness for a moment, feeling the world instead of seeing or hearing it. I’d never had a sensation quite like it. It was horrible. That was certainly one of the problems with both regeneration and respawning — the ability to go through the horrific experiences over and over again. It wasn’t something I would wish on anyone, having the entirety of your body burnt off by acid. And yet, I suppose it was better than paying the ultimate price and actually dying. Maybe.
It seemed like our conflict had ended, because my body started to repair itself, and I didn’t sense anything out in the world beyond ourselves. After a minute or two, I sensed the forest creatures returning, which gave me some measure of comfort.
And as soon as I could tell the regeneration was going smoothly, I retreated into my head and tried very very hard to ignore everything else.
Chapter Fo
rty-Nine
Apparently I was out for most of the night while my body struggled through repairing itself. According to those who witnessed it, it was touch and go whether or not my regeneration process was going to be fast enough to counteract the acidic burns all over. But eventually, my regeneration pulled ahead, and then it was just a matter of watching the disgusting process of me healing.
I was also out for Skeld explaining his new look to the comrades, and Tarryn’s lecture on the race known as the carcajou. He only knew about them from books, but apparently they were native to the hills and mountains farther northwest, on the other side of the Amber Wastes, which I learned was the name of the great plains that butted up against Coggeshall. They were rather barbaric people, big fans of fighting and violence. Their leader was always the strongest in the group, and aptly enough, was called The Powerful One. Their society was entirely organized around fighting prowess and the ability to withstand pain. Once every two years, there were great tournaments whereby it was possible to change your rank. It wasn’t a particularly civilized society, mainly because there was little time for things like farming or building except by the lowest castes. Everyone else spent their time fighting and training. Oddly though, because there was only the biannual challenges, most of the fighting took place outside of the homelands. And it was never really to push for new territory so much as to experience combat. A single army was hired out to whomever had the gold or an interesting possible conflict, because a carcajou never fought another carcajou outside the bounds of the Challenges.
Somewhere at the tail end of the sociology lesson, I came around, blissfully able to close my eyes and see, which I vowed to never take for granted again. Being unable to close my eyes was really just gruesome and horrific.
Slowly, I got to my feet, and looked at myself. Then I felt myself.
I was hairless.
Everywhere. No beard. No long hair. No eyebrows. My clothes had been eaten by the acid. So I was also naked. There was, thankfully, a pair of pants resting at my feet. I pulled them on, but my thighs split the pant legs. I looked like a Times Square version of the Hulk. Maybe the mediocre hulk. It was ridiculous.