My new army, my Gutter-Guard, moved through the forest with a purpose they hadn't possessed three days ago. They were no longer a shambling, bickering pack of scavengers. They were soldiers. Terrible soldiers, but soldiers nonetheless. Their new, Hobgoblin forms moved with a strength and coordination that was still a novelty to them, their heavy footfalls a clumsy but rhythmic drumbeat against the damp earth. They held their new iron-tipped spears at something resembling a uniform angle, and their shields, reinforced with strips of tough Lurker-hide, were held ready, not just as pathetic scraps of wood, but as tools of war.
They were trying. Gods, they were trying. And that, more than anything, was Kale's miracle.
I moved at the head of the column with Gnar, a silent, grey-clad ghost beside his hulking, olive-skinned form. The title of Captain, bestowed upon me by the mad Scholar and ratified by the indifferent System, felt strange and ill-fitting, a coat cut for a different woman. But the role… the role was as natural as breathing. I was the blade, the sharp, cutting edge of Kale's insane, beautiful, terrifying mind. He was the architect, drawing his impossible blueprints in the dirt. I was the foreman, turning his mad visions into a reality of blood and steel.
Our plan was a classic piece of Kale Lucas insanity: simple in its concept, breathtaking in its audacity, and utterly dependent on a thousand different variables all aligning perfectly. My job was the easy part. My job was to be the hammer.
I, along with our twelve-strong warband, was to march on the goblin camp and kick the door down. I was to be loud. I was to be violent. I was to be a sudden, brutal, and utterly distracting catastrophe. My purpose was not to win a battle, not initially. My purpose was to draw every eye, every spear, every ounce of rage and panic in that fifty-strong tribe and focus it squarely on me. I was the diversion. The grand, bloody piece of theater designed to hold the audience's attention while Kale, the true threat, slipped in through the back door to perform his own quiet, delicate work. What that work was, precisely, he hadn't said. He had simply looked at me, his eyes burning with that familiar, terrifying intelligence, and said, "I need to get to the prisoners. I need to turn the key."
I didn't need to know the details. I just needed to know my target. And my target was the entire goblin army.
As we neared the camp, the familiar, foul stench of its existence reached us on the breeze, a miasma of filth, rot, and stale violence. The Hobgoblins smelled it, too. A low growl rumbled through their ranks. This was the smell of their old life, of their oppression, of their shame. And they were returning to it not as scavengers, but as crusaders.
We halted at the edge of the treeline, the crude, sharpened logs of the palisade visible through the trees. The camp was just waking up, a lazy, hungover stirring. I could hear the drunken shouts of the guards at the gate, the crackle of the main cookfire, the distant, heartbreaking sound of the infant's cry.
I looked at my army. Their faces were tense, their knuckles white on their spear-shafts. The fear was there, a cold, familiar ghost. But beneath it, there was something new. A hard, defiant anger. A faith in the mission, in their new god, and in the strange, pale-skinned creature who had shown them the path.
"Remember the training," I said, my voice a low, hard command that cut through the morning mist. "The wall is your strength. Trust the shield next to you. Trust the spear behind you. Move as one. Die as one." I turned my gaze to Gnar. His one eye was fixed on the gate, burning with a cold, focused hatred. "War-Chief. The honor is yours."
Gnar drew his new sword, the iron blade a clean, dark line in the grey light. He raised it high. He did not roar. He did not bellow. His voice, when he spoke, was a low, dangerous growl that was far more terrifying than any scream.
"For the MourningLord," he snarled. "For the Fangs of the Pack. No mercy. No survivors. Take their deep-meat. Take their numbers. Take it all!"
He charged.
The Gutter-Guard charged with him, a wave of olive-green muscle and sharpened iron. They were not a silent, disciplined unit. They were a force of nature, a landslide of pure, focused rage, their war-cry a single, unified, guttural roar that shattered the morning quiet.
The two guards at the gate, who had been engaged in a drunken game of kicking a rock back and forth, looked up, their faces a comical mask of surprise and terror. They had time to raise their spears, to open their mouths in a panicked shout, and then the wave hit them.
Gruk, the squat, powerful grumbler, was the tip of the spear. He didn't even bother with his weapon. He slammed into the gate with the full force of his charging body, his shield held before him like a battering ram. The crude wooden gate, built by lazy, incompetent hands, exploded inward in a shower of splintered logs and broken promises. The two guards were simply erased, swallowed by the tide of furious Hobgoblins that poured through the breach.
I was not with them. I was a ghost at their flank. As they crashed through the gate, I flowed through the opening, a silent, grey shadow. My Predator's Gaze was active, the world overlaid with a faint, crimson tracery of weak points and vulnerabilities. I saw a goblin archer on a rickety watchtower, fumbling to nock an arrow. I saw a hulking Bully Boy, roused from his sleep, grabbing for a massive club. I saw the pathways between them, the geometry of the kill.
My first target was the archer. He was a force multiplier, a threat that could pin us down from a distance. I moved, not with the explosive charge of the Hobgoblins, but with the silent, liquid grace of a striking snake. I was up the ladder of his tower before he even knew I was there. He turned, his eyes widening in shock, and I drove my dagger into the soft spot under his chin, the blade sliding up into his brain with a wet, frictionless ease. He crumpled without a sound. I kicked his body from the tower and took his place, my gaze sweeping the camp, my mind a cold, clear map of the unfolding chaos.
The camp was erupting. Goblins poured from their squalid huts, their faces a mixture of sleep-dazed confusion and sudden, panicked rage. They were a disorganized mob, grabbing for weapons, shouting conflicting orders, a perfect storm of incompetence.
"Wall!" Gnar's voice roared above the din, a beacon of order in the chaos. "Form the wall!"
My Hobgoblins, their training drilled into their very bones, obeyed. They crashed into the center of the clearing and, with a discipline that was still a beautiful, shocking thing to behold, they formed their shield wall. It was a solid, bristling hedgehog of overlapping shields and iron-tipped spears, an island of defiant order in a sea of panicked rage.
The first wave of goblin warriors, driven by instinct and fury, crashed against it. The impact was a dull, percussive thud of bodies and weapons against wood and iron. Spears jabbed from between the shields, clumsy but effective. Goblins shrieked and fell back, blood welling from a dozen shallow wounds. The wall held.
But now the real threat was emerging. The Bully Boys.
Five of them, hulking brutes, a full head taller than even my new Hobgoblins. They pushed through the lesser goblins, their massive, crude weapons—a greataxe, a spiked club, a heavy iron flail—held ready. They were the camp's elite, its enforcers, and their faces were masks of pure, murderous fury. They were not panicked. They were enraged.
The one with the greataxe, a true monster with a necklace of finger bones, pointed at Gnar. "Traitor!" he bellowed. "You and your filth! Grul will feast on your hearts!"
He charged the shield wall, his greataxe held high.
I drew my bow. I had taken it from the dead Orc Archer, a heavy, powerful weapon that felt good in my hands. I nocked an arrow, my movements fluid and economical. My Predator's Gaze highlighted a spot on the charging Bully Boy, a small, unprotected gap in his armor just below his armpit. I drew, anchored, and released.
The arrow flew, a black streak of death. It struck true, sinking deep into the Bully Boy's side. He roared in pain, his charge faltering for a fraction of a second. It wasn't a killing blow, but it was a message. You are not invincible.
The fight became a maelstrom. A grinding, brutal scrum centered on the unyielding rock of our shield wall. The Bully Boys were a whirlwind of destruction, their heavy weapons crashing against the shields with a force that sent shudders down the entire line. A shield splintered. A Hobgoblin went down, his leg crushed by the spiked club. But the line held. Gruk, his face a mask of grim determination, stepped into the gap, his own body taking the force of the next blow.
I became a specter of death from above. My arrows were not aimed to kill, not the Bully Boys. Their armor was too thick, their vitality too high. My arrows were aimed to cripple, to distract, to create openings. An arrow to a knee to slow a charge. An arrow to a weapon-hand to spoil an attack. I was a conductor, using my bow to direct the brutal symphony of the battle below.
Elara, having descended from the tower, was a blur of motion at the base of the shield wall. She was the scalpel to their anvil. She would dart out from behind the line, her axe a flashing arc of silver, and exploit the openings my arrows created. A Bully Boy, distracted by an arrow to his shoulder, would turn, and she would be there, her dagger sliding into the exposed back of his knee, hamstringing him, bringing him down to a manageable level where the Hobgoblin spears could finish the job.
One of the Bully Boys went down, his throat pierced by a half-dozen spears. The Gutter-Guard roared in triumph, a savage, unified cry. Their confidence surged. They were no longer just defending. They were winning.
But the camp had endless numbers. For every goblin that fell, two more seemed to take its place, their courage bolstered by the presence of their brutish champions. The tide of bodies pressing against our small island was relentless. The shield wall, which had been a solid, unyielding line, began to waver.
Mog, the fat one, went down, a crude spear punching through a gap in the shields and into his fleshy side. He shrieked, a high, piercing sound of pain and terror, and the line buckled. Zib, the twitchy one, broke and ran, only to be cut down from behind by a goblin with a rusty cleaver.
The wall was failing.
Gnar, his face a mask of furious desperation, was a whirlwind of iron, his new sword a blur. He fought with the strength of a Hobgoblin, but the reckless fury of a cornered animal. A Bully Boy's flail caught him a glancing blow on the head, and he staggered, blood pouring from a deep gash on his scalp.
"Hold!" he roared, his voice thick with blood. "Hold the line for the Speaker!"
But they couldn't hold. The pressure was too great. The sheer, crushing weight of numbers was grinding them down. Gruk's shield was a wreck of splintered wood. Pip, his small face pale with terror, was fighting with the frantic energy of a cornered rat, his spear a tiny, stabbing needle against a tide of flesh.
I fired my last arrow, sending it deep into the eye socket of a goblin who was about to bring his club down on Pip's head. My quiver was empty. My role as an archer was over.
I looked at the scene below me. My army was being annihilated. My beautiful, insane plan was collapsing into a bloody, chaotic rout. They had fought bravely. They had fought better than I had ever imagined they could. But it was not enough.
I could feel Kale's presence, a distant, focused hum at the edge of my senses. His part of the plan, whatever it was, was taking too long. We were out of time.
I drew my axe and my dagger. My face was a cold, calm mask, but inside, my heart was a block of ice. We were going to die here. All of us. We had flown too close to the sun, and our wings of faith and fury were melting.
Fine.
If we were going to die, we would die well. We would die fighting. We would build a wall of goblin corpses so high it would take them a week to climb over it.
I was about to leap from the tower, to throw myself into the heart of the dying scrum for one last, glorious, pointless battle, when I smelled it.
It was not the familiar stench of goblin filth or the coppery tang of blood. It was the clean, sharp, unmistakable scent of burning pine. Of dry leaves catching fire. It was the smell of a forest fire, where no fire should be.
A flicker of orange light caught my eye, a light that was not from the camp's cookfires. It was coming from the woods behind the main mass of the goblin army, from the direction of the chieftain's hut. A low, ominous crackle began to build, a sound that cut through the din of battle.
The goblins heard it, too. They faltered, their attacks losing their momentum. They turned, their faces filled with a new, dawning confusion. What was this new sound? This new light?
Then the world exploded.
A wall of fire, a solid, roaring, incandescent wave of pure, elemental fury, erupted from the treeline. It was not a natural fire. It was too fast, too hot, too… deliberate. It moved with the speed and purpose of a living thing, a great, hungry beast of flame and smoke, devouring the forest, devouring the very air. It formed a perfect, semi-circular wall behind the goblin army, cutting off their retreat, penning them in.
Panic, pure and absolute, shattered their fragile morale. They shrieked, a chorus of pure, animal terror. Their fight with us was forgotten. Their only instinct was to flee from the roaring, hungry god of fire at their backs.
And the only way to flee was forward.
The sprawling, chaotic mob of goblins, which had been pressing against our shield wall from all sides, was suddenly, violently compressed. They were no longer an army. They were a funnel. A terrified, stampeding herd of bodies, their numbers now a liability, crushing them together, forcing them into a narrow, desperate channel.
And that channel was aimed directly at the waiting spears of my unbreakable shield wall.
I looked at the scene, at the wall of fire, at the terrified, stampeding horde, at the small, defiant island of my Hobgoblins, and a slow, cold, savage smile spread across my face.
You magnificent, insane son of a bitch, I thought, my silent words a prayer of thanks to the madman in the woods. You actually did it.
The time for defense was over.
"Now!" I roared, my voice a thunderclap that cut through the chaos. "Push! Push and kill! For the MourningLord! For the Speaker! For the Gutter-Guard! KILL THEM ALL!"