Faelar sped through the foothills and into the Palnie mountains. He was like most other elves in that he cultivated the strength of his body. They would just repeatedly cast a spell that gave minor enhancements to every aspect of their bodies. After a few decades of casting the spell they would be able to perform feats of athleticism that were impossible for any other races. It was in some ways a very simple and easy path to power. The spell to strengthen the body was not overly complex, and since it added to their lifespans it was possible to get the few decades of casting done within a century if you were diligent.
There were complications that came with the higher levels of power. The hardest stones, and strongest metals were like putty in their hands, they had to relearn how to move. Their sensory organs were enhanced beyond comprehension, and they had to develop complementary magics to either enhance or deaden those senses depending on how they changed. Their sense of touch and hearing had to be enhanced, and their sense of taste, smell, and sight had to be deadened.
Complete reliance on spells to enhance or deaden the senses was dangerous. A momentary lapse in the spell for a powerful body cultivator would leave them unfeeling, deaf, blinded by light, and overwhelmed by the tastes and smells around them. Throwing up was a common response, and would make the whole ordeal far worse. The taste and smell of bile had driven Faelar’s father and two of his uncles to suicide.
So as he ran, or really tiptoed at absurd speeds, he tried to keep his mind and senses open to his surroundings, and reduced the sense alterations down to a minimum. He was finally getting to the level of body cultivation that his people were known and feared for, but it also meant the true dangers of body cultivation were beginning to appear.
His mother had picked him for this mission, and had wanted him to keep his senses as open as possible. She was following a unique path, and trying to teach him to follow it as well. Unlike most body cultivators she wasn’t deadening any of her senses, and instead was trying to enhance her healing and sense of touch to match with the sensory overload of the other senses. All of her contemporaries had called it a fool's errand, and that her approach was doomed to failure. She’d also outlived all of her contemporaries, so now no one called her a fool, at least not within a few miles of her.
When Faelar reached the mountain opposite of where the explosion had happened the sun had set, and the night was overcast, which was perfect for letting his fully enhanced vision loose.
The obvious things immediately jumped out at him. Where the explosion had happened was covered by snow from an avalanche, but the gap in the ridge would be noticeable to someone without enhanced eyesight. There were a couple groups of Kobolds out and about. All of them looked fresh and unwounded, so they hadn’t encountered any enemies. One group had even gotten comfortable and lit a campfire in the valley. Faelar couldn’t help but frown when he saw the fire. Wood-smoke was a strong scent, and he would have to heavily deaden his sense of smell if he had to explore that area. Depending on the direction of the wind, half the valley might smell like that fire-pit tomorrow.
That just meant he needed to work quickly. He avoided all the kobold groups and headed over to the epicenter of the explosion. It smelled heavily of kobold, at least two groups had already explored the area, and a few of them had taken pisses off the ridge. Their gear always smelled the worst, wearing the skin of your dead siblings seemed barbaric to him, but he knew they saw it as a way of honoring their dead.
Underneath the more obvious smells was a slight lingering smell of burnt air, charred stone, and a bit of metal. The smell of this particular metal was very unfamiliar to him. He knew the smell of various metal ores, and a few commonly worked metals that the humans liked to use. This metal smelled closest to steel, but it was still a little too different to be a match.
From the ridge he spent a few minutes looking out into the valley. His sharp eyesight caught some glimmers in the trees. Only two of them were outside the smell radius of the campfire, so he went over to one of them first.
Embedded in the tree was a shard of metal almost a foot long and a few inches wide. Faelar easily climbed the tree and removed the section of wood that the shard was embedded in. He thought his mother might know the source of this metal.
He briefly considered trying to ask one of the kobold groups if they had learned anything, but thought better of it when he realized they were all unblooded youngsters. The unblooded were impossible to talk with. They attacked anyone and anything that wasn’t another kobold, no matter how suicidal it might be. There was a loose alliance between the kobolds and the elves, but it was closer to a non-aggression pact. Kobolds could make some nasty sensory overload traps that could incapacitate an elf, but outside of their nests the elves could slaughter most kobolds with impunity. But the real reason for the non-aggression pact was that they simply had no reason to fight each other. They weren’t in competition for similar land or resources.
The last thing Faelar did was retrieve the other shard he’d seen and quietly left it near the crater caused by the explosion. Hopefully some observant kobold would find it, and maybe their parents would know about the metal.
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None of the kobolds managed to notice Faelar, but one of them would find the shard the next day. They’d find a few more of the shards as they combed the forest. A few of the smarter kobolds thought it might be a bomb, and it didn’t look like the kind of bombs that kobolds make. This idea got the kobolds very excited. A bomb meant an intelligent enemy that knows how to fight, and if it wasn’t a kobold they could get their first blooding.
For a week they crawled over the forest and mountain. Their traipsing managed to cause a second much smaller ambulance that buried and killed a dozen kobolds. But the avalanche also partially revealed the hidden door. It was a solid hunk of grey metal. Claws did nothing against the metal door, and their bone weapons bounced off without leaving a mark. They started digging around the door, but the metal extended into the mountain. However, after a few days there were a couple hundred kobolds digging at the side of the mountain, and they finally found the edge of the metal.
None of the kobolds noticed, but the very edge of the metal was a little softer than the rest of the metal, and it easily deformed when the rock around it was shifted.
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Thralic had a week of peace and quiet to work on the base until the entrance alarm started blaring at him. He got up from his runic workbench where he had been fiddling with a pre-packaged design for automated turrets. The turret’s target tracking, and friend or foe designation systems were miscalibrated for this planet. There was no divine mana on this planet, which was usually an easy way of determining friend or foe, most races fought for their gods, and gave off traces of that god’s mana. The races that fought against the followers of a god usually got racial bounties, and had their own divine signatures.
He thought over the problem as he started gearing up in the personal armory room. ‘The friend or foe designation routines are probably useless. I should just route around those parts of the runic circuits. I can switch the target tracking to use regular mana traces. It will make the targets by-passable by anyone with good mana control. Perhaps I can also use heat signatures, or motion sensors? Good sneaks can still get around those things, but maybe not all three at once.’
He clicked his helmet in place, grabbed his rifle, grabbed a bio-analyzer and jogged out of his partially complete base. Within his helmet he pulled up a visual feed of the inside of the entrance. The tunnel was intact for now, and nothing had managed to blast through the door, that meant whoever was knocking had dug around the outside. ‘Must not be a very smart creature, if you can’t even break in through the front door, what makes you think you are going to get past the other defenses within? Let’s see who it is …’
He switched the visual feed to a fishbowl lens peephole. He saw lizard looking creatures crawling all over the outside of the entryway, digging away half the side of the mountain. ‘Hmm either kobolds or dragonborn, either way shoot first and ask questions later should be fine. They ain’t gonna have any respect for someone that can’t defend their home.’
The tunnel to the entrance was a few miles long, and the kobolds broke through before Thralic was even halfway there.
There was a soft feminine sounding voice that spoke directly into their minds: “Restricted area, please leave. Deadly force will be used against you.”
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They tried to call out and ask the woman to show herself and fight them. The kobolds that had broken into the tunnel were shaking with excitement. They tried tearing into the walls to see if the feminine voice was hiding in a side tunnel somewhere. As more of them crowded into the tunnel the kobolds in front gradually gave up on finding the voice, and moved deeper.
The tunnel was pitch black, but the darkness didn’t bother them. They all had dark vision and had spent most of their lives underground. Many of them were uneasy about the lack of visible support structures in the tunnel. Kobolds had a natural feel for where it was safe to dig and build tunnels, but those instincts were screaming at them that this area wasn’t safe for tunneling.
Thralic had created the tunnel so that it wound back and forth, and that sight lines would not ever be much longer than 500 yards.
He found a spot he liked and began setting up. A bi-pod support popped out at the front of his rifle. He used a little magic to raise up some earth to obscure him from view while laying prone. Another little bit of magic to set up a light obscuring field so his muzzle flash wouldn’t give away his position. And finally a bit of sound magic to distort and amplify the sound in his area. There was no way to make supersonic rounds quiet, but going louder might be good enough to disorient creatures with sensitive hearing and make his position less obvious.
He had been using 4mm shots on the worms, but those didn’t have the range or stopping power that he wanted. He reconfigured the rifle to shoot 12mm rounds. This would probably be overkill, but it was always best to go for overkill on targets with unknown abilities. The 12mm rounds could also be rune stamped for various effects, incendiary, cold shot, armor piercing, and metallic poisoning.
After waiting a while a dozen of the kobolds appeared up ahead in the tunnel. Thralic waited for a few more groups to come around the tunnel bend. The closest group was only 100 yards away. He squeezed the trigger.
A boom filled the tunnel, and four kobolds in the first group were hit. Three had dropped instantly and remained still, and a fourth one was clipped in the side, clutching his chest. Thralic tried to see what level of damage they’d taken. There wasn’t an explosion of gore and flesh that would have indicated overkill, but he’d clipped two and the first one that got clipped went down hard. He wanted to know more, but decided he could find out after the battle, and the current level of overkill was fine.
The kobolds had been thrown into a frenzy, but the direction of the attack had been obvious since it was the group in front that had been hit and there was only one direction they hadn’t explored.
They started running down the tunnel, some of them dropping to all fours, before more booms started ringing out. Each time one or more kobolds would fall to the ground in a pool of blood.
The first group of kobolds was dead within 50 yards. The second group was dead out at 75 yards. The third group was dead at 90 yards. At some point one of Thralic’s shots hit a hide and bone shield. The shot still went through, but had lost enough power that the kobold behind it had not instantly died.
The fourth group was dead at 100 yards.
More kobolds kept coming around the bend. And more of them had started holding up shields for protection, or picking up the shields of fallen kobolds.
The fifth group was dead at 95 yards.
The kobolds were getting low and spreading out. Thralic was no longer able to line up as many shots to take two or three kobolds at once.
The sixth group was dead at 70 yards.
A kobold in the seventh group had thrown a spear at Thralic’s position. It stuck into the solid stone a few yards in front of him. He had wasted an extra shot on the kobold when it stood up.
The seventh group was dead at 50 yards.
Some of them were now carrying two shields, picking up an extra shield from the dead kobolds. Kobolds had stopped coming around the bend. Two shields could stop his bullets, but he didn’t have time to switch rounds to something that would penetrate the shields.
The eighth group was dead at 40 yards.
The shots were easier and faster up close, and the shields were too small to cover the entire body. More spears and thrown weapons were landing near his position.
The ninth group was dead at 30 yards.
Thralic rolled to avoid a spear that would have hit him in the back if he had stayed still. He didn’t want to test if his armor would stand up against these weapons.
He backpedaled and kept firing. The tenth group was dead at 10 yards, but they had overrun his previous position.
Thralic slapped the gun against the back of his armor, and it clicked into place, he grabbed his melee tool and set it for a short sword in his dominant left hand, and his thicker right hand armor unfolded into a small shield centered on his forearm.
He deflected a thrown spear, and the metal of his shield screeched at the punishment but held firm.
The kobold that had thrown the spear leaped at him, it tried to position a shield to block his sword and grab out at Thralic’s shield with its free hand. Thralic swung his sword low and under the shield, chopping through the kobold’s right leg.
Thralic was backing up to give himself more space, but two kobolds hadn’t waited for their sibling's leap to fail, they had rushed around both sides, and were swinging their weapons at Thralic.
He caught a spiked bone mace on his shield, and swept aside a spear thrust with his sword. The bone mace had landed with almost no weight behind it, and the spear was way too easy to turn aside. Thralic realized he had a massive strength advantage over these creatures, and that they were probably kobolds rather than dragonborn.
He changed the setting on his melee tool and the handle extended another two feet, giving him a short sword spear. He then swung the spear at the charging kobolds. They tried to block with shields and weapons. Their gear mostly held up, the sword could only take chunks out of the bone item. But the kobold bodies that were holding the gear couldn’t stand up to the force of Thralic’s swings. If they blocked their own gear was slammed against them, breaking their bones and throwing their bodies back against the wall.
The remaining forty kobolds had all bunched up in front of Thralic. The ones in front tried to duck and dodge around Thralic’s sword spear. But there wasn’t enough room to maneuver in the crowded tunnel. The unlucky kobolds were sliced up by the sword, the thicker scale armor on their torsos offered some protection, but limbs and faces were being turned into bleeding wrecks. The “luckier” kobolds were able to get past the sword blade and either met the haft of the spear or a shield bash that sent them flying, their wounds were non-fatal but they were being taken out of the fight.
Despite the mostly one-sided nature of the fight Thralic did not come out completely unscathed. Weapons were thrown by kobolds right in front of him and impossible to dodge or block every time. A few kobolds had also gotten lucky enough to dodge the sword spear and get in close. There were half a dozen deep marks on his armor. Nothing had broken through, but with how many near misses there had been he felt that was mostly luck.
The tunnel around Thralic was filled with bleeding and groaning kobolds. Some were trying to move, most were completely still. Another group of kobolds rounded the bend. Thralic retreated a couple hundred yards around another bend in the tunnel before kneeling down for a steady firing position and shooting the latest group of kobolds that had caught up to him. Over the next hour he held his position. A few of the kobolds he shot were clearly wounded combatants from the first encounter that had dragged themselves down the tunnel for an inglorious end to their lives.