“There you are,” said Esperanza quietly when a slight rustling of the nearby bushes alarmed her of Dali and Gordy’s arrival. She knew by now that they only made the noise to warn her that they were there, as they were capable of rushing through the forest’s underbrush without making any noise, somehow. Even Gordy, with her large size and thick, shaggy fur, somehow weaved through brushes silently when she wanted to.
Esperanza quietly slithered down the back of the tree she was perched on, using the bulk of the tree’s trunk to shield her from view, and settled herself next to her waiting pets. As she reached them, she received the feeling that the surviving villagers had been led to safety and hidden by the two, which she rewarded with some scratches to their chins, something both dogs leaned into.
“I need the two of you to sneak into the village and take the pendejos in there out, like, real quietly,” she told the two dogs. Normally, the idea of talking to animals was something she’d attribute to a pet lover being overly immersed in their pets, as it was not like animals could understand what they said. Her two dogs – if they were even dogs at all underneath that guise – were different though. She could tell that they understood her perfectly. “Can you do it? Real quiet. Don’t let them sound an alarm or make a noise.”
Both Dali and Gordy nodded to her query, and with [A Glimpse of Understanding] she received a feeling that was almost as if they scoffed at the idea of them having difficulty with that sort of simple task. Normally Esperanza would have taken that sort of confidence as a source of worry, but given what she knew of her pets, if they thought that way, they likely were capable of what they boasted.
“Good, then. Dali, you go in from the north. Gordy, you take the south. I’ll take the east myself. Remember, all quiet-like as much as you can. If someone did sound an alarm, then just kill as fast as you can, and don’t harm any villagers, if any are still alive,” said Esperanza to her dogs. Once again both of them nodded and sent her a feeling of agreement and understanding. “Good, los, vámonos.”
Esperanza made good on her words as she snuck towards the eastern side of the village, the side nearest to her. She completely abandoned any pretense of the human shape at that point, using her body’s amorphous qualities to flatten herself into a puddle that slithered over the forest floor, practically covered in its entirety by the underbrush.
There were no guards stationed outside the village. Whether she should be thankful for that negligence or if her foes were just overconfident – something that might well be the case, given how nobody in the village likely posed any threat to them – she didn’t know, but either way Esperanza was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.
She carefully crawled closer towards the village’s palisade and seeped through a still intact section. The broken sections were more likely to be watched, she thought, and she guessed right, as she noticed how there was a sentry looking over a couple broken spots in the palisades not too far from where she squeezed herself through.
It was rather convenient to have a lot of eyes one could shift around at will, at times.
Contorting her amorphous form, Esperanza quickly linked herself to the underside of one of the nearby houses. From afar and at a glance, people who saw her might only think that she was merely a runoff of water from the house and not take a second look. She used that time to sneakily check her surroundings for other sentries and invaders.
Fortunately, the side of the village she was at was rather sparsely guarded. Other than the first sentry she noticed, there were only two others nearby, who were quite far apart and were not in sight of one another. She did have to take care to watch for the larger group of invaders who were still stacking the bodies of the villagers in the middle of the village square though. Probably around half or more of the total invaders were there.
Esperanza finally got her chance when the sentry nearest to her position yawned and walked closer in her direction. Given how the man was undoing his pants as he walked, she assumed that he was going to answer nature’s call. She waited until he turned towards the palisade and started doing his business before she wrapped around his head all of a sudden.
The man tried to scream, but Esperanza was a good bit stronger than him by that point. She could have quietly suffocated him, but worried that it might take too long, so instead she changed the layer that wrapped the man’s head into a toothy maw and bit down. The headless body then slumped to the ground and ceased moving within moments.
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She repeated the process with the other two guards. By coincidence, she got to see Dali at work when she took care of the guard at the north-east side. Dali was far cleaner and quieter than she was in dealing with his target. From afar she only saw how a dark shape flashed past and the sentry’s head suddenly just toppled off his neck, without making even the slightest sound. Even before the head and body made a sound from hitting the ground, they had been taken away without a sound, as if they were never there to begin with.
Gordy’s method of taking care of the sentries on her side was more drastic but just as effective. From afar Esperanza could only see what looked like a dense fog that enveloped an unsuspecting sentry, only to vanish moments later, taking the sentry in question along with it. Not a single sign of the sentry’s existence was left behind, as if they never existed to begin with.
In those moments when she caught sight of Dali and Gordy, Esperanza also took a moment to pass orders for them to wait for her near the village square when they were done. By taking care of the sentries alone, they had likely taken care of at least a third or so of the invaders that attacked the village. The larger group at the village square was unlikely to be taken so unawares, though, and Esperanza planned to take them down as fast as she could.
As for the enemy [Champion] and their entourage, she planned to leave them for last. Worst case, she’d take on the enemy [Champion] herself. He seemed to have very specialized classes, and the name displayed made her feel like she had seen it somewhere before, but couldn’t recall where. Either way, she got half a dozen levels on him, so that should at least give her some advantage in a fight.
And besides, worse comes to worse there’s always [Respawn] to fall back to.
Surprisingly, by the time Esperanza, Dali, and Gordy gathered near the village square – they were quite a distance away from each other, but close enough for [A Glimpse of Understanding] to deliver thoughts to – the invaders had yet to notice the disappearance of their sentries. Instead, the ones there just looked utterly bored as they lazily lugged bodies from the surrounding homes and gathered it all in one massive pile.
Esperanza did a quick count in her head. The three of them had removed thirteen sentries on their way in. She had personally gotten rid of another four back when she saved the survivors of the village, and there were another five standing far on the western side of the village, including the [Champion]. There were nineteen of the invaders in the village square, carrying corpses around. If she assumed that it was a unit of forty with the [Champion] attached, then all of them were accounted for.
She gave the call to strike just as the nineteen were all gathered in the central square, having just finished carrying the corpses of the many villagers.
The three of them struck as one, from three different directions, and caught the invaders off-guard with their arrival. By the time the invaders reacted, three heads already rolled as Dali flashed between the three northernmost ones. From the south, Gordy once more assumed the fog-like form Esperanza had seen and directly engulfed another three before they could react.
Eseranza herself pounced on two invaders who happened to be standing next to each other even while she formed a hand at the top of one of her appendages and hurled her knife at a third. The knife embedded itself on the invader’s back, the wound unlikely to be a fatal one, but the way the knife started to suck its victim’s blood would make it fatal after a while anyway.
As for the two she pounced on directly, Esperanza directly bit off half of one’s head, while she formed another appendage into a large, sharp blade and bisected the other from head to crotch. Both corpses had just hit the ground by the time screams of alarm and fear came from the remaining invaders, but it was a little too late for them to be alarmed by then.
Even though the remaining ten drew their weapons, it did not change their fates at all. Dali and Gordy struck them from the sides, even while Esperanza herself pushed against their hastily formed formation from the front relentlessly. She even had the chance to let her dagger feast on a second victim along the way.
She quickly learned during the fight that forming one of her limbs into a blade was a good way to distract her opponents. They were ingrained to watch out for weapons, and her bladed limb definitely counted as one. That just left them open to her other limbs, however, which looked more innocuous but were each just as lethal.
Dali kept zipping around his opponent and tore chunks off the invader’s body with each pass, despite their best attempt to block or avoid his strikes. It was rather eerie to see his handiwork, the way parts of his target’s body just vanished as if some large, invisible being gouged them out, the cut so clean it looked as if it was done with a precision tool.
On the other side, Gordy had re-assumed her more “normal” form, using her bulk and power to simply take an enemy down and finish them off with a crunch of her jaws. Despite her bulk, she was deceptively nimble, those enemies who tried to strike at her while she was finishing off their compatriot only succeeding in further maiming their compatriot’s corpse instead.
Esperanza herself alternatingly shifted one of her “legs” into a bladed limb with which she distracted and threatened her opponents, while her arms were shifted into the long-fingered claws she used before, and her other leg morphed into something closer to a snake’s tail, which she used to prop up her body and keep herself moving – well, slithering – even while the fought with the rest.
Her opponents were clearly unused to the way she fought, and before long one of them made a mistake and stumbled into another as he tried to block her bladed limb with his own machete. One of Esperanza’s long-fingered claws struck right at that moment, the slender, too-long fingers wrapping around both invaders and keeping them tied to each other for that moment.
Long enough for the tenebrous tongue-like limb she formed within the limb to shoot out from the maw at the palm of the hand and carve its way through both invaders’ torsos and out their backs.
Even as she allowed the two still-twitching bodies to slide off her “tongue”, Esperanza saw how the [Champion] and his entourage finally began to move. Strangely, they did not seem hurried by the deaths of their compatriots, and if anything, the [Champion] looked at Esperanza with a look that more resembled… excitement? Then she heard the [Champion] speak, and she knew exactly what he had in mind.
“Finally… a proper challenge!” he had said.