Michael
Light moved in a swirling mass as Michael moved his hands slowly. With a hand-closing gesture, he tried to compress and stitch it together into hard light.
Impressed noises came from a couple of onlookers and Michael pulled an annoyed face. This distraction was enough to lose control of the spell and it imploded.
“You need to keep up your focus in the middle of battle, so don’t let yourself be distracted by a couple of curious people who surely have something better to do,” Kiran said and raised his voice at the end to make sure that the adventurers that were watching heard him. Some looked embarrassed while others laughed.
“I know,” Michael replied frustrated, and breathed in deep. He was trying to learn to make hard light without a sigil to be able to call on it quickly but to use it in combat he would first have to be able to do it at all.
He was just about to start again when Sir Zeke Tomp spoke up, “Lord Rowan, please do not forget the meeting in the command tent.” Michael dropped his hands and nodded at the knight.
He walked over to his little tent and washed up in a bowl of cold water before moving over to the close by command tent.
The camp was filled with men and women walking around, sharpening their weapons, and doing other preparations for the soon-starting campaign. Many greeted the young lord as he walked past them and into the command tent where he was awaited by the different unit leaders.
“Welcome Lord Rowan,” Geron said with a small bow and then turned to the rest. “Now that we are all here, I will tell you the current situation.”
Michael stepped next to the table on which a large map of the mountains was placed. It had been expanded in the last days and he saw a bunch of new markers.
“Most scouting groups have returned by now and we have identified multiple large goblin tribes. We will hit them first and we will hit them hard. We have identified twelve major goblin nests in our sector, and they have been marked with numbers. The unit with the corresponding number will attack the goblins at that position and each one will be supported by a detachment of guardsmen to make sure they don’t get away. If they manage to slip through our net, we will have a difficult time hunting them all down. We will move out from here a couple of hours before sunrise tomorrow and hit all of them simultaneously roughly two hours after sunrise.”
“Wouldn’t it be smarter to attack them at night,” one of the guard sergeants asked.
“No, goblins are generally nocturnal so hitting them shortly after sunrise is attacking them while they are sleeping,” the same tall adventurer lady answered that had raised concerns about Michael’s presence.
Michael inspected the markers while the others discussed the perfect time for a raid and quickly found the one that corresponded with his unit number ‘one’.
“I will leave it to the respective units how exactly you want to eradicate their target because you all have vastly different styles, but I will stress again that the cleaner we are at this stage the easier everything will be later.” Geron looked at each of the unit leaders until they nodded and then continued.
“The other camps will do the same,” and he pointed at one camp to the east and one camp to the west of their position. “As well as Viscount Telp’s men in Emall.”
The biggest problem would be the scale of the mountains, they simply had too few men to just push up in one continuing line so they would have to take them piecemeal. To prevent anyone from breaking through into the country every camp would have to assign mounted patrols to cover the space between them.
In the end, they would try to cut down the number of goblins as much as possible and rely on the monsters and ogres to finish off the rest in their search for food once the troops of Reen had thinned out and claimed their usual hunting grounds.
- Next day at dawn -
Michael was walking behind Eydis through the forest. They had left a couple of hours ago and were closing on their target. The sun had just risen and was bathing them in spotted light under the trees. It wouldn’t stay like this for long though, the adventurers had predicted rain and Michael trusted their outdoor skills.
His unit consisted of the tall adventurer’s party and Michael’s guard and was probably one of the strongest units that was being deployed. That also meant that they were going after the biggest goblin camp though.
“First time on a hunt,” the adventurer lady asked, her name was Clara, and she did actually have some half-giant blood in her veins but only a little by her own admission.
“Have gone hunting before but never for monsters, only humans and animals,” Michael answered while concentrating on his step.
“Well, goblins aren’t monsters, they are weaker but both more numerous and vicious.”
“Yeah, I know,” he paused for a moment and then looked at her. She was packed with muscles and had more scars on her limbs than he had ever seen but her face had been lucky to have none, it seemed. Her hair was black and shaved short on one side. Michael had never seen a woman like her.
She looked back and raised an eyebrow. “What? Got something on my face?”
“I have never seen someone like you, that’s all.”
She laughed quietly, not wanting to make too big of a ruckus. “Well, strong women are a rarity in this shithole of a country.”
“That is not it. I have Eydis and she is the strongest person I know. There is something different about you.”
“Don’t go falling in love with me or something like that. You are way too young for that,” she inspected him with an investigating gaze and then added, “But I am sure you will be a cute little guy once you are a little bit older so come hit me up then and we will see.”
She winked at Michael, and he blinked confused when a wave of mana hit him. He looked over to Eydis who was giving the adventurer a deathly stare.
She noticed it as well and smirked at the barbarian girl, “What you got a claim on him or what? You his plaything?”
Eydis stepped closer and looked like she would take a shot at her face.
“Whoa, whoa, stop,” Michael interjected.
“What you wanna fight? That would be interesting,” Clara said cracking her knuckles with a smile.
Eydis signed something and looked at Michael.
“Really?”
Clara looked at him as well and asked, “What did she say?”
Eydis gave him a wave and he sighed, “She said ‘Fuck you’.”
Michael took a step back, not wanting to get between them when they threw it down, but Clara simply smirked in a strange way and said in a tense tone, “Is that an offer, darlin?” She looked up and down Eydis with a hungry gaze.
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Michael looked at Eydis and the young warrior was standing there with wide eyes and a reddening face.
“That’s what I thought,” Clara said, tipping Eydis on the tip of her nose. She got even redder, turned around, and began walking again.
Clara laughed again and watched Eydis as she walked away.
“You have a strange sense of humor,” Michael said and shook his head.
“What? That wasn’t a joke, she is pretty and if she is not yours then I might try my luck.”
“She belongs to no one.”
“That’s good.” Clara chuckled a little and continued watching Eydis move through the underbrush with the grace of a predator.
They walked in an awkward silence until Michael couldn’t take it anymore.
“You have experience with goblins, so tell me something about how they work.”
“Uh, they are small and aggressive,” she started but Michael interrupted her. “I have seen them before, I nearly died because some of them freed a bunch of monsters in the capital once after a stone crusher evolved a second time. I mean more of like a tribe.”
“Right, sorry. Goblins are weird, a mage once explained it to me, but I forgot most of it. Most goblins are part of a tribe and that means more for them than it would do to a human. In a tribe, each generation knows what the previous generations have experienced simply by instinct, or something like that. It means that a goblin tribe gets stronger with each generation, and you can’t just keep them down, you have to destroy the tribes completely from time to time or they will learn from their mistakes.”
“How does that even work? How could they know what the previous generations knew without being taught it,” Michael asked, and the adventurer scratched her head.
“I have no clue. The mage might have explained it, but I can’t quite remember, it had something to do with their way of reproduction and mana. Goblins use a sort of gestation pool, and these things reek of mana.”
“They might imprint their knowledge on their newborn like an artificer,” Michael guessed lost in thought, he wished Kiran was with them, but the mage had bolstered another party.
“Yeah, I think it was something like that. Back to the point, they remember what was done to them, so if you defeated them through a frontal assault, the next time you try that you might run into ambushes. If you snuck in and murdered their leadership, they might start employing decoys. If you attacked them with the element of surprise, they might tame some kind of beast to alert them. You get the gist, the goblins might be stupid, but they are crafty. They will find a solution to every problem; it might be a dumbass solution, but they will find one. If they weren’t so weak and stupid, they would be a huge problem.” She heaved herself over a large log and turned to help Michael, but he jumped over it with mana-infused nimbleness.
“They don’t sound that dumb.”
“Well, goblins don’t think like civilized races. They see prey and only think about eating them, they don’t think about the repercussions of slaughtering a whole village and inciting a cleansing raid that will kill them all. They are smarter in achieving their goals than animals but nothing more, and their goals are always weapons or food.”
“Crafty but not smart, huh?”
“Yeah, and that is the easy part of the little fuckers, now we come to the weirder part that I understand even less. Normal goblins don’t use mana in any way. Still, with a bigger clan, there will be special ones like warriors that can augment a little bit, shamans that can use magic, or chiefs that are a little bit smarter than other goblins and lead them. They don’t seem to get these abilities somewhat random like with humans though because you never find them in small groups.”
Michael was intrigued by their way of reproduction which seemed all too alien from what he had learned.
“Is there a pattern to what kind of special goblins exist,” he asked while his head spun different theories about their workings.
Clara blew up her cheeks a little while pondering his question, she didn’t seem to mind his inquisitive nature. “Well, I never saw a shaman with a group below forty goblins, but warriors appear at around twenty or even lower when the tribe has been there for a while. Goblin chiefs are rare even at the large tribes but there are many more different kinds of special goblins.”
“What can we expect in our target?”
“It was something like hundred goblins in the scout report right,” she asked, and Michael nodded. “Well, we will definitely have a shaman then, probably something like earth or water affinity with forest goblins. Might even have a chief for such a large gang, but probably a dozen warriors maybe some stalkers and trappers.”
Michael looked at her with a questioning look and she sighed, “If you don’t understand trapper then I really can’t help you; stalkers are pretty self-explanatory as well, but they are sneaky little fuckers with bows, javelins, or slings that like to ambush. It really depends on what their tribe had to face till now what they have but warriors and a shaman are pretty much a certainty.”
Michael nodded and thought about what all this new information would mean for their upcoming task. They didn’t talk much for the rest of the way wanting to keep the noise down.
The forest grew denser as their unit of knights, adventurers, and guardsmen approached their destination. After only another hour Eydis stopped and raised her hand to signal the others to do the same.
Michael crept up next to her making sure that his mana was locked away safely in case their shaman was any good at his job.
He squinted his eyes to see but it was just a sea of green with bushes and trees, the sound was something different though. He heard them snickering in the same way the goblins had the day that they released the monsters upon Michael and his friends in the capital.
My eyes really are bad without mana, Michael thought until he finally saw two green goblins with stone-tipped spears. One was yawning and the other one was chuckling while stabbing at something.
“It’s the camp,” Eydis signed and pointed at a small child-sized hole in the bramble bushes.
“That is how they survived so long in this environment,” Clara whispered, “They have a literal fort and the scouts told us nothing about it. Fucking coppers, they have no idea what is important.”
Michael looked at her and saw the silver plate dangling around her neck. Adventurers had a class system that put them in rough brackets of skill and payment.
Wood, copper, iron, silver, gold, platinum, kindled, and ardent in that order but in these times, there were very few that even exceeded silver and the rules on how to advance were as old as humanity itself.
“So, how are we doing this,” Michael asked.
“What? I am in charge here?” She actually looked surprised.
“You're the most experienced here, I presume.”
She scoffed a little bit and cracked her neck. “Did you just call me old? Never mind, don’t answer that.” She was probably in her late twenties; Michael would never have thought about calling her old. “It's just a hundred goblins and we have five knights, a silver adventurer party, and two units of guardsmen, we should manage either way. You come up with a plan, will give you some experience in a way that is safe. Your goal is to make this fight as quick and safe as possible, and I will judge you for how you do and tell the tale to everyone who wants to listen, deal?”
She grinned at the young lord and made a gesture for him to go ahead. He looked at her for a moment, having a silver adventurer sing his praises in the guild would probably help his standing with them.
Michael turned back to the entrance and began thinking. A frontal assault through this little entrance would slow them down considerably if there were guards on the other side to hold them, traps would also be hard to avoid crawling through there for the adults. An augmenter could easily punch his way through the bramble but that would wake the entire camp, slow them down, and cause them to either be split up if they broke in at multiple entrances or have the same problem as with the frontal attack.
He turned back to his men and said quietly, “Move back a little bit until you are well out of range. Eydis, you are with me, we are going scouting.”
Sir Tomp looked at him with a disapproving gaze and Michael added, “I am safer if they don’t catch us, and smaller numbers are better to scout. We are going to stay clear as much as possible and just take a look around.”
They split off the group while they pulled back and began circling the camp. It was surrounded by the brambles on all sides, they served as a natural barrier, creating a defensive perimeter for the camp. The entrance they had discovered earlier was just one of multiple more or less hidden paths through it, but most were even tighter than the first.
“I hear guards inside,” Eydis signed with closed eyes, concentrating on every noise.
Michael could feel the mana emanating from her. “You are burning mana? What if the shaman feels it?”
She shrugged, “I don’t think it is strong enough to feel that from in there.”
Michael frowned but let her be, her senses were much better than his so she would at least notice if the goblins began to rally.
“You got an idea,” she asked him and looked over.
“The brambles are the biggest hurdle for us. We need to find a way to either get in before they rally and fight in the confined spaces or get them to come out.”
“How about, setting fire to one side and smoking them out,” Eydis suggested.
Michael thought about it, it would be risky to set a fire in such a wooded area and they didn’t actually need such a tactic to win, so he shook his head, it was not worth the risk of causing a wildfire.
He looked around and then up. “Wait here,” he said and started climbing a nearby tree. Mana began to slowly flow through his limbs, with Eydis burning mana there was little reason to impede himself.
It took him only a few moments to get up into the branches and look down into the goblin camp. He had a great view from up here and it was a chaotic mess, goblins were lying around everywhere, weapons, tools, and bones littered between them. He could see a couple of moving patrols, but it looked like most of them were asleep, mostly under makeshift canopies made out of leaves and sticks. In the back of the camp was a single tent, decorated with skulls and bones that probably housed either the leader or shaman of the tribe.
Michael tapped the scar on his nose while a plan began to form in his mind.