"Watch out!" Leo yelled. His voice was hoarse and throaty, as though he was speaking after a long sleep. "There's a- " He never got to finish that sentence because a man, the size of a small mountain range, barrelled over the ridge and into the clearing.
The only sign of exertion on his face was the light sheen of sweat that glistened in the soft glow of the rolling aurora in the sky above. Perhaps, the glow had gone unnoticed during the Fox's arrival, but now that everyone was broken from their trance, they caught sight of flowing, twisting snakes of liquid light as they danced in the sky above.
If Bo were here, he might recognise them. If Bo were here, he might have noticed the similarities between these lights and the ones only he and Yvet could see in the Rift.
If Bo were here… maybe things would have turned out differently.
A sharp bellow split the quiet down the middle, rending it like a blade. Every head turned to watch as the huge man with strange tattoos roared and started running.
"What's happening?" Ethron asked.
"I was just attacked by a guy with tattoos like his. I-I only escaped because I got lucky," Leo stuttered.
"You're saying there's more of these giants?" Ethron's hands clenched.
Leo nodded anxiously. "At least one more. The one that attacked me was even bigger than him."
Ethron licked his dried lips and nodded grimly. "I see."
The big man, upon entering the clearing, had raced in one singular direction without pause. Heavy feet pounded on stone like the beat of a tribal drum, each impact shaking the ground with enough force to dislodge rocks and send them spilling over the ridge and down the mountainside.
His face was somewhere between a snarl and a scream, viciously twisted into the sort of expression a nightmare might wear.
It was immediately clear where he was going. Rather than run towards the hundreds of clumped-up tribesmen, the giant had made a beeline straight for Ethron and Leo. The two men exchanged a glance and dived to the side as the titan barrelled past.
As Leo fell, his gaze was drawn to a metal cube tied to the giant's back like a rucksack. On any normal person, it would be far too big to carry, but for the nine-foot giant, the cube looked like a mere paperweight.
For some reason, the second his gaze landed on the cube, Leo's skin started to crawl like thousands of little electric ants were dancing a jig up and down his spine. The mere sight of it made his stomach churn with a sort of grim apprehension he hadn't felt in a long, long while.
While the giant ignoring them certainly brought Leo a measure of relief, the man's eventual target sent that relief running for the hills and ushered in a fresh bout of nervous nausea.
The brute was sprinting at full pelt towards the only other thing on the barren mountaintop.
The Fox.
It watched the big man with the sort of detached curiosity only a god can muster. As though wondering what the big brute had planned while simultaneously unfazed by it.
"Stop!" yelled Ethron. He lay on the ground clutching his hip after diving onto the hard rock. Oasis' blessing or not, he was an old man, and his bones weren't what they used to be.
But the giant paid him no heed. In fact, he didn't even falter as he neared the Fox. Big hands reached around and ripped the metal cube off his back, winding up and throwing it at the Fox.
As it flew through the air, the metal glistened and bent, bulging and contracting as though breathing. It swelled and shrank with each mechanical breath it took, expanding and growing until it dwarfed the Fox it hurtled towards.
The lights of the aurora above flickered and glanced off the gleaming metal, revealing wires and twisted runes that were all piled together in a bird's nest of complexity.
Once it was almost on top of the Fox, the cube flashed bright blue for a second, blinding Leo and everyone else on Fox Mountain. His eyes stung like he'd just stared directly into a star being born, and fuzzy black spots swam across his vision, but he opened them quickly enough to catch what happened next.
The Fox moved like liquid going up a straw. Its body pinched and pulled as it was sucked into the cube, flowing in a way solid matter shouldn't and couldn't. It was all over in a moment, and the glowing creature had vanished into the steel cage, leaving nothing but quiet and stinging eyes behind.
Leo wasn't quite sure what to do next. He glanced around the clearing with wide eyes and bated breath, hoping that someone, anyone, would have a plan.
Unfortunately, the first person to move offered no such consolation. It was Ethron. After finally struggling to his feet, the old man sank to his knees and groaned. "What have you done?" he wheezed, his voice barely audible. "You've doomed us all."
After the cage snapped shut, now glowing as though it held a star within, the big man picked it up and wiped the sheen of sweat from his brow. "Success!!" He bellowed, the roar echoing across the mountaintop like a thunderclap and setting off a chain of events that could only be described as chaotic.
To unwind it all would be like trying to collect a ball of yarn that had been tangled in brambles drenched in tar.
First, the hundreds of gathered tribesmen, women and children roared in unison and began to bulldoze their way across the ridge towards the big man. Second, almost a hundred mercenaries sprinted up the rise to intercept their tidal fury.
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Third – although this went unnoticed by all but Leo – the cage holding the Fox shook a little. Not enough to bother the man holding it, but enough to make it clear the Fox wasn't dead. Not yet, anyway.
The sound of almost a thousand feet running at each other is hard to describe, especially when some of those feet belong to people that would make a Sarpa look dainty. But to put it bluntly, it was loud.
Blood was on the air before any had been spilt. There was murder in the tribespeople's eyes and money in the merceries', both equally motivating considering the circumstances.
However, passion and power were not the same thing. This became clear the moment a second-tier mercenary flattened one of the tribesmen into a paste that would have to be scraped off the stone with a shovel.
The worst part was that the giant hadn't even slowed down when he hit the unsuspecting tribesman. It was like he had stepped on a pebble on the road, not a person.
From then, the chaos kicked into a higher gear, with weapons flailing uselessly at the second-tier mercenaries and fists flailing back to much greater effect. From the beginning, it was clear that the people with multicoloured tattoos were on an entirely different plane to the rest of them. It was like adults fighting children.
Spear tips snapped on their skin, and knuckles broke without leaving so much as a bruise. Leo – caught up in the great heaving push towards the man holding the cage – winced as he watched a particularly confident hunter break his spear on of the giant's legs. The brute turned and grabbed the hunter by his neck, crushing the man's windpipe with little more than a twitch of his wrist. It was like he had plucked a flower.
Leo's stomach churned, and he desperately pushed back through the throng towards Fran, Tor, and most importantly, Gale.
Or, to be precise, Gale's backpack. The old man wasn't much use in a fight, but his tools were.
As he shoved through the seething mass of bodies, Leo heard someone shout, "GO FOR THEIR EYES!" Followed by a muffled thud as something huge slammed to the ground.
He hoped it had been one of the giants. Prayed, actually.
After a few minutes of confused shoving, he found his way to the back of the crowd, where Tor, Fran and Gale were hurriedly rooting through the old man's bag. Gale had already replaced the one he'd left behind when Bo was injured weeks prior, although this bag didn't bulge in quite the same precarious way his previous one had.
"H-Hey!" Leo wheezed, having already had the breath knocked out of him by many stray elbows.
The trio looked up and nodded, gesturing that he join them. Leo slid in beside Tor and glanced at the many objects they had already pulled from the bag.
A handful of tightly bound leather sacks, a single metal canister and a small bone tube with a hole at either end.
"Grab the tube thing, will you?" Gale asked; his question was not so much a question as a command.
Leo picked up the narrow tube of bone gingerly, turning it over as though it might explode at any moment. "And your sure this thing will work?" He asked, not for the first time.
Gale rolled his eyes and grunted. "Can't say it will work, can't say it won't. All we can do is try."
His arm – which was still about elbow deep in his bag – emerged with a handful of little metal balls the size of marbles. "I only made these recently, so I'm not sure how effective they'll be," he muttered to himself. "Still, better than getting trampled under some big lug's boot."
He handed the few pellets to Leo. "Just remember," he said, making piercing eye contact. "Don't breathe in when you're using them."
Leo grunted. "I'm not stupid."
Tor gave him a sideways glance that said more than words needed. Not that a few words wouldn't do nicely. "Still think Aunty Heather can do magic?"
The young man blushed and looked down at the little pipe in his hands, suddenly fascinated by the many rough grooves on its white surface. "What she does is magic," he mumbled.
"No, it's misdirection-" Tor started to say before Gale slapped her on the back of the head.
"Shut up!" He snapped, thrusting a few of the leather sacks into the girl's hands. "Take these, and don't drop any of them. I'd rather not clean you off the ground."
Tor – suddenly muted by what she held in her trembling hands – nodded once. Without a word, she stood up slowly and walked towards the increasingly bloody battlefield.
Leo followed close behind with the bone pipe in one hand and the pellets in another. Both his palms were sweaty, and it had nothing to do with the temperature, which had long ago dropped below freezing. Frost covered the ground, and he spent as much time trying not to slip as he did paying attention to the turmoil just in front of him.
The worst part about entering the battlefield was stepping over the cold bodies of those who had already left it. If there was ever a sign that he should turn back, then the frost consuming the corpses below his feet was it.
Not that he considered turning back. Not even for a second did the thought cross his mind.
The shouts and screams of people he knew were all the motivation he needed to keep pushing forward.
It didn't take long to reach the chaos and encounter his first opponent. If the man lying in a pool of his own blood could even be called that. The man lay in the twisted wreckage of his own leg, glaring up at Leo with enough hatred to raise the hairs on the back of his neck.
The young man inched towards the downed mercenary with almost enough caution. Almost.
When Leo was a few feet from the broken man, the mercenary let out a furious growl and twisted to face him, bringing up one hand and revealing a heavy stone in his bloody grip.
Perhaps because the man was the same size as he was, Leo had assumed this would be an easy fight. Perhaps because he was crippled, Leo had assumed the man wouldn't struggle too much. Perhaps because he had never seen anyone use a blessing other than Oasis, Leo hadn't expected what came next.
The black stone blurred, bursting out of the man's grip like it had been shot from a catapult. It whistled through the air and landed on Leo's shoulder with a dull smack that spoke of crushed bone and snapped sinew. The resulting pain was almost as immediate as the shock.
How had he done that? Leo stepped back, his left arm hanging loosely by his side. He glanced to his right and saw Tor some distance away. She was too busy fighting a one-legged man with a mace to help him.
"First real fight, kid?" The man on the ground cackled. "Bet you've never killed someone before."
Leo winced and stepped back again, his shoulder aching, throbbing and burning all at the same time. "Look's like you'll be my first," Leo said.
He stuffed the white pipe in his mouth and bent down, scooping up the pellets he'd dropped when his arm went limp.
"What's that little toy?" Asked the man as he fumbled around for the nearest rock. "Gonna play me a tune?"
Leo didn't reply, the tube in his mouth stopping him from speaking altogether. Not that he could have said much, even If he wanted to. Apparently, comebacks just weren't his thing.
He took a deep breath and squeezed one of the metal pellets into the front of the pipe. It rolled down the pipe, a tight fit but with just enough room to move.
Don't breathe in, Leo thought as he aimed at the downed man. Whatever you do, don't breathe in.
With a sharp exhale of breath, the pellet burst out of the end of the pipe and flashed past the man's head, smashing into the rock a few inches from his skull.
And, if this had been but a simple pellet, then Leo would have been worried about missing. However, this pellet was made by Gale, and within its metal casing lay a fine dusting of Borealis Leo and Gale had collected while searching for their offerings.
It hit the rock by the man's head and exploded in a ball of flame about a metre across. The fire melted half the man's skull and sent the burning pieces in a thousand different directions like little chunks of a flesh meteorite. As blood and brain oozed from the gaping hole in the man's head, a rock he had been clutching slipped from his rapidly cooling palm.
That had been close, Leo thought. Too close.