Empirical Gnollage: Installment 110 [https://squirrel.dogphilosophy.net/Installment110.png]

The feeling that Al shouldn't look away as he met the gnoll's eyes prevented him from acting on the unexpected certainty that the snarling, barking, growling man should be killed. He did his best not to flinch as Gruntle unhooked his flail from his belt and shook his shield down from his shoulder to his hand, a questioning series of barks and snarls coming from his throat. He didn't look away.

"You wouldn't...," Al heard Wikwocket whisper.

The crazed man grunted and loudly repeated with an angry urgency the noises Gruntle had made, baring his stained teeth. He stepped forward towards Al and stood next to Gruntle, drawing a pair of stained daggers from somewhere. Gruntle grunted and raised his flail, his pupils dilating wide. Violence exploded all at once.

Haunch brayed in alarm as the man lunged forward with manic laughter to stab at Al at the same moment as Gruntle broke eye-contact with Al and his flail descended. Al hastily conjured a protective barrier to defend himself and tried to get Purgatio's point aimed to skewer the dagger-wielding maniac, stepping back in hope of avoiding Gruntle's strike. Al heard Wikwocket leaping down from the cart and rushing forward from behind him. The wild man's daggers skidded off of the short-lived magical barrier around Al as the man rushed in past the point of Al's sword. The man's fervent expression changed to shock and confusion as Gruntle's flail caught him in the back of the head, knocking him forward into Al. Wikwocket dodged out from behind Al and plunged BiteySue's point between the man's ribs, shouting a growling-barking vocalization. Her dagger slashed across the man's right arm.

A sudden sound of someone panting heavily started suddenly as Bote appeared.

"Where did...," the dwarf began, but realizing there was a fight in progress they switched to reciting a short prayer invoking divine punishment on their attacker, who ignored their smouldering flesh from the divine fire and instead stepped back away from Al and Wikwocket. He wheeled angrily on Gruntle. The clearly insane man dodged around Gruntle's shield and leapt up to bite into Gruntle's upper arm, clamping his teeth onto flesh and slashing at the gnoll's chest with his daggers. Bolts of abstract magical violence struck the man as Gruntle bit him back. The gnoll's large, jagged teeth crunched into the man's neck and collarbone, and the man's crazed laughter halted, one last exhalation escaping as a wet, quiet growl. Wikwocket gave the dangling body another stab, just to be sure. Gruntle turned to look around eagerly for more violence, but the dead man's teeth remained clamped to Gruntle's arm as tightly as Gruntle's much deadlier jaws continued to bite down on the corpse's neck.

"What's going on here?" Al demanded to know,"I can't see in this darkness!"

Bote stepped up and gently touched the flat of Purgatio's blade with two fingers, intoning a short prayer for enlightenment. Purgatio lit up with a silvery-white light. Al almost wished it hadn't, because now he could see the gruesomeness. The circle they were standing in had been made with blood, bone, and flesh. The man dangling dead from Gruntle's mouth wore clothes that seemed to have been well-tailored, but not ostentatious. The once-clean white shirt and black trousers had probably been more expensive than a common person would usually wear, at least they were before being slashed, punctured, and grossly blood-stained. The man was slender and seemed less muscular than Al would have expected for someone so eager for physical violence, and he appeared to have several fresh injuries beyond the ones they'd just inflicted on him. Only some of the blood seemed to be his own. The daggers the man's hands, and the lower half of the man's face were stained with what Al assumed was goblin blood.

Gruntle huffed as he worked to pry the dead man's jaws off of his arm. "Hunting call," he said in answer to Al's question.

"Hunting what? This guy?"

"Goblins."

Gruntle pointed to the gruesome pattern of blood and body-parts arranged around them. In the divine light shining from Purgatio, Al could now see the green skin still on some of the larger parts. Seeing the human-sized bite marks still oozing blood in places on the severed green-skinned arms made Al feel a little queasy. Al held his glowing sword up to look around. They appeared to be at the back of a large wooden building - probably a barn or stables judging by the sounds of terrified horses coming from inside. The grasses growing here had been randomly trampled and spattered with more blood.

"Where are we and how did we get here, who was that man, and why did he sound like a gnoll?" Al asked. Indistinct but obviously distressed shouts rang out from somewhere beyond the other side of the building. "Never mind, explain later, we'd better make sure there aren't more of them. Come on!"

Al rushed around the building towards its front. He let pass without comment the brief wetly-ripping, crunching noise followed by the sound of a body flopping to the ground happening behind him.

The barn doors were open. A few agitated horses loudly expressed their fears inside, becoming even more frantic when Al and his companions looked in. Al could see two more small green bloodied bodies laying crumpled in awkward poses on the blood-spattered straw floor as they passed by. The growing chorus of shouts and unpleasantly familiar harsh, malicious, high-pitched laughter of goblins from a larger building across a small courtyard compelled Al to keep moving.

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The building had two stories, and gave the impression of an inn. A raised patio to the left with a lit oil lantern mounted on the pole in the middle invited late travelers to the front door. From what Al could see in the dim light, the building appeared to be well-kept and had a generous number of glass-paned windows. The one to the left of the wide main doors was broken, blood dripping from the jagged lower edges to suggest someone hadn't been careful enough climbing through. The front doors hung loosely open and the shouting, fighting, and evil goblin laughter echoed hollowly from further inside.

Al rushed to the side of the broken window and leaned over to peek quickly inside to see what immediate danger they might have to worry about. The window seemed to have been broken from outside and shards of glass were scattered on the floor amid the wide space of tables and chairs beyond. A low fire still remained in a fireplace near the center of the large room, providing enough light to see that some of the furniture had been shoved out of place and overturned, but no movement was visible besides the shifting shadows cast by the fireplace flames - until Gruntle and Wikwocket rushed through the front door and through the room towards the sounds of struggle. Al grumbled and rushed in after them, followed by Bote. Unable to follow, Haunch brayed nervously as he was left alone.

They had to pause for a moment of decision near the opposite end of the building, where goblins, screaming, and a muffled pleading voice came from somewhere beyond an open door that seemed to lead to a kitchen, and more struggling and shouting coming from up a set of stairs leading to the upper story.

"Which one do we deal with first?" Al asked, urgently looking from the stairs to the kitchen door.

"Both!" Wikwocket answered confidently, "We'll take the ones in there, you two go up and see what's happening upstairs! We'll catch up if we finish first!"

Gruntle grunted, and the gnoll and gnome sprinted into the kitchen and out of sight before Al could object.

"I suppose we're committed, then," Bote observed, nodding towards the stairs. Accepting his fate, Al ran quickly up. As he ascended, he saw that the doorway of the room immediately across from the stairs was open and crowded with goblins, stabbing with short swords and spears at a pair of wounded burly men swinging iron truncheons while an apprehensive middle-aged man behind them watched from the back of the room. Almost without thinking, Al launched a ball of angry fire at the back of the first goblin he saw. The small explosion of flame as it hit the goblin's back engulfed it and knocked its crispy body forward into the others. The ones not in the front line of the fight spun and charged Al with spears. His clumsy defense with Purgatio and the chainmail shirt kept him from the worst of the harm, but he couldn't avoid being stabbed in the hip and leg. Bote stomping up the steps behind him to provide reinforcements seemed to break their resolve, and they fled down the hall, where Al could see a trio of goblins with small axes chopping away at another door, too focused on whatever victim or treasure they thought was inside to care.

With conflict less uneven, the two defenders in the room beat one of the remaining goblins to death and began pushing the remaining three back. With the others down the hall taking a defensive stance around the door-choppers, Al, Bote, and the two room defenders were able to take down two more before the others broke away and dodged past them to flee down the stairs.

"Are you all right?" Al called to the occupants of the room as he turned to face the goblins down the hall.

In answer, the two bleeding men hastily grabbed the corpses of the goblins and tossed them out into the hall. "Fine. Thank you," one of them answered as the other slammed the door shut.

"At least they were grateful," said Bote. "What shall we do about these? While they don't seem especially skilled in combat, it seems unnecessarily risky to simply rush in."

"Yeah, and this is a wooden building, so I don't think I can engulf them all in flames without setting the whole building ablaze. Maybe we could..."

A deafening roar and the explosion of the door outward into splinters interrupted Al and blasted all seven of the goblins outside back against the opposite wall. Only three stood unsteadily back up and fled further down the hall and into the open door of a room at the end. A dense puff of thick black smoke smelling of burnt alchemical substances billowed into the hallway through what little was left of the door.

Dumbfounded by the unexpected events, Al found himself unsure what to do as a gruff, somewhat feminine voice shouted something angry in a language that sounded similar to the goblin's speech. A bright red hand holding a work of obvious mechanical alchemy - a flared hollow metal tube sticking out of a mechanism on the end of a crossbow-like handgrip - poked out into the hallway. The rest of the hand's owner followed, starting with a quick head looking out into the hallway for danger, pulling back immediately, then slowly re-emerging to stare at Al and Bote before stepping the rest of the way out. For a moment, Al thought they were about to end up fighting another demon. Certainly, the bright red skin, completely black eyes, small horns, taloned feet, and sharp triangular teeth indicated obvious demonic ancestry, but the distinctly feminine nightgown draped over the stout woman's body didn't seem like anything a real demon would wear at all. "Who the hell are you?" she asked, lifting the device in her hand to point upwards away from them.

"Uh, I'm Al, this is Bote, we, uh, we heard the commotion and thought people probably needed help."

"I'm Serena. Did you kill all of them?" she asked, looking at the assorted goblin bodies in the hallway. "If I'd known someone else was going to kill 'em all, I wouldn't have wasted supplies loading up to blast them myself! Ah, who am I kidding, yes I would! Nice to have a legitimate excuse to break things!"

She laughed at her own little joke rather more raucously than necessary, Al thought.

Breaking glass sounded from the open door at the end of the hallway. Serena turned and ran to the door and pointed the device inside. The shriek of a startled goblin was cut off by another loud explosion, shooting fire and smoke into the room.

"Is that a tiny cannon?" Al asked in wonder.

"That's right!" she answered proudly.

Gnollish bark-laughter echoed up the stairs from elsewhere in the building.

"Are there gnolls here, too?" Serena asked, alarmed. She shifted the still smoking device to her other hand, then reached down the front of her nightgown to retrieve another one.

"No!" Al quickly answered. "I mean, yes, but it's only one, he's not with the goblins he's... look, we need to get back downstairs, just... if you see a gnoll, don't attack him, he's with us. Come on, Bote, we'd better catch up to them." He gave an awkward wave to Serena as he hurried back down the stairs. Bote followed with a polite "Pleasure meeting you, Serena".

"The next time I see you, you will explain!" Serena yelled after them.