Hobgoblins poured in from all sides.
When we entered the wide, circular chamber three doors flew open, admitting entrance to wave after wave off hooded Hobgoblins bearing farming implements: pitchforks, spades, rusty pairs of shears, wicked weather-beaten scythes held up like standards for the encroaching host.
We sprang into action - Karel fired one of his bolts into the crowd, Galahad worked on some elaborate incantation, Ilsebill banged the butt of her ax against her shield, creating a shockwave, and hey, I was no slouch either, with my throwing knives and enchanted longsword.
One came at me wielding a scythe and I beat him to the punch with a quick stab which severed his weapon in two. He looked down at his hands for a second with all the despair it’s possible for a Hobgoblin to feel and then express, giving me all the time I needed to repeat with his upper body what I’d done to his weapon.
Two rushed me and I brought one down with a Shock and stopped the momentum of the other’s attack with my longsword, pushed him off me, ran through the Hobgoblin who’d snuck up behind me wielding a bread knife, turned back, drawing my sword out, and swiped it across the face of one charging up a spell. The spell fizzled and he clutched the bleeding pit I’d left of his nose. I finished off the stunned Hobgoblin who was just getting up again, then started aiming knives at the next wave. One went spinning into a neck, a shoulder, a couple right into the heart.
I took the offensive. Ducking under the resounding blast of Galahad’s Magic Missile I worked my way through the crowd, breaking their rusty weapons down, punching through shields, leaping and ducking and employing an elegant veronica, until a group of them started back.
A rake swiped past my face and a rusty knife lunged but I grabbed the Hobgoblin by the arm and twisted the weapon out of it and buried it in his neck. Dark, reeking blood seeped and splattered, found its way into my boots, but that was no deterrent: I plunged the longsword through, all the way to the hilt, and I think I even got two at a time this way, believe it or not. I ditched the sword and brought my hands together. A lance made of crackling electricity sprung to life and I broke it over a Hobgoblin’s head. With the thunder magic still sparking in my palms I got out a throwing knife and charged it up, winging it at one who’d almost got his fireball ready which left him as a crumpled up pile of robes on the tiled floor.
Before I could stop to admire my handiwork, though, I got smacked upside the head with a two-by-four! The room spun as I fell to my knees. The battle around me became something abstract. The Hobgoblin heaved the board above his head, intent on finishing the job, but before he could bring it down again a bolt of Chain Lightning tore right through him. It must have been Karel! Not that he intended to save me, I’m sure - I saw him at the other end of the room, firing off spells in every direction. When one of his companions fell he was indifferent, unless you end up being an obstacle to him like that, so while I can say Karel the Lightningrod saved my life, you’d know by watching the way he fought that the Hobgoblin above me was a sort of collateral damage.
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I’ve had a divot in the back of my head ever since then. You wonder how much of your personality is you, and how much is all the nutrition and all the trauma that makes its way to your brain. They say that there’s no magic to it: the person you are is determined completely by the condition of your head, and I can see the logic in that. I’ve never felt quite recovered from that blow from the two-by-four. Like I’ve been living halfway, with a thin film between me and the rest of the world. Maybe it’s my actions. They never made perfect sense, like somewhere between my thinking of them and their performance, there existed a disconnect which made them foreign to me, even though it was of course me who decided to carry them out. Call it impulsiveness, I guess. In the end it's only just one more way adventuring left its mark.
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Karel, with his polearm free of its case, was just as terrible and spirited as the man himself: by tipping the head of the spear slightly downwards, it turned out he could summon a devastating thunderclap capable of wiping out an entire contingent of Hobgoblins. What would have taken me all my mana and combat arts to accomplish he performed with the slightest exertion. If you thought that was impressive, though, when he got started..
In the way that liquid finds the path of least resistance in its descent, how it glides down a window pane on a rainy day, that was how Karel moved. Uniting the momentum of his body into one force capable of spearing three or four Hobgoblins at a time at the end of his lance, he worked his careful way across the chamber weaving and gliding, bringing about his weapon in a savage arch that severed limbs, brutalized Hobgoblins, like they were paper dolls held together by folded tabs.
He brought his polearm neatly down - that’s one enemy sliced in half. And with the motion accumulated by that single blow he continued; a quick forward hop produced a leaping lightning bolt that fried one larger Hobgoblin into ashes, I mean just a neat pyramidal pile of dust on the floor. Of course, there was no stopping there and, like me, he used this opening to press the advantage. It came so naturally to him. He had none of the compunction you see in most adventurers when they’re made to kill a Humanoid monster. No, if anything, I bet he got a kick out of the way Hobgoblins bleed red and plead for their lives.
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The polearm went down again. Need I say that in the process of severing, electrocuting, liquefying, disintegrating, though there was a veritable army before one man, it seemed not so much a valiant stand as a massacre. It made me feel a little bad for the Hobgoblins, terrible as they are.
Galahad and Ilsebill did their part, too, it should be mentioned. Though my head was swimming, and I could feel a steady stream of blood working its way down my head and out of my ears, I was a captive audience, in a similar way maybe as the Hobgoblins, to this scene of expert slaughter. Adventurers are put through the paces so much and cultivate such a rich antipathy of monsters, seeing companion after companion fall to them - crushed by a pair of spiked tentacles, devoured by a gout of acid, or something like that - that when they're given that one avenue in which they can adequately express their discontent, the moment they’ve got a monster on the run, they exploit it to the utmost. They air every grievance in their troubled life on whatever’s caught on the end of their blade, be it their loss, their lack of social mobility, chronic pain and the resulting self-medication, it’s all in a sense made up for in the moment they can show a Hobgoblin the extent of their profound suffering. They won’t tell you this at the Guild, and in fact they see this sort of thing as positive, but there’s nothing quite as ugly as an adventurer getting their way.
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Ilsebill was banished from her homeland over some forbidden love. She loved someone who was either higher or lower than her station, I can’t remember, maybe she just never told me in the first place.
The elves of Elsewhere believe that one should marry their equal, in terms of status, appearance, wealth, as much as possible really, and that if these terms aren’t met your marriage is an affront to nature. Little do they know that love is all about inequality in different respects, but I won’t digress again - what’s important to know is if you go against convention in Elsewhere, you go against the Edict, since, as you might imagine, the former springs completely from the latter.
You see, it was the Wish Meteor that kicked off elvish society in the first place, when it made the originally uninhabitable land of the Northern Wastes endlessly fertile, and due to that, the elves take everything the Meteor tells them as gospel. I guess I don’t blame them. If the Monotheist prophet rose up tomorrow and started healing people I’d be more inclined to take his lessons to heart, and start calling all his enemies deviants. But to me, all the same, I couldn’t help thinking then that maybe their Wish Meteor was the one in the wrong despite its blessings, if it thought a woman like Ilsebill deserved that taboo of taboos among elves: exile.
When you go against the Edicts of the Meteor in elvish society you are so below them that you’re not even considered worth the stain on their weaponry they’d get by executing you. Instead, you’re schlepped off to some “lesser” country never to return again. That’s what happened to Ilsebill who, dear lords, made the grievous sin of loving someone a little different from herself.
So she wandered from place to place, a peripatetic hero par excellence, righting wrongs and flushing evil from its den wherever she went (not to say, though, that she didn't expect adequate compensation for her efforts). She made her way south from the islands and settled in Albion after a time, where she started dungeoneering. Maybe she'd realized by then that there was bigger money involved in it than whatever she could squeeze out of her hick towns with Goblin problems. Whatever the case may be, she proved quite good at it, and it was to no one's surprise that she was picked out by the Guild for our suicide mission.
She was the first famous adventurer to really leave me star-struck. When she went in, caving in the heads of Hobgoblins, and calling upon some heathen goddess, some foe of the Meteor, to heed her call and smite her enemies, I was more than a little impressed. Maybe I was in love; it's only a mild exaggeration to say that when she lifted me up after the battle, maybe not just because I’d suffered significant head trauma right before, I saw a nimbus about her head.
“He’s been hit bad”, Ilsebill said to Galahad. “Get some bandages”. The room kept spinning but through all the blood that stained his face I could still see his perfect white smile. Galahad looked through his satchel and got out a roll of bandages.
“Here”, he said, wrapping a bandage around my head, “you fought pretty good out there. Well, up until, you know..”.
The poet walked through the entrance of the room and upon seeing the carnage we’d left behind he doubled over, a jet of ocher swill arching from his mouth. Looks like his novelettes hadn’t conditioned him to the real thing.
The scientist, surprisingly, took it rather well: adjusting his glasses, and shifting the weight of his equipment on his shoulder, he merely said, “Nicely done”, with a sort of dry humor.
Karel walked over and flicked the blood off his polearm. “Yes, and the next room will be better. I just had to warm up. You’ll see, I’ll have it done in no time."
“Don’t beat yourself up about it", said Galahad. "Sure as hell, there ain’t a deadlier blade in all of Albion than you”, and he reached out his hand for a fist-bump. Karel accepted it.
The party sifted through the remains. Aside from some copper pieces and ceremonial necklaces we were supposed to collect for a quest, there was nothing worth the space it would take up in our inventories.
While our lyric poet leaned against the wall gathering his wits, the rest of us sized up our options by looking through the three doors which had let in the Hobgoblins.
Each offered a long, stonework hallway that led into darkness. Since Galahad and Karel were the highest levels they agreed to split the party into three, the two of them escorting one of the civilians, leaving me and Ilsebill together.
I was overjoyed at the prospect, and thought that whatever the next room offered, it would be an opportunity to make up for my mediocre performance against the Hobgoblins.
We made our way down the long, dark hallway.