I felt my heart drop into my stomach and as I clenched my spear so hard I thought I might shatter it, I could swear that for a moment I was actually seeing red. I know that is not my daughter that was captured, I repeated to myself in my head. She was much too old for dolls now. No, music, makeup, and ignoring her old man were much more to her style.
But none of that mattered, I continued as I felt myself start to hyperventilate, this was a small human girl… and she had been captured by monsters. The best I could hope for was that she was being saved for the goblin leaders to eat in a feast because that was the only hope there was that we would be able to get to her in time. Even then the chances of rescue were pretty much going to be nonexistent.
The best we could realistically hope for was to give her a swift, clean death before eventually being overwhelmed by a horde of greenskins, hopefully forcing them to kill us ourselves rather than being taken alive in turn. The intellectual part of my brain was screaming at me that it didn’t matter. She was already dead, going after her and the rest of the captives was just dooming ourselves. If we die doing this, there is no way that we would ever be able to rescue my own kids from whatever danger they might be in. The smart play was to ignore it, salvage what we could from the wagons, and move on.
Every day back on Terra thousands of kids were killed or put into situations so horrible that it makes you physically sick if you were ever to spend more than a couple of seconds actually physically thinking about it with any sort of true focus. Child soldiers, trafficking for sex, mutilation for ideology, starvation… all of these things are happening on a scale one can’t even conceptualize, and because it wasn’t right in front of me it was always easy to ignore.
Sure to save my conscious I had given to charities, but how much of that money actually ever gets to the root of the problem? This was something else entirely. This… this was right there in front of my face. Humans were not the apex species on this moon. Some of my fellows had been taken… some of our young were soon to be consumed.
As I turned towards the woods in the distance and started walking mechanically. I heard my companion make a small whine and felt him stick his wet nose into the palm of my left hand. I could almost feel the concern emanating out of him as he knew something was wrong with me but couldn’t understand why I would be so troubled. As I left the doll behind and continued walking to my doom, I was conflicted. There was no need for the bear to die with me on my pointless quest. My colder, more intellectual side was almost certainly right. The chances of me even making it to her to grant her a swifter release were almost certainly nil. While having the bear along might grant me an extra few percentage points it wasn’t worth him dying in my quixotic quest.
Speaking up, with tears streaming down my face I chokingly rubbed his ears while I slowly uttered the words telling him it was okay to go along without me. “It’s okay brother, this is something I have to do, you don’t have to come with me. We had a good run, but this isn’t the smart move. There is no way either of us are walking out of this hell. The best I am hoping for is to kill enough of the monsters that I weaken them enough that something else is able to come along and finish them off later.”
As the bear began walking beside me, leaving his head in range of my hand so that I could continue to give him scritches, I stopped trying to talk him out of coming. In truth, I didn’t really want to. Having a friend beside you as you march toward hell makes taking every next step a little easier. As my intellectual side came around and made its peace that this was happening, I slowly ran through different scenarios in my mind on anything we could do to give us a better edge.
I’m not suicidal, or at least I didn’t think I was. Maybe a part of me did want to end it all and was just looking for whatever excuses it could to send me running into something that I couldn’t make it out of. If so then the universe was on his side and had picked a dandy of a bait to hang in front of me. A growling question from the bear interrupted my melancholic thoughts. As he pointed at the smoldering wagons, I took it to mean that he thought we should go look for anything among them that might give us an edge.
Thinking it over in my mind I continued walking as I told him. “You’re not wrong, I’m sure they have some better weapons for me. But trying to head down there, repack, and unpack would take time. And I can only imagine that they hit the wagon train around first light. So they already have a big enough lean on us.”
As the bear slowly began to crouch down to remove his burden, I tightened my grip on his scruff. Not that I thought it would hurt him, I just wanted to stop him before he got started. “No, we may as well keep what we have, we can make a good enough pace that with the prisoners they have we should catch up to them before nightfall. And all sprinting after them is going to do is have us catch them tired and unarmed. Well, unarmed for me, but if it was a big enough group to take out that convoy, I think they could take you on your own as well.”
As Gaian continued walking along beside me, grunting out his disagreement vehemently I let a smile break through my somber facade. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you could take them out, but us being tired and exhausted makes it a whole lot less likely. I think a better chance is to try an attack in the dark. I can’t imagine they are going to have any kind of discipline, they just don’t strike me as the type. And I’m guessing that with the rabbits already pulling off two raids as far as the goblins know that has to be more action than they’ve seen in years so I doubt they are thinking that a third attack might be coming. Certainly not on their camp! Between the dark and whatever distraction we can cause, I’m not ruling out getting the captives free. I just want to go into this with realistic thoughts and not dreams of the impossible. If we go in too fast and assume things are going to fall in our favor then we will most likely end up howling on the spit beside them.”
As I fell silent again slowly getting depressed at how unlikely the scenarios were that we needed for even minimal success, my pragmatic side took another shot at talking me away from the windmill. As it told me that if I did this then whatever slim shot I might have had of saving my own children was certainly going to be going up in smoke, but I ignored it all the same.
I ignored him for the same reasons I would hope that if my own daughter was in danger, someone else sent to save her would ignore the misgivings coming from their own subconscious. Sometimes you need men who will walk into the fire and right now I was all there was. Hopefully, this would generate enough good karma that they will be protected from whatever troubles they might encounter. But right now, I’m sure if this girl’s father is alive he is praying to whatever pantheon might exist in this universe that a miracle is coming to help his little girl.
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The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
As night began to fall and we were still a good eight to ten miles away from the woods we had so diligently skirted the previous two days, I thought about pressing on into the darkness. I couldn’t believe we hadn’t caught up to them yet. But as I saw a bonfire sprout up halfway between us and the woods I realized any chance we had of getting there would have us in the same conditions that I had explained to the bear earlier would have us failing in our assault. Add in the darkness and our knowing nothing of the surrounding terrain, there was too great a chance of making some kind of mistake that would alert the raiders. Out on the plains as small as they were, they had to be nervous about being hunted in turn, I thought to myself. That was the only thing that explained the much larger attacking parties as to what normally patrolled the woods. While I had yet to see anything around that would justify the larger groups there had to be something else out there.
Although I guess the burned out wagon train was something, I just didn’t think that was a normal occurrence. If it happened often enough I can’t imagine the humans in charge just letting it go. Even the worst regimes protected their own peasants from outside forces, if for no other reason than that they were their toys and to let an outsider break them would demand a response. Not for moral reasons but to merely show they weren’t to be messed with and try and grab whatever compensation they could get.
Not wanting to waste the time to set up camp, I quickly set down my burdens, broke out another pouch of food, and poured Gaian his water, while grabbing my own skin to drink. After I had mechanically filled my belly, I took off my socks to dry and dug into the bottom of my pack for the one flower I had held back. Initially, I had wanted to save it for when things got too bad and I needed to wait for the bear to recover his mana until he was able to save me. Being able to wait unconscious seemed like the better option than dealing with the pain. But I knew there was absolutely no chance I was falling asleep tonight. So I pulled out the one flower I had kept back from the bunnies.
I was sure the elder knew that I still had it, and I was glad that he hadn’t considered it a breach of our agreement. Staring at the flower that looked so much like a tulip, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was some other previous connection with Earth, or if there was just in reality only so many shapes that a flower could grow into. Starting at the petals that shimmered and alternated colors, I looked into the specks of white that dotted the insides of the petals like stars across the milky way. Asking the bear if he was good for the night, and getting a grunt in reply. I leaned down into it, taking a deep breath before setting it aside and leaning back into the bear’s bulk to have my slumber enforced on me.
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I woke up with a start as the bear gently removed his jaws from my shoulder, stopping his shaking now that I was awake. I looked around to see that the sky was just starting to lighten. Standing up I stretched out fully while forgoing my usual routine. Drinking deeply from my second skin I poured half the remaining water into the basket I had reserved for my companion. Pouring the rest of the bucket into my own basket, I folded it to more easily refill my two two pig stomachs. With still another quart or show I wasn’t able to fit in, I drank what I could myself before giving the rest to the bear.
Collapsing the bucket, I added it to my pack while pulling out yet another package of dried meat and fruit, all glued together by fat that wasn’t much tastier than candle wax. Splitting it, I added share to my pocket, leaving the bear to eat his while I put away his bowl and got my socks and shoes back on. Shouldering our packs we started off in the morning gloom, anxious to make up some distance. It may be speciesist, but I doubt the monsters were anywhere near as diligent in getting started themselves this morning.
Even if it was the maximum ten miles I thought it might be to the woods, if we only stopped a few minutes for lunch we had a good chance of catching them before they made it back to safety. So I wanted to close the gap enough to have the option of attacking early if I thought that we could get away with it. I was of two minds on what would work best. On one hand, there would obviously be a lot less of them if we caught them out in the plains, but if it was a big enough group on guard I doubted it would make much of a difference.
On the other hand, a surprise attack on their stronghold while they were celebrating the windfall just seemed much more likely to work in my mind, and if it didn’t maybe I would at least be able to go out in flames striking a much more devastating blow to this tribes population. I also had something floating in the back of my mind that I was hoping would coalesce before we had to make a decision. Something was telling me that I could use the exp gains of a battle to evolve several of the fodder goblins to set up a distraction. They had been eager to turn on their own kind in the battle of Rabbit Wood that they had lost nearly a week ago and maybe they would be greedy enough to ignore me for a chance at increasing their power yet again.
I could be wrong and maybe the Merchants had taken out enough of the goblin pack that it was feasible to attack them, hopefully, we would be able to find out soon enough. Shaking my head to stop cycling through scenarios endlessly, I instead focused on trying to maintain my breathing pattern while walking. I should have been doing this yesterday as well, but since seeing that doll I had been in a fog. Now that I had slept on it and my mind was clearer, I was just as determined to free the captives one way or another. But I wanted to do it the smart way if I could. Which meant giving myself any advantage that I could. If I could find a way to utilize the cores that were inside of me, I wanted to be able to send them the mana as quickly as I could.
I hadn’t been able to figure out any way to replicate the effects that cores managed to use to turn mana into a technique. I could only imagine that it had to do with the way the lines moved throughout the center of the glowing rocks. All of the colors that I had found so far had their own unique way of having the lines run out from the center before coming back to start. This was leading more and more to consider that this world ran on the principles of wuxing, but with such a tiny sample size from just one variety of monsters, I was really trying to stop myself from getting locked in on it.
With my own preference for wuxing I couldn’t help but just second guess that was what was happening instead of something else. I was already beginning to think that I had been making a huge mistake when I let my core grow so rampantly that I didn’t want to compound it by guessing early and following the path for so long I found myself refusing to reconsider.
As I continued breathing and rotating the energy around my body to exit my fist in a small puff of air, I couldn’t help but think I was still missing something. From how I had tested it against the ground it was a minimal amount of force. I thought about asking my friend if I could test it on him but held off as I didn’t know if maybe it was just more of a soul attack and that the ground being soulless was just more likely to resist. Better to try it out on a goblin than accidentally cripple my tank right before a boss fight.
I wasn’t planning on having it as any sort of trump card, I just wanted to be ready to capitalize on it if it turned out to be one. Also as I lacked the defenses that every other sentient on this moon seemed to have to the invading exp, if I could use the rotating energy to defend myself from it, so much the better.
Continuing my practice as we moved at a brisk pace, we eventually made it to the hill that the goblins had stopped on the night before. Staring at the pit that had contained their fire I could feel my heart begin to beat faster as I fought to stop the rage that was building from taking over. I could see from the amount of trash scattered around that they hadn’t only taken captives the night before. But I ignored all of it as I could only stare at the blackened bones littered around the camp. Cracked by the jaws of the monsters, all of the bones were scattered about so without spending more time than I had, I couldn’t even determine if they had consumed one person or two. Everything was scattered as the individual goblins had fed more like wolves than sentient beings.
As I continued to breathe and settle myself down I focused on the thought that at least all of the bones looked too large to be that of a child.