Leona’s pained screams echoed around the dig site.
“MY FINGERS!” Her breathing was shallow and sharp, the pain from her dislocated fingers were much more apparent now that she was witnessing first hand, even to the point where her broken ribs didn’t feel more than a discomforting ache in her sides. “Ha… Ah… NNGH…!” Her trembling right hand attempted to get a hold of both fingers however the simple act of touching sent sharp shocks of pain throughout her arm. “ARGH!”
Her back was arching, her upper body contorting as to deal with the pain, but regardless of what she did, it didn’t seem to subside.
“Leona!” Charlotte rushed to her side with her revolver on hand. “What happened to you?!”
“My- my hand! Nngh…! Fingers… they are dislocated…”
“Ah dammit!” She shouted. “Percival! First aid! Her fingers need fixin’!”
Suddenly they heard another shot coming through the backline, Gregor had used another flare to continue illuminating the dig site. At that point Percival had reached them and was taking a piece of cloth out of his bag.
“Bite down on this, Lady Leona.” He gave the cloth a few twists and placed it near her mouth where she held it between her teeth. “It’ll hurt a lot, be ready.” He gently lifted her left hand and inspected the wound. “Are you ready?” She nodded three times in quick succession as he took a deep breath while holding her fingers with his right hand. “Three, two, one-”
At that point her whole body jerked from the pain as her teeth sunk into the piece of cloth. It was as if a piece of heated metal was piercing through the sockets of her fingers.
“NNNNGH…! MMMPH!”
She wanted to scream but the natural reaction of biting down on the cloth with all her might kept her mouth mostly shut.
A vicious crackling came from below, Charlotte turned around and noticed the lumbering kobold walking towards them at a slow pace.
“That must be the brother.” She muttered as her left hand hovered above the hammer of her revolver. “Gregor! I need a hand here!”
“On it captain-!” He rushed in and noticed the bulky opponent walking with the greataxe on hand. “That is one big bugger. Should I use it?”
“Go for it!”
He pulled a rucksack from his belt, the fabric seemed much different as opposed to the usual hemp woven bags, it gave off a strange rubbery sheen under the red light.
While the kobold understood what they were saying, he had no idea what the newly arrived meal was doing with a bag on his hand, until Gregor used his rifle to shoot at it.
“Get down! Cover your ears!”
Charlotte shouted as the man beside her threw the bag towards the kobold. Instinctively, it slapped it away with its hand only to realize the bag had stuck itself to it.
“Huh?! What is thi-”
It only had time to notice the lit fuse on the side of the bag as the sparks went inside the bag. It was the first time Leona saw a large amount of gunpowder go off at the same time, the intense heat and flash of light accompanied the violent blast that swept everything around it. Mound of rocks and bones were pulverized and sent flying at high speeds, even killing some of the other kobolds that were unfortunate enough to be near the blast.
Gregor had shielded Charlotte with his body while Percival did the same to Leona but thankfully none of them were hit by stray debris.
After the explosion the cave became silent, as if waiting to see whether or not the kobold lord had survived or not.
“DISGRACEFUL HUMANS!” A low bellowing roar even dispersed some of the settling dust and emerging from the cloud, the kobold was now missing his left arm up until his elbow and part of the left thigh, blood to which under the red light of the flare made it look black, was now pouring down the dirt ramp. “IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN THAT TO KILL ME!”
It started to charge towards them, despite its size the kobold was extremely fast, closing almost half of the distance in just a few steps. Leona was helped by Cecile in order to stand up, however seeing the large foe charging towards them made her realize there was no way they would be able to run away from it so the only other option they had was to fight.
“All soldiers!” Leona shouted from atop of her lungs. “Take aim!” The rest of them instinctively turned for their weapons as they aimed towards the lumbering kobold. “Fire!”
A volley of shots pierced the threat, but since it showed no signs of stopping the soldiers quickly cycled through their ammo. Leona stood her ground and sheathed her frostburnt silver longsword before starting to cast two spells simultaneously, her left and right hand began to glow green and light blue respectively.
“Shit!” Charlotte unloaded her whole revolver into the body of the charging kobold since it was covering its head with its large hand but it didn’t seem to do much other than enrage it. “Fall back!” She turned to run only to see Leona standing there with glowing hands. For her, who never studied about magic it seemed a pointless endeavor to attempt to stop that thing with spells, she ran past her and yelled. “Get out of there Leona!”
But for the tactician, the moment Gregor and Charlotte were out of the way she decided to unleash the spell on her right hand first.
“-freeze those who oppose me, Ice Wall!”
A violent explosion of ice spikes erupted from her hand and began to stack one on top of the other, creating a wide wall of solid ice that expanded all the way to the ceiling.
“THIS WON’T STOP ME!” It started to hack through the ice shards as if it was nothing. “GREAT WENDIGO WILL CRUSH THE LIFE OUT OF YOU!”
At that moment time seemed to come to a crawl. During the days of traveling to Londria she had Phoebe, one of the best assassins in the continent to train her in defending herself.
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“Listen Leona, the most important part in dealing against someone using a weapon bigger than your own is to know when you can attack.” She held a sheathed dagger in her right hand, occasionally tossing it to her left hand, back and forth. “Now come, I’ll show you first hand.”
In the frozen forest between the trees in a clearing somewhat free of snow Leona held her unsheathed longsword with both hands.
She nodded while adjusting her grip on the handle once again before stepping forward.
“Here I come.”
She analyzed Phoebe’s stance before committing to a diagonal slash towards her chest.
Unsurprisingly, she dodged by side stepping under the attack. Noticing how she was still in range made Leona attack once again this time with an upwards slash in the opposite direction, but once again she simply took half a step back and avoided the blade entirely, at that point the tactician felt the blade tiring her arms so she decided to use gravity in her favor and bring the blade down for an overhead strike, but at the moment her hands turned the blade to cleave downwards, Phoebe stepped in and touched her jugular with the tip of the sheathed blade.
“You would have died just now.” She pulled the weapon away from her throat and took one step back. “Do you understand now?”
“I… I think I do. How did you know I would be open for a counter attack?”
“Everyone, regardless of size, has a limit to how many times they can swing their weapon at full strength.” She threw the dagger in the air as it flipped once before landing on her hand again. “It is especially important to know this when you have less reach than your opponent. Because once you commit to an attack you must make sure they can’t counter you since they have a larger weapon than yours anyway, any hits you take can be fatal.”
“I see…”
She took that lesson to heart as the crushing sound of the ice wall before her didn’t even faze her. Instead, she focused intensively on the kobold’s swings, how its arms moved for each strike and how long it took to wind up another. All the while the other spell charged on her hand.
Once the ice wall was just one strike away from breaking apart she spaced her legs apart a bit more, her feet digging a bit in the dust lying on the ground.
“DIE!”
It kicked the ice down and stepped forward into an overhead slash with its massive greataxe. She saw it coming, a right diagonal slash downwards meant to cleave her body in half, with coldly calculated precision she hopped to her right, just barely avoiding the blade that sunk itself in the ground and the moment she landed on her feet she released the other spell.
“-release thy might, Wind Blast!”
In less than a second there was a greenish flash of light coming from her left pocket, but as soon as it came, it was gone. However that didn’t take her focus away from the spell, an almost point blank blast to the stomach of concentrated wind took all of its breath away and that opening was what she needed. With her now free left hand she pulled the longsword from its sheath as she gathered mana on the other hand, it was like a practiced choreography, once she spinned the blade upright her right hand caught the upper side of the handle, transferring all the mana she had accumulated into the blade to which, in that split second, she brought the mana infused sword down in a vertical slash that release a light blue beam of light.
“AAAAARGH!” It let out a low roar of pain as it managed to block the energy blade with its already destroyed left arm, freshly cutting all the way to its biceps. “I’LL KILL YOU!”
It used the blood from its mutilated limb and splattered it across her face.
“Ack!”
Her obvious reaction was to flinch back which gave it enough time to remove the greataxe from the ground which also made the dirt under her to be unearthed, causing her to stumble and fall on her back.
“DIE! DIE!” It had a shot to strike her down but before he could swing the axe down a sizable rock hit it square in the right eye, making it trip backwards. “ARGH! MY EYE!”
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth brother!”
A shout came from the entrance of the dig site, Hahzi had brought a few of his own kobolds as they swarmed the dig site.
He held a string attached with a piece of leather strapped to the middle, a slingshot. He was tossing a rather large rock up and down on his hand.
“What the hell took you so long?!” Charlotte shouted while crouched behind a mound rock while reloading her revolver. “You didn’t tell us your brother was half the size of a freaking minotaur!”
“He took my share of food when we were little.” He said while putting another rock in the sling and spinning it. “It was a joke, Miss Charlotte.”
The moment he let go of the sling again it was like a whip cracking through the air as another rock landed right in the middle of Wendigo’s forehead.
“ARGH! HAHZI! YOU SPINELESS COWARD!”
“Come and get me then!” He raised his left hand and motioned forward as kobolds armed with spears marched forward like a wall of spikes keeping others of its brethren away from the group. “We end this today!”
Wendigo raised the axe in order to at least finish off Leona in front of him but the moment he was about to attack it noticed she was nowhere to be seen.
“Looking for someone?”
Another female voice came from its right which prompted it to smash the nearby mound of rocks out of reflex, only for a shadowy figure to leap from the top of the mound and nimbly land on its arms. Holding the two daggers doused in murky liquid, Phoebe began carving through the beast’s arm in a flurry of slashes.
“ARGH!”
It tried to grab her but she quickly leaped above its head while landing firmly on the opposite side, obviously, Wendigo’s reaction was to turn around with the axe cleaving down but Leona who had been knocked down was now standing right beside Phoebe with an already charged spell in both hands.
“-pierce through my foe, Ice Spear!"
Another flash of light blue light came from her pocket that just like before, it was gone in less than a second as two large pillars of ice erupted from her hands in a cross shape which were able to hit its throat, pinning it in place.
“GAH!”
Despite that the axe still came down, forcing both Phoebe and Leona to jump away from the strike. It used the left arm stump to support its weight while trying to pull itself out of the ice trap only for it to be slammed back in by a halberd from the armored kobold that accompanied Hahzi.
“YOU-!”
“Ngh!”
Despite putting a lot of strength behind the chop, it wasn’t able to cut through its thick neck fur, which gave it enough time to wind up the axe again.
“YOU WEAKLING DARE ATTACK ME?!” However before it could retaliate, another blade came from the opposite side, Krieg managed to come in time and cleave down with all his might close to the place where the halberd blade was stuck. “UGH!”
“Now!”
Hahzi shouted and the other armored kobold joined the one by the halberd, forcing the weapon down. Gregor and Percival joined as well in the effort to decapitate the monstrous kobold while on Krieg’s side, Leona, Phoebe, Cecile and Charlotte were also pushing down on the longsword handle.
“YOU INSECTS!” It roared while trying to take the blades out of its flesh but thanks to the ice spikes maintaining it in place it was nearly impossible for it to reach any of them outside of the axe range. “I WILL NOT DIE!”
It tried to wind up the axe again, only for its arms to be sliced open by Khalid’s scimitars and Luka’s saber, splattering blood everywhere. With their combined effort, the arm was rendered useless since the muscles and tendons were all cut apart.
At that point it finally clicked, Wendigo was about to die. Decapitated by humans and weak kobolds both, the ones it deemed beneath its might were now slowly taking its life away.
“NO-! NO! PUNY HUMANS! COWARD BRETHREN! I AM WENDIGO! THE GREATEST-”
“Die, please, brother.” Hahzi had a smile on his face. “For the good of all of us.”
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-!”
Its roaring was cut short by a squelch as both blades cut deeper into the flesh before finally beheading the monstrous beast.