Roberts, formerly, Major General Roberts, followed along behind Chief Advisor Grobert. “Are you sure it was wise not to tell anyone what we were up to?”
After Lord Norman had rescued his people and the remaining survivors near his outpost, he decided to retire from service. At least for a few years. He needed time to decompress and take in these new changes.
Unfortunately, the Chief Advisor had other ideas, and the man was rather persistent.
“It’ll be fine. That large slab of muscle may look like an idiot, but he knows how to deal with problems. Besides, this is important.”
Roberts didn’t know what was so important about returning to the recently abandoned SAS base but he kept those feelings to himself. At least he was able to keep up now that his old wounds had been healed. He had heard there was a way to de-age himself, but he wasn’t ready to consider something like that. And he wasn’t ready to take the step into undeath either.
The pair were currently holed up in a small farmhouse outside the old compound. This house was one of the few buildings not destroyed by monsters over the last decade. Probably because it looked ready to fall down with a stiff breeze as it was.
A few broken windows gave them a decent vantage point to keep tabs on the comings and goings of the gnolls. He wasn’t surprised to see they had commandeered the base so soon after they left. It was the Chief Advisor's fixation on the creatures that surprised him.
“There,” Roberts pointed.
He watched the shorter man’s gaze lock on the gnoll in the back of a small patrol. It carried the distinctive marking of a mage, but also the small affectation denoting a leader.
“You’re sure?”
Roberts nodded. “Yes, according to my men’s reports, that’s one of their leaders.”
It was unnerving watching the shorter man’s gaze track the patrol. It was like watching a predator track its prey, waiting to pounce. He almost expected the man to teleport over there and do just that, but the man remained motionless, letting only his head track the moving patrol.
When the patrol disappeared around another building, the man finally moved. “Come on.”
Roberts managed to suppress a sigh as he followed silently behind the shorter man. You would think his longer legs would give him an advantage, but he was barely able to keep up as they moved through the hedgerows along the road.
It was clear from their path of travel that they were paralleling the patrol, but Roberts didn’t have a weapon, and he hadn’t seen the Chief Advisor carrying one either. So he wasn’t sure what the point of their actions was.
After thirty minutes, they finally came to a stop, and he did his best not to let his labored breaths become too loud.
Grobert looked around and nodded. “This’ll work.”
“Work for what?” Roberts managed to gasp out.
“Our ambush, obviously.”
Roberts gave the man an incredulous look. “How do you propose we ambush an eight-man patrol without any weapons?”
Without responding, the Chief Advisor tossed him something. Roberts barely managed to catch the necklace.
He knew what it was as soon as he got a good look at it. “Ok, we have armor now. That doesn’t even the field much,” he spoke as he donned the necklace. Once it was against his skin, he pressed the activation sigil like he had been shown back when Lord Norman and Eugene were trying to get him to join their army.
Feeling the liquid material flow over his body was a very strange sensation. Even stranger was when it solidified and it felt like he wasn’t wearing the armor at all. It was no wonder Lord Norman’s troops were able to fight so effectively while wearing it. He felt stronger than he did back in his prime, and it didn’t restrict his movements one bit.
As he was admiring the armor, he missed the Chief Advisor disappearing and reappearing. When Roberts looked at the man, he saw he too was wearing armor, only his looked even more imposing. All black spikes and jagged edges that looked built to rip and tear.
“All you need to do is ensure none of the soldiers escape. I will deal with the mage.”
Before he could ask how he was supposed to do that, a small satchel was pressed against his chest. It looked like a grenade pouch. When he opened it, he found standardized instructions stitched on the inside.
They were some sort of grenade, a magical one by the looks of it. He quickly read through the instructions but they were rather simple. He just needed to scrape away the wax coating and put a bit of his own blood on the device to activate a one-minute timer. It even gave an estimated kill radius.
Knowing he didn’t have much time, he peeled off the wax from all of the ten grenades. The pouch even contained a razor blade so he could cut his skin. But he quickly saw a problem with that.
“How do I use these with my armor on?” he hissed.
Grobert held his hand up and Roberts watched in surprise as the glove melted away to form a sort of bracelet. Then it reformed back into a glove.
Seeing as the man hadn’t said anything to do this, he figured it was a mental command. Roberts tried willing his glove to form the bracelet. It took a few tries but he did eventually get the glove to retract, freeing his hand.
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He marveled at the function for a bit before Grobert tapped him. The man pointed down the road and held up one finger.
Roberts nodded, the gnolls were almost here. As he listened, he could now make out their heavy footsteps. He waited another twenty seconds before he used the razor and primed the grenades. The green skulls were about the size of a tangerine, but they had a decent heft to them. This would make it easy for him to throw.
Soon he could make out movement through the hedge they were hiding behind. The Chief advisor held out his hand. He waited as Grobert started dropping fingers. When he got to one, he burst through the hedge and Roberts was right behind him and already mid-throw.
His sudden appearance was certainly a shock to the patrol, but they were quick to recover. Only about twenty feet separated him from the gnolls, so they didn’t have time to move out of the way of the first grenade.
It impacted one of the soldiers at the front and burst into a green mist. Roberts didn’t wait around to see what the mist did as he hurled the second and third weapons right after, each impacted another soldier. But they were far enough apart that the cloud only covered one individual at a time.
There was a loud snapping sound as red barriers went up on the remaining soldiers. He cursed under his breath, but at least he had gotten the first three.
With a guttural yipping sound, the remaining gnolls burst through the fading mist and rushed him.
There was no running in this situation, he was nowhere near fast enough to outrun the nearly eight-foot-tall gnolls. So he took up a combat stance and braced for the inevitable encounter with the four much larger bipeds.
Seeing this, the first gnoll soldier bared its teeth and sprinted at him full tilt. Roberts expected to be sent flying down the road from the impact, instead the creature crashed into him and was sent bouncing away with a startled yip.
He had barely felt the impact, but when he glanced down, there was a radiating crater from where he stood.
It was so surprising that he started to laugh. At least until the first spear struck his armor. That impact made him grunt and take a step back, but when he inspected the impact site with his hand, it was undamaged.
Not wasting any more time, he picked up the thrown spear and charged, completely forgetting he had primed his grenades. They all went off simultaneously as he closed into melee range with the three standing combatants.
For a moment, Roberts thought his forgetfulness had just gotten him killed, but as the mist cleared, he found he was standing unscathed and unharmed. He couldn’t say the same for the three he had been fighting. The only thing that remained of them was their armor and weapons. It seemed whatever defensive field they had used, it wasn’t enough to soak up whatever the remaining weapons had dealt.
He turned to the last soldier, but the gnoll was lying on the ground and hadn’t gotten up. He walked over after picking up an undamaged spear, but it was unnecessary. It seemed that the one that ran into him, had broken its spine when it crashed into him. Its head lay at an odd angle, and its eyes were dull and glassy.
When he looked down the street to see how the Chief Advisor was doing, he saw the smaller man holding the much larger gnoll by the back of its furry neck. Grobert was punching it repeatedly in the chest.
Roberts winced at each cracking blow.
“Where did you get it!” The man was yelling.
Roberts couldn’t tell if the gnoll was snarling from the pain of the blows or in defiance of them.
“If you won’t tell me, I will find someone who will.” Grobert dropped the gnoll who tried to scramble away, only for the smaller man to grip it by the ankle and swinge the much larger creature in an ark over his head like he weighed nothing at all.
The gnoll mage let out a surprised yip before it slammed into the road with enough force to crack the pavement and embed itself halfway through the surface. It was clearly dead by this point, but the Chief Advisor slammed it against the ground a few more times before letting go of it and physically tearing its armor apart with his bare hands.
Roberts kept an eye out for reinforcements but didn’t interrupt the man’s actions. Whatever was going on here seemed personal.
After a bit, the man stood and let out a displeased grunt. He teleported next to him, leaving behind a silhouette of blood that had covered his armor. As Roberts watched the blood fall to the ground, he asked a question. “Why are we really out here?”
“You see the armor they are wearing?”
Roberts nodded cautiously.
Grobert strode over to one of the empty sets of armor and stomped an armored foot into it, caving in the chest piece. “It's gron make. Or close to it.”
“Ok… So they have a gron working for them?”
Grobert shook his head. “All gron are bound to an oath not to share our technology. We would sooner die than allow some unadvanced race to have access to it.”
“Wait, aren’t you sharing knowledge with Normenia and Ashvale?” he asked in confusion.
“No. But if they can figure it out on their own, that’s different.”
Not that he wanted to play devil's advocate for the gnolls but he had to ask. “Isn’t that exactly what the gnolls have done?”
Grobert snorted. “Unlikely. Their armor is much more advanced than anything else they have. If they had reverse-engineered gron magitech, they would have improved their pathetic weapons as well.”
“So what? You think they tortured the information out of a gron?”
“No. I think they have one or more gron locked up to produce this subpar armor for them.”
“This is subpar?” Roberts asked, picking up a piece of the broken armor.
“It's an outdated design by over a millennium. But that doesn’t change the fact that it's of gron origin. We need to find out where it is being produced so we can rescue the gron that are imprisoned there.”
Roberts rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed. “This seems like something that you should have brought to Lord Norman’s attention.”
The Chief Advisor waved away his concern. “The boy is busy, besides, I could handle this myself, I just figured you might want a bit of revenge for what they did to your people.”
His gaze took in the dead patrol. The man wasn’t wrong. It had felt good to take on the bastards that had finally forced his people to flee. “Alright, what’s next?”
***
It took a few more ambushes before Grobert found one of the creatures willing to talk.
“You will serve as a slave, just like your kin!” It barked in defiance.
Grobert ignored the creature's taunting as he broke its last good remaining arm. He heard the General wince at this but the man didn’t comment. The gnoll on the other hand screeched in pain. “Answer my question.”
Being the belligerent bastards that they were, the thing tried to bite him instead of responding. All it accomplished was breaking all of its teeth on his armor. After that, it just whimpered piteously.
He used that opening to make it an offer. “I will fix your teeth if you tell me where my people are being held.”
Grobert spread out a map in front of the creature and told it to point to the area with its muzzle. He had made the map shortly after learning about the armor. It wasn’t very accurate because he had to draw it from high aerial teleports, but it would get him in the general area.
It pointed to a series of hills and valleys in the northeast of the gnolls' lands. He placed a few drops of potion in the creature's mouth and it gave out a sigh of relief as its teeth regrew.
“There, as you can see, I am a man of my word.” He bent over the gnoll and wrenched its neck sideways with an audible crack that echoed between the houses. “I keep all of my promises.”
He brushed his hands off and stood up. “I have everything I need. You can stick with me or return to Ashvale, your choice.”
“I assume you are going after your people?”
Grobert nodded.
The man mulled over his words for a bit while he looked off in the distance. “It's possible they captured some of my people as well. I want to go with.”
“I figured as much. I’m going to need some stuff to make this work though.”
“For your teleporters?” Roberts asked.
“That, and to teach these bastards why you don’t fuck with the gron. Let's go.”