"Squads 1 through 10, distract the monster. Squads 11 to 15, get onto the trees and wait for a perfect chance to attack the wendigo. The remaining 25 squads will follow me in causing the wendigo as much damage as we can," the captain said as he stopped his horse and looked at the 8-meter-tall monster.

However, there was no real response from some of the squads, or rather, I should say most of the squads. This was the first time they had seen a beast like a wendigo, which had them scared out of their minds. They were used to fighting smaller beasts like steel wolves, goblins, or even orcs on rare occasions, but a wendigo was a monster on an entirely different scale.

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE ALL OF YOU DOING, LOITERING AROUND STILL? GET MOVING, FOR FUCK' SAKE!" the captain shouted as the wendigo turned to look at him in particular, diverting attention from the rest of the group.

*screech*

"Shit!" he cursed as he pulled his horse's reins and charged towards the wendigo. My squad, along with several others who had somehow managed to gather their thoughts by this point, followed right behind the captain as ordered.

"Jason, Andrew, Carl, Ethan, the captain hasn't given us any exact orders on what we are to do in this situation. All we can do is deal the most damage we can possibly manage. So, we are going for one of the beast's legs and try to make it fall down. Jason, you and I will be constantly attacking the right leg, and the rest of you will be making sure we don't get hit by the monster's attacks," I said, leaning forward on my horse, increasing the speed at which I was moving.

Letting go of the reins for a second, I bent back a bit and pulled out the rope I had brought with me, throwing one end of it towards Jason, who looked at me with a confused look.

"What do I do with this? Strangle you to death?" he retorted with a puzzled look.

"No, we try to make the wendigo fall using this. We damage the legs of the beast for a while using our weapons. When it feels like we have done enough damage, we pull the rope, shaking its balance and making it fall," I said as I kept pace with Jason, moving behind the captain, who glanced at me momentarily but was unfortunately not given enough time to put forth his question as one of the wendigo's massive arms started to move towards him at a surprising pace.

I couldn't hear what he said after that, unfortunately, but it did not seem like he was against what I had been thinking of doing. Nonetheless, he did look cool as he jumped off his horse onto the wendigo's arm, making minor cuts on its arms in the process. Unfortunately, they did not seem quite deep as the fur of the wendigo was too dense to be cut easily.

*screech*

"Move, move, move!" I signaled to the other squads who had been a bit surprised by the fact that the captain's attacks did no real damage, which should not really have been too surprising for them. After all, of all the races that exist on Gaia, we are probably at the greatest physical disadvantage. Setting aside, of course, beasts like goblins and the like, but even they have certain advantages we don't.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

*swish*

*slash*

*grind*

*pak pak*

"fuck, our attacks aren't working," I cursed as I noticed that even that one attack had caused more damage to my spear and axe than it had the beast. "Forget it, fall back, attack the back of the joints. They are probably weaker. No point attacking its femur if all it is going to do is damage our weapons," I screamed as I looked at the four other squads attacking the same leg as my squad.

Of the 25 helping the captain, we had divided 5 squads to each leg, and the rest jumped onto the beast's body to try and damage it.

"Roger that," Jason replied as he moved back with his horse, as did most of the other squads, who started to pull back slightly, and some of them started to pull out bows and attack it from afar.

Following us, some other squads started to do the same. Although most of the arrows failed to pierce through the dense, tough fur of the wendigo, there was the occasional one or two arrows that barely managed to get into the beast's skin, irritating the beast further.

*screeeech*

"shit, it's calling for help," I said as the thing started to flail around like crazy, and started to stomp its feet, flinging away all soldiers that were onto its body and crushing a few of the soldiers who were not fast enough under its hooves.

"Move further back...huh."

***

Part 2 - despair

"Huh," I stopped speaking as I turned to look behind me. A gigantic white saber tooth tiger was standing there, staring at both us and the wendigo with hungry eyes.

"This can't be real, right? Are we going to die here?" I muttered softly, fear taking complete control of me when…

*drip*

*drip*

*drip*

Something fell on my head. I stroked my hand over my hair and looked at my palm. It was covered in red, causing me to look above.

"Captain," I muttered as I pointed above. All the squads that had been on the trees were now hanging on vines, their blood dripping down. Each and every member of the 5 squads that had gone up was dead, and the culprit of it all was a group of green pythons, each of them 6 meters long and a meter wide. At a loss for words, I turned to look at Jason with a scared look on my face, tears dripping down from my eyes.

"This won't be it, right?" he said, looking back at me with despair on his face, snot falling from his nose.

At that moment, the captain jumped down too, walking slowly forward, letting go of his weapon, fear having taken over his face. "Get on your horses, all of you who are still alive. We are only 1 hour away from the camp if we move as fast as possible. Move, move, move," he said as confidently as he could.

"What about the injured?" Jason asked with a look of dread as blood dripped on him, his teary eyes not moving away from the sight of the pythons hissing.

"What about them? Do you want all of us to die here too? Heck, I don't even know how many, if any, of us will even get there at this point. What do you want me to do, huh? Do I look like a god to you? Move," he shouted at us and got on his horse. He wasn't wrong. In this situation, if we started taking care of the injured, even those who were alive had no chance of survival. Had it only been the wendigo, maybe we would have lived, but with everything before us, I don't think I had it in me to care about others.

"Move, move, move," the captain shouted as he pulled the reins on his horse and started to

gallop at full speed, not caring how many were following.

Not looking back, I gestured to Jason to start moving and started moving myself. I don't really know how many of us were left. We would only know the number of survivors after we got to the main camp. But for now, we had to get to the main camp first.

"Huh, did that tiger just smile," I said, noticing from the corner of my eyes the wide grin on the tiger's face as it started to get up, and a weird sensation covered me, and everyone else. If we hadn't been feeling it for a while, we would not have realized it, but this was fear, existential fear.