To hear Tulbat talking around the fire that night, you would have thought he was the one who had come up with the method of pulling mobs to the party. It didn’t really matter who got the credit, as long as he didn’t get in my way. Shemi was happy even though a third of the outcasts had been sent for respawn. Clearly, not all of them were as successful as our group.

But the ones that gained a couple of levels were thrilled. We continued this process for the next two days, but I noticed that the Chief, Tulbat, and Shemi were spending more and more time in the chief’s hut. Shemi wouldn’t tell me anything, but it was obvious they were planning something.

I kept getting assigned different warriors to train in the new method and even got tasked by Shemi with showing a couple of the new shamans how to heal in battle after they had reached level 5. The result was that I was still just shy of hitting level nine and getting a bit frustrated. The best thing was that I gained a couple levels on my new spells.

I was working hard enough between cooking and the different training exercises that I was ready to actually sleep each night. I might not need more than four hours, but it was still sleeping. When I woke up on the third day since the challenge had been issued. The talk around the village was about how I was still level five, but somehow seemed stronger than some of the other shamans who had hit level seven.

It might have worried me if I didn’t know I had almost enough XP to reach level nine. But even with that solace, I planned to do my own hunting after the daily hunting today. The rewards for the quest were too great.

But of course, life got in the way again. The chief called all the ogres together. He was going to lead the largest raid that Ghazban village had undertaken in anyone’s recollection. The head warrior, Shemi, all the warriors who had reached level 10, as well as all the shamans who had reached level five, were going.

A large trade caravan had been seen entering our territory. It was a human caravan, and the Chief thought it carried good loot. When I asked if any players were with them, none of the AIs were able to answer me. Obviously, they had to know what I was talking about, but they stuck to their roles as stupid ogres.

I struggled with a rising excitement at crushing the weak little people. Of course, to ogres all the civilized races were little people. I knew I shouldn’t have those feelings, yet there they were. Another part of me was terrified that this raid would screw up my faction with players. I needed to get connected with some players without them killing me on sight as a monster.

Yet, I knew if I turned against the ogres they would kill me, imprison me, torture me, and who knew what else. So, two hours later, I found myself in a swarm of ogres rushing through the forest heading for the ambush location that the Chief had picked out.

I had to give it to him. The spot he picked out was excellent for this purpose. It was a collection of rocks large enough for ogres to hide behind. They were spread randomly around the sides of the road over a one hundred feet section. It was subtle enough that I assumed NPC’s might not react to the location.

Of course, what did I know about how the NPCs were programmed to react. What I did know was that any gamer worth the title would have immediately seen this spot as a risky one and would have sent out scouts or checked the area with magic. Anything to keep from being ambushed.

So I stood back and waited. I watched as the caravan slowly moved into the kill spot. Several of the younger ogres were fidgeting. While they were purely eager for the havoc which was about to ensue, I was trying to take in the details of the caravan.

There were seven wagons. Each of them was being pulled by two horses except for two in the middle that each had a team of four pulling it. Obviously, whatever was in those wagons was much heavier. I saw drivers on the top of each wagon and a guard sitting next to each of them with a crossbow held in their laps. Three of the wagons were covered, including those with the larger horse teams.

Something about this struck me as too easy. I didn’t see anyone that appeared to be a player. The guards Assessed as level ten caravan guards while the drivers were all level seven or eight.

We had seven shamans and forty-two warriors. This would be a slaughter unless there was something we were missing. The only scout I could see was on horseback riding ahead of the wagons. He would reach us a good five minutes before the rest of them.

Once he did, we would no longer be able to hide from them. But if we took him out, then the rest of the caravan would know about the attack. Shemi took care of that, though. Her spell hit his horse rather than him, and the horse suddenly became sick. It stopped moving forward, and the scout was forced to dismount and check on the animal.

He was a level nine ranger, so I assumed he had some familiarity with animals. I didn’t know if that extended to being able to detect magical ailments or not. A player would have gotten a notification on their interface, but based on my experience in the village, the NPCs had a mindset which incorporated some aspects of gameplay like thresholds or XP but didn’t understand many of the finer points. For example, my buffs made them feel stronger, but there wasn’t a display telling the specific effects of the spell.

The result of Shemi’s spell was two-fold. First, the caravan quickly caught up to the scout, who was walking his horse rather than riding it. The animal likely felt awful because of the spell, but still obeyed its master as he tried to get it to walk off whatever was bothering it.

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The second result was just as important. Six guards poured out of each of the heavy wagons. They must have been added security, and this situation triggered whatever protocol they had for coming out of the wagons. They were still outnumbered, but these guards were a notch above.

Eleven of them were in what appeared to be quality plate armor. Assessment said that all but one of the armored men were level 11 knights. The interesting thing was that individually, the challenge rating system of the game caused them to have a light blue aura, which meant they were deemed to be less than an equal threat to me. As a group, they appeared as red, meaning deadly. I suspected this was because the humans were much weaker individually than ogres, but there was a pretty big difference between level 5 and level 11.

The last two individuals were the ones that worried me a bit. I was still pretty sure that neither of them was a player, but both were too high of a level for me to Assess. One was in plate armor and was simply listed as the Knight Commander. The other was a man in robes who was listed as the High Mage. I suspected both of them were over level twenty.

I whispered to Shemi, “The knight commander and high mage appear to be powerful.”

She shushed me. Whatever was gonna happen would happen. I could only hope that they had learned something over the past few days about having the shaman’s support the warriors. Then again, I realized that none of the ogres saw death in the same way that I did. I had to question if my viewpoint was wrong.

Oh sure, it hurt. It downright sucked, but was it a big deal to die if I knew I was going to come back? Something in me rebelled at that. It was stupid to be suicidal. Forget the natural self-preservation instinct that I still felt despite being physically dead and uploaded as a digital entity. The gamer in me couldn’t agree that dying was a good battle strategy.

Not that it mattered. The caravan slowly moved forward. They were more alert now, but none of them saw us until the seven wagons were well into the ambush. The outcroppings of rock erupted with ogres. Most of the shamans led off with Flash of Light, so at least they were trying to debuff the knights.

The warriors simply jumped into the fray. Chief Kerkek was a veritable beast. I saw his massive sword cut the scout in half with a single blow and still have enough force to remove his mount’s head. Tulbat barreled out like he was a linebacker charging into the offensive line. He hit half a dozen of the knights who were clustered together. They were all knocked around like tin cans. I had no doubt that many of them had broken bones after the impact.

The lesser warriors had no problem taking out the drivers with a single blow. It was just a reminder of how much weaker humans were physically. I doubted many of them had more than one hundred hit points. Shemi’s spirit wolf hopped around, killing one after another of the archers. Their bows seemed to hurt the ogres they hit, but as powerful as a crossbow bolt can be, none were powerful enough to take an ogre out of the battle.

I used my Flameburst spell to cause eruptions amongst the teams of horses. That made them panic, which added even more chaos to the battle as they tried desperately to pull their wagons from this place of death.

After the initial assault which killed 80% of the humans, I was watching carefully for the counterattack. It never came. The knight captain managed to last against Kerkek for all of thirty seconds. The mage erected a barrier around himself and fired off a lightning bolt, killing one of the ogres.

In fact, this appeared to go off without a hitch until the mage shouted out, “You brutes shall all pay for this.” Then, without another word, he teleported away. I presumed it was some version of a gate spell. Now, whoever had sent out this caravan would be looking to regain their lost goods.

It was hard to worry too much. If this was all the force they could muster, then Ghazban village was more than a match for them. The question in my mind was what was in the wagons. That would give me some clue of how hard they would fight to get it back.

The ogres slaughtered all the horses. I tried to get them to stop, but apparently, they really like the taste of horse meat. I halfway understood because the horses had been terrified of us and never would have followed us back to Ghazban village. As it was, ogre warriors were going to have to haul the wagons back.

Chief Kerkek wanted to cook the horses here, have a feast, and go through the loot of the wagons. I was able to convince them that since the mage teleported away, it wasn’t safe. Apparently, my training the warriors how to pull monsters to them for leveling had earned me a bit of trust.

When we got back to the village, I offered to cook the horses, but only if I could go through the wagons with the elders. I knew they wanted to take any good stuff for themselves and while I wouldn’t mind getting some armor or other good gear, I was mostly interested in finding out how valuable the shipment was. That would tell me a lot about what kind of response to expect.

Most of the other outcasts were trained in how to set up spits for cooking now. They didn’t have the ability to start a fire magically like I did. Apparently, I was still the only ogre with a fire spell, but they had been able to start cooking fires long before I arrived.