“Are we there yet?” The axe wielding man jokingly asked his much smaller companion. With a sigh of annoyance, the dwarven woman replied, “For the last time, there’s still a long way to go. Please bother someone else with your pointless questions.” The clear dismay in her voice caused the beastman to sigh in defeat. “Boring. I’ll go talk to the guide.”
As the man, commonly referred to as Chris by his companion, turned to face the craftspeople to look for the guide, his ears suddenly rose and his body froze. An unknown sound had entered his ears, and it didn’t sound like anything good. This sound was followed shortly by his sense of danger going off like never before. Immediately, his relaxed attitude vanished and was replaced with seriousness.
“EVERYBODY! GET BACK! Something dangerous is coming.” The words had barely been registered by the other people before a loud screech could be heard. Thankfully, the people who’d hired them knew what to do in case of emergencies, so, as soon as he’d registered that the couple dozen people were properly retreating to the few carriages, he turned all attention to the quickly approaching threat.
Around him, his companions of the last couple decades gathered, each of them ready to fight. He himself drew his large two-faced battle axe and roared out. To anyone unfamiliar with beastfolk, such an action could seem quite weird, but to those familiar with them, it was a common sign that the person in question was about to transform. As such, he grew from slightly below two meters to around two and a half, along with having orange fur with black stripes grow out to cover his back and the outwards-facing parts of his arms and legs. The most noticeable change however that would go to his head, which had changed from quite human like to more beast than man.
As the beast began to descend down towards the treetops, it quickly became clear to all of them that they’d have no chance for escape, so it was do or die. “Jack and Cammie, back up a bit and shoot at every opening you find. Don’t worry about conserving arrows beyond this fight. Selene and Björk, try to confuse it as much as possible while avoiding direct hits. And Penny, you follow me.” As he was by far the one with the best senses on the team, it was commonly Chris’ job to delegate roles in surprise encounters, and everyone quickly and efficiently followed them without a single complaint. Even Penny, the dwarven lady who’d previously been annoyed with him, showed no sign of that annoyance anymore.
Pretty much the moment Jack, the elf who’d also been acting as their guide, and Cammie, a regular human, reached the back and had drawn their bows, the beast landed before them. The creature in question was a giant bird with pure white feathers. Standing at just below ten meters, its size was dwarfed only by the surrounding trees that all stood at least multiple tens of meters up, with multiple reaching towards a hundred.
For the appearance of the bird itself, it looked like a mix between a stork and an eagle, with the eagle part for the legs and torso, while the wings, head, and neck seemed closer to those of a stork. Unlike the rest of the body that was white, the beak and eyes of the beast were green as grass, giving it a pretty unusual appearance. But the appearance aside, the aura of dominance the beast gave off felt unrivaled by anything Chris had experienced beforehand.
And that was the moment he noticed it, there was a light blue eight-pointed star in the middle of its forehead. At this point, he knew that their chances of even dealing this beast a proper wound were slim, but he couldn’t let his companions know of his inner panic. Mentally, he was questioning what a beast of its rank was doing here in the middle of nowhere; they weren’t that close to the icy mountains, were they? In the end, he figured that it was probably just out on an exploratory hunt, or something like that. That was the only reasonable explanation he could come up with.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the beast spread its wings in a large swooshing motion, creating really powerful wind. The reason for it doing as such quickly became obvious, as two arrows that had been speeding towards it were sent way off course. This essentially served as the sign of attack. As such, Selene and Björk both began what they could to distract the bird, be it through clanging their metal equipment against each other, throwing flashy but ultimately useless magic attacks, or sending a couple of their ranged skills towards it.
Meanwhile, Chris himself took charge with running straight towards it with his axe raised for strike. Around it, increasingly large bolts of electricity began to snake around the head, and upon stopping a good five meters from it, he swung his axe for full force. As the axe head cut through the air, the bolts of electricity began to move away from it, until a multiple bolts of lightning were traveling straight from the axe towards the bird’s right leg. With lightning being lightning, the bird wasn’t able to properly react in time, resulting in it being struck quite cleanly, but despite being hit, it didn’t really seem like anything had happened.
Immediately after he had fired his projectile, Chris resumed his quick approach towards it, followed closely by Penny. Sadly, all it took was for the bird to quickly aim its head towards him and screech for everything to really go wrong. Thanks to his heightened senses and high stats, he was able to barely dodge out of the way of the beam of solid cold that was shot towards him, but the same couldn’t be said for Penny. She, unlike him, was only able to react when it was already too late, and in a quick turn of events, the love of his life was frozen solid.
Even Chris himself had only barely escaped with his life, his left arm had gotten caught in the beam and he immediately lost all feeling in it. As soon as he turned to look at the woman, he knew wouldn’t have been able to react, the right wing of the beast smashed its enormous wing directly into both him and her. Terrifyingly for Chris, Penny splintered into multiple pieces, and his own arm broke straight off. “PENNYYY!!!” In his horror and anger, he didn’t even notice the weirdness of how Penny had broken into exactly six pieces, the head, the torse, and the four limbs.
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Completely fueled by emotions at this point, his beast transformation continued, until he could be fully called a weretiger, but that meant nothing for him at this moment. In his shock as his mind processed what happened, he had failed to properly notice the multiple balls of frozen mana the beast had shot towards the two archers, both of whom had now turned into frozen statues. The arrows had apparently been enough of an annoyance for it to just end the two archers with a practically unavoidable valley of projectiles.
Now down to three people, the bird turned towards Selene, and before she could properly react, she was stuck between the two parts of the beak, lifted into the air, and less than a second later, swallowed whole. Running towards it, Chris saw it make a jump and land directly on Björk, in such a way that he was locked beneath its left foot. As if to mock him, the bird appeared to let Chris run all the way up to its leg and take a proper good swing. The reason for this contempt quickly became clear, as despite using his most powerful skill, his axe barely entered a couple centimeters of its log thick claw.
As defeat properly set into his Body, the beast transformation began to recede, and his axe fell from his hands. Seeing this, Björk called out as best he could. “No Chris. NO! You have to keep going. You can’t give up.” But it didn’t face Chris the slightest, and with no resistance, he was grabbed by the beak and swallowed, followed shortly by a screaming, and crying Björk. With that now over, the bird went around to each frozen piece or statue on the ground, and one by one, ate them up. At no point did it even seem to really take note of the craftspeople gathered in the back.
It wasn’t until it had finished eating that it even cast a glace at them. With what could only be described as utter contempt and a feeling of looking at trash, it shot out a ball of compressed wind that landed before the carriage. With that done, it turned around and flew off, knocking the tops of some trees in the process. This allowed the craftspeople to see it fly in a straight direction towards an icy mountain. They could only assume that they were still alive for a single reason, it saw them as too weak to even qualify as a meal.
Very quickly, the people realized that they didn’t have the time to wait around, the ball of wind didn’t exactly seem stable. So, in an effort to just save their own life, one of them began to run away, which was an action quickly adopted by everyone else there.
Less than thirty seconds after they started to flee, the ball exploded outwards, releasing winds strong enough to topple some of the trees. The couple carriages weren’t safe either and one of them ended up thrown in the same direction they had fled.
Despite even the slowest having covered at least a hundred meters, the winds were still more than strong enough to throw around the majority of the people there, killing multiple simply by them colliding poorly with trees or the ground, while others were killed or maimed by debris from the carriage, rocks, or branches that were flung around.
When the winds had calmed, there weren’t more than nine people alive and able to stand, at least three of whom had pretty serious injuries. For a bit, they contemplated their options. They could either head back towards the path they had been following, but without a guide it’d be quite likely for them to head down a wrong path and get lost, or they could move further away from where the bird had flown off to and try their best at surviving. No matter what they choose, they decided to stay as a group to increase their chances.
So, they went with the solution of voting, ending in a 5:4 for trying to survive. Thus, despite wanting to just get away from the disaster and their dead companions as soon as possible, they first tried to gather as many of their supplies and essential tools as possible. For consumables, the vast majority had been destroyed or lost in the winds, leaving them with just a day’s worth of bread. On the other hand, they were a bit luckier with their tools, managing to recover two blacksmith’s hammers, one set of tongs, three saws, a two axes, one chisel, a hand drill, and three workman’s hammers.
They had all been hired to help construction of a castle in a county just on the other side of the forest, so there were a lot of tools they had brought with them. With all their gear gathered together, they grabbed some broken planks from the carriage for fuel for their first night and set off into the forest.
Over the next two weeks, they traversed quite the distance, living day to day with what they could find and gather. They also had to say goodbye to their three injured companions one by one, as the injuries ended up with them perishing. On the eve of their 16th day, Philip, a human blacksmith who had essentially become their leader, decided that it was time for them to decide whether or not they had travelled enough. Because they were reaching a point at where they’d be unable to continue.
“Alright guys, we need to decide. We need to find a place to settle down by tomorrow at the latest. We can’t keep this pace up with our lack of actual supplies or an elf to guide us towards food. I don’t know about you, but I- Yes Sally, what is it?” As he was about to say that he thought this was an alright place, the youngest member of their little flock, a dwarven girl named Sally interrupted him. But despite being the youngest, she was also the one with the best senses of them.
“A pretty sizable group is approaching us from that direction, though I’m not sure what exactly it is.” All it took was for her to point in the direction and make them aware of there being something for them to notice as well. “Everyone, grab your gear and get ready, we may have to fight for survival.”
While people were grabbing their things, goblins and enhanced goblins began to appear from the surroundings, making clear what the sounds they’d heard were. Unusually, the goblins weren’t immediately attacking them, but the reason quickly made itself apparent; they were being led directly by a taller and dark green skinned goblin, a hobgoblin to be exact.
Straight away, it became clear to all of them that they were outmatched, as even their highest leveled companion had only passed level 25 by a little, and none of them were trained in combat. While the goblins and hobgoblin on the other hand, they were used to fighting. But they were also aware of what cruelty could happen to them, especially the women, if they were caught alive, so, they were all ready to lay down their lives, as fleeing wasn’t an option.
As the hobgoblin’s expression turned into a disgusting smile and everything seemed most grim, it suddenly let out a “Guh.” From its chest, a stone spearhead stuck out. As the spear was retracted and the hobgoblin fell, it made way for them to see their savior. In place of the disgusting monster stood a beautiful elf with blonde hair and leaf-green eyes, dressed in a green tunic with most of her weight clearly on the right leg. “Need a hand?” At her question, they could only nod, and just in time, for without a leader, the goblins began their attack as soon as they realized that was the case.