Chapter Fifty-Eight: Realisation

Tom and Val were moving at pace, drawing every bit of speed from themselves that they could. The encounter with the orcs had been sobering. It lit a fire in them. Although it was successful, every orc slaughtered quickly and efficiently, it had been concerning.

There were more of them, for starters, than seemed to be the standard for orc scouting parties. They were better equipped. They were much further out than the scouts they had followed back from their mission to the orc camp.

And most concerningly of all: these ones had an Idealist with them.

It was only thanks to Tom’s Ideal of Silence that it didn’t become a major issue. Hush had allowed them to kill it before it managed to use any skills to even the odds.

They had been lucky. With advance warning from Sere to prepare themselves, and the orcish Idealist nullified, they had laid an extremely successful ambush. But Tom could now see all too well how other encounters might have gone differently, how the orcs had managed to capture so many Idealists.

They moved incredibly fast through the woods. Their bestial natures suited them well in that regard. Any Idealist without a sensory skill, or a familiar, or possibly an item, to warn them of approaching orcs, would find themselves taken completely by surprise.

Most of the prisoners wouldn’t have been expecting to see orcs at all, let alone orcs using skills. It was no wonder they had subdued so many.

These were the thoughts that occupied him as they ran. Tom felt like he was being drawn on a string. They needed to reach the forge. If the orcs were this far out, they could have easily reached it.

If the Lord’s followers hadn’t found Scriber and Cub first.

They ran for days, stopping only to catch a handful of hours’ sleep every night. It was not as much of an issue, after a body tempering or two. They could handle this pace for weeks.

They fell into a steady rhythm. Wake, run, stop, eat, run, run, sleep. Another week. Still another to go until they reached the forge.

It was then that they ran into more orcs.

It was midmorning, and they were moving through a relatively clear patch of forest. The trees were thinner, newer. There was almost no deadfall. The ground was flat. They were making good time. Then a frantic sending came from Sere.

Orcs! Orcs! Bad! Orcs! Bad Bad!

The accompanying images she sent sent his stomach plummeting.

The group was even bigger than last time, perhaps twenty strong. Tom couldn’t get a solid count of them. They were running, loping, as they usually did, but a low black mist clung to the ground around them. It was unnatural. Every minute or so, a few of the rearmost orcs would seem to plunge into the mist, as if they’d run headfirst from stable ground into deep water, and then would reappear at the leading edge of the mist, in front of all their fellows, in a plume of black fog.

They had an Idealist with them, obviously. One with skills to help them all move faster. They were moving directly towards them. They had minutes.

“Val! Orcs!” Tom half-whispered, half-shouted at her.

She stopped, turning wildly. “Where? How many? How long?”

“North east! Twenty! Minutes away! They have another Idealist!”

Val let out a string of expletives. Tom was too worried to really register them. Smitten flowed into the woods to their left, away from the approaching orcs, obviously at some mental command from Val. It made sense. The dog, useful as she was, was not built for combat.

She grabbed Scorn by his scruff, a most undignified action, and tossed him high in the air. He twisted with feline grace, snagging a branch as he sailed past it and pulling himself onto it. He gave a small shake of his fur to settle it before turning towards the north east.

Val strung her bow and poked a handful of arrows into the earth. Tom quickly pulled a couple of potions out of his inventory and downed them. It was dangerous, mixing poisons. Where individually, they might trigger Sweet Suffering, mixed together they might react with each other, and the resulting concoction might not. He didn’t have the time for prudence, though.

He breathed a sigh of relief as his wisp pulsed with Sweet Suffering’s activation. Strength and power flooded his limbs. His vision sharpened. He hitched up the left leg of his pants and summoned Sesame. He had subbed the bear while they were running.

Sere was still tracking the approaching pack. They had less than a minute now. Tom pulled a few throwing knives out of the storage ring he had found on Honeyfield. They were not his usual weapon, but he had trained with them. He hoped he could injure one or two orcs.

He saw the mist approaching through the trees. It flowed along the ground in rivulets, swirling, congealing in places, flooding forward in others. He had been unable to identify the orc responsible for the skill with Sere’s scouting.

The first orcs came into view seconds later. They caught sight of them, two lone humans and one bear, and came on in a mad, howling rush.

Val loosed an arrow. One of the leading orcs went down in a tumble. Its packmates leapt over its sprawling, twisting body. She loosed again. And again.

Tom waited, trying to pick his moment. They were close now, spreading out a little. He could see the animal fury in them, the predator’s instinct. They had found prey, alone and in their territory.

Tom drew back his arm and threw. A knife flickered in the morning light, rotating through the air, and hitched violently to a stop, hilt-deep, in an orc’s face. It fell.

He cocked his arm and threw again. The second knife turned. It struck an orc, hilt first, in its throat. It let out a strangled bark and skidded to a stop. One of its packmates barrelled into it from behind and knocked it down.

Tom saw Sesame’s chest expanding from the corner of his eye, and a booming roar followed. There was a sound like a gust of wind lashing hail on a wall, and several more orcs dropped.

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The mist reached them seconds later, and then the orcs were among them.

Tom, Val and Sesame fought together, making three points of a triangle, Val leading. They broke upon her like a wave. She had drawn her thin sword, and sprayed a cloud of acid at the orcs as they closed. The first few came through screeching, clutching at their faces as the acid ate away at them, and were dispatched with swift slices and stabs.

Tom cast Wild Boar Strike into the charging orcs, and felt a surge of vicious satisfaction as they slammed to a stop, the knockback force from the skill stopping the lead runners cold. He followed up with Agony, and cast Misery on the first orc to round Val’s deadly cone of influence and attack him.

The orcs were not particularly strong combatants at an individual level, more savagery than skill. They could not compare to two Idealists. They made up for it in numbers, though. Twenty orcs was a tall order for any but a Flawless Idealist.

The mist swept around their legs as they fought. Tom kept an eye on his wisp, but there was no notification of Sweet Suffering activated. He was glad that it had no poisonous properties. While he might be okay, Val and Sesame would not.

Tom killed the first orc to attack him with a thrust from his spear. It slumped, blood pumping freely from the hole in its chest. Two more took its place. He had no idea how many they’d killed, no idea how many were left. He focused, trying for the clarity that comes with such situations sometimes. He had just begun to find it, when it was shattered by a sending from Sere.

Watch! Behind! Bad! Behind!

He couldn’t turn, couldn’t take his attention from the orcs in front of him, but he saw the issue through Sere.

In the middle of their defensive triangle, an orc appeared from the mist. It rose from the ground as if carried by some architect’s crane, and immediately turned to Val. It carried a wicked looking knife in its hand.

Alarm spiked through Tom. He slashed out at one of the orcs in front of him, and knocked it into its partner. Then, without even turning, using Sere as his eyes, he twirled his spear behind him.

Two things happened at once. First, he felt the butt of his spear impact something. Through Sere, he could see he struck it on its arm, fouled the thrust it was making at Val’s back. Second, Scorn finally made himself known, and several whisker thin beams pierced the would-be assassin. He must have been waiting to identify the Idealist. If it had chosen to hang back, supporting the other orcs with its skills, neither Val or Tom would have been able to engage properly.

Neither action was enough. The orc’s dagger hit Val in the shoulder. Tom felt relief wash through him. It wasn’t a deep thrust. He had seen Val shrug off worse wounds than that.

The Idealist orc fell to the ground in pieces, sliced apart by Scorn. The mist began to disperse.

Tom turned his full attention back to the orcs in front of him, struck one down with a thrust to the head, battered the other to the side. Sesame roared again.

Tom! Bad! Val! Came another sending.

He split his attention, and saw Val wavering on her feet. She looked drunk. An orc leapt at her, and she stabbed it straight through its face for its troubles, but it knocked her down with its momentum. She did not get up.

Tom felt a flare of panic. What was happening?! He was sure the wound she’d taken hadn’t been lethal! Poison, maybe?

He had no time to think about it. He stepped backwards, warding off the orc in front of him until he stood over Val’s prone form. He glanced down. She was breathing, but unconscious.

The orc in front of him pressed forward. Another menaced him from his left. He felt Sesame’s dependable presence right behind him, knew that he was dealing with orcs of his own. They were in trouble.

The orcs attacked at once. Tom turned and struck, stepped, blocked, stabbed and twirled. Orcs fell. More replaced them. He kept fighting.

Orcs crowded in on them, sensing victory near at hand. Tom kept them at bay by a hair’s breadth. He fell into that elusive place where time did not matter. Where nothing mattered. Nothing but the fight.

The orcs were feral, but like wolves, they worked together instinctively. Whenever he gave one his attention, another would attack. He began to accumulate wounds. Stinging cuts from claws, bruises from clubs, from strikes with crude axes that couldn’t break his mail. One of his ribs was broken. His left shoulder wasn’t quite working properly. He slipped deeper into the trance.

He split his attention between his own eyes and Sere’s. It was possibly the only reason he survived those last few minutes.

His movements changed. He had spent months fighting alongside Sesame, and the two of them were a seamless unit. It was evidenced in their fight now, as they guarded each other’s back, trading off threats and rotating to give each other space.

He had been unused to Sere. He had relegated the birds to the role of a scout in his mind. He was ecstatic to have a familiar even as useful as that, being honest. But now, he saw her true worth.

He trusted her, as a scout, for the information, the advance warnings, that she provided, but he had not thought her useful in combat.

He was wrong.

At first, he had been overwhelmed by the information she sent him. Then he had gotten used to it. As he moved into the very heart of the battle-trance, it became truly seamless.

It was like having eyes in the back of his head. Whenever an orc worried his flank, trying to attack from his blindspot as he moved to kill another, he knew.

His spear was a whirlwind. The combination of its length, its reach, its versatility, combined with Sere’s information, was immaculate. He could block one orc and thrust at one in the same movement. Foul one’s movements and stymie yet another too.

Then Sere began to help more directly. Several bodies stayed in the trees above to provide coverage, watching the battle, feeding him information. The rest entered the fray.

Even with a bird’s eye view of his own fight, even with a spear, and Sesame at his back, Tom could still only be in so many places at once. Sere began to make up the difference. Where an orc found an opening, she would swoop into its face, chirping and pecking, the sounds comically small and sweet compared to the braying, barking orcs.

The little sounds only did trivial damage. Her pecks only did trivial damage. It was why he had so easily seen her as a scout, and only a scout. But trivial damage was still a lot, when applied directly to an eye, or an ear.

The orcs, surging forward to take advantage of an opening, found themselves flinching, unable to see, suddenly deafened. Green flashes marked more attacks from Scorn. Whisper tags began to explode periodically, blasting small chunks out of orcish limbs, spraying blood into the morning air.

The wounds stopped accumulating. The pressure lessened. The tide turned.

Tom stood, drenched in blood. It dripped from him, ran in a rivulet from his speartip. Sesame huffed from behind him. Tom could tell the bear was heavily injured, but in no danger of death.

Dead orcs were arrayed all around them. A single, injured orc fled away through the woods. A tiny pink line connected it to him. It snapped, and the orc crashed to the ground. Tom cast Wild Eagle Strike on it. It lay still, and did not get back up.

Tom dropped to his knees beside Val. She was unconscious still, her breathing light. He checked the wound on her shoulder, and confirmed that it was only barely more than a scratch.

Poison, then, he thought. This must be how they capture Idealists.

It was one mystery ticked off the growing list.

Tom was unsure what to do. Val would hopefully wake at some point, but he had no idea how long that would take. He couldn’t sit still, not with the amount of orcs about. If he ran across another pack now, they would both be captured. Sesame was too injured to carry her on a travois though. Despair welled in him.

He gazed absently around at the bodies of the orcs, perhaps hoping some inspiration would strike him. He noted their weapons, several of crudely forged iron, just like the last lot. Many had badly cured hides covering most of their vitals too. It was strange. The size of the packs… They were so far out from their camp…

Ice cold realisation flooded him. These weren’t scouting parties. They were raiding parties.

The army was moving. The invasion had begun.