“[Entangling Roots],” Nenn yelled out. He was the first to move, and first to react. After spending all morning practicing his active spell it came naturally to him. The ground before the orc broke, and a weaving of roots shot forth, wrapping tightly around the orcs ankles. The mass of orc smashed into the ground with a sickening thud. Nenn wasn’t done. He focused his intent and the roots began to retreat into the ground, dragging a disoriented flailing orc towards its earthly grave.
Two more orcs appeared behind the orc in the process of being buried alive. The first had a rusted sword in its hand and the other had a quiver strapped to its back, the instrument to actually fire the arrows themselves had been lost in haste. The two orcs tried valiantly to free their comrade, but found themselves quickly joining it as the twins finished casting their spells.
The two orcs had been enfeebled by the surprising blow. Nenn seized the opportunity and was able to divert his last bit of control over the [Entangling Roots] to bind a large root around a leg of each Orc, holding them down for the moment. The first orc,however, was not as lucky and had expired shortly after taking its first lungfull of dirt.
“Behind!” Ortango shouted. The group turned and another three orcs had emerged. This time the orcs had enough sense to form up, with the archer taking up a rear position while the two leather wearing melee hunters made their way around the crudely sharpened tree trunks. Nenn and Aiden moved at once, each taking the side closest to them. The trench wasn’t complete on this side and would allow the orcs an easier path towards the Obelisk. The orcs split as the party had hoped they would. Two seconds later the orcs engaged the party’s melee fighters.
The orc who charged at Nenn was wielding only a short hunting knife. Nenn unconsciously let a small smile appear on his face. He had a severe advantage in this fight. Nenn swung his combat staff, capitalizing on his reach. The Orc stumbled as it took an ill-executed backstep, leaving the hunter open for a follow up. Nenn stepped in, swinging his staff down, smashing the orc hunter in the side of the knee. The orc forcefully turned, its knee giving out momentarily.
Nenn followed the momentum around, sliding his hands down the staff as he turned and struck the orc in the neck with a baseball-esque like swing. The orc twisted and crumpled, falling into the trench.
Aiden, on the other hand, had already managed to smash his opponent hard enough to cause it to fall into the tench. The orc had managed to land on a sturdy sharpened tree branch. The branch punctured through the orc’s midsection, revealing the broken, blood stained wooden tip. The orc flailed around on the spike but only managed to impale itself further.
A faint twang rang through the air and Nenn’s attention snapped to the archer. An arrow had been loosened on Aiden, and the sturdy man was now clutching at his own chest. A wooden shaft was protruding right around where his heart should be. He stumbled, falling down to a knee, as he tried to hold on.
“[Entangling Roots]”
“[Mana Bolt]”
“[Shadow Bolt]”
The twins and Nenn fired off their casts all at once. Unfortunately for the group, the archer was wise to the group's tactics, and managed to leap out of the ensnaring trap at its feet. The orc kept moving, causing the twin’s attempts to direct their bolts to fail. The orc nocked an arrow and let it fly, catching the extra material of Harper’s robe, leaving only a thin red cut along her midsection. Half a step faster and she would have been impaled.
She managed to catch Aiden just as he finally lost his battle against the arrow.
“No!” Harper shouted as she pulled herself and Aiden into the trench and out of the line of fire. Frantic shouts of “Healing Bolt '' were half-registering in Nenn’s mind. He was focused on the archer who was preparing to strike again. Only to find its gaze shift at the last moment as Ortango’s arrow found itself a new home in the orc’s gut. Nenn wasted no time and casted [Entangling Roots] once more. This time he managed to fully ensnare the distracted archer and drag it to its grave.
The next group of orcs made their presence known by barrelling out of the treeline a quarter turn to Nenn’s right. At least the orcs were polite enough to only face them one group at a time. Unfortunately, this group was three melee combatants, an archer and an orc that was wearing what could only be described as disheveled and torn robes. Nenn thought for sure that the robed orc was a caster of some variety. As per the game plan the twins would deal with the ranged fighters while Nenn and Aiden handled the melee, which now left only Nenn to handle the three on coming fighters.
Nenn moved to engage them, finding a good choke point between the trench to funnel them through one at a time. It was the only easy way across the defensive line on this side of the Obelisk and the orcs were running to beat Nenn to the gap. Thankfully Nenn had the power of magic on his side and willed his [Entangling Roots]to cast just ahead of the first orc, causing it to trip and smash its face into the ground. It seemed to be quite a useful tactic, especially when the roots began to retract into the ground, pulling their captive with them. Unfortunately this time Nenn did not have enough control left in the spell to do anything more than pull the orcs leg into the ground up to its knee.
The other two melee combatants had hardly missed a step as they swerved around their ensnared comrade and engaged with Nenn. The quarterstaff was a blessing in disguise as it helped to create enough distance that only one orc could engage Nenn at a time from the designed chokepoint. Nenn pushed at the orc using the blunt end of the staff, catching the orc square in the chest a couple of times before it stumbled. An arrow found the opportune moment to lodge itself in the orc’s throat, causing the orc to crumple over and asphyxiate.
The second orc was definitely the bigger threat. The orc stood at least a foot taller than all of the other orcs Nenn had fought thus far, and looked to be more developed and built. It was also greyer in skin tone. The large orc wielded a wooden club. A club that looked like it had just been barely refined from a tree trunk by beating it against a rock. The big orc swung down at Nenn. He tried to move his staff to redirect the blow, but the orc moved too fast. The club smashed into Nenn’s shoulder. The blow had been nudged just enough by Nenn’s attempted block, thankfully sparing his head. The rest of his body was another story altogether.
Nenn felt the entire right side of his body go numb. It screamed with pain all at once. He was smashed into the ground, his senses blinded by the pain. It was a pain that he had never felt before in his entire life. His mangled body felt foreign and broken. In front of Nenn a severed right arm still clutching onto the quarter staff laid limp on the ground. He was still conscious, but at this point, he almost wished he wasn’t. Nenn couldn’t move. Half of his body had been rendered into a sickly smear of bone and bloody paste.
The orc raised its club once more to deal the final blow to Nenn, but just as it paused with the club raised to its apex, a [Mana Bolt] caught the large orc in the armpit, causing its arm to falter. The raised club fell, carrying the orc's body with it as it could no longer support its mass with only one of its arms. As it fell backwards it managed to land on top of its fallen comrade crushing its skull.
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Nenn, with all of his remaining clarity, and a healthy dose of adrenaline from his fight or flight response, managed to cast [Entangling Roots] once more and pulled the large orc down into the ground, ensuring that one of the roots managed to wrap itself around the orcs thick neck constricting the orcs airway as much as possible.
With the immediate threat dealt with, Nenn felt calm. The type of perfectly serene calm that can only happen in the moment. He was in so much pain, and the blood loss was certainly not a good thing, but for the moment he was calm and focused. He reached out to the world around him and found himself drifting into a meditative state that blurred into unconsciousness. He felt his body’s reserves of life mana bleeding away. It flowed out of him and was being replaced by a dark energy. It was sickly and sluggish, like it would be resistant to movement if Nenn could influence it somehow. This must be the death mana that Genbunto had been talking about, Nenn thought.
Nenn had an idea at that moment. Well, it would be a stretch to call it an idea, but more of an instinct. He reached with his mind and felt the life energy all around him. The grass on the ground, the trees across the way, the flowers that poked up here and there to add a splash of color to the battleground. And the blood. And the bodies. The sources of life and death mana. Nenn formed his remaining mana reserves into strings, strings that wrapped and warped and spread out just like his [Entangling Roots] spell. The roots made of mana reached out and prodded some of the larger sources of mana and found it receptive to his attempts. The mana in the orc corpses was unbound, unowned, and perfect for the taking.
Nenn formed channels into the mana roots, finding that the root easily accepted this change. The mana roots formed smaller root hairs around the corpses and small streams of mana to follow through the channels and into Nenn. The life mana on his left side was fighting to keep him alive. The death mana was gathering in his right side, swirling, and gradually snapping into place as it reformed the missing parts of Nenn’s body.
In the middle of Nenn’s body there was a battle between the two opposing forces. There was a spot where the two forces swirled and mixed with each other, threatening to consume each other. Nenn felt the battle for mana supremacy being waged in his chest. He instinctively pushed the manas into a pattern that balanced the mana just perfectly while managing to control the surge of incoming mana. The mana war within himself managed to settle down as they became balanced.
Nenn took a breath. His body felt off, incorrect, and foreign. But it was stable. His life was no longer in peril. The world around him seemed to be a lot more bleak, and lacking color. The plants were drained of life energy, they were now looking brown and withered. The orc corpses were reduced to nothing but bones. Nenn reached out with his meditative state looking for his friends. There were still five large life sources around Nenn. Four of them were dim while one shone with a burning hot radiance that nearly blinded Nenn’s figurative eyes.
“[Lay On Hands]!” A voice filled with desperation but yet had an angelic quality to it yelled out. A pillar of light exploded upwards out of the trench that Aiden and Harper had been in. Nenn had to close his actual eyes and cover them with his remaining good arm to block out the blinding light.
The pillar of light began to dim and then winked out of existence. A moment later a battered Aiden climbed out of the trench and charged forwards, engaging the orc caster that had managed to hold off Ortango and the twins. The caster went down like a wet sack of potatoes as soon as Aiden met it. His sword had taken on a red glow as he brought it over his head and slashed downwards, cutting the orc caster straight through from shoulder to hip. The body fell over in two directions as the orc succumbed to a followup slash through its neck.
The victory was short lived as another horn sounded out and the fourth group of orcs joined the fray. The orcs had held what looked to be the best group of hunters for last as a veritable horde of them jumped out of the woods. Six melee fighters, two of them being the larger variants. Three archers, and two casters rounded out the rest of the orc raiding party.
Nenn felt his strength return, spurred on by the challenge before him. My friends… Nenn thought. They… Need me. Nenn pushed himself up off the ground. His right half felt foreign, but now somewhat familiar at the same time. It moved a little differently, and when Nenn brought his uncovered right hand up he found it wasn’t flesh, but had been replaced with old rotten wood that resembled a hand. It moved and bent like his hand, but it wasn’t quite right. It was sickly, rotten and unnatural.
Nenn stepped forward, finding the new half of his body was able to respond as required. Then he stumbled, finding it hard to balance on his new leg. Nenn needed a new plan of action if he was to be helpful. He reached out with his rotten arm and casted the spell that popped into his head instinctively.
“[Rot],” Nenn said out loud and the two Orc caster suddenly stopped, and turned to face Nenn. They began to raise their own hands against him in an attempt to cast a rebuttal, but stopped as they began itching themselves with fervent need. They scratched with ferocity, quickly drawing blood, but then the feeling must have intensified as they began to rip and tear away at themselves as Nenn watched their greenish skin corrupt into a black and brown sludge that poured off of the orcs’ bones. The two casters fell inwards onto themselves as their skeletons were no longer supported. Their last thoughts oozed out of their respective eye sockets as the black sludge liquified all of their flesh and organs.
The sickening black bubbling puddle of rotting flesh began to settle down and became still as the last bits of life mana were consumed. The orcs bones poked up from the pile, held in place by the viscous sludge that now once again supported it.
Nenn stumbled. His mana reserves were nearly spent, and the whole event of getting nearly half turned into paste then somehow regrowing part of his body, and casting an unknown spell had pushed him to his absolute limit. He staggered to his good knee, his body unable to hold him up any further.
The orcs charged forward. Aiden charged forward with his new found speed to intercept them. But before he could get there a twin cry of [Hellfire] was shouted out from the backlines of the fight. The sky turned red and the air grew hot as a barrage of fire began to rain down upon the orc melee fighters. They shouted and screamed as their flesh began to burn and sizzle, fat began rendering from their bones, and clothing began burning almost instantly. Then there was a flash, and a hot searing wave of air passed around Nenn. The fires were gone, but anything they had touched had been incinerated. Other than the barren and baked circular section of ground that now dipped down by a foot or so, the only sign that the orcs had been present was a couple of puddles of metal from what used to be their weapons.
The three remaining archers turned tail and began to retreat into the woods after witnessing the rest of their raiding party get annihilated. It was another mistake on their part as Aiden managed to catch up to the one that had been slowest to react, running it through before it could try and defend itself. An arrow from Ortango caught another one of the orc archers in the leg. The orc fell into a bush at the edge of the clearing. They tried to free themself, but Aiden was on the orc before they could manage to get righted. It was an easy cleanup kill for Aiden and his glowing red blade.
The final orc had managed to get away, slipping into the forest at a dead sprint that none of the defending party could manage to maintain, let alone surpass while avoiding the unfamiliar forest landscape.
Aiden waited for a moment, ready to face whatever else decided to jump out of the woods, but then decided to return to the party. An instant later a sickening sound of pain sounded out from the forest in the direction the orc had disappeared to. The group waited, looking towards where the sound had come from. A minute passed then a couple of goblins hunters had emerged, pulling the now dead orc archer back into the clearing. The group breathed a sigh of relief now that they were finally out of danger. The cavalry had arrived and the orcs had been repelled. Euphoria flooded Nenn’s body, then the world went dark as he collapsed in exhaustion.