“Get them!” screamed a particularly large and smelly bandit. “Punish the puppy killers! Destroy the king’s puppets! Fight the evil—guh!”
He’d barely got halfway through his speech when Captain Toirtap charged him, slamming his armored body shoulder into his chest. The bandit went tumbling head over heels.
“For Kingdom and for Nation!” the captain shouted, brandishing his sword to the sky.
Nation, the seventh-born of the second generation of gods, was the god of unity and co-operation. A lot of soldiers served Nation, although relatively few of their rulers did. A bandit carrying a wooden staff lashed out at the captain, who easily fended him off.
“Are we fighting?” Nanoc asked, surprised. He had not been paying attention. “Oh, great! Let me just—”
The troll grabbed Nanoc and shoved him face down into a barrel so that only his little legs were sticking out. The little gnome wiggled his feet as he tried to climb out, but he was wedged in tightly.
The bandits closed in confidently; they had the numbers to easily win. Captain Toirtap was fighting off three bandits by himself, and Rotcel ‘Loc was dodging blows from two more. The other bandits approached Dren.
“The scholar is mine!” the troll yelled, and the bandits fell back.
Dren did not hesitate. He pointed a finger at the troll and yelled, “Koob’s light of truth!”
A bolt of bright light hit the white troll in the chest but had no effect. The troll gave a surprisingly high-pitched chuckle as it walked towards the elf.
“That might work on my weaker brothers but not me,” the troll said, grinning. “You serve Knowledge, elf? Surely you’ve heard that the university folk are working on spells to steal your teeth so that they can keep them for themselves?”
Dren looked at his fingers in shock. They had never let him down like that before.
“Do you know, I have another version of the spell in one of these books—” the elf began, but the troll wasn’t willing to wait. He grabbed Dren and threw him into the air.
The elf flew with all the grace of a bag of old clothes and hit the side of the barrel Nanoc was stuck in, tipping it over. Nanoc managed to get to his feet, still in the barrel. He took a few steps to the side and hit a bandit, knocking him over, then stumbled to the other side and hit a bandit in the back. A third bandit smashed his spear against the side of the barrel, but it bounced off, vibrating with a wummmm sound and jumping out of his hands. It landed in front of Dren, who picked it up tentatively.
He had always believed that words were more powerful than weapons, but his spells had temporarily failed him, and so he needed to try something new. He threw the spear; it hit the troll in the back of the head and bounced off without doing any damage.
“Is that all?” the troll said nastily.
He took a step forward, but the spear twisted into a snake that wrapped its legs around the troll, tripping him. A bandit rushed to his side to help, arriving just as Dren hit the troll with a purple blast of light that bounced off the beast and hit the bandit instead. The bandit screamed, her voice getting higher and higher as she shrank down to the size of a football. She tried to run but had barely made it a few feet when Nanoc came rolling over her in his barrel.
Dren was already muttering a new spell.
“Your spell won’t work on me,” the troll said smugly. “You silly scholars think you are so powerful and mighty, but no spell you cast on me will work! I am immune, elf! You are pathetic! Now let me slay you with my own powers!”
The troll pointed a crooked claw, and a fireball leaped out and hit Dren. Flames rose, smoke clouded the air, and when the air cleared, Dren was gone.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Ha!” the troll said gleefully. “You are nothing, elf! I am far stronger than you, smarter than you! All the girls like me better than you! You are dead, elf!”
But he was wrong.
“May I give you some advice?” Dren said from directly behind the troll. “Do you know, the path of Knowledge is like climbing a mountain. If you climb higher than most, you may think you have nearly reached the peak and grow arrogant from your height. If you keep climbing, however, you realize that the mountain is infinite, that you will never reach the peak, and that you are nothing but a fool with a great view of the world.”
“What?” the troll said, spinning around in surprise. “What does that mean? How did you get there? Why aren’t you dead?”
“Do you know, you ask so many questions, but you don’t wait for the answer.”
“Why are you smiling, elf? Your spells don’t work!”
Dren bobbed his head.
“I may be a fool, but I know many spells,” the elf explained. “One of which does this: gnome missile!”
He pointed at Nanoc’s barrel, which floated into the air, then shot towards the troll, hitting him in the head. The troll stumbled as Nanoc’s barrel circled for another attack and another after that.
“Dren!” Nanoc screamed. “Stop that! Get me out of here!”
The elf was too busy slamming the troll into the ground to listen. By the time the spell ended – depositing the barrel back upright so that Nanoc was once again head down and feet up – the troll was lying on the ground, defeated.
“I’m going to get reinforcements!” the troll shouted to his bandits. “You lot, keep fighting! I’ll be back!”
The troll scrambled to his feet and fled through the trees. The bandits eyed their leader’s hasty retreat with concern, but they didn’t run after him. There were still six of them, after all.
“More for us, then, with the boss gone,” one of the bandits said with a smile. “The gnome is nothing, the soldier is down, and the elf is weak!”
But he had forgotten the lizardling. Rotcel ‘Loc had used the distraction of the running troll well. She pulled Nanoc out of the barrel, placed him back on his feet, and pointed him at the remaining bandits.
“Go get them, then,” she said and wandered off to find a spot to sit and watch the action.
“Right!” Nanoc shouted. “Did I really miss fighting the troll? That makes me… angry!”
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Berserk ability activated!
Go get them, you little gnome maniac!
----------------------------------------
The bandits were brutal men and women, veterans of hundreds of fights. They had not panicked when their troll leader had fled, nor even when half their number had fallen, yet Nanoc’s attack scattered them like autumn leaves in the wind.
Nobody expects a rampaging gnome.
It was all over too fast.
“Say ‘hi’ to my uncle for me,” Nanoc said as he hit the last bandit over the head and knocked him out.
Nanoc’s berserk faded away, leaving him feeling tired and still unsatisfied. He looked around: Captain Toirtap was on the ground, winded but not injured, Dren was examining an interesting flower he’d noticed during the fight, and Rotcel ‘Loc was looting the fallen bandits.
“I think I got six the bandits,” Nanoc said. “Dren got the troll, which is just unfair. Captain, how many bandits did you get? Rotcel, did you get any? Rotcel?”
The lizardling ignored the gnome, hissing in pleasure as she found a particularly shiny bauble.
“Well, anyway, we got them all… but we lost the three guards.”
“Are they… dead?” the captain asked, his voice heavy with concern for his men.
“What? No, they just ran off.”
“Impossible! My guards have hearts as true as steel!”
But they didn’t. The young guards had slunk off from the fight, discarding their uniforms and armor as they went. The captain looked so downcast at this news that even Dren tried to buck him up.
“Do you know, captain, we can continue without them. We will still be victorious.”
“Do you really think so?” the captain asked.
“Do you know, I do. They were terribly weak, so not having them will make no difference to us. Much like if we were to lose you, too.”
“Oh…that’s, uh, what?” the captain said. “You know, elf, you really need to work on your people skills. I—"
“Hey! Look, it’s the troll's footprints!” Nanoc shouted, pointing at a set of wide prints in the mud. “Follow them, Rotcel!”
The lizardling didn’t. She just sighed and kept searching the fallen bandits.
“Follow them, Rotcel!” Nanoc said a little louder in case the lizardling hadn’t heard him.
She had.
“I’ll do it when I’m ready,” she muttered.
“Are you scared, little lizardling?” Captain Toirtap mocked her. “Fine, we don’t need you, anyway.”
He had not been impressed with Rotcel ‘Loc’s fighting ability, although he would have been astonished at her loot-finding skills had he been paying attention. The lizardling flashed the captain a smile full of short, sharp, white teeth as she searched a bandit’s pockets.
“Go on, then. Head off into the woods. These two are terrible with maps, and I’m guessing you’re just as bad. I’ll bet I’ll find you fallen into the nearest river, half drowned and begging for rescue.”
“Do you know, that’s a fair assessment,” Dren agreed. “My navigation skill is not very good, and I do like rivers.”
“I can’t swim,” Nanoc said, “But I’m still going to follow that troll!”
He started walking into the woods.
“It’s this way, gnome,” Rotcel ‘Loc said, throwing an empty purse over her shoulder and walking away from the gnome. “Try and keep up.”
The scout walked off into the trees, the others following behind her. The troll fortress was close.