“Hey,” David said casually as Erasmus Thorn stepped into view.
Like David himself, Erasmus wore chainmail armor and a steel helmet. Unlike David, however, Erasmus had grown his snow-white hair long enough that it fell below his shoulders and was thus visible under his helmet. Even wearing heavy armor, Erasmus’s charisma and regal bearing were apparent to everyone. Though he was merely the leader of a band of brutish mercenaries, he carried himself like a nobleman.
“I see that your hunt has gone quite well, Captain,” Erasmus said in good humor as he looked at the corpses strewn across the ground.
“Yeah,” David said, laughing darkly. “You should have seen their faces after I killed the first ten, Erasmus. They thought they’d have an easy time killing a single isolated man, but they just ended up walking into a woodchipper. And when I started shooting fire out of my sword, they acted like the world was ending.”
“Woodchipper?” Erasmus frowned. He stated the unfamiliar English word with confusion.
“Nevermind. It’s not important,” David said. “Anyway, I must have killed fifty of ‘em. How many did you get?”
“A mere thirty,” Erasmus said with a minor hint of annoyance hidden behind a casual smile. “They died too quickly at the main front for me to kill any more.”
David laughed. “This must be the first time I’ve outkilled the great Silver Flash.”
“Well, perhaps I should have adopted your master strategy of getting yourself surrounded by enemies,” Erasmus retorted. “Plus, the battle is not over yet. We still must take the Blue Skull Tribe’s encampment. Will you join the assault?”
“No thank you,” David said. “As much as I would like to join you in murdering women and children, I’m going to be spending the next few minutes cutting the ears off of these corpses.” David punctuated his sentence by tapping his hand against one of the orcish corpses he was sitting on.
“Women and children, David?” Erasmus frowned. “That hardly seems like an accurate assessment. They’re orcs, after all.”
“I know that,” David said, his tone becoming serious for the first time since the conversation began. “They’re monsters… but… when you kill the non-combatants, they still scream like women and children.”
“Suit yourself,” Erasmus said, shrugging. “A swordmaster is hardly necessary for clearing out the non-combatants, anyway.”
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Erasmus’s retinue turned away and headed toward the orcish encampment. Almost automatically, David unsheathed his hunting knife from his belt and began methodically removing the ears from the dead orcs.
David shook off the memory of the last time he breached an orcish encampment. He cut dozens of those non-resisting orcs to the bone, and he set fire to several huts. It was only when David looked at the dead orcs did he realize how much the female orcs resembled human women.
Killing orc warriors was different, David thought. They attacked with a ferocity and a willingness to kill that made it perfectly justifiable, even satisfying, to return the favor. David had no problem slaughtering dozens of orc warriors and making sport of it, but killing the non-combatants was too much. In their final moments, when they had no chance of resisting death, something human burbled to the surface. David had seen it many times, and he was not interested in witnessing it again.
On an academic level, David understood why all of this was necessary. They were not fighting a war per se; they were exterminating monsters. Monsters were just incredibly dangerous vermin that had to be put down from time to time. That was the primary job of adventurers. Whenever monsters became too much of a problem for society to function properly, adventurers went out and slew the monsters for a fee.
This was different, however. The 1st Army of Northwind, better known as the Band of Bastards, had been hunting orc tribes for five years by that point. They had completely wiped out five orc tribes, and this would be the sixth. After the third tribe was killed, the rest fled from the Band of Bastards. David had not fought a real fight in six months before the extermination of the Blue Skull Tribe. They were getting harder to track down now that so many had been wiped out.
By the time David was done, a small pile of green, pointed ears had been accumulated on the ground. He had only cut off the right ears as was standard when presenting evidence of orcish kills. All told, David had underestimated how many he had killed. After counting the number of ears twice, David realized that he had killed fifty-three orcs. At a conversion rate of ten silver pieces per slain orc, David knew he was going to get a nice five-gold bonus from that battle.
Smiling, the memory of the orcish encampment gone from his mind, David dumped the pile of pointed ears into a pouch he had prepared before the battle. The vision of all the things he could buy with five Etronian gold pieces flitted through his mind as he started walking back toward his unit.
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A few hours later, the contents of David’s pouch had been converted from orcish ears to silver and gold. In the pouch were five gold pieces and thirty silver pieces. David couldn’t wait until the next time they stopped at a town. They were in the eastern region of the Lowlands, David knew, so the nearest settlement would have to be the City of Redcliffe. He fully intended to spend all his money at the bars, gambling dens, and brothels of Redcliffe next time the Band of Brothers stopped there.
David York walked through the remnants of the encampment that had previously belonged to the Blue Skull Tribe. Most of the corpses had been carted away to a mass grave, but many corpses had been fused to the ground by Hellfire. At least they wouldn’t attract wild animals.
After walking around for a bit, David found the area of camp that was being used by his unit, the Fourth Company. Dozens of David’s men surrounded a large bonfire that was being fed wood from the orcs’ demolished huts.
“I see the party’s started without me,” David chuckled as he approached the roaring fire.