Edwin grabbed the fallen adventurer’s spear, as the dead man wouldn’t need it anymore, and turned to jog back to his assigned position behind the center of the line. Immediately, he realized that things were taking a turn for the worse.

A dozen wounded soldiers were behind the line, struggling with their armor to patch up wounds or simply apply pressure to stem the bleeding. Three of the marksmen, their quivers empty, were helping the worst of them.

Edwin stopped next to a soldier whose arm was hanging limply down his side. With only one hand, he was struggling to bandage a ragged gash in his leg. Edwin quickly finished the knot, then moved on. He reached his destination and halted next to Salissa, craning his neck to check on the state of battle.

It was actually going better than he had feared. The goblins had, sometimes literally, banged their heads against the shield wall for minutes, accepting horrible losses for few gains. In the field in front of the soldiers, green corpses were starting to pile so high that in the center, the only way to get to the humans was to climb.

The monsters were aggressive and stupid, but they weren’t completely mindless. In the face of this much carnage, even the dumbest creatures had to wonder if charging the well-armored humans and their pointy sticks was a good idea – and they did. The continuous stream of little monsters that had been coming out of the forest had trickled off, and the charge of the ones already in the field was slowing down, with more and more of them simply stopping outside of reach of the defenders’ spears instead of trying to break through.

Finally, it seemed like the goblins’ morale was wavering.

None of them were turning and running away yet, though, probably because of the hobgoblins that were in the path of their retreat. The hobs were still cowering behind their wooden barriers and lobbing projectiles at the humans, be it goblins, sticks or small rocks, but of the four that had been there initially, only three remained standing, and two of those had arrows lodged in their arms and shoulders. The marksmen, it seemed, hadn’t been idle.

Edwin was just about to remark on their changing luck when a voice boomed across the hesitating crowd. It was deeper and scratchier than that of the usual goblins, and it made all of them turn their heads.

Out of the forest trundled something so ridiculous that Edwin couldn’t believe his eyes at first. It was a goblin, that much was clear, but where a regular member of the species was around a meter in height and little more than skin stretched tightly over bone and some muscle, this one was as tall as a short human and disgustingly obese.

Rolls of fat wobbled with each step, accented by lines of reddish-brown war paint that Edwin assumed was blood of some kind. It had an animal skin tied around its neck like a cape, and literally topping off the look was a silly headdress made mostly of feathers that looked like it had been made by a child – with the purpose of making fun of the one who had to wear it.

The goblins apparently didn’t share Edwin’s opinion on the newcomer’s fashion sense, as they stilled and turned, paying rapt attention to the monstrosity’s croaked words.

“Archers!” Vellis shouted once more, and the diminished ranged contingent sent a small hail of arrows towards it. Two more hobgoblins stepped out of the forest, these ones wearing armor and helmets crudely made of leather and wood, and interposed their shields between the fat goblin and the marksmen, blocking their shots. It continued screaming at the goblins, the smaller monsters clearly getting riled up again.

“That must be the shaman!” Edwin told Salissa, yelling to be understood over the probably rousing speech that none of the humans could understand. “We have to take it out before the crowd gets…”

He didn’t get to finish, as the shaman’s words reached a screeching crescendo and it partially stepped out from behind its protectors, raising its hands towards the humans.

A wall of flame billowed towards their line and panicked screams rose from soldiers and adventurers alike.

Where a human mage’s fire was usually a thin, concentrated beam that became increasingly hotter the more mana was fed into it, the goblin’s fire was a rolling inferno, almost as wide as their line and tall enough to completely obscure the trees the monsters had emerged from, even though it lacked the incredible heat.

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Edwin raised his shield to cover himself and Salissa, but several meters before the blaze reached them, it suddenly stopped dead, breaking like waves against an invisible obstacle. After a second, Salissa’s shield began to shimmer a light blue as the flames began to chew through the mana that was fed into it.

Despite their situation, Edwin grinned as he turned to the girl next to him. Salissa had her hands half-raised and balled to fists, a bead of sweat rolling down her temple. Fire wasn’t particularly good at breaking shields, but creating one this large, and quite far away from her at that, was taxing.

“That’s how you do magic you stupid, fat charlatan!” Edwin roared into the shocked silence. Then he laughed. The flames still burned against the shield, spilling impotently over the top and around the sides, while the humans stood completely untouched a mere few meters away, watching the spectacle.

First one, then several of the soldiers joined in, infected by Edwin’s laughter and the ridiculousness of the situation, and soon they were all laughing so hard that their bellies ached.

Finally, the flames ceased, and Salissa dropped her shield. Where it had stood, a perfect line separated the blood-drenched but healthy green grass from a blackened, smoldering wasteland. A number of goblin corpses were on the ground, flames hungrily consuming their flesh. Most of them had been killed by the human defenders. Some of them simply hadn’t gotten out of the way in time.

Where the goblins, whose vision had been completely blocked by the massive wall of fire, had expected to see only burnt corpses, they instead found their enemies untouched by the grand display of power – and laughing uproariously at their leader.

A fearful chittering arose from the surviving goblins, some of whom had actually been in the path of the shaman’s attack, and the first ones began to turn back, trying to squeeze through their companions and past the hobgoblins.

The shaman recovered from his slack jawed expression, his face reddening like a tomato, and began to screech. It actually jumped up and down in rage, its massive belly wobbling dangerously, and when a goblin snuck past one of the hobs to scurry back into the forest, the shaman pointed its hand at it.

Flames engulfed the fleeing creature, a much more modest size of conflagration than before, and it fell to the ground, rolling around with shrill, piercing cries. The shaman turned back towards the other goblins, which had stopped and were huddling together in fear. It unleashed another gout of flame over their heads, encouraging them to charge the humans once again with wild gestures and incoherent screaming. A few more arrows zipped towards it, but again the hobgoblin bodyguards were paying attention and protected their charge.

“We need to kill it!” Edwin said, turning to Salissa. “Before it can scare them into attacking!”

“How?” She asked, frustrated. “It’s too far away for fire, and anyway, the shields…”

Edwin grabbed her shoulder and pushed the spear he’d picked up towards her.

“Use this!” He said, gesturing to try and get his thoughts across. “Can you do it?”

She looked at him in confusion, then understanding dawned on her face as he repeated the motions more urgently.

“I think so.” Salissa said, her eyes narrowing at her target. “Give me that.”

Edwin let go as the spear suddenly sharply rose into the air, the point rotating towards the shaman. Salissa stepped forward until she was pressing up to the soldier in front of her and extended a hand past his shield to close the distance as much as she could. The soldier turned around in surprise, but before he could ask what she was doing, the spear zipped past his head with a whoosh of air.

Despite its speed, the hobs guarding the shaman saw the projectile coming and interposed themselves between it and the screeching abomination, wooden shields at the ready. Their equipment wasn’t well-made, so a spear with some serious telekinetic force behind it might have punched through one of them. Whether it would have had enough force to kill the shaman was debatable, and as it stood, they would never find out.

After all, Salissa hadn’t aimed for the shaman.

The spear zipped above the hobgoblin in front, passing a solid meter above his head. The monster relaxed, opening its needle-toothed maw to laugh derisively at the humans and their bad aim. Had it turned its head, it would’ve seen the spear suddenly stop in mid-air, several meters above and just behind the shaman. It flipped around, the tip pointing directly at the gaudy headdress that bounced up and down atop the wobbly creature’s raging head.

Several of the goblins in the audience saw the spear’s strange behavior, but their cries of alarm came too late. One moment the spear was hovering motionless in the air, then it was gone, moving almost too fast to see, crossing the distance in a fraction of a heartbeat.

The shaman’s furious tirade stopped abruptly. Its guardians turned around in confusion, only to stagger back in surprise. The shaman was still standing, held up by a thick, wooden shaft that had penetrated the back of its head, pierced its body lengthwise, and protruded from between its legs. The steel tip was completely buried in the ground, holding up the corpse despite its considerable weight.

Edwin grinned darkly, putting a hand around Salissa’s shoulder and guiding her to the ground as her knees went out and her eyes rolled back. There was a good reason why mages didn’t usually use telekinesis at faraway objects – but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t. Just that they couldn’t do it often.