“Hurz, you can’t be her,” he puffed out, staring at me with bulging bloodshot eyes, me so nicely backlit by the dying explosion and colorful clouds in the distance he was working hard not to stare at in rapture.
My Soulsword vanished, and Chalice extruded her full normal blade, gold with black edges. Then her Song began to rise, and all his hair bristled. He took a step back, and all his lads did the same.
“What happened to that feeb you had to carry off the field, furball? He running the campaign?” I gestured to the southeast lander, which was arranged in the most disciplined and rigid fashion of the seven of them.
He looked spooked that I had guessed the right location. “Yarz, he’s telling the runts where ta go an’ what ta shoot.” He blinked again, as I was one of the things they were supposed to be shooting. “Er... you been shooting my gobbers, Lady. Why you here?”
“Would it horribly surprise you to learn that I’m human?” I answered calmly, eyes dancing. As if every human on this side of the galaxy didn’t know that by now.
He blanched despite himself. “This planet is ours!” he stated unequivocally. “The rockies took it ‘way from us long ago. We’re jes taking it back!”
“Please. You took it from the akefer back before then... you think I didn’t look at the planet’s history?” He had the most interesting expression. “This place isn’t your homeworld, so it was conquered by you, and then you were kicked off it in turn. Just like you’re trying to do now. Should have come back three thousand years ago, before it was discovered and settled. We didn’t even have to fight anything for it then.”
He growled deep, a big old rumble in his chest, and his expression wasn’t very calm. “So, yer ta be killing all the gobbers here? For the humans?”
“Well, I can’t possibly be killing all of you, can I? Just the important ones that will stop this invasion.” My smile grew wider, and double canines flashed at him, while Chalice’s Song started to get very ominous indeed.
“Tremble, oh oooo oh, Tremble, she comes,” the urgobs behind him hummed along helplessly, and things got very tense indeed. Goblin dread smells right peculiar, it does.
He was looking at me and my Sword, and all sorts of things dealing with him being dead in the next few seconds, along with all his hairy boys, were running through his head. I certainly didn’t seem to be worried that there were lots of goblins with heavy weapons around, and, well, anything sufficiently strong to kill me was definitely going to kill all of them as well.
Things weren’t looking good for the newly christened Warlord Gorgrum, fighting to the top of the goblin race after surviving the Ceremony in Bloodheart.
“Er, no backsies, eh?”
I tilted my head. “Just how many humans have you eaten in the last six months?” I tsked at him. “Yeah, kinda late, furball.”
He sighed, and then he roared.
It had great stirring power, helping combat the fear I was broadcasting with its buhzerk energy and psychic power spiking all the aggressive instincts around.
At the same time, he bounced twenty feet up and sixty feet back. “KILL ‘ER!” he bellowed, hit the ground, turned and ran.
I laughed despite myself, and the sound chased him as Chalice’s Song rose in terrible killing majesty.
“Tremble, oh oooo oh, tremble, she comes!” squealed a whole lot of goblins, who began to explode in every direction.
“Gorgum said Kill ‘er,
An’ she’s right killin’, she is.
Damn dat Sword cuttin’
Slicin’ up da urs’ suits like cheese
Watchum squeal and squeak
Spitting da steel, screaming
Dat Sword is comin’ -akkK!”
Gorgrum’s hardened personal company of buhzurker stealth cyborgs in power armor roared and bellowed and squealed, and metal protested at the terrible things I was doing to it and the things it was supposed to be protecting.
They went crashing into one another as I heaved them back and forth, heavy bodies and armor being tossed around like they could one another, only much faster. Chalice inserted into every weak point and opening, and chewed through their armor almost as if it wasn’t there... as Way of Water IV was reducing its protection by 8, it was less than half as effective as it could have been, and the adamant-fed orichalcum wasn’t respecting anything less hard as it did its thing.
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My Tails were inserting Spikes from all sorts of uncomfortable angles, locking up limbs and popping power supplies, so there were a rather large number of explosions around me that were taking out the guys not in power armor explosively, drawing in more goblins to the excitement.
“Tremble, oh oooo oh tremble, she comes!” they sang along, and if all their hackles were rising and some of them were pissing themselves and others were shaking with every step, they were still singing along to the refrain as Sun Strikes went off and the corpses of elite urgob buhzurkers went flying in pieces.
“Dey wuz a hard Kill Crew,
Gorgum’s lads, shining and clawed.
Bam, dat fire going off,
Dere claws and fangs all flailing
Wee, watchum go flying
Or, he lost ‘is hand, go givit back,
An’ dere’s his head sayin’- akkK!”
The slaughter commenced, even as the doors on the Landing Rok began to close up urgently, since I was getting very, very close.
Some energetic fans tried to level the ship’s guns on me, and suddenly most of the ground I had been standing on got atomized, along with scores of goblins trying to throng me and the last of his Kill Crew.
Me, I was running up the side of the ship towards those guns. What might all fourteen of those Engineering and Shipwright Ranks be worth in such a situation?
“Tremble, oh oooo oh tremble, she comes...” the crew of the Landing Rock were singing along...
“Or, watch dat cannon go!
Oops, dat wuzna shootin’
Great color, da gun core
Gribble-hue red, good stuff,
Once, twice, Gorgrum’s Rock
Haz a new hole dere an’ dere,
Or, he’s fallin’, gunna hit -akkK!”
I was inside his Rock as its engines lit up and it engaged anti-grav and tried to get out of there. If a few thousand gobs didn’t get out of range of the engines in time, that was the price of fandom.
I was carving my way through the low-end crew and heading towards the engines and the famously unstable goblin power cores very quickly, the whole Rock resonating with Chalice as she Sung out to them, telling them I was coming.
Gorgrum was quite the decisive sort, as he unstaged the lower half of the Rock, which took away his primary weapons and energy core, leaving him only enough power to run and leave me behind.
Then, of course, the reactor blew apart.
-----
Chalice popped me a few minutes back along my Lived-line into a prior location, close to where I had come falling down. A lot of goblins were watching the big explosion of a Rock going off a few miles up there, while Gorgrum’s pinnace zipped up into the sky, leaving behind this world with me on it.
“Tremble, oh oooo oh, Tremble, she comes...”
A bunch of goblins mouthed the words and turned to look at me as all the guns and Tails lifted, and my Soulsword was back out.
Obviously, I hadn’t died.
“Or, der went Gorgrum’s Rock,
‘e made it out, waytgo ‘im!
Wattashow, dat Plant goin’ off,
Did ‘e get ‘er? Is she singin’?
All dat fire, all dat blow?
Smoke and scream hadda be...
Or, she’s right here -akkK!”
And the killing continued, as I moved towards the other Rocks.
-------
Only one of the Rocks didn’t make it off the ground, as whoever was in charge of it didn’t really believe I could cut through a couple of miles of goblins, avoid all the cannon fire and artillery that started to open up around me, carve my way in through his airlocks, overcome his elite marines and ‘borg guards, upset that Weird Fire reactor they used, and then somehow get out of there before a few uncontrolled megatons of power that didn’t get vented off subdimensionally glassed a circle a couple miles across.
The goblins got a half dozen more verses out of the process, broadcast and downloaded to them, so they were happy.
The rest of the Landing Rocks decided that their skins were more important than getting added to -akkK!, and lifted off, one after another. Some took the time to allow their elites back on board, but mostly they just left the millions of goblin ground troops behind to fight without them there.
Oh, and with me. Dying at 40 gobs a second around me.
------
Well, while I wasn’t saying I won the war single-handedly, goblin morale and troop cohesion of the clans on Capristi II did tank rather suddenly as their ruling class decisively abandoned them, inciting them to kill and plunder and do all that they could against the filthy monkey-people, while being very certain not to go back to the planet themselves. They were actively looking for a way out of the system and to some other place without a certain Rantha and her Sword belting out their now-favorite tune.
Inter-clan and interspecies coordination dropped off rather sharply, and rivalries for local warlord status meant some goblins started shooting at other goblins, which they were allowed to do by the thoughtful humans, who concentrated on picking off the goblins still shooting at them.
Some goblins stayed true to their ideas of kill, burn, and eat right to the end, and didn’t worry about the bit of politicking going on between the mostly hobgoblin-led forces. The urgobs always did what they wanted regardless, and the runty greens just needed lots of explosions and things to shoot at to keep them happy, even if it was one another.
It took another nineteen months to wind down, and a lot of orbital bombardments, before the goblin presence was mostly gone from Capristi II.
------
My Archer Level was the first Secondary Level to get to Eight. Can’t imagine why, after shooting so much stuff in the face at twenty pulses a second x 2 for so many weeks. As a matter of fact, it was also the first one to get to Seven.
Class benefit, Penetrating Shot, basically a Cleave for shooting stuff. If you killed something, and there was something right behind it, you could shoot that too...
Wow, I had a lot more angles to figure to make use of that ability... keeps the brains happy...