Meathead’s plasma blast ripped apart one of the green creatures and one of the orange, slicing through them like a blade of fire, the red skull icons appearing as they fell. But then with an unmistakable descending sound, the weapon ran out of charge.
‘Shit,’ Meathead said. A green creature swung at him with a sword and Meathead parried it with the plasma cannon, then returned fire with his pistol. The creature was so quick that Meathead missed the shot even at close range. Another green goblin came from his right and Meathead punched it in pure reflex, sending it sprawling, its health bar dropping.
Everywhere on the narrow trail there were the screams and grunts of combat. Neb fired once at a green goblin and then twice more at an orange, but none of his shots found their target. Another goblin charged at him with a knife and knocked him to the ground. It stabbed down hard at Neb’s heart, but Neb grabbed the creature’s arm and they struggled over and back. The point of the knife got closer and closer to Neb’s chest, but just when he had almost accepted he was about to be stabbed, Gray’s boot crashed into the side of the creature’s head, sending it sprawling. Neb was able to roll free and fire his pistol at short range twice into the thing’s body, then once into its head. The goblin lay still and the red skull icon appeared over its head.
Neb had an instant to think: Oh my fuck I have just killed someone, before he heard Anna yelling, ‘FALL BACK, FALL BACK!’ On nothing more than instinct and training he got to his feet and sprinted back with the others the way they had come.
Mallory and Meathead were firing wildly with their pistols, Mallory still carrying Buzz, a few seconds still remaining on the countdown timer. Anna was dragging Grey who was also unconscious, her health bar down to 2/20. Fuck, Neb thought. No more orbs.
Everything was happening too fast, spinning wildly out of control. The goblins were trying to flank them and Neb fired wildly, not even sure what he was aiming at, exactly as he had been drilled in training not to do. Then from nowhere one of the orange creatures got close enough to pop out of the undergrowth and drive a knife deep into Meathead’s leg.
Meathead screamed in agony, swinging his pistol like a hammer but making only partial contact with his attacker. Neb aimed his pistol but could not get a clear shot. The orange goblin howled in triumph, showing curving, sharp teeth more like a dog’s than a human’s, and slammed a second knife in its other hand into Meathead’s side. The health bar over Meathead plummeted and flashed, dropping almost to zero. Neb saw the delight in the goblin’s face as it celebrated the moment of death.
We’re fucked, Neb had time to think, before he heard Mallory yell: ‘Fire in the hole!’
Oh fuck, Neb thought as he dived for cover without a microsecond’s hesitation. When Mallory said something about explosives, he was not kidding around. Neb pulled Meathead down with him and the big man seemed to move slowly through the air, like a felled tree. The goblin attacker was caught off balance as Meathead fell away from him. The humans were largely on one side of the path and the goblins on the other, and Mallory had lobbed his grenade towards the goblin side, but it was still essentially beside all of them.
Neb did not hear the grenade detonate; the world was just suddenly silent and he was flying through the air. Trees blurred past on either side of him. Then he was on the grass, sliding fast as if he had been thrown from a crashing vehicle, before slamming into a tree and coming to an abrupt stop. He groaned in pain. Bits of wood and earth and stone pattered quietly to the ground around him.
He went to get up but his left arm was badly broken. He looked at it curiously. He felt no pain. He was on his back, looking up at the branches against the sky. He could hear Buzz’s voice in his head: Get fucking moving, soldier. But he wasn’t going anywhere. Fuck that. It was nice here. It felt restful. And anyway, the Game had completely sucked. He wouldn’t miss it.
Then someone was over him and he felt the application of a healing orb, a cool tingle. There were a series of strange sensations from his left arm, things grinding back into place. He only realized he had been stabbed in the stomach when a large chunk of wood shrapnel was forced out of him by the pseudo-magical physics of the healing orb. The sharp piece of wood lay there bloodily on top of a jagged gash in his uniform, his muscled stomach visible and again undamaged underneath. He was still disorientated and his head ached, but he was alive and functional. It was a deeply strange reversal, one he would never get used to.
‘Get the fuck up, Doc!’ Anna yelled at him. ‘We have to move. Check the bodies for orbs, these bastards seem to have lots of them. Move move move!’
Neb forced himself to his feet and staggered forward. He had been blown at least twenty meters back into the forest when Mallory’s grenade went off, his flying body finding a narrow channel through the trees that he never would have thought was there. To his left an orange goblin was impaled on a tree branch, the skull icon showing over its head, blood still dripping to the ground below. Neb checked its inventory and found an orb there. He grabbed it, ignoring everything else the goblin had.
A circular area had been leveled by the blast, trees lying down and pointing out from its center neatly, as though they had been intentionally arranged. There was the crack of gunfire as Mallory fired at an orange goblin, hitting it twice in the chest and causing it to stagger. But another of the creatures applied a healing orb a moment later, and the first goblin did not even fall. Where the fuck had they gotten all the orbs? Neb had time to wonder.
Buzz was back on his feet, yelling orders. ‘FALL BACK! FALL BACK INTO THE GRASS!’ he roared. At least five goblin corpses were scattered around the area, but more of the creatures were still coming through the trees. And now they had been joined by a blue variant that was larger and bigger than the others.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Fuck me, Neb thought. Three civs together?
‘MOVE MOVE MOVE!’ Buzz roared. Meathead was lying on the ground, unconscious but not dead. Neb applied the healing orb he had taken from the dead goblin and the timer started. Mallory swooped in and rolled Meathead up onto his shoulders as he had done with Buzz, almost knocking Neb over in the process.
‘Move your ass, Doc!’ Mallory shouted. ‘Go go go!’
‘FALL BACK!’ Buzz yelled again. ‘FALL BACK TO THE GRASS!’
They all turned and ran, sprinting through the trees down the steep hill to the grasslands below, the goblins crashing hard and heavy on their tail. Buzz led the way, running flat out like a man half his age. Gray and Anna were just behind him. Then came Neb, pushed on by fear, and last in line was Mallory carrying Meathead. Mallory was clearly feeling the strain, face red, huge muscles straining. But this was do or die, and do or die was what he lived for.
‘COME ON YOU FUCKERS!’ Buzz bellowed. ‘GET DOWN THIS FUCKING HILL!’
Behind them were howls and screams from the goblin players. They knew the humans were out of options and on a mad dash to nowhere. Fuck this Game, Neb thought, his heart screaming at him to stop running, the vibration of each step seeming to reach up to his skull. It was hard not to slip on the steep incline. His lungs ached and blood pounded painfully in his temples and his mind was spinning. How the fuck was it fair that all these goblin civs could group together? How the fuck did they have so many orbs?
He knew that even with the fear of death driving him on, he could not sustain this sprint for much longer. The others had a deep-in-the-bones fuck-this-pain do-it-at-all-costs mentality that he just lacked. They would literally run until they died from it. But for Neb, sooner or later the voices in his head would win out.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw one of the green goblins was right behind them, reaching out to grab Mallory with its left hand, a blade in its right. At the same moment Anna turned in her run with a sort of balletic pirouette, facing backwards just long enough to shoot the creature in the head before resuming her sprint. The goblin sprawled in the dust.
Finally the humans go to the bottom of the hill. Meathead’s timer ran out and he was back up and running. The grass was sparser than it looked from above, but it reached high over their heads and visibility was only a few meters. They ran on, deeper into the Banker’s zoo, their boots pounding in the dry dust.
‘Keep fucking moving,’ Buzz panted, sweat streaming down his face. ‘Find that fucking cage.’
They raced along rough paths between the thick stalks of grass, their pursuers almost on top of them, and then several things happened at once.
First, Neb gave up. His heart was pounding frighteningly fast. His legs and lungs burned with a pain he had never known even on his worst day with Meathead. Sweat stung his eyes. He was running at full tilt, and then his legs just mutinied. He fell and rolled in the dust, and a significant part of him was glad. He simply could not go another meter.
Second, something low to the ground but huge, like an outsize, fast-moving crocodile, scuttled across the path in front of them, disappearing into the grass. ‘What the everliving fuck,’ Mallory said. The thing had passed only a few meters from him. Neb was still sliding to a stop in the dust as the creature ran by, and he would have screamed in fear if he had the breath to do so. Meathead reached down and grabbed Neb by the collar as he passed, heaving him to his feet and forcing him forward without breaking stride, as if this was a move they had often practiced. ‘It’s not nap time yet, Doc,’ he grunted.
Neb felt like he was a zombie, lumbering on with only partial control over his body. But then after only another few moments the cage loomed up out of the grass right in front of them. It was one of the smaller ones, about ten meters square.
‘INSIDE!’ Buzz roared, and they followed him without hesitation. Once they were all through the gate Meathead slammed it shut and rammed its bolt home.
‘Positions,’ Buzz ordered tersely. All of the men had chests heaving, sweat pouring down their faces. Gray and Anna were flushed from the exertion, but the run had clearly not taken as much out of them. Neb was shaking, both from the run and from fear. He smiled to himself, feeling slightly insane. He had thought, from all the training they had done, that he was fit.
There was a strange and incongruent moment of peace as they caught their breath, their heart rates slowing. The long grass rustled in a cool evening wind. The sun was drifting towards the horizon.
‘Ahooooyyyyyy there,’ called a toothy, high-pitched voice from somewhere out in the grass, speaking Cluster Common. ‘Good humans, you ran right where you were herded.’
‘Eyes,’ Buzz whispered fiercely, but no-one could see the speaker. The world was filled with a heavy, tense silence.
‘Show yourself!’ Buzz shouted. It was so commanding that Neb felt the instinct to react.
‘Nooooo I don’t think so,’ the voice called back. ‘You’ve got some pop-pops left in those pea-shooters, I think. Not much though, I bet. But I am generous, and I will offer you a deal.’ There was a clanging sound high up in the bars of the cage and then something fell heavily to the ground just outside, landing in the dust. It was like a combat knife but with additional hooks and blades sprouting from it. It was an evil-looking thing.
‘That’s a Marinak funerary knife,’ the voice said. ‘Returned to us from our transport crate. A dying warrior on our home world uses it to finish the job himself, and the brutality of the knife shows the world that the brutality of the enemy is nothing. The knife pulls and tears and breaks, but the warrior does not cry out.’
Neb felt slightly ill looking at the weapon. It was like something from a shameful period of the deep past.
‘Send one of your group out to be sacrificed, and we will spare the rest,’ the goblin said. ‘Show us some fucking courage, instead of just scuttling into your cage.’
The silence hung and hung. The grasslands seemed empty. The goblins all kept well out of sight.
‘So humans are just cowards like everyone says?’ the goblin leader said. ‘Will none of you sacrifice yourselves for the greater good?’
‘Go fuck yourself!’ Buzz yelled back, and from all around them, the night lit up with howls and yells and shouts of glee.
‘So be it, you fucking cowards! So be it!’ the leader screamed. ‘You are cowards and you will die a coward’s death!’
Out in the twilight a fire started to burn, catching from a small flame and then billowing rapidly upwards in the summer-dry grass. It gathered momentum quickly, spreading towards the cage, and smoke wafted over the humans.
Buzz looked back at the team. He didn’t speak, but the message in his flinty blue eyes was: I think we’re fucked.