Harb awoke to the sound of a loud horn that made a noise like someone was blowing into a conch shell. He exited his tent and found the camp bustling with activity. He followed the masses to the other side of the camp. They all formed a semicircular ring around three Orcs. Harb was surprised to see that two of them were clearly female. The one in the center was either the clan leader or the leader of this expedition. She was lean and scantily clad—like a cave woman, Harb thought. Her nipples stood erect under the bit of cloth that was covering just a tiny portion of her small breasts. She wore what appeared to be a loincloth affixed to a belt with a few pouches arrayed around it and some sort of headdress complete with horns. That was all that she wore, save for some leather cords around her wrists and ankles that looked like they were more for decoration than function. The woman even lacked any sort of footwear. She carried a wooden staff that spread out at the top in a compact antler formation.
Harb recognized Vultag, who was standing to her right. He was dressed for battle now and stared straight ahead, unmoving. On her left was another woman. This one wore an abundance of clothing that looked like it was made of fine blue cloth with fur trimming it everywhere it could. She even had a matching cloak. She was shorter than the leader, and while she was not fat, she looked it by comparison. She had a head of burgundy hair that she wore so that only her left ear was visible, which was quite a feat given that her ears were significantly larger than those of any of the males that he had seen. She wore no armor, but there was a shoulder protector on her left shoulder that looked like a large shoulder pad or small buckler. The pad was decorated with the insignia of a bloody ear emblazoned in the center.
The leader held up her staff, and the crowd grew silent. “Our spotters have found a small caravan heading towards Ildul,” she said loud enough for all to hear. “Tonight, we strike, but these foes will be no unskilled Gnolls or even from another of the clans who die easily to our blades.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Tonight, we fight Dwarves!” she cried, lifting her staff over her head to the cheers of the surrounding Orcs. When the cheering subsided, she continued, “The Dwarves are guarding something so important that they have brought Humans with them for protection. We will take their riches, and tomorrow we feast!” Another round of cheers erupted, and she lowered her staff and turned and nodded to captain Vultag. The captain turned and walked over to one of the scouts, who then gathered the other scouts and headed out of the valley.
The soldiers began following in the direction that the scouts had gone, and Harb fell in line. They traveled at a brisk pace for nearly three hours, alternating between jogging and running. The scouts had run ahead, and when he asked one of his neighbors the reason for the speed, the man simply stated that this was how it was done. Being new to the game, he had no idea of the strength of anything, monster or otherwise, but it seemed reckless to travel like this. Moving this fast was bound to draw attention to the large group, even with the scouts roaming ahead to set their path. Harb had seen some of the scouts flanking the group or stationed atop a hill as the group ran by, so there would at least be some warning if anything attacked them.
He did like the fact that he had already traveled close to fifteen miles and, while very tired, was still able to maintain his pace. He activated his HUD and checked his status bars to see how he was faring. There were three bars: a red one for his health, a purple one for his mana, and a green one for his energy. The first two were at 100%, but his energy bar was just under 25%. He hoped that this camp wasn’t much farther, or he would be running on empty when they started raiding. He wished there was a way to keep the status bars up even when his HUD was not active.
His thought must have activated something, because suddenly his HUD shut down and the status bars remained in his vision. It was mostly translucent, but whenever he lost more energy, the bars grew more opaque and updated the loss. He still felt fine, but several of the Orcs around him were beginning to flag from the prolonged exertion.
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Harb activated his HUD again, this time to look at his mapping feature. Other than the area that he had just recently run through, the map was generally either black or gray. The black clearly represented places he hadn’t visited, and the gray showed places he’d been but was no longer close to. This was a typical fog-of-war mapping system, only there was less information in the gray area than he would have expected. Normally, a map of this style would keep more features in the gray area and would update with new information when you visited the place again. This map, however, kept only notable things, like a hill or a stream. There was, however, a beacon for his spawn point as well as a marker for the Orc camp located right next to that. The camp had more features than anything that he had passed on this run-to-nowhere. He attributed that to the extra time that he had spent in the camp. Other than those, the map was devoid of markers.
Harb noticed that the Orcs in the lead had begun to slow, so he followed suit. They gathered next to a small stream, where many of them stopped to drink. Everyone was breathing heavily except for four of the scouts that he didn’t recognize. This was unremarkable, as he had spent little time in the camp. It was odd, however, that it didn’t look like these four had run at all. He could see their breath in the cool night air, but everyone else was so hot that steam rose off of their scalps. They must have been the advance scouts that had located the target caravan in the first place.
The four men were speaking with Captain Vultag and the nearly naked woman with the staff. They had rested only a few minutes before there was a hushed order for them to move out again. Harb was tired, his energy having only slightly replenished—at least they were walking now. In real life, the longest distance that he had ever run was just over three miles, some of which he had walked. His endurance skill had advanced to level four during the run, so at least he had gotten something out of it.
He wondered at the body that he now had: Maybe my situation is actually like that movie Avatar, where Sigourney Weaver and whoever the main guy was had been hooked up to bodies that looked like the indigenous people of the planet—or was it a moon? Whatever, I could be in one of those pods and just mentally in this body.
Harb looked around as they walked, and it was clear that their numbers were definitely not what they had been at the start of the run. This apparently wasn’t a concern of the leadership, but he hoped that the change to a slower pace would allow the laggers to catch up. If the rest showed up after the fighting began without the chance to rest first, they would be severely hindered in the battle. Harb didn’t see any advantage to this strategy, which made him question the competence of the people in charge. They were Orcs, though, so maybe stupidity was just part of the programming.
A soft light began to appear in front of the slowly advancing group of Orcs. Harb could also hear sounds coming from that direction. His dark vision ability allowed him to see several wagons and a few carriages up ahead. He caught a whiff of smoke, so the light was almost certainly from one or more campfires on the other side of the vehicles. The Orcs were making their own noise. The armor of the soldiers was clanking, but Harb didn’t think that they were close enough to be heard by anyone in the camp that they were approaching. Then again, anything was possible in a magical world. They could have spells going that detected or amplified sound, or there could be a skill or racial ability that gave some of them exceptional hearing. He would have to learn more about what was actually possible without giving away that he was not of this world.
An alarm from the camp sounded when they were still a good distance away from it, and the soldiers increased their pace to a strong jog to close the distance before the occupants of the camp had more time to prepare. Harb preferred to be cautious, and while he did begin to jog, he purposefully began to fall behind. The charging Orcs ran into resistance, and fighting broke out ahead of him. Harb veered to the left and angled towards one of the parked wagons. When he arrived, he used the wagon as cover and unshouldered his greataxe.