“Pull it down, Boys!”
Sorcha leapt into action, yanking hard on the rope she held in her hands at Jockel’s shouted command. She and Ricket and a half dozen of the others who Stavros had ordered behind pulled as hard as they could, ripping the crossbeam timbers out from the tower brace. With a frankly terrifying crack and pop, the whole makeshift structure buckled like a fat man’s worn-out walking cane as the stone tower over their heads began to lean and crumble.
“Out, out, out!” Ricket shouted at them all, his voice colored manic with his strange laughter.
Not that he needed to say anything, everyone had already turned tail and rushed out the north-facing tower door to get the fuck out of the doomed tower. No one in their right mind would willingly choose to stay put while several hundred tons of rock collapsed overhead. Choose to stay in demon infested territory to mine for eleria while the imperials were too busy to notice they were being robbed? Sure. That was a calculated risk, one that they had all agreed was worth it.
Tower collapsing? No. No, that wasn’t a risk, that was suicide.
And yet Ricket had somehow convinced Stavros that it was worth setting up the insanely over-the-top trap that required people to tear out the support struts from inside the tower. And even more insanely, Ricket had convinced Jockel to actually use the trap against the poor, stupid soldiers that had come hiking north for whatever reason.
Were the soldiers there to survey the land for demon activity? Maybe. Were they there because they’d figured out Stavros’ crew were mining eleria? Possibly. Were they an advance scout for a larger imperial force that planned to push back against the demon invasion and clear the area all the way to the mountains? Gods, hopefully not. Whatever the reason they were there, the soldiers’ presence meant it was time to pack up and move. Discretion was the better part of valor, as the goblins liked to say.
Unfortunately, Jockel and Ricket could be called just about anything but discreet.
An opportunity, Ricket had called it. A chance to wipe out a good portion of the imperials and force a delay to give the rest of the gang more time, Legs had added. Maybe, if they were lucky, they’d kill off enough of the soldiers that they’d be forced to turn back. Wouldn’t that just fix everything? Then they could get back to mining without worrying about more interruptions from authority figures, the two barley heads had proclaimed with the conviction of the righteous.
Except, as Sorcha had herself pointed out, unless they killed off everyone, the ones who lived would know for facts that their gang was operating in the area. And more to the meat of the matter, they’d have a serious bone to pick with them since they’d just murdered imperial soldiers.
Oh, but they know we’re here anyway, Legs had argued. He saw their scouts following their tracks. He saw them find Ricket’s traps at that shitty cabin by the river. He saw them coming straight their way. So there was no point in trying to hide their activity in the area when they were hot on their heels.
Sure there was, Sorcha had said. It was just a small group of maybe, what, twenty people, according to Legs? They couldn’t do a big search forever. The Great Southern Forest is a damn big forest. It wouldn’t be that hard to disappear into it. The mountains were even bigger, so the gang could hide out there if they needed to. Winter was coming, anyway. No one would be able to do a serious search once the snows hit.
But what about the giants? Legs had ranted on and on about the three giant women in ominous dark armor that were so strong they crushed frost drakes under their boots like ice skippers. He’d seen them do it! If they had a chance to get the jump on those deadly menaces before they could catch up to their main group, all the better, he’d said. They’d built the trap, Ricket had insisted. Why not use it to take out a threat while they could?
Hog shit.
Ricket had just seen an opportunity to use one of his traps and was taking it as he could. And Legs? If the giants he saw were real, and that was a big “If” when it came to the hyperbolic man, then they were, at best, a trio of orcs who stood a little taller than average. Probably a bunch of paid mercenaries, like half of the soldiers were that came out of Far Felsen.
Ominous dark armor her green ass. Who cared what color the armor was? Who cared about tall women? They could be as tall as Legs standing on Rickets’ head and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference when it came to levels. And, as Jockel had pulled from between Legs’ lying teeth, he’d pegged the group of soldiers as all around CLR forty to fifty. There were even some in the twenty range. The Giants? CLR fifty. A threat, to be sure, but not worth the freakout Legs had gone on, especially when they were all at the same level or higher.
And yet, despite knowing that the CLR of the soldiers that were coming their way made them a threat to their small group, they were ambushing them and trying to kill them off. Because Legs saw giants and Rickets wanted to use his blasted traps. And Jockel was a drunk who wouldn’t listen to good sense if it bit him in his flabby ass.
The plain truth of the matter was that the whole thing was a bad idea. Stavros had ordered them to stay back and watch the soldiers to get a gauge on where they were going and what their levels and resources were. Not to attack or try to delay, just observe. Don’t get in trouble, catch up when you can. Was that such a hard order to follow?
Apparently, yes. Which was why Sorcha found herself running as fast as her legs could carry her out of the collapsing tower, listening to Rickets cackle like a madman.
She was, of course, the last one out of the building. Still fast enough to avoid introducing her head to any new stones, but only just barely. She wasn’t exactly built for speed. As she exited, the tower collapsed behind her with a tremendous crash and clatter, tossing up a cloud of dust and debris that obscured half of the fort’s courtyard. Turning with the rest of her crew to check out the damage, Sorcha’s jaw dropped. The tower had fallen exactly as Rickets had said it would, smashing down on top of the old inn and flattening it completely, along with the whole fucking wall right behind it.
“Strike and shadow!” Jockel shouted from his lookout spot on the fort wall somewhere to Sorcha’s right. “Double time!”
That was the signal to move in and cut the throats of anyone who hadn’t been killed outright, then withdraw to the fallback point. Sorcha had hoped Jockel would have told them to just fall back, damage done and job over, but no. He wanted to make sure the unfortunate sods were dead.
Fine then. Sorcha would do her part. She could complain about the stupidity of the whole event once they caught back up with Stavros.
Pulling the blue-tinted bone wand from her belt, Sorcha cast her stealth spell onto the men and women near her. It wasn’t true invisibility, but the transparency that the spell gave to the group was more than enough to hide their approach considering the thick cloud of dust obscuring the area. As the nearly undetectable crew of thugs stalked into the debris cloud, Sorcha fell back to hide in the shadows near the northern gate. Switching her blue wand for her amber-yellow one, she huddled low and out of sight, but with a good view of the south side of the fort. If any of the imperial soldiers somehow came running out of the cloud in her direction, she had a spell in store for them. Not that she thought that anyone but her fellow thieves would be coming back her way.
As the cloud expanded and the wind carried it her way, Sorcha was careful to make sure her cloth mask was pulled up over her mouth and nose. The noxious tressleberry powder Ricket had set up in the inn had no doubt been stirred into the mix considering where the tower had fallen. Maybe someone had triggered the trap first and that had been the reason Jockel had given the command? Whatever the case, she still didn’t want to breathe in any more of that junk than necessary.
After a few seconds, noises began to emanate from the still obscured area. Ahead and to the left of the tower, she heard the sounds of her fellows getting to work, a familiar shout of pain and gasp of steel on flesh. At least a couple of them had found targets. Maybe someone had found one of the “giants” Legs had gone on about? If they had, Sorcha hoped that there was time to rub it in the stupid git's face how absolutely not giant the person was, whoever the soon-to-be-dead person was.
Further south, past where she could see, Sorcha could hear the sounds of more people running up. Probably more soldiers, she had to guess. She’d been in the tower and hadn’t seen a thing when the imperials had arrived, but she wouldn’t have been surprised to find that they’d split their forces into two, a forward scouting party and a rear guard. Which meant Jockel had signaled them to drop the tower on top of a couple of scouts. What a waste! At that realization, she revised her assessment on how many people had likely been taken out by the collapsing tower. Really, probably only a handful.
Except, why were there still sounds of fighting coming from the cloud? The sodding idiots really should have been back out by then. Didn’t they know the meaning of a strike and flee? If they expected her to go in and get them—
Sorcha’s dour thoughts were cut off abruptly as a body came flying out of the cloud. She nearly let out a shriek of fright as the man rolled across the ground, coming to a limp-limbed stop only a couple of feet away from where she hid.
“What the fuck…?” Sorcha whispered as she stared at an unconscious, possibly dead Fritzi.
The man’s arms were both broken, twisted up in odd angles, almost like all their bones had been removed. Or crushed to pulp. The sight was almost enough to make Sorcha gag. She’d seen a lot of terrible gore on the battlefield, but arms were not meant to be crumpled up like old socks.
“What the fuck!?” Sorcha squeaked out more loudly as a second body tumbled through the air.
This time it was Gitta. The woman’s stout form was tossed what had to be a dozen yards as though she weighed nothing. She landed in a heap ten or so feet away from Sorcha. She, at least, was alive, since she immediately began groaning and crawling away, as though she was going to pull herself through the north gate with her fingers alone.
As Sorcha stared speechless at Gitta’s battered form, her ears twitched at the sound of heavy, metal-shod feet approaching. Whipping her gaze back to the south, Sorcha’s eyes widened to saucers at the shadow that stalked out of the haze.
“What the FUCK.”
The looming figure was massive. Colossal. Gargantuan! She’d never seen anything like it! The huge, armored thing marched determinedly forward, a gigantic war hammer carried in front of it in two hands. As the details became clearer the closer it came, Sorcha realized that the weapon the figure carried was made of metal. Metal? That immense weapon was made of metal? How heavy was it? How heavy was the person, no, monster that was carrying it? The fuck was this black armored beast!?
The giant, the actual, literal, completely accurate giant, stomped ever closer. Sorcha couldn’t take her eyes off the horrifying sight as the massive monster approached. Its armored head tilted slightly, clearly glancing at the unmoving form of Fritzi, before turning to focus on the desperately crawling Gitta.
Coming to a stop just behind the prone human, the giant leaned forward, one huge hand reaching down to grab hold of poor Gitta. The moment stretched as time seemed to slow. What was it going to do once it had hold of Gitta? What was it going to do once it had hold of any of them?
“Shit me sideways!” Sorcha screeched out an unintimidating war cry as she leapt out from the shadows.
With a wave of her amber-studded bone wand, Sorcha cast her most powerful spell, hoping it would be strong enough to kill the giant before it turned on her and squashed her under its boot.
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