A tremor ran through her as she glanced at the dark patch of snow in the flickering torchlight. Though it appeared grey now, she knew by morning it would be a rusty red. Pushing the nausea back down, Jun returned to her work. Nestled against her neck, Shiori napped in the depths of her hood, her Master's fur and body helping to stave off the winter chill as images of the short fight continued to play in her head.
Her team had been quick to catch up, bursting through the trees only seconds after Jun killed the lookout, weapons and spells ready before they realized the immediate threat was taken care of.
With nothing to fight, they split up with Keira going back to take care of the other lookouts, while the rest of them started looting their small outpost. Michael silently took charge of the lookout's body while Jun joined Aya and Cian in taking anything useful and shoving it into their bags. As they set to work, Jun vaguely noticed that her team was discussing something, but she was preoccupied replaying that mad dash chasing down the lookouts.
It was far from the first time she'd killed. Those first weeks alone with Shiori she had killed plenty of forest creatures for food, and she killed dozens of goblins on her way out of the Forest, first in rage as she realized what the goblins Shiori captured did to innocents, then the second time instinctively to save her future friends and roommates. The killing hadn't stopped after she left the Forest either. She helped capture those goblins with her teammates, only to let them be swiftly executed. She helped her roommates kill the slavers and hid their bodies, then killed more creatures during her bounties, and her actions had led to a family of nobles being executed.
Hunting for food wasn't pleasant, but it was necessary, and none of those creatures had spoken to her like Shiori did. In her mind, Shiori had always been a person, different from the animals she hunted or had hunted her. Then the goblins were different. The first time, her mind had been clouded with rage and grief, and she saw them as mere monsters, not people. Then she saw the evidence that they were more, and she started to have doubts. Every other time she'd fought to protect others or herself from a direct threat. She'd stopped using lethal spells, focusing on defense and throwing her enemies off balance. Anything to minimize the amount of blood on her hands from every fight.
But it didn't truly help. Her actions still led to the deaths of others. Monsters didn't make weapons or build camps or have their own language. People did. Even if goblins looked radically different from her with their small statures and green skin, and though they were murderous and took grisly trophies from innocents, they were still people. The slavers and nobles who supported them were also people, even though their actions were monstrous and predatory. Taking another person's life wasn't simple and guilt free, but she could still justify her actions even though her hands were covered in blood. Rage blinded her. They were about to harm others. She didn't strike the killing blow, that was the choice of others. Execution was a decision of justice made by people far above her.
Excuses, but ones that kept her feeling innocent. But tonight changed things. The goblins had attacked first, even harming her, she idly recalled as she reached up to wipe crusted blood away from her cheek. But it was just a scratch, something that Michael had healed in less than a second really. But then they ran, only fighting to try and save each other, but she chased them down. The first goblin she'd knocked over and didn't know what happened to it, but she could guess easily enough. The second though, she killed outright. She grabbed it from behind and it had only fought to try and save itself, and she killed it. Intellectually she knew that leaving it alive wasn't an option, that if it warned the horde her friends would be in serious danger, but that excuse wasn't cutting it for some reason.
Bile rose up her throat again but she swallowed it back down with a grimace. Every justification, every excuse, every evasion felt weak and hollow. The truth was obvious. She was a killer, and it was something she had to live with. She needed to accept that she was a killer, and that she would kill again. The life she chose, that of an adventurer, wouldn't let her avoid killing. She could use all the snares and barriers she wanted, and she still would, but when it came down to taking a life to protect others or holding back, she'd taken lives.
Blinking, she refocused on what she was doing, her hands oily as she stood among the mostly vanished signal fire, just a few more pieces of wood left that she hadn't shoved into her bag while stuck in her thoughts.
The missing lookouts would be noticed sooner or later so they were on an unknown amount of time. It could be hours, or it could be minutes, but there were things they could do. Jun had taken it upon herself to start taking anything flammable from the camp, the work easy enough that she'd been able to think as she did it. With new focus, Jun finished picking up the last of the oil-soaked logs and moved on. Before long, she ran out of things to shove into her bag and joined her teammates as they stood in the cleared camp debating what to do next.
"—ambush the replacements, then go," Keira argued, gesturing towards the small trail that seemed to lead back down the ridge.
"We don't know how long that could be sister," Cian replied. Jun hid her surprise. Normally the warrior was quiet, rarely talking and almost never disagreeing with his twin, but she must have missed something while she was zoning out.
"The longer we stay here, the more we risk discovery. It will take time to sneak back out of the goblins' perimeter. Time we don't have. We're not all as fast or stealthy as you Keira," Michael said with a pointed look at the scout.
"What do you think Jun?" Keira said, looking at her with fierce eyes. The rest of her team turned to look at her as well, putting her on the spot.
Jun flinched at the sudden attention. From what she could recall, it sounded like both Cian and Michael wanted to go immediately, while Keira wanted to ambush the next set of lookouts. Both made sense, but she wasn't some tactical genius. As she wrestled with indecision, a gust of wind blew through the small clearing, the chill cutting through her layers of clothes. That was enough for her.
"We don't have our bedrolls or tents with us and can't risk a fire for warmth. The longer we're away, the longer we're exposed to the elements, and Arwen's alone in our camp doing who knows what..."
Keira opened her mouth to argue, but Aya spoke up in a commanding tone only partially undercut by her chattering teeth. "It's freezing out here and it will only get colder deeper into the night. As it is, it'll take us hours to get back to camp even with Jun transporting us, and we'll still need to figure out what we're doing from there. We're going now."
Nobody argued. Finished with their looting, the party quickly left the clearing, Keira following behind to cover up their tracks, just in time for a new flurry of snow to fall. With luck, anything they missed would be buried in an hour.
Garug flexed is aura again, reveling in his new strength. He wasn't the only one. Horde Leader Kranesh had elevated all of the raid leaders he found worthy, a generous measure of sharing strength uncommon amongst the people. The amount of precious kaba shared had been enough to take a single goblin from the bottom of the Second Step to the peak of the Third, or enough to break through from the peak of the Third into the Fourth, yet instead Kranesh had shared, elevating not just Garug, but his Second Drecu and three other raid leaders. It was a generous gesture, but most Horde Leaders would find it too dangerous creating more rivals of the same step.
But Kranesh hadn't stayed in the same step for long. While the rest took the Third Step, Kranesh had taken the Fourth, his aura vanishing as it concentrated down until they couldn't feel it anymore. Normally such a thing would cause chaos in a camp as the leader's aura vanished, but the Fourth Step was different. Instead of a stronger aura, links had formed between all of the goblins in the area. It made each member of the horde distinctly aware of each other and bound further to Kranesh's will, the Horde Leader's strength flowing through the bond to make them stronger.
Through the new bond and his newborn aura, Garug could feel the surrounding camp and only barely hid his surprise. His fellow raid leaders and Drecu weren't the only ones to have taken the Third Step. Prin was at the Third Step as well, though by the way she restrained her aura Garug didn't realize it until she started teaching the newly ascended to control their powers.
As they trained deep into the night getting used to their new abilities, Garug couldn't help but feel heady with anticipation. The horde's patrols were already hunting for the humans, and when they were found, the People would have vengeance for their fallen. First on the humans who thought they could invade the People's lands, then on their fortress and the honorless lands beyond.
Jun cursed under her breath, and she wasn't the only one. Sneaking in past the last valley hadn't been easy, but they only had to dodge a patrol every hour or so, most of their time spent covering their tracks on the way in. Now though, it seemed they spotted a new patrol every few minutes and it was making things even slower. Even worse, the patrols weren't just in the last valley they had to sneak through in the afternoon.
As they climbed their way up the next ridge, what greeted them was another lookout station with a dominating view of the surrounding area. Jun and her team had briefly debated killing the lookouts, but the way they hugged close to the signal fire meant that doing so risked bringing down the horde on them. Too dangerous.
The only luck they had was that the lookouts were focused on the flatter foothills below, letting the students skirt around further up the ridge. From their vantage point further up, the scope of their problem became more obvious. Moving dots of light throughout the foothills made it obvious that the goblins were still patrolling late at night, practically scouring the surrounding area. The number of torches and bright moonlight made the landscape eerily bright in the night as all of the light scattered and reflected off the falling snowflakes.
Still, that worked to their advantage a bit since the amount of light would make Jun's spells less obvious. After hours of sneaking about through the snow, being able to move quickly again was freeing, especially since the moonlight made it just bright enough for easy travel. With every valley they pushed through the number of lights nearby dropped, and the more confident Jun and her teammates grew.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Right up until Jun plowed through the middle of a patrol.
Surgash held back a snarl as he trudged through the snow, his hands all but frozen against the haft of his spear. Horde Leader ordered them to patrol, so they patrolled. Not just during the day, but at night too. Hours from camp they still patrolled, looking for traces of stupid humans.
Gormac thought he spotted a sign earlier, a weird trail across one of the valleys, but they didn't go back to report it. Instead the squad leader forced them to follow the trail, climbing up a ridge and then back down into the next valley. Then it started to snow. Climbing down an icy ridge without ropes was dangerous, and Gormac slipped halfway down, knocking into Porga and sending their expensive lantern knocking out of her hands to tumble and shatter against an outcropping of rocks below. Followed by Porga.
Surgash hadn't known her well, the girl only recently getting added to their patrol by raid leader Corma, but any loss of one of the People was unfortunate. Still, a death falling against the rocks at the bottom of the cliff was better than death at the hands of humans since her honor remained intact. At least Gormac let them take the time to retrieve Porga's body and bury her in a makeshift grave. it wasn't a warrior's pyre, but it would do until they could retrieve her later. Whenever that was.
As soon as the last stone covered Porga's body and a hastily lashed together marker was stabbed into the snow, the squad leader forced them to search the valley for more signs of the strange trail. At night. In the snow. Without a lantern.
For the tenth or twentieth time that night, Surgash gritted his teeth as he stared at Gormac's back, his nearly numb hands itching on his weapon as he eyed the squad leader's weak spots. A quick stab and getting the other two to join him in a story about Gormac also slipping and impaling himself on a tree, and they could grab Porga's body and return to camp and a warm bowl of stew. But it wouldn't actually work. The raid leader would know, or the Horde Leader. Even now Surgash could feel the link from miles away. It wasn't the familiar aura the Horde Leader coated them with when they went into battle but something different. But it still carried the Horde Leader's presence. Surgash was sure the Horde Leader would notice if he stabbed his squad leader in the back. Plus, if Gormac died, who would take the blame for—
Surgash's mind went blank as a glowing tentacle wrapped around him, the cold touch draining something from him as its grip tightened and pulled him out of formation. He barely had the time to scream as he flew through the night, before a sharp pain lanced through his head, and then he knew nothing.
Jun expected a lot of things with her new method of travel, especially since this was only her third time using it. Jerking movements, the occasional slip, even the muttered complaints from some of her friends as the touch of her snares drained their mana. What she hadn't expected was for the stump she grabbed to start feeding her mana and scream as it came loose and flew towards her instead of pulling her to it, nor for the stump to turn into a flailing goblin that Cian casually stabbed through the skull with his spear.
Hot droplets of blood splashed across her face as the goblin's screams cut out, but that wasn't the end of things. Despite the loss of her expected anchor point, Jun's forward momentum kept them going and she was able to recover with a hastily positioned pair of tendrils that launched them forward and past a trio of dark shapes that she belatedly realized were the rest of the patrol. Before she could do more than snag a pair of trees to slow herself down, Cian and Keira had launched themselves off of the small basket she'd woven out of some of her spell's tendrils. Screams of pain and squelching filled the air as Jun came to a stop and turned around with Michael and Aya still gripping the edge of the basket, only to find the fight already over with the twins already looting the goblin patrol.
With the late hour and the unknown clock they were on before the goblins found the slain lookouts, and now a slain patrol, they didn't have time to do more than snag the ears, weapons, and belts of trinkets from the four goblins and throw them into their storage bags before moving on, though Jun started to move slower and avoid hooking herself to anything unless necessary, instead skittering across the landscape on her snare tendrils like some demented spider with her team taking turns resting uncomfortably while she carried them.
This proved an unnecessary precaution as they encountered no more patrols, and by the wee hours of the morning they were back in their hidden camp being greeted by an irritated Arwen woken by their hasty preparation of a late dinner. Exhausted by the longer than planned scouting mission, the students retired to their tents with Jun excused from the watch rotation.
The next morning, Jun woke to the sound of horns clamoring across the icebound land.
Samuel frowned at the edge of the snowcapped Forest. His team had been hunting the goblin raiding group ever since they'd started the expedition, and yet all they managed to do was fight off a couple of small patrols, not that they were much of a challenge. Paladin Brava hadn't said much about their performance so far, but they were all sure the man wasn't impressed with the results so far. Ten goblin kills was hardly impressive for an Iron ranked team, especially when they were in an Iron ranked region.
Not that Samuel would have chosen this region himself. It was too far from the other expedition teams, the information a bit more outdated than other areas, and it was only a single Iron ranked region surrounded by Bronze threats. It was barely enough for a single Iron ranked team, let alone three of them. But Melody and her friends insisted on this region not long after the group Keira and her brother were with split off. Awfully convenient that the region Melody and her friends chose also seemed to be around the same area Keira's group headed for. He didn't understand the obsession the girls on his and Chao's team had with that girl Jun even though they certainly complained about her every night.
He'd seen her in the Sergeant's class, sparred with her a few times too, and while she was okay with a shield, she was pathetic with basically every other weapon, barely acceptable. The only impressive thing he'd seen was the time she tied up Ivar and his idiot friends in Galimund's class, but if Mara and Gina were to be believed, the girl didn't even use true offensive magic. A mage that only used a single control spell was hardly someone to obsess over, let alone an opponent to worry about.
Still, his teammates' obsession with the girl meant that he and Chao were along for the ride, and it was going poorly. They'd set a brisk pace to try and catch up to Melody's rival, but they'd definitely fallen behind, probably because Melody had insisted that first day on checking every single side trail for things her supposed rival might have missed. The second day, they found a surprisingly well put together campsite that was probably built by the other team, but nothing else of interest. That night things got a bit interesting when a goblin patrol attacked while they were cooking dinner, but it wasn't much of a challenge. Chao and Emily held them off for a minute until he and Gina picked them off with arrows and spells. Paladin Brava hadn't even looked up from the campfire as he and Mara kept working on dinner during the fight.
The second patrol they fought the next day was more interesting at least. They'd found the tracks of a large group of goblins, probably a full raiding party by Samuel's guess, and he and Chao were able to convince Melody to follow the trail. Though that might've been because he'd lost track of Keira's team's trail. His fellow scout was disturbingly good at covering tracks after all. That he'd managed to follow them as long as he did was a minor miracle.
Still, he'd been excited to have a new target, and the glory of taking out a full raiding party as a first year team excited him. Or it would have if they could find the damned goblins, he thought to himself with a curse. Following the trail through the Forest had been easy enough, at least until they got to the edge. Wherever the goblins were headed, it wasn't in the trees at the very edge of the Forest, but a step deeper into the foothills and mountains just beyond the outermost layer of the Forest of Kresh. And of course, that's also where Samuel lost them. His best guess was that it must've snowed overnight while they camped beneath the icecap, and that snow wiped out whatever signs there were to follow. The only thing telling him they were even still out there was the goblin war horns he could hear in the distance, but he wasn't stupid enough to want to go find them. From the number her heard, it was far more than a single raiding group, and they were hunting something.
Sighing, he turned to talk to his teammates, already dreading the scowls he'd get from Melody, Gina, and Emily when he told them they needed to run.
On the snowy plains between the outskirt mountains and the first layer of the Forest, Ivar snarled and twirled his massive two-handed axe around him, the two-sided crescent blade cleaving three goblins in half as they futilely tried to pierce his thick armor. A short distance away, Roger and Karl bellowed war cries as they smashed through the goblins surrounding them, their weapons rising and falling in brutal swings that sent steaming blood spraying out onto the snow-covered ground. Behind him, he knew that Clint and Hunter were back-to-back, fighting far more defensively but the quick thrusts of their efficient style meant the goblins would run out of bodies before Ivar's comrades started to sweat, and every few seconds the deep thrum of Hunter's war bow announced another of the spears he called arrows had just punched through the ranks of the goblins.
While their heavy armor made them tougher than most other teams in a straight up fight, goblins weren't known for fighting fair. Somehow, half a raiding party heard they were coming and set an ambush. Easily a hundred goblins, more than enough to kill the average Iron ranked team. Still, it wasn't enough. When the goblins started their ambush, Ivar was the first one into the fray, charging through their lines and cleaving their shamans in half with a few quick swings of his axe. The idiots hadn't done more than cast a simple barrier that Ivar's axe smashed through like a simple clay pot. The anti-magic enchantment he spent most of his earnings on was worth it. Stupid mages, Ivar had thought to himself. Only good for petty tricks and useless when something got in their face.
Unbidden, the image of two pretty girls, one with black hair and the other with a dark purple, came to mind, sending rage coursing through his body. The mages cheated, tying an honorable warrior like himself up when all he did was offer to protect them in the wilds. Ungrateful bitches. Because of their tricks, Ivar, Roger, and Karl hadn't been able to find a team and had been thrown in with the remaining students. All of them warriors. No healers, no mages, no scouts. Just honest and honorable men with blades cast aside and treated like dregs. If not for Hunter, who'd grown up hunting in the mountains around the city, their team would have to resort to throwing rocks to deal with anything at range, like the cursed monster birds and spitting spiders that infested this layer of the Forest.
Still, he didn't hate his team. Good, solid men who understood the value of heavy armor and good steel weapons. And even though their advisor was an orc, he was one of the good ones. Massive brute of a man that knew how to leverage strength and weight in battle, and a master of every weapon. Ivar had been good with a blade before, but Ghorro taught him how to be excellent.
Using Ghorro's teachings, Ivar hooked the crescent of his blade around a goblin's leg, pulling it to the ground and leaving a gap in the creatures' line that he bullied his way through. A well placed stomp of his heel sent his iron-shod boot smashing through the downed goblin's skull in a spray of blood and brain even as he braced for another wide swing that severed limbs and cleaved torsos. Hungry for more blood, for more glory, Ivar whirled around looking for his next target, only to be disappointed. That was the last of the monsters, the last few of the goblins already sprinting back into the Forest.
With the battle over, he immediately set to work harvesting his kills, throwing the severed ears into a stained sack. After the expedition he'd buy one of those storage bags, he thought to himself. They weren't as manly as carrying his belongings on his back, but the usefulness outweighed how weak it made him seem. Expensive though. Marching through the Forest with a bedroll and a bunch of dried food strapped to his back had almost made him regret spending all his money on plate and an enchanted axe, but the battle proved he was right to do so. Where the rest of his team were bandaging themselves or popping bits of healing pills to heal wounds where the greenies got through armor, all Ivar had was a few bruises that'd be gone in a few hours thanks to his high Constitution.
A lack of mages wouldn't keep him down. And, once he caught up to that purple haired bitch and her friend, he'd prove to her just how weak she truly was.
https://www.patreon.com/NekoSaigai
