Michael stoked the fire of their camp a bit as the light of the sun started to rise. He’d taken the last two watches since he needed less sleep than the others. The night had felt long for some reason. Lots of reminiscing about his family, friends, and his life before. It was the hardest when they were travelling and he wasn’t able to keep himself occupied. When they were in Southwind he could train, or run, or go into town for an early walk, or even find others who were having trouble sleeping and speak with them. On the road it was nothing but him and his thoughts. His prayers helped, as did the whispers of the gods, but they didn’t make the thoughts go away. That was for the best, though. The sadness, his thoughts of his family, anchored him. As often as they made him sad, they also made him happy and it was well worth the trade.
He stood and stretched, taking a sweeping look along the treeline. They had seen some signs of some kind of activity nearby. There were small fires, bones of tiny animals, and a number of leavings and broken twigs. Unfortunately since it was only Michael and the other Stent takers they didn’t have the expertise to identify exactly what it was, but they were being wary as they made their way toward the fishing village they’d been told of.
Pyotr was the first to wake, giving Michael a nod before stumbling a short way into the woods to relieve himself and then coming back to slam half a canteen of water and push back his unruly black hair.
“Good morning, brother,” he said, taking a seat next to him by the fire and nibbling on some salted fish he’d pulled from his pack. “How are you and your gods today?”
“I’m alright, the gods are… eager? There’s a kind of excitement to their words.”
Pyotr nodded. “I think they just like to talk to you. You’re their most special boy after all.”
“Emphasis on ‘special’,” said Ollie pulling himself from his tent. It was always comical watching him exit a tent, it was like watching a very long hermit crab pull itself out of its shell. He stretched, his hand brushing some of the leaves on the trees above them, then he muttered a few soft curses under his breath and his canteen floated out of the tent to him where he sipped from it.
“Your limbs are going to start atrophying at this rate,” said Michael.
“It’s for the best. We’ll use him as a rope, or a collapsible bridge to cross rivers with,” said Pyotr.
“You’d both do it if you could. Envy is a bad shade on you.”
Pyotr raised an eyebrow and muttered something in Russian, causing his own canteen to float to his lips as well. It wasn’t quite as steady, but he winked at Ollie as he took a sip.
“Fine, I’ll allow Pyotr the high ground. Michael, you can go fuck a crocodile.”
Michael laughed and shook his head.
It wasn’t much longer before Davi and Marcus woke up as well. Everyone took their time with breakfast and breaking down camp before they got back onto the road and started walking.
“The village I heard about should be just a few more hours away,” said Marcus, who’d been kind enough to gather the directions they needed for the trip. They’d only been on the road for two days, so that meant as long as they’d be able to get on the water that day they should be able to make their way back to Southwind before the week was up.
They walked for around an hour, finding several more signs of recent movement in the woods around them as they went. Eventually Marcus held up a hand.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Something's nearby. Something small, and-”
“AHHHHHHH!” came a scream from the woods as what appeared to be a green toddler with an oversized head filled with rows of sharp teeth charged at them from the treeline holding a spiked club.
Pyotr barked a surprised yelp and kicked it in the head, his enhanced boots causing the kick to land with such force that the creature's head snapped backward and it actually rolled as if flew into the trees behind it.
Nearly twenty more of the things ran at them shortly after, all of them holding knives that to them were like swords, or crude clubs, or even spears. Up until this point, Michael had encountered a Griffin, giant beasts, enemy soldiers, and rift creatures of all kinds, but there was something so uniquely terrifying about something so small moving so quickly and violently toward you with evil intent that it actually made him yell a bit as he drew his mace and struck out with it. It was like seeing a spider or a roach running toward you.
Luckily, while they were so uniquely disconcerting for him, they also died easily. Michael tore them from his armor and bashed them on the ground two at a time. Pyotr danced around them kicking them as fast as he could, unable to actually draw his sword he’d been so swarmed by them, though he did manage to blast a few with fire that actually launched themselves at him by leaping off their fellows shoulders. Davi was just picking them up and slamming them down as quickly as he could. Ollie actually had to create a shield for himself and Marcus as they’d quickly taken a number of wounds. From inside of it they bashed them away with staff and rifle butt.
The only real difficulty was that none of them were used to fighting such small opponents. You had to bend forward to hit one, and while you did that another would slip behind and stab at you back. Add on the inflexibility of full plate and they became surprisingly dangerous foes.
It was over after only a few minutes, but they were all panting and wild-eyed by the end of it.
Davi lifted one of the corpses by the long green ears to look more closely at it, though he held it at a distance as if even touching it was distasteful.
“Goblins?” He asked the rest of them.
“Probably,” said Michael. “They definitely match the description I’ve heard. Though I didn’t expect them to be so…”
“Fucking awful?” asked Marcus.
Michael took a moment to heal everyone. It was mostly minor cuts, but Marcus and Ollie had taken some real damage before Ollie'd managed to get the shield up.
Davi was poking at one a bit, flipping it over. Its stomach was distended and its ribs were showing. “They must’ve been very hungry to try and attack us. I hadn’t heard that they were stupid, and it must’ve been clear that they wouldn’t be able to take on so many well armed and armored foes.”
“Better us than someone that wouldn’t be able to defend themselves,” said Michael, as he finished sealing a cut on his own leg last.
“I’d’ve picked someone else,” replied Marcus. “I think I’ll stay in Southwind next time. Deal with the boredom and the enmity of my fellow gamblers.”
Once Michael was done healing they got back on the road, eager to leave the goblin corpses behind as quickly as possible. After about an hour the air changed, and a heavy mist began to obscure their vision. It was heavy enough that Michael could feel his clothing starting to get wet behind his armor, and he could see drops of water running along the edges of his helmet's visor.
When the mist grew thick enough that they could no longer see where they were walking, Ollie summoned a number of orbs of light and set them to float around them. That helped them to increase their pace, and the mist actually cleared a bit as they made it further down the road. Eventually a small village came into view a hundred feet ahead of them. It was lit by soft light that made the stilted buildings on the water look like strange creatures walking along its surface. The buildings all looked to be made of driftwood even though they were almost definitely cut from the nearby forest. As they closed in, Michael realized that the pale lights on the village buildings were all actually large lanternflies that were lit up in a myriad of different hues. ɴᴇᴡ ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ ᴘᴜʙʟɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴏɴ novel{f}ire.net
“Do the giant bugs remind you of home?” Pytor asked Ollie.
They found a set of rickety steps and walked up it, seeing from the higher vantage point that a number of boats were out on the water, lit in the same way as the village. A white shape landed next to Michael and made him jump, swinging around to look at it.
A winged cocked its head at him, then squinted yellow eyes as it looked at the rest of them. Its feathers were mostly white and tipped in gray and it looked to Michael like an overgrown seagull about to beg for fries.
“What do you want?” it asked.