Expecting Visitors

The group had stopped for the night.

The air was chilly, especially because no fire had been lit, as it'd have only attracted the attention of whatever creatures were lurking in the woods.

Five sentinels were disposed around the camp, while the rest were trying to do their best to sleep despite the cold. Everyone was too tired for trying to make some conversation... but there were a couple of exceptions.

In a corner of the camp, surrounded by darkness, Ludd, the captain of the Brightsword, and Zeno the sorcerer were talking to each other. Although they were whispering, their tones were clearly angry and pissed.

"Can't we just cut her throat and dump her in the woods already?" Ludd asked "Or even just tie her to a tree and let the beasts do the job for us?"

"No, we can't!" Zeno replied "If it was so easy, we wouldn't have to follow her in this goddamn forest!"

"But why must it be so complicated!?! Would the curse affect anyone that would harm her?"

"Certainly not! But it would affect anyone trying to get her book after having her killed!" Zeno was talking with the exasperated confidence of a teacher explaining things to a retarded children "Magic does not obey the same rules of nature. The spirit of the magical rules is just as important as the letter. And most importantly, magic always start with a will."

"What do you mean?" Ludd asked, confused.

"I mean that her death should be the result of her decision in order for the curse to not activate." Zeno sighed "In layman terms, she has to have a choice on the matter."

"So you're telling me that she has to choose to die!?!" Ludd was bewildered "And how, pray tell, are you gonna make her take that choice? Only a bloody fool would choose death! And she doesn't strike me as a fool."

"Alas, I still don't have a detailed plan." the sorcerer replied, shaking his head "But I'm sure that a suitable occasion will arise during this mission!"

The mercenary was still bewildered, blinking at the caster, but then a sudden thought appeared in his mind. Ludd wasn't that bright, but he wasn't stupid either, and years of mercenary work, of pillaging, threatening and blackmailing people had forged his mind into something very devious.

"Uhmm... the girl seems pretty chummy with that red-haired boy, doesn't she?" he asked.

"Uh? Yeah, I guess so." Zeno replied, a bit confused by the question "Why are you asking?"

"Well, I'll tell you something." Ludd said, while making an evil smirk "Some people, especially young, idealistic ones, can get very irrational when one of their friends is in danger, and it's very easy for them to get killed." his smile widened, looking similar to that of a shark "I know this from experience."

The sorcerer looked at him in amazement for a few seconds, but then he started smiling too.

"You know what? You've got a point, Captain." he said in a very slimy tone "I think that young Felix has done us a big favor accompanying his girlfriend on this little stroll in the woods!"

On the other side of the camp, Klara was trying to sleep. She was on guard duty right before dawn, so she needed all the rest she could get.

Too bad that she had an annoyance sitting right next to her.

"Ehm... Klara, I know that you're still mad at me, but we need to talk." the boy said in the darkness "There something I need to tell you..."

"You're right, I'm still mad." the girl interrupted him "And right now I want to sleep. So shut up and let me be."

"But... this is important Klara!" Felix protested "I've got a suspicion about the Brightswords. I think they have come on this mission to kill you!"

Klara moaned, rolling her eyes in disbelief.

"Felix, that would be ridiculous." she said, turning to look at him in the eyes "I agree that Vicker could have easily payed them to provoke me at the village, but my house is not worth enough to justify joining this expedition and risking their lives."

"I know but... the sorcerer accompanying them, that Zeno..." the boy stuttered.

"What about him?" she asked with impatience.

"Well, he had stayed in Oakfell for at least a month, and during this time he never really interacted with the Brightswords." the young man explained "Actually, he never really did anything. He just stayed in the inn and sometimes spoke with people. He said that he was in the village to buy some magical reagents, but he didn't seem really interested in that..."

"I fail to see the connection between him and the Brightswords wanting to kill me." Klara interrupted him in an annoyed tone "Maybe he just has a debt and joined the mercenaries to pay it off. Nothing to worry about."

Felix remained silent for a few seconds, and when he spoke again his voice was dubious.

"Well, maybe it's just my impression, but to me it seems that the villagers started hating you only since he arrived in the village." the apprentice sorcerer said "I've even remembered him walking inside Gertrude's store when I was getting out... and it was after this that she had that change of heart. Before she talked to him, she told me that she wanted to help you..."

"Felix, this is completely nonsense!" Klara cried "I know that mind manipulation is illegal. Any wizard found messing with someone else's mind would be hanged immediately. And my house is simply not worth enough to justify such a risk!"

"Maybe they're not after your house." Felix replied.

"Then what would they be after, pray tell?"

"I don't know." the boy admitted "But it's just that it makes se..."

Suddenly, the boy seemed to have stopped talking, as no sound came out of his mouth.

But after a second, Klara realized that not only Felix's voice, but all sounds had disappeared from the world: she couldn't even hear her own heartbeat!"

"What's going on!?!" she thought, trying to say this out loud... but no sound came out of her mouth.

For a moment, she wondered if she had gone deaf, but then she saw that Felix was acting distressed too, holding his hand to his throat and seemingly trying, and failing, to emit sounds.

Klara looked around, alarmed, and it was then that she noticed many figures running around the camps and the frantic movements of people fighting, although the details were hidden by the darkness and she couldn't hear anything.

She immediately jumped up, picking up Felix too. She didn't know what was going on exactly, but one thing was clear: they were under attack, and if they did nothing they would be killed before they had a chance to react.

The problem was how to give the alarm since most of the group was asleep and with that unnatural silence they couldn't just shout to wake them up.

And to top it all off the darkness didn't help. The decision to not lit a bonfire had bitten them back, since they had been discovered anyway and now it was hard to see...

Suddenly, Klara had an inspiration. The darkness could actually help them, as an explosion of light would almost certainly wake up a lot of the people sleeping even without sounds. And Felix was certainly capable of conjuring something like that. She grabbed the boy's head, making him turn towards her, and tried to mimic an explosion with her hands, gesturing towards the apprentice mage.

It took a few precious seconds to convey her idea, and Klara started to panic as the figures started getting closer to the camp but then Felix suddenly understood and nodded.

He quickly took out a small, black stone from his pouch, gripped it strongly in his hand while murmuring something to himself, and then threw the stone, which at that point had started glowing, in the air.

The glowing stone exploded, and the area was lit up by a blinding white light. There was no sound but Klara, who had covered her eyes with her hands, could see many people suddenly rising from their resting spot, woken up by the sudden light. And beyond them, just at the limit of the camp, she saw the attackers, and she felt heart sank. It was goblins, and that in itself wasn't particularly scary, but a quick glance at their number was enough to make the girl terrified: there were no end to them. They were completely surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands, of goblins, with no possible chance of survival other than fighting their way out.

The humanoids right now had momentarily stopped their advance, blinded and confused by the light that kept shining in the air, but their daze lasted only for a few seconds before they resumed their attack.

Luckily, these precious few moments had given the humans a chance: Dagobert, the leader of the expedition, stood up, raising is sword and gesturing everyone to follow him, and charged at the goblins. The other two knights immediately followed him, and after a moment the rest of the group did the same, waking up those who were still asleep by shaking them and urging them to run.

Moving so fast that they were almost impossible to follow, the knights reached the goblins on the north and cut through them like a hot knife through butter. The other humans followed their lead, wedging themselves into the enemy formation and fighting to advance.

Klara was in the middle of them, using her short sword to stab everything on her way, and Felix followed her like a lost puppy, sometimes using his staff to knock an assailant away.

The Brightswords acted as the rearguard and fought like demons: they advanced without any trace of panic, methodically killing any goblin that tried to stop them while remaining in formation. Ludd in particular moved almost as fast as the knights, his sword a barely visible blur that left severed heads and bloody stumps in its wake.

It was kinda weird that there was no noise at all, but the light from Felix's spells was still lingering and together with the stars and the moon it was enough to let everyone fight well with their sight alone.

The battle was harsh, but for a moment it looked like the humans would have made it. The knights, which were all Aura Masters, seemed all but invincible, the hunters fought with a ferocity born from desperation and the mercenaries coldly and professionally dispensed death to every enemy that approached them.

Then another group of humanoids emerged from the darkness, similar to a wall of scales and muscles at least two meters high. On their flanks there were two formations of smaller, but still bigger than average, armored goblins, wielding pikes, spears and other pole weapons all pointed against the incoming humans.

Klara recognized them, and cursed in her mind. Those were hobgoblins, and to be more specific the big ones were orc-hobs and the armored ones were human-hobs. She knew that they were much stronger and more dangerous than the normal goblins they had faced so far, and sent a silent prayer to the gods to watch over her and Felix.

Then the knights reached the hobs, and there was no more time for idle thoughts.

Thanks to the strength of the Aura Masters, the group was still advancing but now it was taking a lot of casualties. The humongous clubs of the orc-hobs were all but impossible to parry and were taking a bloody toll on the lightly armored hunters, and the simple mass of the hobs was obstructing their advance.

If a man got injured or separated by the main group by any means then he was dead: there was simply no time to rescue him in this slaughter.

Klara was now grabbing Felix's hand, making sure he wouldn't get lost while she tried her best to keep up with the rest of the group. Luckily being in the center meant that she was protected from all directions, so they still had a chance to survive.

A few meters behind them, Ludd noticed the girl dragging her friend, and an evil smile appeared on his face.

Klara suddenly felt Felix being jerked away from her. She turned around immediately and she saw the apprentice wizard flying in the air, a shocked expression on his face, after being thrown away by Ludd, who was making an evil smile at her, as if daring her to go rescue her friend.

Without a sound, Felix landed away from the group, at the feet of an orc-hob who stumbled upon the young boy, before looking down and raising his mace to hit him.

Klara acted on instinct, without thinking. She immediately threw herself at the hob, stabbing his neck while he was distracted.

The hobgoblin fell, spraying blood on the girl's face, and she immediately grabbed Felix, trying to pull him up.

"We're still on time!" she thought frantically "We can still rejoin the group and escape from her..."

Klara didn't hear the boy's warning, as the unnatural silence was still present, but the sheer alarm and fear on his face tipped her off and she instinctively dived for cover at the same exact moment a humongous wooden club was swung at her.

The attack would have killed her if it had connected fully, since even something that could be barely called a glancing blow sent her flying a few meters.

Klara felt all the air leaving her lungs, while pain exploded in her torso. She then hit the ground, where she remained, too hurt to get up. Through her tear filled eyes she could see little dancing dots of light, and beyond that she could see the backs of the mercenaries disappearing into the darkness.

She and Felix had been left behind, and were now surrounded by the orc-hobs.

The girl tried desperately to get up, but her limbs didn't respond. The apprentice sorcerer tried to hurry to help her, but he was immobilized by another hob.

Meanwhile the one that had attacked Klara approached her, spat on the ground and lifted his mace to finish the work.

"No!" Klara thought with panic "I don't want to die! Oh gods please no! Please help me!"

She closed her eyes, waiting for the club to hit her.

But that blow never arrived.

A moment before the hob could drop his weapon on his victim, a huge shadow dropped from the sky right on the humanoid's face, and with a silent scream the hob stumbled backwards.

Before anyone else could react, three other shadows appeared and shot something in the face of the hobs, which caused them to jump back, obviously in pain and probably screaming.

Before anyone could do anything else, one of the shadows sweeped over Klara, grabbing her and lifting her from the ground. The sudden movement sent a shock of pain through her torso, and she felt her senses leaving her. The last thing she remembered seeing before fainting was Felix struggling as two of the shadows lifted him in the air.

In his cave more than ten kilometers away, Marcus was positively jittery with excitement.

The flying drones had been following the humanoid army for two days, as Marcus was just very curious to know what enemy justified such a deployment of troops.

Sadly, the gremlins were accompanied by those damn gargoyles, so the drones had to follow from a very long distance, and could only get closer during the night, when the darkness would hide their presence.

This was the reason why Marcus had discovered that the mysterious enemy the gremlins were facing was a group of humans only during the second night, and by then the humanoids had already started their attack.

Finding out about the humans had been a shock, as he had assumed that by this point he was on an alien world with no member of the human race present, but his joy and surprise had been greatly mitigated by the fact that the gremlins had surrounded them and were probably gonna kill them all.

A few weirdly dressed humanoids, each wielding staves decorated with skulls, had done something that involved a lot of dancing around, and suddenly all sounds had disappeared in a radius of two kilometers. After that, the gremlins had started their surprise attack, killing the human guards and preparing to slaughter the whole sleeping camp.

Luckily, things didn't go exactly their way, as a blinding light was somehow produced by the humans, waking the group, and they had started fighting their way out of the ambush.

The drones were watching the battle from the sky, and despite the humans fighting with incredible valor it was clear that they weren't gonna make it: they couldn't see it from the ground, but they were charging directly into the biggest formation of gremlins in the battlefield, at least one thousand of them that were waiting behind a smaller formations of those big, scalied humanoids.

It was then that Marcus decided that he needed to do something. He couldn't save all of the humans, not with just four drones, but he could at least try to get a couple of them.

Luckily, the chance presented itself very soon: a couple of young humans, a boy and a girl, had somehow been separated from the group, and were being surrounded by four of those big, fat gremlins with the maces. The rest of the humanoid army was concentrated on the rest of the humans, and this gave Marcus the window he needed to perform his rescue.

The flying drones had dropped from the sky, biting and spitting poison in the gremlins face, and while they were distracted screaming (although he couldn't hear them in this silence) the oversized dragonfly creatures had grabbed the two humans and fled to the sky.

The girl, which had probably been hurt in the fight, had simply stopped moving completely, fainting in the drone's clutches. Marcus hoped that she wasn't dead.

However the boy had been quite a problem, struggling to free himself from the drones, almost falling a couple of times as result of his actions. This had bothered Marcus quite a lot, as he had no way to reassure him and didn't want to lose the liveliest of the two, but after a while (and a quick look at the ground which had been worryingly far at that point) the young man had somehow calmed down, simply shivering and trembling like a rabbit caught in the talons of a hawk.

At this point Marcus had finally been able to let out a sigh of relief, and he had left himself fall on his bed.

He laid there for a few seconds, and then he started giggling.

"Humans!" he said while giggling "I've found some humans! Real people! I'm not alone on this fucking shitty world! I can't wait to talk with them! I have so many questions! Are there cities in this world? Can they help me come back to my own world? And most importantly do they have toilet paper? Not that I really need it, my shits are so small and dry that I couldn't get dirty if I tried, but still wiping myself with soft, wonderful toilet paper after getting the duty done would be very nice!" he giggled again, but then a sudden realization hit him "Wait... maybe I should do something about my appearance. After all I don't look very human right now, and I could scare them... but what could I do?"

He got up, looking around to find something to improve his look, and then he noticed that the cave itself was pretty intimidating: it was dark, damp and completely coated in mold-wax. But what worried Marcus the most was the ground, which was covered by bones, scuttling larvae and most importantly a huge number of eggs.

"Dammit! I can't let them see the cave like this!" he screamed "Especially not the eggs. I can't let them know about the fucking eggs. No one can know about them. I couldn't live with myself if someone finds out that I'm the one laying them!"

He quickly issued a few mental commands, and a few worker drones ran in front of him, starting to move eggs and clean the room.

"Let's get this place clean asap!" Marcus shouted "Double time you double fuckers! We're expecting guests!"