Gaia's Gambit: Evolution Online I (A LitRPG)

by D. L. Harrison

I nodded, no doubt it would take a while to compile and map the reports. Then there was the small matter of a two-mile jog to our glade from the outpost.

  We sat down, and started in on breakfast. The elves had taken care of the first meal as usual, and I stared at one of the plates.

  “Is that bacon?”

  Gwen snickered, “No, you’re not dreaming.”

  I gave her a look, and then started to pile some on my plate. There were also scrambled eggs, sausage, and some fruit. No biscuits, but I’d survive. The first bite of bacon was like sinking into nirvana.

  Gwen said, “I really like eating out here instead of in our cottages, but it would be nice to have something better than a log to sit on in front of the grill and smoker.”

  I nodded, “Fair enough, I’ve had similar thoughts. I could build a larger table, more chairs, and a gazebo of sorts. Maybe with one wall, so we can hang a map.”

  Wynn said, “Our days are going to be longer. On the offensive will be different, a lot more than one battle a day. We should focus on our skills, I’ll have Rylla send back word to the outpost, and my people will build us something.”

  That… I hadn’t considered that. We wouldn’t have nearly as much decompress time with this next phase, and most of that will be eaten up by studying and maintaining our skills and concepts. It also meant more and less time with Gwen at the same time. We’d be together more, but while fighting and chasing down the enemy. I’d adjust.

  “Works for me.”

  A comfortable silence reigned as we ate breakfast. My mind wandered a bit, but uselessly. Until we got the reports from the scouts there was no point in thinking about the day ahead, or the coming fights. The skies were clear that morning, and the morning sun felt good on my skin, but I knew that could change at any moment. The weather seemed pretty variable there.

  When breakfast was finished, we cleaned up and chatted about nothing important, and Rylla showed up about an hour after dawn’s break.

  Rylla was about five foot eight, willowy, with long dirty blonde hair and brown eyes. She had a thin angular face like most of the elves, and while her skin was still fair, it was also darker than any other elf I’d seen. She had on a suit of leather armor, and wore a crossbow over her shoulder, and a dagger on her belt. I wouldn’t say she was closed off, but she definitely had a no-nonsense expression on her face.

  Wynn introduced Gwen and myself to her, I presumed she knew Anlyth and Lyre already.

  Then he asked, “What do you have?”

  Rylla pulled out a map, and rolled it out on the ground. It was large, and showed about ten miles square. My eyes easily picked out the small forest with our glade, and the outpost to the south of it. On the west side it showed a small part of the elven forest on the other side of the plains. My eyes easily picked out the goblin cave to the north, with the fortifications, it was dead center on the map. There were numerous other markings around it.

  Rylla said, “We’ve only had one night to get a general idea of things. We’ve got the six lookout posts surrounding the cave, and some of the patrol routes. There is one major thing.”

  She leaned over and tapped the map on a hill a mile north of the goblin caves, about halfway from the cave to when the mountain range truly started.

  “There’s something going on there, I don’t know what. There are six teams of six goblin warriors and one lesser shaman patrolling that large hill. My people were able to get close enough to make out some caves. There’s something in there they desperately want to keep safe.”

  Lyre nodded in agreement, “They wouldn’t have put six lesser shamans on it otherwise. That has to be more than half the potential shamans of this generation.”

  Rylla nodded curtly, “Exactly.”

  I asked, “Could they be starting another tribal cave?”

  The elves all looked at me like I was an idiot. Well… I didn’t know much about goblins.

  Wynn explained, “Goblin tribes near each other would war until one was driven out. No goblin chieftain would purposefully set up another tribe, or have his own people too far away and out of his control, lest they get ideas. No, it has to be some kind of training ground, or something else they find of strategic importance. What else do you have Rylla?”

  Rylla shrugged, “The current patrol routes. That’s about it right now, they show no signs of forming a large force to march on our forest.”

  Gwen said, “I vote we find out what’s in that cave.”

  Wynn nodded, “How close together are the patrols?”

  Rylla said, “That hill is pretty large, not a mountain mostly because of a height technicality. I’d say ten to fifteen minutes apart.”

  Lyre asked, “Which way does the entrance face?”

  Rylla replied, “The caves are on the eastern face, about a quarter of the way up the hill. There’re some thick woods there.”

  Wynn grunted, “I suggest we circle around to the northern side, around this neighboring hill. We’ll catch them in the north east valley, and ambush the six patrols one at a time. Okay, how do we stop them from escaping, or alerting the other patrols. We’ll need to take them fast, and move forward about a hundred yards and reset the ambush, so they don’t see evidence of the previous fight, or scent the blood.”

  Lyre said, “I can use an air spell to contain the noise. To make it that big I’ll need to just deaden it, so the sound doesn’t travel that far.”

  The concepts to do that were in my mind, and I shuffled through them.

  “That’ll take a lot of mana.”

  Lyre nodded, “I’ll restrict myself to arrows for damage. There will only be seven of them, the rest of you will have to take them down fast. They also can’t be allowed to separate too much.”

  I replied, “Alright, I’ll be able to entangle them all, as long as they’re within thirty feet of each other when we start the ambush. Is that likely?”

  Rylla nodded, “They’ll be formed up around the lesser shaman, and unlike the goblin cave itself, there’re plenty of trees around. Maybe fifteen feet in diameter for all of them?”

  Wynn nodded, “The rest of us will attack simultaneously, and take down the shaman. If he doesn’t go down fast, everyone’s second action will be to finish him off. If we take them by surprise, we should be able to get off two attacks before they can respond. Then we’ll take down the other six as fast as possible, before they can escape the entanglement. How long can you maintain the silence?”

  Lyre said, “Fifteen feet around? Maybe a minute. That’s a lot of cubic feet of air to control.”

  It was, if she tried for total silence in an area that big, she probably had enough mana to hold it for two seconds.

  Gwen said, “That should be enough, as long as we aren’t dodging arrows that should give us ten to fifteen attacks each.”

  I nodded, “At best though, the entanglement will hold them for half a minute. It should still be enough, I’ll use exploding area of affect attacks with the shaman at the center. Just six of those should take down all of them by half their life, at least, and I can do that much in thirty seconds. I’d suggest the rest of you focus your attacks on the ones firing arrows from the ground, instead of struggling to free themselves.”

  Lyre asked, “Damage over time?”

  I shook my head, “That would be better against one opponent. But the plan of the day is to kill them fast, so mana management needs to take a backseat. If I put twenty mana in each area of effect spell, and cast six of them, thirty-nine each for the shaman. That’s… two hundred thirty-four in total. Any goblin warriors four to six feet away from the shaman will take two ten or so, the rest farther away will take almost two hundred over those six spells in thirty seconds. That will probably kill most of them, as long as I can keep casting. The only catch is if the shaman has the Light sphere, and casts protection from fire.”

  Truthfully, I could probably cast them a lot faster than one every five seconds.

  Wynn shook his head, “If the shaman does have
Light magic, the rest of us will concentrate on him. That much damage is too useful to throw away for any reason, since we need to kill them fast. The rest of us will make sure you aren’t hit by arrows, even if I have to step in front of one myself.”

  Anlyth snickered, “I’ll protect him with earth, so he can ignore counter attacks. If I miss one or two rounds of sending a projectile at the enemy it won’t matter if he can focus on casting.”

  Wynn grunted, “Anything else?”

  Gwen asked, “What if they’re further apart, or one of them escapes.”

  Wynn said, “We’ll dig in, and let them come to us. They’ll know we’re there, and we won’t get the advantage of surprise, but we’ll do the job anyway. Then we’ll go see what’s in that cave.”

  There were no further questions, and Wynn dismissed Rylla who looked like she needed sleep. They’d been scouting the enemy all night and yesterday evening.

  Chapter Eighteen

  A side effect of having an intelligence of twenty-three seemed to be perfect recall. The map of the area was stuck in my head, and I remembered it with perfect clarity as we moved north of the forest, and into the hills to the north. It almost felt like cheating, knowing all their patrol routes it was child’s play to wend our way through the hilly terrain and avoid them all.

  We stayed a hill or two away from any known goblin areas, and circled around the hill to the east of our target hill as planned. There was a thin valley between them on the north east side of the target hill, which broke into a Y shaped split of valleys around the hill to the north. It wasn’t forest, but there were a lot of trees, and copses of trees, as well as wild grass.

  It was likely I’d have to use control fires at the end of every fight, to stop any fires from spreading.

  We set up our ambush spot along the hill to the north, the hill was situated halfway between the two hills to the south, the target hill to the southwest. Anlyth set up a just in case three-foot-high stone wall we could dive behind if everything went south. We had a good plan, or at least I thought we did, but it would be stupid to forget the goblins got a vote.

  We prepared, and waited. It wasn’t long before they showed up, the patrols were staggered ten to fifteen minutes apart after all. The goblins were in close formation, with the shaman surrounded but slightly to the rear. They were easily all within the fifteen feet of each other that Rylla had promised.

  My heart was pounding.

  I used the five mana detect life spell, in a twenty-foot radius to detect goblins. Then I added another thirty-five mana for entanglement, five mana for every goblin the spell would detect and target.

  Wynn gave the signal, and I let the spell loose. It impacted the shaman, and vines shot from the ground under the seven targets. The grunts of surprise turned into alarm as vines twisted around their legs. Some of them managed to remain standing, several fell to the ground.

  Lyre’s spell seemed to be working as well, the grunts and yells weren’t silent, but they sounded hollow, and I imagined from another fifty yards away or so, the sound would have been unheard.

  Wynn’s and Gwen’s arrow, along with a jagged piece of metal launched by Anlyth hit the shaman at the same time Lyre and my spells struck.

  My eyes widened with amusement, as Gwen’s curse took hold, and the shaman struck out with air blades at the closest goblin. It made me wonder if we should let him live a little longer, but I stuck with the plan.

  I formed the explosive fire blast spell with the base fifteen mana, five for the spell itself, ten to make it area affect for a nine-foot radius, which was more than enough to cover them all. Then I pumped in five more mana to up the damage, and released the spell.

  The goblin formation disappeared for a moment behind the fires of the explosion. The shaman took thirty-eight points of damage, just one less than the maximum, which verified my thoughts yesterday that I’d been doing it wrong. Maybe not wrong, but not using my magic to its peak efficiency through the concepts.

  The two goblins in the rear were within three feet, and took thirty-four damage, and the four goblins towards the front were all within four to six feet from the shaman, and took thirty damage.

  The rest of the party hit the shaman again with arrows and jagged metal, ending his life less than five seconds after the battle had started.

  Two goblins reached for their bows, while the other four drew swords and started to try to hack themselves free of the vines.

  I sent my second fire blast into the middle of the group, and they disappeared in fire again for a moment. The damage was thirty-three, and twenty-nine, still only two under the maximum possible.

  Gwen, Lyre, Anlyth, and Wynn all hit different goblins. Normally it would make strategic sense to go after the same one, but the point of this ambush was to kill them all quickly, before Lyre ran out of mana, and if they took out one fast, that would just waste the damage of my area of effect spell. Better to spread it out a bit. Gwen had also hit one of the ones getting ready to shoot his bow, which caused him to scream in rage and throw down the bow, and draw his sword to free himself.

  Two of the goblins had taken sixty damage so far, and the other four closer to ninety or a hundred, depending on how much damage my group did on those four other goblins.

  The last goblin with the bow shot an arrow, but because he was held tightly by vines, and the angle was awkward as hell as he twisted his body, the arrow went wide and completely missed me by about three feet.

  I released my third fire blast spell, and the rest of the party hit the same four. Maybe ten seconds had passed since the beginning of the battle. I estimated between my three fire blasts, and their two attacks, those four were up to at least a hundred forty or fifty of damage. They didn’t look good at all.

  The goblin shot another arrow at me, seeing me as the greatest threat. I admit freely, I flinched when Anlyth’s staff shot out in a blur and knocked it off course.

  My fourth fire blast spell, and the rest of the party’s attacks, save Anlyth who had used his to protect me, killed three of the goblins outright. The fourth goblin looked like a feather would finish him off, and the other two didn’t look in great shape either. They’d both taken over a hundred and twenty damage just from my exploding spells, closer to a hundred thirty actually.

  Fifteen seconds had passed.

  All three goblins left were struggling with their swords, it almost wasn’t fair with magic on our side. I supposed the goblins were just a primer on battle, because I knew future foes would have magic on their side too. I didn’t want to be too cocky though, the goblins did have those shamans.

  I fired a fifth fire blast. The one just barely clinging to life died with a scream. The other two were unharmed from the rest of the party up until that point, but with five fire blasts they’d taken almost a hundred and sixty in damage.

  Gwen and Lyre shot arrows at one of them, while Wynn and Anlyth took down the other. Between them, they’d done at least another sixty to seventy to both, and put them both down.

  Less than twenty seconds had passed.

  Congratulations! Seven goblins are dead. You have earned two thousand five hundred Experience Points!

  Huh, three hundred each, and seven hundred for the shaman?

  Lyre gave a startled laugh, “That went better than I hoped it would.”

  I couldn’t disagree, and neither did anyone else.

  I cast a water elemental, which morphed and shifted as it scooped up the six corpses and moved them into the brush.

  “I can move each group we take out to the same spot back here. We can loot them later.”

  Wynn grunted, “Good plan. The shamans might have something useful we can divvy up, but I suggest we just leave the rest of it all together, then split up the coin evenly when we sell it later tonight. Let’s move up.”

  No one objected, and it worked for me. I also didn’t imagine the goblin shamans would have anything I’d want, and the others all used spells too, so they could have it. I didn’t imag
ine our stuff would get much better or more powerful until after we’d gained apprentice, and fought something more powerful.

  The fight had gone fast, but we had to shift up a hundred yards if we wanted to ambush the next group which would be along in less than ten to fifteen minutes. That meant we needed to set up new defenses and recoup our mana. If they caught sight of the charred trail, or scented the blood, the jig would be up. There was just no time for looting until we were done with all six groups.

  The next two ambushes went like clockwork, our tactics and the advantage of an ambush mixed with our magic to stop them from charging us, worked like a charm. It was the fourth group we ambushed where random chance reared its head. The enemy did something we hadn’t accounted for. Before we could finish the shaman off, the shaman shot off a fire blast.

  Straight up into the sky.

  We were able to finish them off easily enough, just like the first three groups they were entangled already and at a disadvantage, but we had a decision to make when we were done.

  Wynn said, “I’d say it’s almost for certain that the last two groups saw that and will be wary of an ambush, there’s no way they missed an exploding fireball in the sky. The next group may even wait, and combine forces with the last group before continuing on. Worse is the idea that others could have seen it. The goblin’s home cave and look outs are only a mile away to the south, it’s very possible they saw the fire blast, and will prepare a large force to check it out.”

  Lyre said, “Maybe, but doubtful. This hill is very tall, almost a mountain, and the fire blast exploded on the northern side of it.”

  Gwen interjected, “I agree, let’s dig in here. If they do combine groups it will take them at least twenty minutes to get here.”

  Anlyth nodded, “It’s a risk, but chances are the goblins to the south didn’t see a thing.”

  Gwen and I exchanged glances, and I knew she was thinking the same thing.

  I said, “Just in case, if they do come, we’ll run for it. Gwen and I can lead them with an obvious trail, and try to circle back to rejoin you for the trek home. We can come back if…” I trailed off.