The Goblin Horde

by Ivan Kal

  Titus was up in the workshop, commanding an army of both non-ascended and ascended as they worked on crafting more of the bombs Morgan had devised. Their first test had been a success, and so they had started crafting more of them. There wasn’t much need for Morgan there, as anyone could put them together; the only thing magical that was required was the trigger engravings that Titus and Morgan had crafted, but Titus could make them alone.

  Morgan heard a shout from behind him, and turned to see Artos yelling at one of his apprentices next to a contraption in the process of being built. Morgan had much knowledge from his homeworld that he had tried to apply here with the help of magic. Although he hadn’t been studying weapons and explosives there, he had spent quite a lot of time on the internet—and while he might not have actual knowledge on how to build some things, he had the ideas. It was really surprising how much random knowledge he had accumulated over the years. He didn’t really need to know the specifics; there were people here who were smart enough to figure it out once Morgan explained what he knew.

  Morgan turned his head forward as he saw that Artos had everything in hand. He kept his focus on the tendrils of energy he had been extending beneath the ground. His newly acquired skill, Phytokinesis, had allowed him to manipulate plant life with greater precision and ease. He watched as people exited the holes in the ground and pulled out buckets filled with earth, digging tunnels beneath the ground, and Morgan used his Phytokinesis to extend roots and create braces to hold it all up. It was taxing work, but there were a few more ascended close to him who shared his nature alignment and were helping out. They didn’t have his skill, but they could aid him nonetheless.

  Frankly, he was bored. This kind of work wasn’t anything interesting, and he had already spent a few days doing it—but he knew that they needed all the advantages that they could get.

  Soon enough, he finally released a sigh of relief as they finished for the day. He jumped down from the wall and made his way through the chaos inside the walls into the town and then up the mountain to the Guild Hold. A while later, he was inside the Grand Hall and was making his way up to his and Ves’s room. Just as he was about to put his hand on the door handle, he heard sounds coming from inside.

  “Clara, stop!” he heard Ves say.

  “Oh don’t be like that, just a little bit!” Clara said, and Morgan blinked.

  He grabbed the door handle and swung the doors open—only to see Clara sitting on top of Ves, straddling her chest.

  “Oh my god! I was right, wasn’t I?” Morgan asked. He turned around and covered his head with his hands. “You are trying to take her away from me!”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Morgan,” Clara said. “Turn around!”

  With a sigh, he did so. He looked at Clara, who seemed deeply annoyed.

  “I thought that we were friends, Clara; bestest buddies, even. Did you have to wound me like this?” He put his hand over his heart.

  Clara just raised her hand and waved it in his direction. “See? I’m not trying to take her from you! Stop being such a baby.”

  Morgan’s eyes refocused on her hand and he saw her holding what looked like to be a pair of scissors. He looked further down to Ves, who looked suitably embarrassed.

  Ves cleared her throat and then gave him a smile. “I asked her to help me, but Clara is a bit overzealous,” she said, turning to glare back at the orc sitting on top of her.

  “C’mon, you’ll look so cute with short hair!” Clara protested.

  “I told you I want it shortened just a hand’s width!”

  Morgan narrowed his eyes on Clara. “I don’t know how much I can trust you around her.”

  Clara rolled her eyes and stood up, letting Ves get to her feet. Morgan crossed the room and pulled Ves close. He then glared at Clara. “I hear there are quite a lot of orcs down in Reach Town. Maybe you should go and try to find a nice girl for yourself.”

  “Really, Morgan?” Clara gave him a droll look. “I haven’t noticed. There’s no reason why I haven’t gone down to the town in days,” she told him sarcastically.

  “Right, then, I guess I can lend Ves to you for a little bit—but just as a friend!” Morgan said with a cautionary wag of his finger. “Since I am such a generous guy and all that.”

  “Uh, I’m right here, Morgan,” Ves mumbled against his chest, as Morgan kept her tightly pressed against him.

  “Shush,” Morgan told her. “I am trying to come to an understanding with my bestie.”

  Clara glared at him, clearly annoyed. “Ves is my friend, and I don’t need permission to spend time with her.”

  “We might need to come up with a schedule. I mean, I’ve barely spent any time with Ves over the last few weeks,” Morgan said, ignoring Clara completely. “Actually, we should all hang out together! I’m sure I can come up with something interesting for us to do, maybe some hunting or exploring…”

  “There is a goblin army coming down on us! Don’t you have better things to think about other than planning an outing?” Clara asked him.

  “Huh?” Morgan said, feigning ignorance. “Oh, that! Everything is mostly done, but I guess you’re right—I should really focus on that. But after, we are going to go and have another adventure!” He looked down at Ves. “How does that sound?”

  “Sounds good, Morgan,” Ves said dryly.

  Clara shook her head and left the room.

  Morgan let go of Ves and she took a step back and looked at him. “You really shouldn’t tease her so much.”

  He allowed his expression to soften. “As long as she’s annoyed at me, she isn’t thinking about her dad and all that orc stuff.”

  Ves gave him a kiss. “You’re a good friend, Morgan.”

  A few days later, Morgan was woken up by a knock at his door. He slowly disengaged from Ves’s embrace and walked over to open it, finding Lucius there.

  “The scouts have returned.”

  Morgan took a deep breath. “So it begins.”

  Lucius nodded, and Morgan went back into the room, put some clothes on, and then walked out, following Lucius to the Sky Guard headquarters. They entered a round planning room with a large table in the middle with a map of the valley centered on it, and various pieces representing different towns placed there. Next to it stood two people: an orc woman, and one of the Sky Guard scouts they had sent to the north. The two greeted them respectfully, and then Morgan planted his arms on the table, all business.

  “What do we have?” Morgan asked as he and Lucius walked up to the table.

  “The goblin horde is on the move,” the Sky Guard reported. “They are slow, so we should have around three more weeks before they get close to Reach.” He grabbed one green block of stone and placed it near the mountains north of Reach. “They are currently following the river Ro, moving southwest along its bank. This will lead them to the stone bridge crossing here,” the man said, pointing at the symbol for the bridge.

  “That could be a good place for an ambush,” Morgan mused. “We might even look at trying to take the bridge down.”

  Lucius nodded in agreement. “It is a good place for an ambush, but we won’t have enough time to take the bridge down. It is built out of strong stone, and even if we managed it, it would not work in our favor. We need them to cross there. If they move for the bridge further west, then they will be too far away from Reach—they will most certainly bypass us and spill into the valley unchecked.”

  “And if they cross there?” Morgan asked.

  Lucius put his finger on the bridge and drew a line south. “The forest on the other side of Ro is too thick for an army to pass, meaning they will have no other choice but to continue south following the road until they reach the river Lev. There are only two bridges that would let them cross: one a bit east of their position and closer to Reach, and the other further west. We need them to use the one closer to Reach if we are to lead them to attack us.”

  Morgan looked at the map, thinking furiously. A thought about destroying
the bridges entered his mind, but like with the stone bridge, he knew it wouldn’t really be viable. The goblin horde would just build a simple bridge or a raft to cross—it would only buy them some time. While that would be good, Morgan knew that then they wouldn’t be able to control where the goblins would cross—and guiding your enemy where one wanted them to be was one of the most important things when one planned encounters.

  “How long before they reach the stone bridge?” Morgan asked.

  “If they continue at their current pace, a little over a week,” the orc scout told them.

  Morgan nodded and thought furiously about what the best course of action would be. “All right, then,” he said after a long minute of silence, “I think I have a plan in mind. Now we just need to figure out how to get it done.”

  Nine days later, Morgan arrived at the stone bridge, just a day ahead of the goblin horde. They had set a brisk pace and had managed to get here quickly enough with just under a hundred people. He had sixty orc warriors as well as around forty of his Sky Guard and Hunter ascended. They spent most of the previous day carefully unloading the carts they had brought with them and preparing for the ambush.

  Now, on the day of the horde’s arrival, Morgan looked over the river—it was fairly wide, around twenty meters across at least, with a long and wide stone bridge over it. Morgan had asked about the bridge; it wasn’t anything like the other wooden bridges in the valley, but no one knew anything other than that it had been here for a long time. Morgan enjoyed mysteries as much as anyone, but he didn’t really have the time to put into this one at the moment.

  The goblin horde had arrived a few hours ago, just as night settled in across the land. They had set up camp right before the bridge as their scouts moved to secure the area. His people were hidden pretty well in the forest across the river from where their camp was, yet one of the goblin scout parties had managed to get close enough that they were forced to eliminate them before they found Morgan and his people.

  As Morgan stood over their bodies and watched them turn to blue dust and dissipate, he turned to his people standing behind him. “This accelerates our plans. Their absence will be noticed,” he told Ereden, who was accompanying him as his second in command for this operation. Most of the ascended here were ranged classes because of the nature of Morgan’s plan, so there was no one from his original party with them. It was admittedly a strange feeling for Morgan—he hadn’t really done anything without at least one of them until now.

  “Get into positions,” Morgan said to everyone, and in response there came a shuffling behind him as his people moved.

  Before long they reached the edge of the forest and looked on at the camp across the river. It was a simple camp, one populated principally with tents made out of hides and furs. Many of the goblins were starting fires and beginning the process of making food for the night. The ogres, too, had a camp just next to the goblins, but compared to the goblin camp, it was tiny. Morgan saw at least two dozen of their kind lumbering around there, although there were more walking through the goblin camp. He knew from his talks with the orc Chieftains that ogre tribes were generally much smaller than goblin ones, and their words seemed valid—there didn’t seem to be all that many of them, for which Morgan was thankful. He still remembered what just the one had done to their Guild Hold.

  But there was a very large number of goblins: around five thousand by his scouts’ last count. Among them, Morgan had seen many goblin chieftains and shamans, and he had even glimpsed the Goblin King. He was large, about the same size as the goblin chieftains, though he wore a large sword on his back and was covered in armor which looked to be of much higher quality than the others’ own. He also had a different color to his skin, being more gray than the typical goblin green. Wherever he walked, the other goblins stopped whatever they were doing and moved swiftly out of the creature’s way.

  Morgan could tell that something was different about him—beyond the differences in his appearance—but he couldn’t tell what it was. He had ordered his scouts to try and find which tent he was in, but they had failed. The goblin seemed to be smart enough to keep that information well hidden. Morgan looked on at the goblins, who laughed and joked around their fires, thinking about how they looked like any other sentient beings. But then he remembered what they did: how they killed and ate other people. His people.

  He turned around, seeing the few Sky Guards that were melee classes take positions near the bridge and in front of the rest of his people, there to protect them in case the goblins managed to retaliate, though Morgan seriously doubted that they would. He raised his hand, and the sixty orc warriors raised their long ropes with balls attached at their ends before placing a small ascension crystal in a slot on the metal plate at their tops.

  Morgan had gotten the idea for this particular ambush when he had seen the orcs playing just outside of the walls of Reach Town. They would take a large rock, tie it up with a rope, and then swing it in a circle before releasing it, throwing it off into the distance, competing to see who could throw the furthest. It was almost exactly like the Olympic sport of hammer throw, except that Morgan was pretty sure the orcs could throw further than what the world record on Earth was—and the rocks were heavier. One of them had thrown one at least two hundred meters. Morgan had been surprised, but knew he shouldn’t have been: orcs were stronger than even some ascended.

  Morgan lowered his arm and spoke. “Now!”

  Immediately, sixty orcs spun in a circle and then released. The only sound over the sound of river was the whistling of wind as the balls and the ropes flew over their heads and the running water, only to land among the tents and the campfires. Nothing happened for a moment—Morgan could hear the cries of confusion among the goblins.

  Then came the explosions. They weren’t all synchronized; they had no way of making that happen. The engravings that Titus and Morgan came up with weren’t able to be that precise, or at least they didn’t know enough in order to create them. Instead they had made a small engraving which would drain a small ascension crystal, and once it was drained push that energy into the trigger for the fireball engraving. The fireball would fire inside the ball and explode, the pressure in the closed ball sending its contents flying in all directions.

  Booms could be heard from across the river in a staggered and unsynchronized sequence. Cries of pain erupted among the goblins as the shrapnel of what Morgan was calling frag-bombs showered them. But then there were the second type of bombs: from which eruptions of what looked like liquid fire came. Morgan called those ones napalm-bombs, even though they weren’t, not really—they were filled with the oil that orcs used for their torches, which was a bit more potent than the type most humans in the valley used. Thankfully, it was enough, as the fire spread and the tents caught fire. Goblins who weren’t injured were running around trying to put the fire out, or simply just running away.

  Morgan turned around to the orcs who had already prepared their next volley. “Throw!” he said, and they spun again and let the second volley fly. It fell among the confused goblins, and again the bombs exploded. Morgan didn’t waste any time—he called out again. “Archers!”

  The orcs stepped back into the forest as the ascended from his Guild stepped forward and nocked their arrows, taking aim. Morgan joined them, pulling back his own string. “Fire!” he said, and let loose.

  Forty arrows flew over the river and fell into the enemy camp, only to explode on impact as each arrow had been one of his enchanted Exploding Arrows. They nocked again and fired—Morgan infusing his energy into the arrow, and as it flew over the goblins, it exploded and rained energy arrows on the monsters down below. There were horns being blasted now, and goblins were moving across the entire camp. The area they had bombarded made for just a small portion of their camp, but there were still hundreds of goblins there.

  Morgan and his archers fired now at will, and arrows flew to fall on the goblins. Then Ereden drew Morgan’s attention.

&
nbsp; “Guild Master, the bridge!” Ereden called out. Morgan glanced at it, seeing a party of goblins running to cross the river and his defenders taking positions in front of his people. Morgan turned around and yelled out, “Bombs!” At his word, five orcs stepped forward with the last of their bombs, putting in the crystals swiftly and then spinning around, throwing them with amazing accuracy. The balls fell among the running goblins and Morgan had his archers change targets and fire at their assailants. He could see the goblins panic in the light of the fire, some grabbing the bombs and throwing them over the bridge into the river. But then three frag-bombs exploded and cut through the goblin party. His Sky Guards ran forward onto the bridge and cut the rest down, then ran back to the forest’s edge as another party of goblins gathered on the other side.

  “Retreat!” Morgan screamed, and they turned around, starting to run into the forest. Morgan glanced back and saw a large goblin dressed in armor, his face filled with dancing shadows from the burning camp behind him, glaring at Morgan with red eyes.

  Then Morgan turned around and was away.

  They stayed ahead of the goblins pretty easily. The goblin parties sent after them were fast, but every time they got close Morgan had his archers fire at them from beyond their enemies’ range. His ascended were just better, and the goblins learned quickly to stay out of range. They still followed, though, which was exactly what Morgan wanted. He had sent a small party of ascended and orc scouts to double back and keep an eye on the goblin horde.

  They wanted them to follow them to Reach, and from the rage Morgan had seen in the Goblin King’s eyes, he was pretty certain they would follow. But Morgan still had a few things in store for them at the western bridge if they decided to ignore Morgan’s force. Four days later, at a brisk pace they arrived back home. They had abandoned the carts they had used to carry the bombs, and the horses had been taken by the scouts to keep them more maneuverable.