The rattle of wood, leather, and hooves came to a gradual halt as the wagon slowed to a stop. The robed human in the hard seat of the cart squeezed hands repeatedly, forcing the feeling into them after hours of holding reins, maintaining the gentle tension needed to control the enormous horned grazers that stood breathing sullen breaths in their heavy tack. That a driver of these creatures needed to do so, with force enough to keep their nose rings taught, a constant reminder of who led the train, was a tip he would have liked to have had when he’d bought the sonsofbitches.
When the limbered digits had been massaged back into working order, the man hopped down from the tall wagon with surprising alacrity and ease of motion, barely lifting a dust mote from the dense sod below. He raised hands overhead, stretching back and shoulders to their fullest, relishing the freedom from the wagon’s hard seat, its jouncing unmuted by such comforts as leaf spring shock absorbers or independent axle suspension. One day, when he wasn’t getting tossed around the winds of fate, he was going to get time to work on that project and own the luxury wagon and coach market.
"Watcher's tits, what a haul!" Announced Ulric Einar to the rolling hills.
Those hills, dressed in thick grass, thickets of dense brush, and copses of wind tortured trees barely five meters high, offered no response. They were mercifully silent and peace reigned supreme, as it had for the last few days. That condition had not been maintained in those weeks prior. Weeks had stretched to months and his best-laid plans had come to as much substance as cow farts in a stiff breeze.
**********Second Day After Parting from Taipan, Somewhere on the Plains*********
Ulric wrenched again on the reins connected to his pair of draft animals, a great pile of muscle, horn, and hoof that seemed custom-built to vex a man nigh unto insanity. The shitheads were now turning back into the line of his intended path, the wagon jackknifed behind him at a sharp angle to the great oxen.
“That motherfucker turns left so you gotta go too, HUH?” Ulric yelled at the leftmost ox, which had started turning simply because its neighbor had, without instruction from his loose reins.
Why can’t they just walk in a straight line? Ulric wondered. Probably the Legranel who sold him the things was laughing his ass off in a pub somewhere, on a cushioned chair, telling his mates all about how he’d foisted off a pair of serial killer ox on some schlub.
Fuck it, Ulric concluded, time for a break.
He climbed down and drove a sturdy ashwood pole down through the ring that held the reins, which kept the nose rings pulled low to the ground. It discouraged the beasts from wondering, even if it did not prevent it completely. He’d spent too much time tracking the pair of assholes down, his wagon in tow when they’d roamed away while he slept, for the prevention to be proven foolproof. Slogging through the rapidly melting snowpack, mud, and wet grass was already old as fuck. He was gonna start embedding the reins in a [Stone Wall] from now on. Bastards.
One of the beasts started pawing the ground and gave a sonorous lowing. Its neighbor joined in and Ulric was treated to a bovine serenade. He would blame that racket for why he didn’t hear the goblinoid monster creep through slushy snow behind him with a crude wooden club before it tried to brain him.
*SMACK*
“Cocksucker!” Ulric yelled in response to the harsh impact against his shoulder blade, bruising instantly through his thick travel robes.
He turned just in time to catch a backswing across his thigh, with a sound like a golf club hitting a wet bag of oats, pain radiating outward from abused muscle that threatened to cramp. He spun away taking in the ugly sight before him, senses coming alive with adrenaline and fury.
“Fucking ouch! And what the hell are you even?!” the weary traveler yelled at his attacker.
No answer was forthcoming, other than to draw that knotty stick back for another yak at his knee, which Ulric only dodged with a quick hop backward.
It was small, maybe only up to his hips. Green skin, with bulges and warty protrusions that helped break up its outline in the tall grasses, though its coloration did nothing to hide it in the scattered patches of melting snow. Bulbous yellow eyes with slitted pupils told the story of exceptional night vision, which was probably why it had waited until dusk to make its try on him. Long nose, which looked like it had been broken several times, and sharp serrated teeth, dirty, with scraps of previous meals caught between them. All told it was as near to the descriptions of fairy tale goblins as he could have imagined. Damned if it wasn't a toad bred stuffed into a chimpanzee mold, ugly as hell.
“Reaarrgh!!” The little humanoid yelled, charging in with its weapon.
Ulric briefly entertained the notion that this creature may have been desperate, starving, misunderstood, and truly meant him no harm, if only he would take the time to find peace. And then he chose violence.
Core screaming to crackling life, lightning magic surged forth, strengthening his body beyond human limits.
[Surge]
A lunging leap forward, drove his full momentum, knee first, into the little goblin’s face, crunching bones and teeth, sending spittle and blood into the evening air.
The club flew away and the disarmed little savage drew an obsidian flint-knapped knife as it came to its oversized four-toed feet, their long claw-like toenails digging into the soft grasses and muddy earth below as it hissed at him.
Damn if it wasn’t tough. He’d put down full-sized men with a blow like that. Still, he’d hurt it pretty good and its moxie made no sense, not unless…
Ulric flexed his mana, pulsing electromagnetic waves into the vicinity with a steady beat of ten Hertz.
[Ceraunoperception]
Taking no chances, Ulric scanned the environment for a flank, his intuition telling him that small creatures only attack larger ones when they thought they had every advantage.
Bingo! Sensations against his skin, like a tapestry of pressure that, after long, long hours Ulric had learned to interpret like an image revealed hidden forms crawling spiderlike through a patch of already tall grass behind him. Crafty little bastards. But they didn’t know who they were fucking with.
He returned his attention to the sight before his eyes and saw, to his amazement the fairly well mashed facial features of the monster healing visibly. A loud pop accompanied the realignment of the jaw bones and the beast worked its maw a few times, its new teeth already budding from the sockets of the ruined ones. Like a damned shark.
“Aww fuck, heal tanks in a pack? This is gonna take for-fucking-ever.” Ulric growled aloud.
He couldn’t afford to let them drag this out.
Off his back came the great sword, over two meters of indigo metal that was harder than Tungsten, if not quite as dense. Two razor edges glittered cyan and he kept his senses honed on the flankers as he readied his stance.
The little hominid creatures in the weeds behind him slung a hail of rocks at impressive velocity for such small arms and Ulric raised Xef’tocht as a vertical wide, turning himself behind the width of the blade to block them. Clangs of impact rattled against his sword and Ulric empowered his core, bringing the energies to life, cycling Ceraun chasing itself through his nexus.
When the last stone had flown the Reforged man raised a hand and retaliated with lightning.
[Lightning Javalin] X 2
Directed paths of breakdown potential, led by streamers of his lightning mana, guided the twin bolts of Ceraun into the tall grass, lacking the precision of using a thrown focus. Then again, he didn’t need that precision when there were so many of them grouped together. Gore and flame from the strikes leapt up and Ulric saw through his electrical sense that six of the goblins were destroyed. The rest of the bunch were thunderstruck by the clap of sound from such proximity and flash blind, their sensitive eyes scalded by arc light.
Hefting his weapon, Ulric Einar took a three-step run and leaped into the mass of figures and laid into them with furious strokes of a blade sharper than a scalpel, its edge magically enhanced to project its sharpness ahead of the metal. Driven by strength beyond any man on his old world, goblin body parts separated from their owners, and bodies were opened to spill their contents onto the prairie floor, red-orange blood and gore painting snow and grass alike.
The initial rush and killing left another seven hominid things dead and Ulric turned to break the half dozen trying to circle behind him. Those bent over scrabbling briefly through the mud for ammunition and threw another salvo of stones which did little damage, mostly deflected as they were by his weapon’s girth. Instinctive aggression and combat training said to scatter the creatures before they could whittle him down from range and he pulled his sword in front of his body, protecting his head and body as he charged the creatures down.
Two Ulric simply ran over, the metal of his weapon and the power of his rush mowing them down into the sodden ground and his boots crunched a limb, breaking it loudly as he passed into the throng of forms. Again, Ulric used wide sweeping cuts to hack apart swathes of limbs and the tall grass that made their forms hard to distinguish to the eye. The creatures, the two of them that were still able, broke at his assault and fled, leaving their wounded behind.
Can’t have that, not from healer beasts. Ulric took a moment to convert Ceraun into white mana, freeform unattuned magic, and reverted it into the harmonic resonant to wind magic, Caelum. Eight scythes of air formed into being and launched, guided along threads of wind mana by fingers that wove as if playing a piano. The spell followed vacuum channels that accelerated the blades at crossbow velocity toward his intended targets.
[Wind Blade] X 8
Mists of red-orange goblin blood sprayed as the two fleeing goblins were cut apart by the reaping Caelum spellform.
Half crouched, Ulric checked his surroundings and found, to his surprise and disgust, that the first set of goblins he’d cut apart were already back in action, regrouping and hefting their clubs and crude spears, entire limbs regrown, though more skinny and pale lime than the darker green skin and stringy muscle that had been there before he’d carved them. The lightning-struck monsters had not risen, their healing ablated by the burning secondary to the electrical attack.
Right then, fire it is Ulric nodded, drawing the focus gifted to him by an Ash Mage Adept. Werona Autumnclaw’s specialty spellform a pyroclastic cloud of burning ash leapt into being, consuming the mana he channeled into the focus artifact, molded into the spellform imprinted by the Adept and Ulric mentally shoved the cinder-ridden roil of black ash into the group of goblins.
Shrieks filled the air briefly as the creatures were consumed by the spell, their healing negated by the purifying flame that charred them to husks.
A path of clear ground tracked the flight of the ash spellform, vaporized snow, and whisps of flame from burning grasses along the path’s boundaries indicating the incredible heat contained by the magic.
He had his own fire spells and they were effective but they had suboptimal characteristics for this particular engagement, being too slow to prevent the monsters from scattering, requiring more mana of his core than was necessary, or being unsuited to dealing with a wide area. Mage Werona’s working was designed for these types of scenarios.
As was evident, looking at the blackened skeletal forms that lay where the spell had caught them, the dissipating volcanic cloud turned into a heavy ash fall as its energy was expended.
The second group, over which he still stood was writhing on the ground, regenerating right in front of his eyes. Ulric hacked a few of their heads off and the bodies stilled. Okay, good, he noted, at least decapitation works. Another two he opened with a hewing stroke, parting ribs and chests to reveal their innards. Ignoring the smell and sight of viscera Ulric reached into the chests and pulled free the little cores that infused the creatures with magic, as they did for almost all animal life of any size at all. When he had removed their cores, the source of the energy that sustained them, the beasts succumbed immediately to their wounds.
Cores were possessed by more than simply animals, there was at least one demigod tree he’d seen that had one: the guardian arbor of the Iriel’en onto which they had built their citadel city, named for that same tree, Irielhos. Taipan had spoken of several other plant-based monstrosities as well.
The tiny little faceted crystals, shaped like knuckle-sized tetrahedrons, emanated a potent green-orange glow that rang loudly to his mana sense of Sano, the mana associated with life and growth. He hadn’t encountered Sano-cored monsters before. Tricky. You had to deal with them quickly, they’d just outlast you in a sustained fight.
Ulric pulled the corpses into a pile and used a single small burst of fire, his oldest fire magic [Flame Crash], to light them ablaze. Then he grabbed the still trying to mend bodies that had been carved apart by his [Wind Blades] and threw them onto the pile. Soon enough, those forms stilled as the fire consumed them.
Ten minutes of fighting and dealing with the cleanup had it taken to settle this pack of goblins. If the nasty little fuckers had been smarter they would have attacked in twos or threes and never bunched up. He’d have been forced to expend himself hard to chase them down. Good chance they’d have worn him the hell out if they’d waited until full dark to do it, where he could only rely on [Ceraunoperception] to find them. That spell didn’t take much magic out of him but holding it for hours and hours while a running battle occurred would prevent him from regenerating his mana. It was a losing strategy.
Shaking his head at the misfortune of running into such monsters only a couple of days out from his parting with Taipan, Ulric saw the writing on the wall already. This was going to be a long couple of weeks to Prespang.
The rattle of wood, leather, and hooves came to a gradual halt as the wagon slowed to a stop. The robed human in the hard seat of the cart squeezed hands repeatedly, forcing the feeling into them after hours of holding reins, maintaining the gentle tension needed to control the enormous horned grazers that stood breathing sullen breaths in their heavy tack. That a driver of these creatures needed to do so, with force enough to keep their nose rings taught, a constant reminder of who led the train, was a tip he would have liked to have had when he’d bought the sonsofbitches.
When the limbered digits had been massaged back into working order, the man hopped down from the tall wagon with surprising alacrity and ease of motion, barely lifting a dust mote from the dense sod below. He raised hands overhead, stretching back and shoulders to their fullest, relishing the freedom from the wagon’s hard seat, its jouncing unmuted by such comforts as leaf spring shock absorbers or independent axle suspension. One day, when he wasn’t getting tossed around the winds of fate, he was going to get time to work on that project and own the luxury wagon and coach market.
"Watcher's tits, what a haul!" Announced Ulric Einar to the rolling hills.
Those hills, dressed in thick grass, thickets of dense brush, and copses of wind tortured trees barely five meters high, offered no response. They were mercifully silent and peace reigned supreme, as it had for the last few days. That condition had not been maintained in those weeks prior. Weeks had stretched to months and his best-laid plans had come to as much substance as cow farts in a stiff breeze.
**********Second Day After Parting from Taipan, Somewhere on the Plains*********
Ulric wrenched again on the reins connected to his pair of draft animals, a great pile of muscle, horn, and hoof that seemed custom-built to vex a man nigh unto insanity. The shitheads were now turning back into the line of his intended path, the wagon jackknifed behind him at a sharp angle to the great oxen.
“That motherfucker turns left so you gotta go too, HUH?” Ulric yelled at the leftmost ox, which had started turning simply because its neighbor had, without instruction from his loose reins.
Why can’t they just walk in a straight line? Ulric wondered. Probably the Legranel who sold him the things was laughing his ass off in a pub somewhere, on a cushioned chair, telling his mates all about how he’d foisted off a pair of serial killer ox on some schlub.
Fuck it, Ulric concluded, time for a break.
He climbed down and drove a sturdy ashwood pole down through the ring that held the reins, which kept the nose rings pulled low to the ground. It discouraged the beasts from wondering, even if it did not prevent it completely. He’d spent too much time tracking the pair of assholes down, his wagon in tow when they’d roamed away while he slept, for the prevention to be proven foolproof. Slogging through the rapidly melting snowpack, mud, and wet grass was already old as fuck. He was gonna start embedding the reins in a [Stone Wall] from now on. Bastards.
One of the beasts started pawing the ground and gave a sonorous lowing. Its neighbor joined in and Ulric was treated to a bovine serenade. He would blame that racket for why he didn’t hear the goblinoid monster creep through slushy snow behind him with a crude wooden club before it tried to brain him.
*SMACK*
“Cocksucker!” Ulric yelled in response to the harsh impact against his shoulder blade, bruising instantly through his thick travel robes.
He turned just in time to catch a backswing across his thigh, with a sound like a golf club hitting a wet bag of oats, pain radiating outward from abused muscle that threatened to cramp. He spun away taking in the ugly sight before him, senses coming alive with adrenaline and fury.
“Fucking ouch! And what the hell are you even?!” the weary traveler yelled at his attacker.
No answer was forthcoming, other than to draw that knotty stick back for another yak at his knee, which Ulric only dodged with a quick hop backward.
It was small, maybe only up to his hips. Green skin, with bulges and warty protrusions that helped break up its outline in the tall grasses, though its coloration did nothing to hide it in the scattered patches of melting snow. Bulbous yellow eyes with slitted pupils told the story of exceptional night vision, which was probably why it had waited until dusk to make its try on him. Long nose, which looked like it had been broken several times, and sharp serrated teeth, dirty, with scraps of previous meals caught between them. All told it was as near to the descriptions of fairy tale goblins as he could have imagined. Damned if it wasn't a toad bred stuffed into a chimpanzee mold, ugly as hell.
“Reaarrgh!!” The little humanoid yelled, charging in with its weapon.
Ulric briefly entertained the notion that this creature may have been desperate, starving, misunderstood, and truly meant him no harm, if only he would take the time to find peace. And then he chose violence.
Core screaming to crackling life, lightning magic surged forth, strengthening his body beyond human limits.
[Surge]
A lunging leap forward, drove his full momentum, knee first, into the little goblin’s face, crunching bones and teeth, sending spittle and blood into the evening air.
The club flew away and the disarmed little savage drew an obsidian flint-knapped knife as it came to its oversized four-toed feet, their long claw-like toenails digging into the soft grasses and muddy earth below as it hissed at him.
Damn if it wasn’t tough. He’d put down full-sized men with a blow like that. Still, he’d hurt it pretty good and its moxie made no sense, not unless…
Ulric flexed his mana, pulsing electromagnetic waves into the vicinity with a steady beat of ten Hertz.
[Ceraunoperception]
Taking no chances, Ulric scanned the environment for a flank, his intuition telling him that small creatures only attack larger ones when they thought they had every advantage.
Bingo! Sensations against his skin, like a tapestry of pressure that, after long, long hours Ulric had learned to interpret like an image revealed hidden forms crawling spiderlike through a patch of already tall grass behind him. Crafty little bastards. But they didn’t know who they were fucking with.
He returned his attention to the sight before his eyes and saw, to his amazement the fairly well mashed facial features of the monster healing visibly. A loud pop accompanied the realignment of the jaw bones and the beast worked its maw a few times, its new teeth already budding from the sockets of the ruined ones. Like a damned shark.
“Aww fuck, heal tanks in a pack? This is gonna take for-fucking-ever.” Ulric growled aloud.
He couldn’t afford to let them drag this out.
Off his back came the great sword, over two meters of indigo metal that was harder than Tungsten, if not quite as dense. Two razor edges glittered cyan and he kept his senses honed on the flankers as he readied his stance.
The little hominid creatures in the weeds behind him slung a hail of rocks at impressive velocity for such small arms and Ulric raised Xef’tocht as a vertical wide, turning himself behind the width of the blade to block them. Clangs of impact rattled against his sword and Ulric empowered his core, bringing the energies to life, cycling Ceraun chasing itself through his nexus.
When the last stone had flown the Reforged man raised a hand and retaliated with lightning.
[Lightning Javalin] X 2
Directed paths of breakdown potential, led by streamers of his lightning mana, guided the twin bolts of Ceraun into the tall grass, lacking the precision of using a thrown focus. Then again, he didn’t need that precision when there were so many of them grouped together. Gore and flame from the strikes leapt up and Ulric saw through his electrical sense that six of the goblins were destroyed. The rest of the bunch were thunderstruck by the clap of sound from such proximity and flash blind, their sensitive eyes scalded by arc light.
Hefting his weapon, Ulric Einar took a three-step run and leaped into the mass of figures and laid into them with furious strokes of a blade sharper than a scalpel, its edge magically enhanced to project its sharpness ahead of the metal. Driven by strength beyond any man on his old world, goblin body parts separated from their owners, and bodies were opened to spill their contents onto the prairie floor, red-orange blood and gore painting snow and grass alike.
The initial rush and killing left another seven hominid things dead and Ulric turned to break the half dozen trying to circle behind him. Those bent over scrabbling briefly through the mud for ammunition and threw another salvo of stones which did little damage, mostly deflected as they were by his weapon’s girth. Instinctive aggression and combat training said to scatter the creatures before they could whittle him down from range and he pulled his sword in front of his body, protecting his head and body as he charged the creatures down.
Two Ulric simply ran over, the metal of his weapon and the power of his rush mowing them down into the sodden ground and his boots crunched a limb, breaking it loudly as he passed into the throng of forms. Again, Ulric used wide sweeping cuts to hack apart swathes of limbs and the tall grass that made their forms hard to distinguish to the eye. The creatures, the two of them that were still able, broke at his assault and fled, leaving their wounded behind.
Can’t have that, not from healer beasts. Ulric took a moment to convert Ceraun into white mana, freeform unattuned magic, and reverted it into the harmonic resonant to wind magic, Caelum. Eight scythes of air formed into being and launched, guided along threads of wind mana by fingers that wove as if playing a piano. The spell followed vacuum channels that accelerated the blades at crossbow velocity toward his intended targets.
[Wind Blade] X 8
Mists of red-orange goblin blood sprayed as the two fleeing goblins were cut apart by the reaping Caelum spellform.
Half crouched, Ulric checked his surroundings and found, to his surprise and disgust, that the first set of goblins he’d cut apart were already back in action, regrouping and hefting their clubs and crude spears, entire limbs regrown, though more skinny and pale lime than the darker green skin and stringy muscle that had been there before he’d carved them. The lightning-struck monsters had not risen, their healing ablated by the burning secondary to the electrical attack.
Right then, fire it is Ulric nodded, drawing the focus gifted to him by an Ash Mage Adept. Werona Autumnclaw’s specialty spellform a pyroclastic cloud of burning ash leapt into being, consuming the mana he channeled into the focus artifact, molded into the spellform imprinted by the Adept and Ulric mentally shoved the cinder-ridden roil of black ash into the group of goblins.
Shrieks filled the air briefly as the creatures were consumed by the spell, their healing negated by the purifying flame that charred them to husks.
A path of clear ground tracked the flight of the ash spellform, vaporized snow, and whisps of flame from burning grasses along the path’s boundaries indicating the incredible heat contained by the magic.
He had his own fire spells and they were effective but they had suboptimal characteristics for this particular engagement, being too slow to prevent the monsters from scattering, requiring more mana of his core than was necessary, or being unsuited to dealing with a wide area. Mage Werona’s working was designed for these types of scenarios.
As was evident, looking at the blackened skeletal forms that lay where the spell had caught them, the dissipating volcanic cloud turned into a heavy ash fall as its energy was expended.
The second group, over which he still stood was writhing on the ground, regenerating right in front of his eyes. Ulric hacked a few of their heads off and the bodies stilled. Okay, good, he noted, at least decapitation works. Another two he opened with a hewing stroke, parting ribs and chests to reveal their innards. Ignoring the smell and sight of viscera Ulric reached into the chests and pulled free the little cores that infused the creatures with magic, as they did for almost all animal life of any size at all. When he had removed their cores, the source of the energy that sustained them, the beasts succumbed immediately to their wounds.
Cores were possessed by more than simply animals, there was at least one demigod tree he’d seen that had one: the guardian arbor of the Iriel’en onto which they had built their citadel city, named for that same tree, Irielhos. Taipan had spoken of several other plant-based monstrosities as well.
The tiny little faceted crystals, shaped like knuckle-sized tetrahedrons, emanated a potent green-orange glow that rang loudly to his mana sense of Sano, the mana associated with life and growth. He hadn’t encountered Sano-cored monsters before. Tricky. You had to deal with them quickly, they’d just outlast you in a sustained fight.
Ulric pulled the corpses into a pile and used a single small burst of fire, his oldest fire magic [Flame Crash], to light them ablaze. Then he grabbed the still trying to mend bodies that had been carved apart by his [Wind Blades] and threw them onto the pile. Soon enough, those forms stilled as the fire consumed them.
Ten minutes of fighting and dealing with the cleanup had it taken to settle this pack of goblins. If the nasty little fuckers had been smarter they would have attacked in twos or threes and never bunched up. He’d have been forced to expend himself hard to chase them down. Good chance they’d have worn him the hell out if they’d waited until full dark to do it, where he could only rely on [Ceraunoperception] to find them. That spell didn’t take much magic out of him but holding it for hours and hours while a running battle occurred would prevent him from regenerating his mana. It was a losing strategy.
Shaking his head at the misfortune of running into such monsters only a couple of days out from his parting with Taipan, Ulric saw the writing on the wall already. This was going to be a long couple of weeks to Prespang.
