Chapter 22: Operation Rescue

The massive curtain wall which surrounded the city of Astyanax was as close to square as the crown’s engineers could make it. Thus, despite the amorphous and ever-changing cityscape within, the outermost architecture of the city remained fixed. It had only four gates, one in the center of each wall, facing towards one of the cardinal directions. The nobles’ carriage had been ambushed along the road which led directly from the South gate, so the party of adventurers followed the same route. After less than an hour’s march, the three companions were met with the unmistakable signs of the ambush described in the quest book.

“Fuck me,” Lexi muttered under her breath upon seeing the utter carnage. Gretel simply replied with a low whistle, while Samantha maintained her wall of stoic silence.

It appeared as if the goblins had been laying in wait to specifically target carriages, as the trio saw that the wheels had been sabotaged with cunningly wrought iron barbs attached to what appeared to be crossbow bolts. When fired at the sides of the wheels, the barbed iron rods became entangled in the spokes and axles, inevitably bringing the carriage to a halt. That done, the goblins had obviously attacked the guards with simple melee weapons, as the corpses of the four guards and the lord all showed obvious signs of having been slain by edged weapons.

One guard had the broken shaft of a spear still protruding from his gut, blood and entrails spilling out of the gaping wound into a viscous pile of gore beneath him. Another appeared to have been hamstrung before having had his throat slit by some jagged edged blade. The third lay face down in the mud, the back of his head caved in from the blow of a heavy blade — something like a cleaver, Lexi guessed. And, the last guard had been unfortunate enough to have been been gutted by a slashing strike to his lower abdomen, but to have survived the blow just long enough to have crawled a dozen paces from where he had stood, leaving a gory trail of his own torn and bleeding intestines behind him.

Worst of all, though, was the noble lord’s fate. Unarmed, he had made easy sport for the cruel pack of goblins. Lexi assumed that the lord had likely been holed up inside the carriage, with the doors bolted, while the goblins executed his guards. By the time they had pried open the door — which now hung limply from a single twisted and broken hinge — there had been no one left to protect him or his family from the vile creatures. His death appeared to have been deliberately slow and torturous.

His corpse hung from a nearby tree, his arms fixed above his head, impaled through both wrists by a single spear which had been thrust deep into the wood. He had been stripped, likely with the blades of the goblins’ knives, based on the numerous small cuts which marked the places where his fine velvet clothes had apparently been brutally cut from his body. They had castrated the poor man, leaving his severed cock and balls lying in a pool of bloody muck beneath him. His feet had also been severed, and lay in the same gory heap. No other obviously fatal wounds marked his body, which led Lexi to surmise that he had simply been left to bleed out painfully from these horrible wounds while his wife and children were carried off by his killers.

In addition to the brutalized and savaged human members of the caravan, the small child-sized figures of two goblins also lay amid the wreckage. Their green bodies, having been pierced and torn by the guards’ weapons, now soaked the ground red with their own blood. While Lexi and Gretel were both somewhat desensitized to the scene, after having lived through a similar attack only one day ago, Samantha was completely aghast. Lexi had naively expected the monk’s mental and emotional fortitude to mirror her seemingly limitless physical strength, and was taken completely off guard when the mighty warrior fell to her hands and knees, vomiting into the dirt between her clenched fists.

“Gah!” Lexi cried, narrowly dodging a splash of Samantha’s stomach contents.

Gretel rolled her eyes dramatically at the paladin, mouthing the words be nice as she knelt down to comfort the monk. “There now,” the mage said softly, brushing Samantha’s white bangs from her forehead, where they had stuck due to the light sheen of sweat now covering it as the huge girl panted and heaved.

“I am sorry,” Samantha said, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrapped fist. “I…have never seen anything so…horrible before.”

“It’s fine,” Lexi said placatingly. “The first time I saw anything like this, I was pretty freaked out too. You’d have to be fucked in the head not to be affected, right?”

Gretel nodded in agreement, patting Samantha on the pack and rubbing her thickly muscled arms with soft strokes.

“It is j-just that I thought I would be able to handle this,” Samantha said, her voice trembling. “I have spent my entire life in preparation for battle, but it seems that no amount of sparring can truly prepare one for the horrors wrought by the greenskins.” She tried, but failed, to look directly at the mutilated corpse of the lord which hung from the carriage’s side. “Such vile abominations are beyond anything I ever dreamed. I knew that the greenskins were the epitome of evil and depravity, but this…this is worse than any nightmare vision.”

I’m supposed to be the fucking leader here, Lexi thought to herself. Guess it’s to to put up or shut up.

“Listen,” the paladin said with a forced air of authority. “We’re a team, Samantha. Me and Gretel are here with you, so don’t feel bad about having a normal human reaction to something as fucking vile as this shit. Just remember, the whole reason we’re here at all right now is to go and murder those green fuckers — hopefully before they have a chance to do this to the woman and her kids that they snatched.”

With a final sniffle, Samantha nodded strongly and rose to her feet. She took a deep breath with her eyes closed, and Lexi felt that she could almost see the despair melting off of the girl’s broad shoulders. When she exhaled and opened her eyes, the look of anguish had been replaced by one of cold determination. There was no mercy or pity in the monk’s cold gray eyes — only death.

Gretel had taken it upon herself to be the party’s de facto secretary, which made sense, given her bookish and analytic inclinations as a mage. As the trio continued to assess the battle’s site, she reviewed from memory the pertinent details, to refocus the party’s intentions following the shock of the grizzly scene.

“So,” she said very businesslike. “We can assume that this,” gesturing to the impaled corpse. “Is Lord Eschenbach, and these others were his family’s guards. Since we don’t see any other bodies, it’s safe to assume that the lord’s brother was accurate in his report. That means we’re looking for the Lady Eschenbach, age forty-five; their son, Hans, nineteen; and the eighteen year old younger daughter, Hilda.”

While Gretel rattled off these details, Lexi scoured the area looking for any evidence of where the surviving goblin raiders might have carried off their human prey. After a few moments, her efforts were rewarded, and the paladin found a small trail of trickled blood and trampled earth leading off the grassy area beside the main road and into the forest which surrounded it.

“This way,” she called to her two companions. “I think this is where they went with the nobles.”

The three adventurers tread carefully down the path, walking quietly and keeping silent so as to listen out for any signs of goblin activity up ahead. The last thing they wanted was to walk into an ambush themselves. Thinking along those lines, Lexi quietly drew the enormous broadsword from her back. Samantha carried her weapon openly already, an iron staff studded with small pyramidal rivets towards each end. A look of concentration passed over the mage’s face, as she called the words of a few key defensive and offensive spells to mind.

After a few hundred yards, the footpath came to an end, leading the party towards the mouth of a cave which opened up in one of the many rocky hills which made up the wooded landscape around the city. Lexi held up a hand, signaling for Samantha and Gretel to stop. Keeping an eye on the cavernous opening, Lexi circled up her two followers, to ensure that whatever plan they carried out from this point on was executed in unison.

“This has got to be where they took the hostages,” she whispered. “So, we’ve got to go down there.” Samantha and Gretel both nodded in agreement at this. “We didn’t think to bring any torches, something to definitely remember next time. Do either of you have a spell or something that can give us reliable light while we’re down there? There’s no point in us just going in blind, and my Holy Illumination spell only lasts for a few minutes at best.”

“I’ve got it covered,” Gretel said at once, sublingually intoning the command word which caused the top of her staff to begin glowing with a soft light reminiscent of an incandescent bulb. “As long as no one takes my staff, this’ll last us for about an hour.”

“Perfect!” Lexi said, giving the mage a glowing smile. “I’ll take the point position. Gretel, you stay behind me. And then, Samantha, you take rear guard — that way our spellcaster can give both of us light to fight by, and she won’t be unnecessarily exposed.”

“I like it,” the burly monk said, a hint of a smile pulling at one side of her mouth.

“Alright then,” Lexi said quietly. “Let’s get to it.” And with that, the party proceeded into the dark tunnel, leading them steadily deeper into the earth.

With as much stealth as they could muster, the trio descended through the long and winding tunnel. For the most part, it was tall enough for even Samantha to stand upright, but it was clearly a natural passage, and was uneven throughout, with some parts forcing all three of the adventurers to duck their heads and crouch forward. They came across no forks or branches, and after maybe five minutes, Lexi spotted what could only be flickering torchlight coming from up ahead around one of the numerous bends in the tunnel’s course. The trio all listened intently, and could clearly make out something up ahead.

“Guards,” Lexi whispered. “If we attack outright, then every other goblin in this hole will know we’re coming. Any ideas on how we could either get past or — better yet — eliminate them without making a racket?”

“I can move as silent as the night,” Samantha whispered back seriously. “But, even my silence would not enable me to evade their line of sight.”

“I’ve got you gals covered,” Gretel hissed, grinning wide. “I can cast an invisibility spell on both of you, but it’ll only last for about a minute, so you’ll need to be quick.”

“That’s awesome!” Lexi whispered excitedly. “That should give us just enough time to slip in between however many there are, and then take them from behind without making so much noise that it’ll rouse the rest of the pack that this lot are supposed to be guarding.”

“This meets my approval,” Samantha said. In the soft light of Gretel’s staff, Lexi could see that the monk’s mouth was smiling, but her gray eyes were as cold as the grave.

“Let’s do it then,” Lexi said decisively.

Gretel sublingually muttered the spell’s command word, and Lexi gasped involuntarily as Samantha’s form faded from her vision, shifting from mild opacity to complete transparency in a few short seconds. With that, the clock started ticking — one minute to clear this stage!