Chapter 51: Warg Riders in the Night

“Awooo!”

The howling of a single wolf, followed shortly by what must have been a dozen others, jolted Lexi and her companions from sleep. The paladin looked around groggily, half expecting to see a pack of wolves in their campsite. However, in the intermingled lights of the smoldering campfire and the large gibbous moon, she saw only the bedrolls and faces of her three companions — all but one sharing the same apparent confusion as her. Samantha was the exception, her eyes were wide with what Lexi took for panic.

The monk immediately scrambled out of her bed roll, hopping up to her feet. “Warg riders!” she shouted to her groggy companions.

“What?” Lexi asked, the phrase pulling at a thread in the back of her mind, but not quite resolving to anything meaningful.

“G-Greenskins mounted on w-wargs — enormous wolves — are known to roam some of the n-northern regions,” Gretel stuttered, her eyes wide with terror.

“This is bad,” the monk added. “Being this close to what we know to be the greenskins’ slave market and temple, there is a good chance that this is some kind of organized raiding party specifically looking for travelers like us.”

“I c-can smell the wolves c-coming,” Danica said, voice trembling with unconcealed fear. “They don’t smell like r-regular wolves at all. There’s something…evil about their scent.”

“I would imagine,” Samantha said, now fully dressed and armed. “That having been bred and raised by foul greenskins would have that effect.”

As Lexi and the other two companions scrambled into their respective clothes and gear, the phrase “warg riders” finally clicked in Lexi’s head. After that, the scene from The Hobbit where Bilbo and the dwarves were assaulted by the wolf-riding goblins played on a loop in her mind’s eye. On the third or fourth loop, this sparked the seed of a plan in the paladin’s mind.

“Samantha,” Lexi directed. “Grab more wood for the fire, quickly, we need to get it blazing so we can see whatever the fuck is about to happen.”

The monk nodded sharply, turning immediately and running off into the wood line to collect what suitable branches and logs she could quickly find.

“Gretel and Danica,” the paladin continued urgently. “Help me spread these burning brands out into a circle around us.”

The team sprang into action, assembling the one or two dozen smoldering logs which remained burning in the large campfire out into a circle around the encampment’s perimeter. The howling of the wargs continued, the sounds echoing throughout the valley so that Lexi had no idea what direction it was actually coming from. She knew, though, that time had to be running short. And, if the seemingly structured set of encounters she and her friends had experienced thus far on this quest were any indicator, then Fantasy Adventure Quest most likely had something pretty nasty in store for the party. In a moment, Samantha returned, her arms bursting with kindling, which she and Lexi added to the ring of burning brands in the hopes that they dry wood would quickly catch.

“Everyone!” Lexi yelled, as the howls were joined by the unmistakable sounds of a large number of pawed creatures crashing through the brush. “Quick, get the fuck inside the circle. They’re almost here!”

As if Lexi’s warning was their cue, the warg riders burst into the clearing just as the four adventurers made it into the flaming circle. Lexi gasped audibly in shock at the sight with which she and her companions were met. The paladin had expected it to be bad, but the reality of their situation appeared to be far more dire than Lexi would have expected from the kinds of graded scenarios the game had — apparently — been throwing her way over the past four days.

This is some seriously fucking grimdark shit, she thought to herself, surveying the encircling riders.

Forming a semi-circle around the adventurers’ circle of burning brands, the large black wolves prowled about, growling and baring their teeth at the quartet, their eyes flashing in the smoldering flames, looking like demonic tormentors who were born from the night’s darkness itself. Lexi was shocked at the size of the wolves. When Samantha and Gretel had explained, she was imagining something like a large dog — never having been near an actual wolf before. These, however, were far larger than any dog Lexi had ever seen, each one being close to four feet in height and longer than the paladin was tall.

Lexi counted a dozen of the beasts, and atop their backs was a truly gruesome menagerie of riders, that she assumed must be hobgoblins. Each one was larger than a child-sized goblin, but still a bit smaller than an average human. Their heritage was apparent from the sickly green complexions that flashed into view whenever the wolf being ridden by the hobgoblin approached the flames. The wolves bore no saddles, and were ridden bareback by the hobgoblins — all of whom appeared to be extremely comfortable atop their respective mounts.

The hobgoblin riders wore the same type of mismatched armor, likely scavenged from slain adventurers, that Lexi had already seen in her encounters with their smaller goblin cousins. The difference with this collection of miscreants was that many of them bore the most appalling “decorations” that Lexi had ever seen. Every one of the riders was adorned with some kind of human — or at least humanoid — body part.

When one hobgoblin rode past, Lexi gasped as she saw a girl’s head impaled atop his spear, the tip having been rammed through the severed neck and plunging out of its open mouth, tongue lolling grotesquely. On another, the paladin spotted a pair of hands affixed to the horned helmet worn by the creature. Others rode by presenting such horrors as necklaces of fingers, severed limbs swung about as mock weapons, with all of the ghastly collection appearing to be quite fresh from the wet blood Lexi could see still weeping from many of the gaping wounds. The horrid creatures bore a variety of weapons — spears, pitchforks, and axes — whose black, blood-encrusted blades gleamed malevolently under the moonlight.

Most terrible of all was the leader, whose mount approached menacingly from the rear of the pack, looming hugely over his troops in the flickering fire’s light. Nearly twice the size of the other enormous wolves, his mount — a dire wolf — was easily the size of a small horse, its size so far out of line with anything Lexi had ever seen that her mind struggled to comprehend what her eyes were seeing. The teeth bared by the titanically proportioned dire wolf were well over half a foot in length, like a mouth full of ivory colored daggers, primed and ready to shred any unwary piece of meat within reach.

The rider who sat haughtily astride this monstrosity was equally huge as compared to his hobgoblin troops. Knowing that this must, just based on his size, be an orc, Lexi was stunned at his size as well — the hulking green frame being almost as large as the stoneskinned warrior she and Samantha had fought just that evening. Not to be outdone by his underlings in any way, the orc captain wore a full shirt of mail, with large matched plates of black armor atop each hulking shoulder. For his weapon he carried an enormous two-handed warhammer which — in an obvious show of strength — he easily bore with a single hand.

The pièce de résistance of the entire gory tableau was the standard borne by the orc in his other hand. It was an huge pole arm, easily twelve feet long from butt to bladed spear tip. Hung from this long pole was the corpse of a girl who could hardly have been older than Lexi, her ginger hair hung limply over a pale face from which blue eyes stared out with the blankness of death. The girl’s limbs had been hacked off, and likely adorned some of the warg riders Lexi had already seen passing across her line of sight, with the four stumps still oozing blood down the staff.

For her sake, Lexi prayed that the girl was dead before she had been mounted to the pole arm — though, given the proclivities of the greenskins, this had likely not been the case. She had been spit through, the blade shoved into her bloody cunt and pushed brutally all the way through her guts until it burst from the side of her neck, leaving her lead lolling at an unnatural angle. With every padding step the dire wolf took, the dead trophy’s tits jiggled in a horrific mockery of the once beautiful girl’s life.

The sight enraged Lexi beyond belief.

The paladin slowly drew her sword, locking eyes with the orc, and held the blade up in front of her face in a salute, then pointed the tip straight at him — the universal message crossing whatever linguistic gaps separated their two races. The bestial orc captain responded in kind, raising his gruesome standard high into the air.

“Värske liha!” came the orc’s growl.

Whatever this meant in the apparently shared tongue of the greenskins, it was lost on Lexi, but triggered a thought in the paladin’s head.

I wonder if there’s some kind of subtitle feature in the game that would translate stuff? That’s pretty typical of RPGs after all. If there is, that’d be deadass helpful right about now. And, I’d bet that it’d follow the same patterns as all of the other commands. Might as well give it a shot!

Lexi then subvocalized the command, and was more than a bit surprised to see that it worked.

Get Subtitles!

Immediately, like she was in a fansubbed anime movie, blocky white subtitles appeared superimposed in the bottom of her field of vision, giving her an easily legible translation of the orcish speech. While it was good to know what had been said, Lexi was not, however, happy with the speech’s content.

“Fresh meat!”

“Well, they’ve made their intent perfectly fucking clear,” Lexi said to her companions. “They either want to eat us, fuck us, or probably both at the same time.”

“Hold up,” Gretel said. “You speak greenskin?!”

“Long story short,” the paladin answered, not wanting to get into her special abilities as a PC. “I can understand it to a degree. The point is, there’s absolutely no need to pull your goddamn punches — so let’s fuck ’em up!”

“And it just so happens,” Lexi continued, a wicked smile spreading over her face. “That I’ve got a little something new that might help.”

“New combat spell?” Gretel asked. Lexi nodded in response, never taking her eyes from the orc captain. “Nice! You’re also not the only one,” the mage added with a smirk. Though not consciously aware of having leveled up, a new spell had been added to the mage’s repertoire by the system while she slept. And, apparently she was not alone in this.

“Indeed not,” Samantha added. A hint of a smile passed over the muscular monk’s face as she cracked her knuckles ominously.

“Fuck yeah!” Gretel cheered, grinning up at Samantha.

“How about you, munchkin?” Lexi asked Danica. “Got any combat-oriented spells or prayers that might be useful in this lovely situation we’ve gotten ourselves into?”

“Umm,” the elf said, scratching her head. “I don’t have any prayers that are for combat per se, but I might be able to do something with animals that can help out! And, I’m a pretty good shot with my bow, so as long as I can keep enough distance between myself and these stinky green uglies, then I think I should be able to make myself pretty useful to the team! And—”

“That sounds good enough to me,” Lexi cut in. Time was, after all, of the essence here, and she knew that with the numbers being so heavily weighted against them, a lot would depend on her party being able to seize the initiative. “Let’s roll!”