Chapter 53: The Hobgoblins Roll the Dice

Having seized the initiative and taken down three of the hobgoblins — and two of their respective mounts — in such spectacular and varied fashion, the adventurers found themselves in high spirits. However, as with any game system, the monsters got their turns to attack as well, and there were still more than two opponents remaining for each adventurer. Not intending to waste this opportunity, the orc captain shouted out commands to his lesser cousins. Among the adventurers, it was only Lexi, with Fantasy Adventure Quest’s subtitle function still enabled, who among the adventurers was able to understand the orcish commands.

This is the big test, she thought to herself as he rattled off orders to his troops. With these odds, every single one of us is going to have to step up, or get seriously fucked up.

“You two,” the huge orc growled at a pair of axe-wielding riders on the opposite side of Samantha’s thunder-carved crevice. “Take down the little elf’s tree. We can’t let a little morsel like that climb away so easily, can we?” The two chuckled darkly at their leader’s suggestive joke, and nodded their heads in assent.

The captain kept an honor guard of three warg riders in reserve next to him, but similarly dispatched the remaining four troops to attack the three adventurers still standing in the fire-lit circle. Heeding their captain’s commands, two riders sped off towards the grove’s edge, axes in hand. Another pair of wargs began loping towards the largest and most physically imposing member of the adventuring party, Samantha. While the final two riders split off, making their ways towards the mage and paladin.

As soon as the two hobgoblins reached Danica’s tree, they leaped off their wargs, not even waiting for the enormous wolves to come to a halt. Axes in hand, the pair of green monsters began hacking away furiously at the base of the maple tree in whose branches Danica currently sat. While their riders laughed to one another, swapping lewd remarks about which of the elf’s tight little holes they’d fuck first, their vicious lupine mounts took turns leaping as high as their powerful legs could take them, snapping at Danica’s dangling feet.

“Ahhh!” the elf cried, clutching wildly at the branch and dropping her bow in the mad scramble to pull her feet up from the leaping wolf.

One of the wolves just barely missed her boot, its seemingly infinite number of enormously long and sharp teeth snapping together just inches from Danica’s precious toes. The creature’s claws dug deep furrows into the tree’s bark as it slid back down, snarling and growling at the elf all the while. The second wolf got nearly as close in its initial leap, but it thankfully appeared to Danica that she was just a bit too high up for the wargs to reach her. However, this meant that she was high up enough that a fall to the ground would be bad news — and the axe-wielding hobgoblins were making quick work of the tree’s trunk.

Danica realized with growing anxiety that she was not as safe as she had initially thought. As the tree began to sway ominously underneath her, and the wolves continued their terrifying leaps, the elf tried to steady herself atop the large branch on which she sat. Danica wrapped her small legs tightly around the wood, leaving her hands free to reach for her bow, which had slipped from her hand when the first wolf nearly bit her foot, and now lay in the foliage of a smaller branch a few feet ahead of her. The elf extended herself forward, arms searching in the darkness for the familiar smoothness of her weapon, desperately hoping she would be able to find it in time.

A wolf-riding hobgoblin peeled off from the pack, making a beeline directly for Gretel. Charging fast, he lowered his pitchfork, leveling it with the clear intent to skewer the pink haired mage where she stood. Unfortunately for the cocky young mage, Lexi’s prediction came true. Completely drunk on the power of her enormous floating magical fists, Gretel threw caution to the wind. In a failed attempt to show off, she decided to try and smack the incoming hobgoblin with one of the bloody arms which she had just torn from his companion’s shoulders.

This proved to be a costly error for the mage.

The hobgoblin dodged the ill-aimed blow with the practiced ease of a clearly seasoned fighter, swaying to the side atop his mount without so much as breaking his stride. Having no backup plan in case her attack failed — after all, how could it — Gretel simply stood there, staring blankly as the warg rider charged in. Fortunately for the mage, his wolf did slip in the increasingly large puddle of blood oozing out from the gaping wounds in the hobgoblin carcass directly in front of Gretel. This caused the rider’s blow to slip down, and instead of his pitchfork impaling the mage through the chest, the sharp tines of the hurled fork instead dug deeply into her fleshy thigh.

“Grahhh!” Gretel cried out, dropping down to one knee, and clutching her bleeding thigh in agonizing pain. The two long tines of the pitchfork had sunk in deep into her leg from the powerful throw, so much so that the mage felt the cold iron scrape against her femur.

Not having been unseated from his mount by the slight slip, the hobgoblin circled his warg around behind Gretel. He drew his knife and dug his heels into the warg’s flanks, impelling it onward towards the undefended back of the voluptuous and seemingly helpless girl. The only question on the hobgoblin’s mind was whether he wanted to fuck her first and then cut her to pieces, reverse that order of operations, or may be even try doing both at the same time. His mind awash in the combination of sexual frenzy and blood-lust common to his race, the wicked creature licked his lips lewdly as he closed the gap between himself and the injured mage.

At the same time that Danica was dodging leaping wargs in her tree and Gretel was swinging a bloody arm at her opponent, Samantha readied herself into a defensive stance as two warg riders closed in fast. The first wolf came in from the front, its huge jaws snapping at the monk’s face as the beast leaped at her. Samantha’s reactions being honed to a fine edge, she managed to catch the wolf by the mouth, her powerful hands each gripping the wolf by the end of its jaw.

“Kyaaa!” Samantha shouted at the wolf.

The thick corded muscles in her arms bulged as the monk slowly, but surely, pried the wolf’s jaws apart, forcing the beat’s mouth open wider and wider. At first, the warg fought back against Samantha, snarling and making every attempt to bite down and sever the impudent human’s fingers which she had so foolishly wrapped around its teeth. However, as the challenge wore on, and the warg’s jaws were forced open past the point of comfort and into the painful position of being spread unnaturally wide, the animal changed tactics entirely.

The warg thrashed and shook its head, making every attempt to pull itself free from Samantha’s iron grip. The sheer power of the monk’s strength was far too great for the wolf to overcome. Not only did Samantha not release the beast, but she continued prying its jaws further and further apart, her bulging muscles flexing to the utmost until — with a sickening crack — the incredible tension being applied snapped the wolf’s jaws and neck, felling the beast instantly. The warg’s body went limp, its tong lolling sickeningly as the light faded from the creature’s eyes.

With one final heave of her seemingly limitless reserves of strength, Samantha wrenched the dead warg’s neck, throwing the hobgoblin rider cleanly to the ground. He still bore his axe, but had fallen far enough from his mount that the monk was currently out of range. Samantha completed the toss, hurling the wolf’s carcass atop its former master, temporarily pinning the hobgoblin underneath the massive beast’s eighty pound corpse. The monk was hoping to have the time to finish off this opponent before he could get back to his feet.

This plan was, however, foiled by the second warg rider. While Samantha had been wrestling with the first rider’s wolf, this hobgoblin had cut a broad circle around the embattled pair, hoping to catch the monk unawares from behind. Samantha whipped around just as the rider closed in, launching a vicious roundhouse kick at his head. Unfortunately for the monk, the angle was just a bit off, and her shin whizzed harmlessly over the hobgoblin’s ducking head. At the same time, his spear struck home, slashing deep into Samantha’s side.

“Arghhh!” the muscular girl gasped, as the blade cut into her flesh.

The wound was bad enough that the normally stoic monk actually cried out in pain, clutching at the gash. The spear’s blade had actually cut cleanly through her abdominal wall, leaving not only a virtual torrent of blood pouring out, but the telltale glistening pink of the monk’s small intestines peeking out. Samantha nearly swooned from both the pain and the gory realization that if she did not act fast, then her guts might quite literally start spilling out. Thinking quickly, she undid her large sash, and retied it around the wound, saying a whispered prayer to whatever deity might be listening that this could at least hold her together until this battle was concluded.

While her comrades all faced their respective foes, the sole dispatched warg rider looped around behind Lexi, taking a similar approach to Samantha’s second opponent, hoping to catch the paladin off guard and score an easy victory against the girl with the terrifying flaming sword. The hobgoblin drove is warg in for a strike, the beast’s huge jaws opening wide to clamp down on the back of Lexi’s exposed neck, eager to tear into her white flesh and crush the bones beneath, shaking the life from the presumptuous warrior.

Lexi’s seeming blindness to the warg’s approach was, however, a feint.

Just as the warg leaped in for what it thought was going to be the kill, the paladin spun around, bringing the flat of her flaming sword directly in line with its wide-open jaws. Unable to halt the motion of its own body, the wolf’s teeth inadvertently clamped down hard along the edges of the sword’s blade, wedging the creature’s mouth open wide, as the sword’s edge bit deep into the gums between its sharp teeth, cutting into its soft palate and tongue.

Blood streamed from the sides of the warg’s mouth, but the pain from the self-inflicted cuts was nothing compared to the searing agony as its mouth and throat were scorched and burned from the inside out by the paladin’s fiery weapon. Content in the damage done by her offensive parry, Lexi gave her sword a gut-wrenching twist, cleaving huge chunks out of the warg’s lower and upper jaws as she pulled the enormous blade free from its maw.

“Take that, bitch!” Lexi shouted with a triumphant laugh, squatting down into a combat stance and readying herself for another strike.

The warg thrashed its flaming head about wildly, desperate to put out the magical flames, which at once crept down its throat and had also ignited the fur around the beast’s face. Amid the pained howls, the warg reared back suddenly, throwing its rider to the ground. As the hobgoblin scrambled back and away from its wild mount, he dropped his pitchfork. Lexi took immediate note of this, a wicked smile spreading across her face, squared off against the flaming wolf that separated her from her now disarmed hobgoblin target.

“You boys sure did pick the wrong gang of girls to fuck with tonight,” she said dangerously, stalking towards the downed hobgoblin.