Chapter 54: Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

From her perch atop the high maple tree, Danica surveyed the scene below. The two hobgoblins that the orc captain had dispatched to capture her were beginning to make a serious dent in their task of chopping down the tree. Bits of wood flew hither and thither as their axes sung out in the night. All the while, the two wargs upon which the hobgoblins had ridden incessantly leaped up, snapping their huge jaws at the elf’s feet — hoping to catch the girl unawares and pull her down to her doom.

Ominously, the tree began to sway and wobble, and Danica knew it was now or never.

Smooth as silk, the elf drew an arrow from her quiver and took aim at one of the two hobgoblins working at chopping down her tree. She exhaled slowly, and let fly. Danica’s aim was true, catching the green monster directly in the eye. As soon as the iron-tipped arrow pierced through the socket and into his brain, the creature went stiff as a board, dropping his axe mid-swing and falling back into the leaves below, his body trembling with involuntary shakes as his life departed.

At the bottom of her second exhalation, the elf let loose another arrow, drawing her bead on the second of the two hobgoblins before the first had even hit the ground. The tree’s wobbling, however, threw off her aim. The arrow went low, impaling the hobgoblin through the foot, pinning him to the ground. And although Danica would have liked to finish off the prone target below her, at that same moment, one of the wolves had finally succeeded in catching its paw on one of the trunk’s knots, and was getting dangerously close to her branch.

With a sigh, the elf twisted around behind her, taking aim at the wolf, who was even now just feet away, dagger-like teeth snapping at her legs. This time, Danica’s shot was not misdirected. The arrow hit the warg in the side of the neck, the broad head shredding the animal’s throat as it entered in one side, and exited out the other. With a coughing whine, the beast fell from the tree, collapsing into a heap on the ground, struggling to draw breath as its lifeblood ebbed out of the elf’s wound.

Gretel’s mind was racing. The fresh blossoms of pain erupting from the pitchfork that had been thrust deep into her thigh nearly consumed the mage’s entire sensorium. But, at the same time, she was aware that not only had she failed to dispatch the hobgoblin who had dealt her this grievous injury, but he was just now circling back atop his enormous wolf. Knowing that it was now or never, Gretel heroically pushed the pain aside, closing that door in her mind and attempting — as much as was possible — to block it out while she focused on casting a spell that she knew would not fail her in this moment of need.

“Magic Missile!”

One, two, three! The bolts of sizzling blue magical energy rocketed out from the mage’s outstretched hand, each one thudding into the chest of the warg barreling down on her. The wolf’s mouth hung open limply, the rippling currents of magical electricity coursing through its body, pulverizing internal organs and rupturing arteries with each searing bolt. With a triumphant shout, Gretel pumped her fist in the air grinning, as the warg stumbled to the ground beneath its rider, its legs tangling beneath it as the spasms of death overtook the beast, throwing the hobgoblin wide as the forward momentum came to an abrupt halt.

“Hah!” she cried. “Take that!”

The mage’s shouts of victory proved, however, to be rather premature. Contrary to what Gretel had initially thought, the hobgoblin was not in fact being thrown from his dying mount. Rather, realizing that the warg was going to go down, the rider had leaped from the wolf’s back, and was now hurtling towards the mage feet first. The words, “Oh, fuck!” flashed through the mage’s mind precisely as the warg rider’s heels connected with her sternum, knocking the voluptuous girl flat onto her back. The violent motion did succeed in dislodging the hobgoblin’s fork from her soft thigh, but it also served to crack Gretel’s head viciously against the ground — knocking her clean out.

When the hobgoblin pulled himself to his feet, the first thing he noticed was that the exceptionally curvy girl laying prone in front of him was wearing an extremely short skirt with no panties underneath. The mere sight of the unconscious girl’s delicate pussy lips peeking out from beneath her skirt and the manicured strip of pink hair above it was enough to drive the hobgoblin absolutely wild with lust. Similar to their goblin cousins, although hobgoblins were smaller than human males — roughly the same size and proportions as a young teenager — their cocks did not follow suit, being significantly larger than an average man’s.

The slender framed hobgoblin, looking in silhouette like an teen human boy, slithered out of his breeches as quick as he could, freeing his throbbing erection from the over-tight confines of the leather pants. With no more foreplay than to spit into his hand and give his member a quick coating of saliva, the hobgoblin knelt down between the unconscious mage’s outspread legs, aimed the tip of his green cock at the entrance to her pink pussy, and slammed it in for all he was worth. The battlefield fuck had no delicacy or buildup from the monster’s part. As soon as he tasted the warm cunt and felt the luscious wetness her body produced involuntarily from the stimulation, his mind was overcome by the overwhelming urge to savagely pound this girl’s little pussy into oblivion.

As the hobgoblin crouched over Gretel’s limp body, the glade was filled not only with the sounds of pitched battles, but also by the telltale slapping of thighs upon the mage’s ample ass cheeks, and the sloshing sound of her wet cunt being brutally penetrated by a hard cock.

“Fists of Fury!”

Samantha slammed her fists together, intoning the spell’s words of power, causing them to explode into bluish-white flames. Immediately, the monk quick-stepped towards the hobgoblin who she had tossed from his mount after wrenching the warg’s jaw apart with her bare hands. Her fists looked like meteors, trailing their magical flames as Samantha executed a bone-shattering combination of jabs, crosses, and uppercuts against the unsuspecting greenskin. She felt his sternum crack from a jab, ribs splinter from a particularly vicious uppercut, and his jaw all but disintegrate as the finishing cross connected with her entire magically enhanced momentum behind it.

The hobgoblin was dead on his feet before Samantha even finished the magical combo attack. Even an unenhanced punch from the powerfully built and expertly trained monk would have been enough to drop the puny greenskin. As a race they were, to be sure, far tougher than mere goblins. However, Samantha’s martial prowess and physique had already been proven against far more capable foes than this poor specimen. It was small wonder that his bones quite literally shattered under the machine-gun combination of heavy hands thrown by the monk — particularly given the bonuses to both her attack points and damage that the spell yielded.

Unfortunately for Samantha, Fists of Fury — like all of her magical combo attacks — had a serious flaw to compensate for its advantageous power and speed.

The problem was that the rapid-fire sequence of attacks necessarily focused all of Samantha’s attention on the target directly in front of her, which left her vulnerable to attacks from any other combatants aside from the one being pounded into oblivion. In this turn, though, the same hobgoblin that had succeeded in slicing open the monk’s midsection spotted the opening in her defenses as he was circling his mount back around. Unhesitatingly, he drove his heels into his warg’s flanks, urging the beast on as he ducked down, bringing his spear in for yet another devastating blow.

“Gahhh!” Samantha yelled, dropping to one knee instantly, as fierce lightning bolts of pain erupted in the back of her leg.

At the same time as she was delivering the final strike in her combination, the mounted hobgoblin had swept past her right flank, slashing her hamstring with a nasty swipe of his spear. The muscle was severed entirely by the blow, the two ends snapping hard towards the respective ends of Samantha’s femur like a tightened rubber band that had been cut by a pair of scissors. Apart from the utterly agonizing pain that dominated the monk’s entire perception at that moment, the fact that the hobgoblin had actually succeeded in rupturing the entire muscle meant that Samantha was effectively hobbled.

She tried — unsuccessfully — to stand, but found that she was unable to even begin to straighten the injured leg. With compounding injuries and an opponent who was still armed, mounted, and completely undamaged, this round was not looking good for the monk.

Lexi panted heavily as she squared off against the remaining hobgoblin, his warg lay burning and yelping pitifully, its face a mass of flaming fur after getting a mouth full of the paladin’s flaming sword. The hobgoblin managed to retrieve his pitchfork, and had circled around the backside of his dying mount, eager to put a bit of distance between himself and the clearly irate fighter. The hobgoblin had no idea what she had been shouting as his comrade while she hacked him to pieces, but the ferocity of the blows and the wildness that still showed in her icy blue eyes did not inspire confidence in the creature.

On the contrary, if it were not for the fact that he would most certainly be executed for desertion by his captain, the hobgoblin would have bolted into the woods that very moment. Not keen on what would, to his mind, effectively be suicide, the hobgoblin opted to at least try to deal some damage to the enraged paladin before she cut him down. Looking around at his comrades, the hobgoblin saw that the monk and mage were not faring well in the attack at all. Far from being a stupid representative of his race, the creature sought to capitalize on this.

It had seemed before like this human — somehow — understood the common greenskin tongue, so the hobgoblin decided to try the gambit that had come to him.

“It is hopeless,” he said to Lexi, eyes narrowing as a cruel smile spread over his face, exposing barbarously long and curved canine teeth. “Look upon your fellow meatbags and despair. For, even if you kill me, they are surely lost. See now how the huge warrior, so proud in her skill, can no longer even stand against my mighty comrade! And your mage, she has already become our brood-mare, ready to serve as the receptacle for our mighty seed — to further our noble race!”

Lexi’s face grew redder and redder as her eyes scanned the subtitled translation of the hobgoblin’s screed. In her head, she knew what he was doing, that this whole diatribe was just an attempt to get under her skin so that he could ultimately slip in some kind of surprise attack. But despite that, it was working — largely because he wasn’t actually lying about Samantha and Gretel. As soon as Lexi looked over and saw the state of her companions, she felt sick to her stomach. Everything was going wrong, and she felt powerless in this moment to help either of these women for whom she cared so deeply. Channeling all of that rage, Lexi coiled herself back for an attack.

“Fuck you!” she yelled out, feinting a thrust towards the hobgoblin’s stomach as she darted forward towards him.

As she expected, the hobgoblin took the bait, throwing his sword out to block at the feint — leaving his head wide open. Uncoiling her legs into an explosion of powerful energy, Lexi leaped high into the air, bringing her sword back behind her head and then down in a brutal chopping strike. Her flaming sword connected with the top of the hobgoblin’s head, the blade parting his skull and continuing down through his neck, and torso — the red-hot blade cauterizing the two halves as they split, traveling all the way down until the sword became lodged in the corpse’s hip bone.

Your Attack Hit!

-31 HP (0/20)