Chapter 36 Full force of the storm
The fighting froze as the two stared at each other. It was only when I swung down with my axe, burying it into a bandit's head, did the fighting start again. I didn’t care about their backstory. I was going to win this fight because I had to, because if I didn’t, I would be killed, and my wives would meet a similar, if not more terrible, fate.
The man walked casually forward with a group of about thirty stronger-looking bandits. The first bunch was rabble, about half broke and ran while the other half died like sheep. I had killed four myself, and I had the fewest kills out of all the adventurers. All three of my wives were in the double digits on kills. I would be freaking out if I had the time to, but was so focused on living I couldn’t freak out that I killed someone right now.
We didn’t get a chance to breathe as the wave of fresh-stronger bandits hit us at once. Only Leaf’s arrows were rapidly securing kills as we all fought for our lives. I ducked under a blow as my axe dug into the bandit’s chest, but it wasn’t enough to kill him, and he knew that. With a sneer, he kicked me in the chest, knocking the weapon out of my hands.
He swaggered toward me as I flung dirt into his face. Now wasn’t the time to care about fighting fairly. Cursing up a storm, he instinctively backed up, letting me grab the axe that was still stuck in his chest and wrench it out before burying it in his head. We were losing. There had been casualties, but now that the stronger bandits fought us, we were losing more than we were killing.
The bandit leader wore a thick suit of armor and had begun chasing Leaf around the outskirts of the fighting. She pelted him with arrows that bounced off before picking up any of the discards she could to keep firing. Her arrows had run out on her third volley, making her have to pull them from the ground or out of corpses.
A larger bandit fought against Delilah and a cow beastkin I had never seen before. They worked well together as large attacks were blocked by Delilah while the beastkin swung an axe the size of herself at the bandit. Delilah deflected a blow, which led the man to overextend, and the cowgirl took advantage of it, landing a clean blow, hurting him badly, but he was still up and fighting them both.
Silk and Tems fought a team of two fast bandits; they worked well together, but so did the bandits. I lined up my axe as I tossed it at the man who had his back toward me. It dug in and for a brief moment, it looked like he was going to fall, before he reached back and pulled it out to toss at Silk. Cherry kept flinging spells, but I could tell she was running on fumes. Instead of stopping, though, she pulled out a kitchen knife from nowhere and waded into the fight as she stabbed a bandit in the back.
The orc barmaid Roka, rocked a bandit with a haymaker as she moved in to block an attack that would have killed someone's housewife. The gnomish alchemist Millicent was just standing there, but around her were a bunch of corpses bleeding from their orifices, their eyes open in terror as their hands reached for their throats. Olivia’s pink hair had been dyed red from the amount of blood she shed. Holding a hammer and chisel, she was going for debilitating enemies by giving them crippling injuries more than she was going for kills.
The winner of the fight could have been decided with a coin toss, it was going to be that close. We were on the losing end, unless a miracle happened, or more of the bandits fled, we would be on the losing end. So that was why I was surprised when the trader, whom I knew wasn’t a combatant, stepped in and took an attack. The crowd went silent as he did so. All traders worked under a certain code, and it had been tried and tested enough to be an unspoken rule. Never attack a trader.
Traders were third-party; they very rarely got mixed into conflicts, only caring for making money. They served anyone who had the coin, even bandits, and would never fight in any conflicts, and woe to those who tried to kill a trader. The moment an attack landed on him, the homeless man I hadn’t looked at twice sprang from the ground before sighing.
“I told you, you’re getting far too attached to your customers, Maxwell. We could have easily avoided getting involved in this.” The trader drank down a potion as he responded. “That may be true, but I wasn’t moved to the outskirts because I was good at following the rules, did I, Clay?” The overweight trader waded into the fighting as his bodyguard stood up, revealing he was secretly one of the biggest people I had ever seen before.
Stiletto knives flew from the trader's hands as he proved how adept he was at fighting. His bodyguard pulled a two-handed claymore out of nowhere as he cut a bandit in half. A man on the verge of dying was hit with a potion as Maxwell yelled out. “You owe me three gold!” I picked up a sword from the ground and got back into fighting before I heard Leaf scream.
She held her arm as it limply hung to her side. Clive had stopped going after her, and forced her to block his blade that would have killed another man who wasn’t paying attention to the bigger threat. The bandit leader ignored her now that she was wounded and less dangerous, instead diverting his attention to fighting everyone else, which shifted the combat again. Now that he wasn’t completely distracted, it was clear that he was a cut above everyone else. Silk and Tems had defeated their opponent and moved to block him, but even two against one, it was clear that the man was just a step ahead still.
Cherry’s mother cried out next. “Retreat to my home!” I watched as everyone broke off and started to move toward it. The only saving grace we had was that the bandit leader’s main stat wasn’t agility. He was built like a tank, but it meant we had the time to whittle down his troops' numbers instead of just being outright overwhelmed from the start.
I dragged an injured adventurer while carrying another on my back. They let us retreat for some reason; that reason was visible as some of the bandits who ran away now poured into the town. They began to loot while their leader stared us down. We were in a worse position. More and more bandits came back, and while they were weak, they still had the numerical advantage, and now most of us were injured.
“You’re mine, Berry! I’ll take you even if I have to raze this town to the ground to do it!” A magical barrier encapsulated the house before Berry(Cherry’s mom) closed the door. She spoke again. “I’ve warded the building, it’ll buy us some time to recover… I know that man, he was in our adventuring party thirty years ago. I hadn’t seen him since we left to raise Cherry.”
I didn’t need to know the entire backstory; I needed to know what we could do to get out of this situation alive. She kept on explaining how there was a love triangle, and I tuned it out until I heard Tems softly speak beside me. “Tems… Peed herself.” I looked down at the puddle between her legs, the room went silent at the sight of her water breaking.