Chapter 249: Gnoll Party

The gnolls’ cackling language erupted from all around us. In Hound training, Hearne had told us this was an intimidation tactic by gnolls when they hunted. We didn’t have to wait long as a trio of large gnolls rushed the only wide opening. With just three enemies, I considered holding the pellets. Maveith’s bow twanged and one of the gnoll shadows jerked from the impact of his heavy arrow and spun to the ground, accompanied by a piercing yip. I knew gnolls had excellent night sight. We were at a disadvantage in the low light of the blue moon and severely outnumbered.

I sent one last earth pulse, and then I slammed two sneezing and blindness pellets on the stones near the entrance. There was no wind tonight, so we shouldn’t have to deal with the spores blowing back on us.

The pellets shattered on the ground and the air ignited their payload with a pop. A ten-foot-wide cloud burst in the moonlight. Since those four pellets had no smoke variants, we could still make out the gnoll shadows as they rushed us with their spears.

“Seven heartbeats before the spores become inert,” I warned Maveith about entering the cloud. “Five are about to scale the wall to our left. Can you handle the two remaining in front?”

“Easily,” Maveith rumbled as he released a second arrow into a confused gnoll coming through the cloud. He tossed aside his bow to pull his hammer from its belt loop. The black spear appeared in my hands, extending my reach to strike the climbing gnolls. With a quick flick of the spear, the head of the first gnoll was separated from its body. Unexpectedly, the weight of the five gnolls scaling the wall affected its stability. The old stone base popped, and the ten-foot wall started falling slowly toward us.

“Maveith! Move right!” Maveith looked over and understood my urgency. I slapped Ginger’s flank. “Run!” She understood the command and bolted past Maveith, trampling the last blinded gnoll as she exited the structure, rushing into the night. It wasn’t ideal, but it would have taken too long to coax Ginger to move out of the corner in the confusion.

The ground shook as the stones making up the wall broke apart like shattered glass. The gnolls who rode the wall to the ground were stunned, and some appeared injured as they yipped in dismay. I took the opportunity to use the black spear to stab two of them in vital locations—the heart and head. Maveith’s hammer cracked a third’s head, and I heard him cursing the loss of his bow under the collapsed wall.

The gnolls were not done with us. We didn’t see the thrown spears in the moon’s low light. One spear pierced Maveith’s abdomen, and he grunted in displeasure. My aether shield flashed, draining its charge as a spear targeting me was deflected. The flash of light from the shield blinded us for a moment.

I pulsed earth speak and detected five more gnolls rushing us. “Handle the last one in here,” I ordered Maveith, who was carefully pulling the spear out of his torso. If we stayed in the structure, they would be free to attack us from range with spears.

As I rushed the oncoming gnolls, I was worried for Ginger. But first, we needed to eliminate the gnolls. As I ran into the open, the temperature of the air suddenly dropped unnaturally. Gnoll mages were rarer than an ogre that didn’t reek. It appeared Fortuna was taking the night off from watching over me.

Frost appeared on the ground as I ran, but more deadly was the unnatural fog materializing around me and filling the woods, rising to the canopy. The gnoll shaman … mage … Whatever you called it, it was smart. The fog was thick and rising, and soon, the woods would descend into complete darkness, giving the advantage to the gnolls’ dark vision. Gnolls hunted at night but usually in packs no larger than six. If I ever had a chance to talk with Hearne again, I was going to bitch about this encounter, as it was far from what he taught us.

Just before I clashed with the lead gnoll, I sent out an earth pulse and cursed. The flash image returned more than ten gnolls in range, some of which were half the size of the warriors. Focusing on my opponent, my air shield deflected a spear, and my spear tore out his guts. I pivoted and swung the black spear in an arc, slashing two more gnolls, one critically, just below the neck. The remaining two uninjured gnolls backed off and defended instead of attacking.

I couldn’t waste time as the darkness was rapidly encroaching. I cut one of their spears in half in a quick exchange, the black spear easily cutting the shaft. These gnolls were strong but very unskilled with their weapons. The most experienced hunters in the pack would have attacked first, but they were now all dead. I pressed forward, as I doubted it would be long before I was in complete darkness.

I started to form an idea of what these gnolls were doing. These gnolls must be migrating their entire pack—maybe away from the war front. The distant gnolls were smaller, so likely younger, and running away from the combat, and their high numbers matched my conjecture.

Before I could engage the remaining gnolls, an unseen arrow pierced my thigh, and I struggled to remain standing. I grasped the arrow and it snapped in my grasp and crumbled. I concluded it was an ice shard and not an arrow from the gnoll spellcaster nearby. I was hobbled and soon fending off the four resurgent gnolls as they got confident from my injury.

I wanted to pulse earth speak and search for the caster but couldn’t find the time to divert my attention from the fight as they attempted to surround me. Without my aether shield amulet available, one of these ice arrows could strike me in a vital region. As I worked on healing, I shuffled to put my opponents between me and the mage’s likely direction.

The ice arrow had penetrated deeply, and it must have had a freezing effect tied to it, as the surrounding muscle was damaged as well. I pushed aether blindly toward the wound. When I was sufficiently healed, I surprised the gnolls, lunging on my bloody, injured leg that I had been favoring.

I grunted in mild pain since the wound was not quite healed. The spear pierced the surprised gnoll’s sternum. I extracted the tip at an angle, widening the wound and causing a spray of blood. The other young gnolls backed off in fear. They didn’t realize my vision was almost gone as darkness quickly descended. I broke away and raced toward the gnoll I suspected was casting spells. If I could eliminate him, I hoped, it would break the gnolls’ spirit and lift the darkness.

Unfortunately, my guess was correct, and another unseen ice arrow pierced my chest. It had been too dark to see the attack, and I collapsed behind a tree, wheezing as cold blood filled my lungs. It hurt to breathe as I quickly and carefully worked the ice shard out to speed up the healing. As I healed the injury and spat congealed blood, I switched the spear for magebane to deal with the caster. The thick fog covered the canopy and the darkness was almost complete. My earth pulse told me the gnolls were retreating, no longer interested in the fight.

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I released a long breath of relief. If I had to continue the fight, I would have had to use a glowstone and be a marked target with attacks coming from the darkness. I focused my senses on listening to the woods. Maveith was still in the structure, but I didn’t hear any sound of Ginger. After a few moments, I heard Maveith’s voice cut the night air fifty yards away. “Eryk, where are you?”

“Stay there, Maveith. I will come to you. The gnolls are retreating. They are a large migrating pack,” I yelled back. My chest injury had healed sufficiently for my breathing to return to normal. The metallic taste of blood lingered in my mouth. I kept spitting to clear it.

The gnolls were fleeing, already out of the range of my pulses, and my aether core was pretty depleted. I was content with letting them retreat, as the darkness was not receding.

As my racing, adrenaline-fueled heart calmed, I spent time recharging the aether shield amulet and then stood from my cover. I moved back toward Maveith, but no attack was forthcoming. In the light of a glowstone, Maveith was leaning against the wall, his abdominal wound mostly healed. “Do you need more of the orc healing potions?”

“My mouth may never recover if I consume another,” Maveith whined in good humor. “I have just some lingering soreness but will be fine. Where is Ginger?” His tone changed to concern.

I listened to the quiet night and didn’t hear anything. “I will go look for her with earth speak. She probably didn’t wander far away,” I replied with hope.

“I will go with you,” Maveith stated, not taking no for an answer. I didn’t object, and we moved into the dark woods. I pulsed infrequently to conserve aether and wondered why the dense fog overhead hadn’t dissipated with the departure of the gnoll spellcaster and his pack. Maybe it was because there was no wind tonight. We were forced to use a glowstone to light our way.

A pained equine cry cut the night a distance away. Maveith was already lumbering ahead to Ginger’s rescue. If it was strange to put our lives in danger for a horse, neither of us mentioned it. I paced myself with Maveith, holding the glowstone and magebane. The horse’s second cry had us both shifting into a sprint. My earth pulses increased in frequency as we closed in on the combat.

I got some rough feedback on what was happening. One of the gnolls had roped Ginger and secured her to a tree. She was fighting back as they tried to take her down with spears. “They are killing her!” I snarled as I began to outpace Maveith.

Maveith’s war cry echoed in the night behind me, drawing the gnoll’s attention away from Ginger. I reached them first and slashed into the nearest gnoll, deflecting his spear with magebane while tossing the glowstone on the ground to light the area. My second slash was to free Ginger, who was bleeding from multiple stab wounds. Instead of running, she reared and came down on a gnoll, crushing its skull in retribution.

I only detected six gnolls in the clearing. One was dead and one was wounded. Maveith’s hammer crushed a third, and then things went dark. I guessed a gnoll had covered the glowstone, so I produced another, but its light only lasted a few breaths before being snuffed out like a candle. Maveith was blinded as well. “I can’t see,” he said, his deep voice echoing nearby.

I pulsed earth speak again and saw the three young gnolls grouped together. Their cackling language echoed in the woods, and I guessed our loss of sight was due to the gnoll mage somehow. More cackling conversations occurred around us in the deeper woods, and it angered me. Ginger was huffing angrily nearby, bleeding as I tried to call her to me. “Ginger! Come! Apple!”

It didn’t work, as she was also blind and heavily injured, but at least her training kept her from running from the battle. A thud sounded, and Maveith grunted, “An arrow has struck me.”

“Is it an ice shard?” I asked as I continued to pulse earth speak to fight the fog of war. I was now fairly certain which of the distant gnolls was the caster.

“Yes,” Maveith’s voice returned angrily as I heard ice crunching in his grasp.

“I am going to rush the caster. He only has two guards,” I informed Maveith. Not being able to see in the dark was becoming an annoyance. I was so accustomed to the night vision goggles of the Hounds that losing that ability needled me. Perhaps I should have searched the Archives for Hound gear or tried to locate more Hound caches in the western Empire.

As I raced toward the trio of gnolls, my aether shield flashed as an ice shard shattered on the defensive magic. The flash and confusion allowed me to close the distance, and the gnoll guards interposed themselves to protect their caster. I had overestimated myself. In the dark, I took a spear to the shoulder and one to the chest and had to step back and recover. It was too hard to fight in the dark, even with earth pulses, when my opponents could see and I could not. I could tell their general location and their rough movements, but their bodies were not clear enough to defend myself from their attacks.

I retrieved the blindness pellets and cast them into the ground, but I knew they were prepared for the trick from the cackling warning from the mage. I started to retreat, backstepping toward Maveith and Ginger, and produced my third glowstone. It too soon winked out, and I shoved it agitatedly into my pouch since my aether wouldn’t charge it. I only had one glowstone left in my dimensional space.

The two gnolls with spears were now getting bolder, stalking me as I retreated. I had stopped the bleeding from the spear wound, but defending against the mage and his guards was too difficult if I couldn’t see. My aether was dangerously low from the night’s combat as well. Fuck, I swore to myself. I needed to see in the dark. And then I could.

I was stunned as my vision suddenly crystallized. My vision was like twilight, heavily gray in color, but high in contrast. I understood what had happened. I had just imprinted a spell form to see in the dark. I was channeling aether into the new spell form on my aether core, and it was affecting my eyes, similar to the Hound goggles.

My vision was only clear to about twenty-five feet, but that was good enough to handle the overconfident gnolls. A grin slowly formed on my lips, and the gnolls sensed the change in my demeanor. Before they could back away, I rushed the pair.

They didn’t stand a chance; their brains were still processing my change in confidence. Magebane made short work of the pair, and I chased down the mage after his guards fell. The mage tried to flee, necklaces of bone rattling as he stumbled away in fear. I cut him down from behind and realized he looked ancient for a gnoll. I pulsed earth speak, but no more gnolls were in range.

There were still more gnolls out there, but they were mostly females and pups, unlikely to bother us. I returned to Maveith, who was still in the dark but guarding Ginger with the remaining gnolls all dead. “It’s over, Maveith; the caster is dead.” I produced the last glowstone to shed light on us. Maveith blinked until his vision cleared. My eyes didn’t need to adjust to the light until I dropped my new spell form.

I hadn’t planned to hunt down the remaining gnolls, but after seeing Ginger’s wounds in the light, I changed my mind as my anger surged.

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