Taking cover behind the school's walls, Silva, Gustavo and Olivia watched in amazement as Corporal Tomás fought two groups of Goblins alone, taking a beating but returning it doubled. Private Gustavo, now a pile of nerves, was beginning to second guess his own plan after watching him take very serious blows from the monsters but pressing on. He and Silva had already reached their planned positions, they were just waiting for Olivia to check the circling Goblins' position and return, so they could commence attack. But, Gustavo feared, if she took much more time, the Corporal would perish and the civilians with him.

  He was accumulating his Fire Mana inside himself in preparation for the attack, bringing his body heat up accordingly. There was still much nuances to the Magic that Gustavo had to discover and learn, but the first one was that Fire Mana was an excellent heat source, matching its name, and that he had enough to of it to create numerous balls of fire that would turn the monsters into ash.

  But, as Gustavo was about to check on his radio to raise Olivia, the girl appeared on his line of sight. Getting close to the two, she crouched and looked at the battle scene just ahead, impressed.

  "Tomás is sure a tough son of a bitch, huh?" she said in a hushed tone, turning to Gustavo and Silva. "The group circling the school heard the battle and are now moving together to here from that side," she said, pointing at where Tomás was fighting, “so I think we should move in quickly to cover the Corporal. They are twenty-six in total, but there is one that I am pretty sure is a Magic user".

  "Okay. Tomás signaled that we should wait for his signal to commence attack but I want to move in now. Then let’s just hope he knows what he is doing," said Silva, studying the Goblins with his rifle. During the preparations, he and Tomás discovered a very important fact: the two could apply Aura to bullets. The effects were devastating, with just a simple pistol round being able to shatter concrete. Now, Silva was the only one with a rifle and all of its ammunition, but he was also carrying Gustavo's and Olivia's rifles as backups, fearing that the strengthened shots would put more than enough pressure on the weapons' barrel.

  With this, the group was ready and waiting for whatever signal Tomás was going to send them.

  Tomás, limping towards the closest group of Goblins with immense pain in his left leg, arm and on his kidney, was studying the opponents ahead of him: two Infantries and ten Fighters, more Goblins at the same time than the last two groups. Tomás thanked the invisible logic that was preventing the Goblins from advancing on him, as the simple notion that they enjoyed to toy with their prey was beginning to fall apart in his mind. Now, he was beginning to think that, even in their wicked minds, the Goblins were respecting him, allowing him to fight a 'fair' battle due to some kind of honor, because nothing could explain the fact that they were not rushing a wounded opponent.

  Tomás obliged and readied himself. In this fight, the problem would be the ten Fighters, as they were more than enough to surround him from all sides, so the soldier had to be extra careful for that to not happen. The Infantries, both with shield and sword, also instructed the Fighters to tactically approach the man, with Tomás resisting the urge to simply throw his hatched on one them because he was now so tired that he was sure he would miss it entirely. Instead, he simply threw his weapon, nailing the Fighter closest to him, killing the unsuspecting Goblin while it paid attention to the Infantries instructions. The Goblins, startled by the attack, hurried themselves to their surrounding positions, forming a now perfect circle around Tomás, who could do nothing as to wait for them to position themselves. He, now unable to run, couldn't move to intercept them, having to stand in place and wait for the attacks. With a shriek from the Infantries, the Goblins moved, taking careful steps towards Tomás.

  Using his good right leg as a support, Tomás surprised the Goblins and went in, piercing the chest of the one right ahead of him when it entered his range, retracting himself rapidly to avoid a serious wound. Even with his speed and rapid movement, the Goblin on his right was able to cause a cut in right arm with its knife that spilled blood on the ground. Grunting with pain and repositioning himself, Tomás cut the Goblin down, in retaliation, with a downwards slash, maneuvering the blade for the next strike with the pommel of the crude sword. Turning to face the Goblin on his left, he swinged the sword sideways and made a slight cut in the thing's carotid artery, making it stop and put its hand on the wound, its fate already sealed. Trying to spin on his heels to face the Goblins behind him, Tomás took a club to his left knee again, but kept himself up just to strike the Goblin by turning to his right and killing it by piercing his neck.

  Feeling his leg give in because of the sudden spin, Tomás fell to his knee again, facing the five remaining Fighters in complete disadvantage. Completely forfeiting his weapon, Thomas threw the sword at the Goblin ahead of him, piercing its chest awkwardly. The other Goblins, sensing the opportunity, ran, preparing strikes. Tomás responded by grabbing the foot of the one closest to him when it stepped forward to attack, pulling the Goblin up and using it as a living club to smash the other three, killing the living club and another Goblin instantly.

  As he did it, Tomás noticed one of the Infantries jumping over the entangled Fighters and raising its strengthened sword to thrust his head with its tip, and, with his enhanced senses, the other one doing the same from behind him. Raising his Aura coated hands to deflect the strikes and dodging slightly to his left, taking his head out of the swords' trajectory, he grabbed the arm of the one from behind and threw him over his shoulder, making him collide with the Goblin in front.

  Rapidly picking up the sword from one of the fallen Infantries, Tomás struggled forwards in his fours and started stabbing the knocked Goblins, piercing exposed necks and chests and ending the monster's lives in a quick but desperate manner. The last one alive, one of the Infantries, struggled back up on his feet, picked up a knife from one of the Fighters, and charged Tomás. Dropping his sword, stuck on a corpse, the soldier met the charging Goblin, using his longer arms to grab its head.

  The two struggled, with the Goblin stabbing and clawing at Tomás' arms, and the Corporal attempting to crush the monster's head. With the soldier not relenting, the Goblin shifted its focus to stabbing Tomás' face, piercing his right eye. Screaming with pain, the Corporal pressed his thumbs in the Goblin's eye sockets, crushing the eyeballs beneath. The Goblin screamed and Tomás, using his new grip on the Goblin's head, twisted the monster's head to an unnatural angle, breaking its neck.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Falling to the side victorious and gasping for air, Tomás looked up at the morning sky. If not for his deadly predicament, he would watch the clouds and guess their shapes, and, if he did that, he would see one shaped like an airplane, one with a dragon's shape quickly dissolving in that of a human, another with an elephant's silhouette, and a third, enormous, dark and shapeless, carrying rain. But, because of more pressing matters at hand, Tomás rolled to the side and, very painfully, struggled back to his feet.

  Now finally sparing a moment to look at his wounds, Tomás noticed the absence of the Drake’s Blood effect, with his injuries not closing up even after some time. Not only that, he noticed that the effects he had protecting himself with Aura were been diminished by something. There was something wrong, he knew that. He wondered if it was abstinence of the substance, a withdraw perhaps. Cursing himself to fall to the call of the blood, and cursing himself even more of giving it to his comrades, Tomás spat on the ground some blood. But now was not the time to cry over spilled milk, he had to move on.

  Now completely without will to pick up a weapon from the ground, Tomás looked at the remaining Goblins: now very close to him, the monsters were actively showing their fangs in a wicked and perverted smile. One of the Infantries, with a helmet adorned with a skull, stepped forward, clapping his hands, and stopped some ten meters away from Tomás. It bowed in a mocking manner, gesturing to both sides of him for Tomás to choose his next opponents.

  With blood on his mouth from the wound in his eye, Tomás laughed a red smile. "You son of a disgusting wretch," he said, pointing with his left hand at the Goblin Capitan, "why don't YOU come at me, you rascal?"

  The Goblin opened its mocking smile even wider, unsheathing its weapon, a sword, covering itself and it in Red Aura, and stepping towards Tomás. The Corporal, now focusing his remaining Aura towards his right hand and sneakily moving it next to his pistol holster, assumed a dueling posture, like that a cowboy would do in a western movie. When the Goblin was halfway from Tomás, and the Aura on his right hand was of a deep red, he reached for his pistol, letting the Aura soak the weapon together with its ammunition.

  Tomás drew the weapon and aimed, awkwardly now because of his wounded eye, but, at this distance, he would not miss. He pulled the trigger, watching the face of the Goblin lose color and smile.

  The bullet left the barrel two, maybe three, times faster than it normally would, covering the short distance between Tomás and the monster in a fraction of the blink of an eye. It hit the monster square in the chest and, as it entered spinning on itself, destroyed any semblance of matter on its path with uncaring abandon. Skin, muscle, bones, lungs, heart, everything was liquefied as the lead bean carved its way inside the now dead monster. It continued, nailing an unfortunate Fighter who was behind the captain, and causing the same effect on the unsuspecting monster.

  The Goblin still stood for some seconds, exposing its wound: the entry hole was not wider than the circumference of an olive, but the exit hole was bigger than a basketball, with a trail of jetted blood and organs continuing up to five meters behind the Goblin. Finally falling down, the monster tumbled behind, amazing Tomás with the destruction he caused. The other Goblins, apparently enraged by the scene, started shrieking at the soldier, forming a mob that aimed to tear the Corporal limb from limb.

  Tomás was preparing himself to shoot the closest Goblin when his face was lit by orange light as he noticed Gustavo's fire ball forming form behind the lines of angry Goblins, a huge sphere of fire more than five meters in diameter. The Goblins, also noticing this, stopped and turned just in time to see the ball start moving towards them at a somewhat fast pace, with some trying to scramble and flee, entangling and trampling themselves over other afraid Goblins as they desperately attempted to get out of the way of the ball of fire.

  Tomás watched in awe as the ball hit the Goblin's line, splashing itself against the ground in a wave of almost living fire, with its tendrils seeking fuel in the monsters, turning them in husks of burning meat. The air around the point of impact grew so hot that the Goblins started suffocating before spontaneously combusting just from the heat, with the fire spreading around like snakes made from flames, licking the fleeing Goblins and burning them alive.

  Tomás, snapping out of amazement, reminded himself to shoot down some of the fleeing Goblins, at least those who were getting too close to him, this time using less Aura than before. Now, the heat of the flames was beginning to be felt even from where he was standing, and Tomás was sweating rivers, what was doing wonders to his comfort, not to say the contrary.

  The second ball of fire was smaller than first but more focused, Gustavo appearing to start understanding the gist of the thing: instead of letting the fireball hit the ground on its trajectory, he hovered the thing just above ground for most of the time. Doing that, the sphere of destruction started sucking Goblins with the difference in air pressure it was creating, like a small tornado, growing slightly with the fuel it absorbed, and, when satisfied with this, Gustavo moved it down, flattening the moving orb into the ground, sending more living flame to any Goblin next to it, creating a firework spectacle that brought tears of joy to Tomás’ face.

  In the midst of all of this, Silva’s shots were picking out any Goblin that got away from the carnage Gustavo was imposing. Standing behind cover and with precise shots, he liquefied the heads of the fleeing Goblins with Aura strengthened shots, his brand-new trick, and killed most of the remaining Goblins after the second fireball exploded. He also shot any Goblin that was too wounded to stand up, mercy killing the monsters.

  With this, the Goblins in front of the school were almost completely obliterated, save just for a few stragglers Silva was already taking care of. Tomás smiled again, his teeth red with blood. If they kept this pace, he thought, they should be able to use Olivia’s lightnings to finish the remaining Goblins that were on the sides of the school, just as they planned. Tomás relaxed a little, letting the adrenaline wear off, hoping that the trio could take care of the rest of the Goblins and he could, finally, rest a little. At this time, for Tomás, the world slowed down a little.

  With this, the Corporal wondered where was Olivia. He searched for her in the fire covered battlefield with his only good eye, finally finding the girl standing up next to Gustavo. The two were running, waving their arms above their heads, mouthing something. Trying to decipher the message, Tomás realized that they were not mouthing, they were screaming something at him with worried expressions on their faces, it was just that he couldn’t hear them with all the sounds of destruction. Tomás waved at them with his left arm, attempting to tranquilize the two.

  Finally focusing on their mouths, Tomás understood their plea: ‘Dodge, Corporal!’, Gustavo said. ‘Get out of there!’, Olivia screamed. The sounds were muffled to Tomás, perhaps because of all the beating he had taken or the pain he was felling. ‘Dodge what?’, he thought, numb minded.

  Suddenly, Tomás watched as Olivia and Gustavo started turning upside down. ‘That shouldn’t be right’, he thought in his tired mind. Tomás’ vision kept spinning for a moment, doing two full revolutions. The world turned black.

  To Silva’s dismay, the Goblin Caster had arrived with the rest of the Goblins. He watched as the monster hit the unsuspecting Tomás from behind with a ball of dark energy, sending the Corporal flying. The man turned in the air three times, with his arms swinging wildly while he did it, finally stopping when he collided with a metal pole some twenty meters form where he was hit, falling to the ground, bloodied and battered. With avenging rage in his mid, Silva brought his rifle up.