Chapter 129 - Raids and Rumors

  One of the pack of burly, pig-faced humanoids rushed me, and I grinned in anticipation. My sword flickered in the sunlight as I dashed toward him. He was tier five—no easy foe, this one. But I was confident anyway. I’d faced much stronger opponents than he and won. One on one, these fights weren’t difficult. It was the fact that these raids always involved a lot more than ‘one’ that I was most concerned about.

  We’d taken to calling them ‘orcs,’ which would do at least for the time being. If I’d made a wild guess than the goblins had been somehow evolved by the Event from squirrels and the avians from birds, it was even more clear that the orcs had come from pigs. My scouts had even identified where these packs were coming from. There was a cluster of pig farms just north of the city, and from what we could tell it looked like every pig on each farm had been turned into orcs.

  Or at least, any pigs that hadn’t changed had already been eaten by the ones who were. We weren’t sure which. Either way, those farms were packed with orcs. All told there were at least a couple thousand of them, and they’d figured out that the city half a day’s walk south had lots of cool shit they wanted.

  Our sword clashed as the orc met me in mid-battlefield. I blocked him easily enough and then darted to the side, slashing at the inside of his thigh as I moved. These guys wore armor, so I’d had to learn the hard way where to hit them to take them down quickly. They had chest armor made of leather—no idea where they’d gotten all of that and I didn’t really want to know, since it looked like there was pig leather mixed with cow. I supposed that lent credence to the theory that only some of the pigs had changed.

  But they didn’t have leg armor, which was a major mistake. The orcs’ femoral artery ran almost as close to the skin as it did on humans, which meant that with my Strength, a quick slash to the inside of a thigh was a slow death sentence. It didn’t kill them right away, but it set them to bleeding out, which never took more than a minute or two.

  I backed off from the orc at that point, looking for more targets as he staggered after me, limping hard as he favored the injured leg. Each step was just helping pump more blood out of the wound. He left a trail of it as he tried to follow me.

  If the orc had retreated right away, maybe gotten the wound patched up by other orcs, he might have lived, but they’d proven to be single-minded in a way that made survival play second fiddle to the fight. It helped that they were insanely tough creatures. Most of them turned out to have Stamina as their key crystal, although some had high Strength instead. Those were far and away the most common drops we got from them, though.

  Another orc raced toward me, legs pounding the ground. An arrow sprouted from his neck, then another from his nose. He fell forward and didn’t get back up again.

  I glanced over my shoulder toward the archer. “Thanks, Kara!”

  “Just trying to keep up with you!” she replied, laughing.

  Sue was at the edge of the field, shooting off Fireballs whenever the timer expired on the spell. The T.rex skeleton was one of my strongest allies, and one I tended to keep in reserve against emergencies. It wasn’t fair to leave Sue out of all the fun, though! I send a mental command and released Sue, ordering the dino to rush into the battle and attack the orcs up close and personal.

  If you’ve ever seen a skeletal dinosaur complete with very long teeth coming at you while spitting Fireballs into your backfield, you’d understand what happened next. The orcs held their line longer than I’d have thought they would, but as soon as Sue closed with them and chomped down on the nearest orc, biting the top half off and shaking it around, spraying blood on the rest of the orc’s friends, the rest of them decided that discretion was the better part of valor and beat feet. Sue bit the head off another one as they were running, but I ordered a halt at that point rather than pursuit.

  Kara came over to join me. “Not chasing them down?”

  I shook my head. “There doesn’t seem to be much point. They just keep coming, anyway. We kill them all, they send a new batch. Maybe if we let some of them go they’ll warn the rest that this isn’t a good hunting ground, and they’ll go elsewhere.”

  “Yeah, or maybe they’ll realize that they can win massive glory and honor by being the orc to take down the giant dinosaur skeleton,” Kara replied. “Then they all come at once, and we’re in deep shit.”

  It had been my big worry since not long after the orc raids started, about a week ago. The first strikes hit the northern part of the town. Word got to us via rumor at first, and then I heard from Gideon Carver that they’d been looting stores and homes not far from his fortress. His men chased them off—it was he who’d first called them orcs.

  Soon after that, I’d sent scouts to locate their base of operations, and that’s when we realized we had a bigger problem than we thought. Those initial raiding groups were each only about a dozen orcs. That was pretty easy to manage. I could probably solo a raiding party like that, in a pinch. But there were thousands of orcs not that far away, and that was a frightening idea.

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  If they kept coming at us piecemeal, we could hold them off forever without issues. If they ever decided to come at us with everything they had, though? If thousands of tier four and five orcs came rushing into the city to attack us? We were going to have a very difficult time holding that sort of force off. I was hoping that wouldn’t happen. We’d only had two weeks since the whole mess with the mall and the Forgotten King. It would be nice to believe we could have a peace that lasted at least a little longer.

  Hope wasn’t a terrific battle strategy, though, which is why we were on our way to meet Gideon at his fort. He’d invited Colonel Turner from the Guard base as well; we were all gathering to discuss strategies for dealing with this new threat.

  “Not chasing?” Farnsworth asked, riding over on a horse. We’d found a few, and now one of our stables had livestock again. I really wanted some cows, too. I didn’t think I’d ever want us raising pigs, though. Not after seeing what magic turned them into, anyway!

  “Kara just asked that!” I said, chuckling. “No, not this time. We’re running late for the meeting, and we don’t want to hold things up.”

  I raised the wrist that had my watch on it, one of the only wind-up watches we’d found since this mess began. It was nice to know what time it was. A small luxury, but in a world without clocks, the one-watch woman turns into the schedule keeper for everyone else.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Farnsworth said. If he was worried about running into Turner again, it didn’t show in his eyes or posture. He’d been one of Turner’s top people, maybe even his right hand man. Certainly one of the folks Turner counted on to keep the base running well.

  Then I’d revealed that Turner was using the power of his Charisma to manipulate his people, and his reign came crashing down. Farnsworth came to join me, along with a few dozen other folks. The base decided they were done with military leadership and elected a civilian governing council, along with an elected council leader named Delores. While Turner still owned the control stone, and thus the Domain at the Guard base was still his, the civilian council did all the day to day running of things, and they’d stripped him of his Charisma stone as a requirement for being allowed to stay there at all.

  Neither Farnsworth or I had seen him since. Turner probably wasn’t fond of either of us, though, so I had concerns about how he’d act at this meeting.

  The orc I’d sliced open had tried to run with all the others, but didn’t make it far before he keeled over from blood loss. With Kara, Farnsworth, and a few ratkin guards, we looted the bodies of the slain. Six dead orcs out of twelve wasn’t a bad job for the day, but I really wished that we could whittle them down a bit faster than this. They had a lot of heavily armed and armored troops, and while I was still many tiers above them, my next highest warriors were Kara and Farnsworth, both of them tier six.

  Most of my people were still in the tier two to four range, although I’d been handing out tier four or five Strength and Stamina stones like candy as we got them from dead orcs, so our people were growing fast. It just wasn’t fast enough, and we didn’t have the numbers to hold back the invasion my gut said was definitely coming sooner or later.

  With the dead looted, I checked my stats.

  Magical Stones

  Point 1: Black Stone (Tier 6) - Control Undead

  Point 1, Second Ring: Black Stone (Tier 5) - Augment Undead

  Point 1, Third Ring: Black Stone (Tier 10) - Animate Dead

  Point 1, Fourth Ring: Black Stone (Tier 3) - Dark Pulse

  +

  Point 2: Black Stone (Tier 7) - Animate Dead

  Point 2, Second Ring: Black Stone (Tier 5) - Heal Undead

  Point 2, Third Ring: Black Stone (Tier 2) - NightVision

  +

  Point 3: Black Stone (Tier 6) - Drain Life

  Point 3, Second Ring: (Tier 3) - Health to Mana

  +

  Point 4: Clear Stone (Tier 6) - Will

  Point 4, Second Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 6) - Agility

  Point 4, Third Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 7) - Stamina

  Point 4, Fourth Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 6) - Strength

  Point 4, Fifth Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 5) - Intellect

  Point 4, Sixth Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 5) - Will

  Point 4, Seventh Ring: Clear Stone (Tier 6) - Charisma

  +

  Point 5: Yellow Stone (Tier 2) - Flight

  +

  Point 6: Green Stone (Tier 3) - Stoneskin

  +

  Control Stone (Tier 2) - Domain Active

  Spare Stones

  Black: Animate Dead x11, Augment Undead x5, Contagion, Contagion (Tier 3), Control Undead x22, Curse (Tier 3), Curse x2, Drain Life x4, Harm (Tier 2), Harm x15, Heal Undead x2

  Clear: Strength (Tier 5), Strength x2, Agility x1, Intellect x7, Will x3, Charisma x8

  Green: Healing Infusion (Tier 2)

  Brown: Alchemy x2

  Control Stone (Tier 1) x1

  I’d given away some of them to people who could use them better than I could, and I’d also expanded my installed stones just a bit. When I hit tier ten, it opened up a new socket, a sixth point. I was assuming that once I ranked up whatever was in that sixth point to tier five, it would open another socket of the same color, just like the others did. That made me think long and hard about what color to add, since it would set the tone for all the other stones I added to that point.

  Once we realized that the orcs were sometimes dropping green stones, in addition to clear, brown, and even the occasional red, I went with Stoneskin as my new spell. It made sense. Boosted my defense quite a lot, and as I ranked it up I’d be able to insert other green spells into the new sockets. I’d considered Natural Armor, which was similar to Stoneskin but ‘on all the time,’ instead of being activated. Stoneskin used mana to keep it running, but while Natural Armor didn’t protect as much per tier level, it didn’t use mana. It just always worked, all the time.

  Farnsworth got that one, and he was already tier three. Since that was the only grey crystal we’d seen, he was taking a chance socketing it. If we didn’t find more grey stones, he might end up having to pull it eventually. But for now, it was helping keep him alive, which was what I needed.

  I flew up to Sue’s back and called out. “Everyone ready to move out?”

  My little crew gave a chorus of nods and affirmative answers, and we set off again, moving swiftly northwest toward Carver’s fortress and our future.