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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 226
🕑 Added 2025-05-13 14:39:37 +0000 UTCAfter an hour of entering the woods, we had to leave the horses behind due to the thick vegetation and go on foot. As for the direction, it was an easy assumption to make, as beasts are not in the habit of leaving false trails, so we just followed the straight line of where the blood trail led from the village to the woods.
Fortunately, the mercenary scout found stray drops of blood that made it through the canopy, confirming that we were on the right track. But that meant we had to go bushwacking in woods that had not been maintained by man.
Hours of trekking later, the scout stopped and gave us the hand signal to do the same, and when he got low to the ground, everyone followed.
Not ten seconds after we got low, we heard a whoofing sound, and I only found out that it was the sound of a pair of huge wings flapping above us as we saw our target fly just above the canopy in the direction we were going.
We stayed still and nobody made a sound for a few minutes or so until the scout gave us the all clear and turned to the rest of us. “If the beast is flying this low, chances are that its nest is nearby.”
After another hour of travel, we arrived at a cliff face that was around fifty meters high, and near the top of the cliff face, was a deep and wide alcove which had all the makings of a nest or lair. There was a gathering of sticks, dried grass, and loose feathers littered along the edge of the alcove. Bones, remains of eaten carcasses, and other unmentionables were piled up at the base of the cliff face. And there was a cacophony of chirping sounds coming from the alcove.
Now that we knew where our target was, we gathered around for a meeting to hatch a game plan. “So, how are we going to do this?” I started the conversation off.
***
A round of planning later. All of us were climbing the cliff face with the scout in the lead. When he closed onto the lip of the alcove, he signaled us to stop before carefully peaking over to check out the scene.
After looking left and right, he leaned back down and whispered, “There is a cave inside the alcove. Come up after me, carefully.” before he climbed up, his body silently hugging the ledge as he slid out of sight.
When we all climbed up, Dad looked at one of the mercenaries carrying a sack on his back, “You know the plan. If it gets past us, snare it. Hopefully, it would not be able to unfold its wings and fall to its death.”
The mercenary nodded as he unslinged the sack and took out a neatly folded net.
As the mercenaries unpacked their gear, which they had secured to their bodies extra tightly to make their climbing easier, Dad, his knights, and I did the same. Once we were finished, the mercenaries were stacked up on the sides of the cave entrance, ready for action, while the rest of us walked straight in with our shields raised, and ready to unleash our aura at a moment’s notice.
But despite being able to use aura to make ourselves stronger and tougher, we still had to be careful, hippogriffs may not be magical beasts, but they do outweigh full-grown men by around four times, and are able to smack us around with just their strength and mass, aura be damned.
About ten steps into the cave, three chirps echoed that were different from the constant chirping we had been hearing until then, and then there was silence. We immediately froze in place to avoid making any noise.
After ten seconds of stillness, there was the sound of fluttering and the rapid sounds of claws scratching on stone.
At the moment, Dad shouted, “We have been discovered!Charge!”
So we flared out our auras and charged in, only to run face-first into the hippogriff when we turned the corner of the cave tunnel.
Dad was not fast enough to react and got sent flying back with a front-body check. The recoil from crashing into Dad was enough for it to rear up on its hind legs and take two swipes at the rest of us, tearing ugly rents into our shields and pushing us back.
Once the hippogriff was done with its second strike and was about to land its two front talons down on the ground, one of Dad’s night charged in, making the hippogriff throw out a quick and unprepared swipe at him.
The swipe struck his shield, but instead of absorbing the blow, he allowed the already damaged shield to be knocked out of his hand and used the momentum of the impact to spin to the hippogriff‘s side, appearing to be in the process of performing a slash.
But before he could properly swing his blade, the hippogriff threw its whole body to the side against him, smashing him into the wall with its bulk.
By then, the rest of us were in motion, charging the hippogriff. I tried to finish this quickly by taking a swing at its neck, but it reeled back with a loud screech that echoed painfully in the cave tunnel.
Another of Dad’s knights took advantage of me making it reel back, and managed to stab it in the shoulder, and got a swipe of the claw in return that he tanked with his shield, totally ruining it.
Another knight sneaked around back to try and backstab the hippogriff, but it had eyes further apart, which granted it excellent dynamic vision and saw him coming. And when he closed in, he was rewarded with a horse kick, putting a serious dent in the shield and sending the man flying.
By then, Dad was back on his feet and had jumped over my head to give the hippogriff a shield bash to the face and a slash to its other shoulder, but of the two attacks that Dad delivered, the shield bash was more effective due to it snapping the hippogriff’s head to the side to smash it into the cave wall, stunning it, and when stunned while surrounded by five knights, it was as good as a death sentence.
Seeing the opening, all of us, except the knight who was sandwiched between the wall and the hippogriff, thrusted our swords into the hippogriff, and with aura coating our blades, it slid in through the dense muscles and into its vital organs.
From its stunned state, the hippogriff froze like it knew something was deeply wrong.
Knowing that beasts tend to sometimes lash out in their dying moments, we all withdrew our swords and hopped back.
As blood gushed from the deep wounds we inflicted upon it, the hippogriff buckled but caught itself, letting out a weak chirp that sounded as though it had liquid in its lungs. It looked at all of us with what appeared to be a look of resolve and weakly backed away with caution.
The knight situated at its back cautiously stepped aside to make way for its retreat, which led us to an open section of the cave that contained a huge nest three times larger than what I believed a creature of its size should possess.
The hippogriff stopped in front of the nest, turned around to face us. Even as it was breathing laboriously and bleeding heavily, it widened its stance, spread its wings, and puffed up its feathers as it screamed threateningly as if daring us to attack it while it stood its ground.
As we stood ready for the hippogriff to launch one last attack, we noticed that its chest was no longer moving from breathing, and the light of life from its eyes was no longer there.
After a while, one of the knights cautiously approached, and seeing that there was no reaction to his approach, he prodded the hippogriff with the tip of his sword. He then turned to us and said, “It died on its feet while threatening us.”
After looking around for any threats and finding none, we all lowered our weapons while Dad said, “There are worse ways to go… personally, I would like to die surrounded by my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, but a death like this is a close second.”
This seemed to be a sentiment that the other knights shared as they nodded and regarded the dead hippogriff with a degree of respect, and to some extent, I understood and agreed with that feeling.
But back to the situation at hand, the job was not done. The hippogriff was clearly defending its young.
When I climbed up and looked into the nest, there was just a layer of brown, fluffy down feathers. That was until a bird's head popped out of that feathered layer and chirped in alarm. At that chirp, more than twenty other bird heads emerged from the feathers and stared at me, and my ears were soon assaulted by a cacophony of chirps.
Comments
Yggdrasil
Would be interesting to see if they could turn them into mounts for their own personal knights. But would the crown even let them?
