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Unto the Ages: Chapter 121
🕑 Added 2024-08-16 17:05:07 +0000 UTCNo longer burdened by the hex, Grud decided to take it easy on his way to backstab the Blazebringer’s battle line as he once again felt his mana flow freely through his body, not to mention giving his body some time to shrug off the effects of the other hexes cast upon him at the last moment, even now, through sheer will, he was keeping the bile from rising up his gullet from whatever hex caused his stomach to feel like it flipped upside down.
As Grud got a few huts away from the building he set on fire, he tried to take a less conspicuous route to the Blazebringer’s backline, which meant staying away from the main road and going in between huts, where he dispatched a few villagers who looked to be dressed for battle but were cowering and hiding.
When Grud was moving through the third cluster of huts, he stopped mid-stride as, subconsciously, all his human senses and those he got from the beasts, animals, and monsters, whispered into his mind that he was being stalked. It was not the tingle of danger he felt when stalked by a truly dangerous predator, but he decided to thrust his instincts nonetheless and scrutinized his surroundings more intensively.
As Grud looked around to see what was putting his instincts on edge, the pupils of his eyes started deforming into different shapes as he cycled his various visions. As he swept his eyes over the surrounding huts, what he would have missed in the darkness of the huts, his heat vision picked up heat signatures just behind the crack of doors and windows.
‘Could be just villagers hiding in their houses.’ Grud thought to himself, but his gut feeling told him otherwise, and so far, his gut feeling has never led him wrong. ‘Better safe than sorry, I suppose.’
Grud walked toward the edge of the cluster of huts while acting like he did not notice anything, and just so happened to walk next to a door where he saw one of those heat signatures peeking through the door.
When he was right next to the door, he could practically smell the sweat and hear the rapid heartbeat of the person on the other side of the door.
As Grud looked like he was about to walk past the door, he suddenly spun to the door and punched through the wooden door, and when he pulled his hand back, he was holding a Blazebringer warrior in decorated copper armor by his neck.
The moment Grud did this, warriors in similar copper armor burst out of the surrounding huts spears and bows drawn.
The moment these warriors revealed themselves, he knew from their movement that they were different from all the chaff he had been slaying with ease so far, and not to mention their armor, copper was currently too precious a meterial for most people to use on armor, yet each of these men had enough copper to cover their head and torso.
Reacting to this sudden escalation, Grud tightened his grip on the warrior he was holding and crushed his neck. At the same time, spears and arrows were flying through the air at Grud.
Not having enough time to blow away the projectiles with a mana pulse, Grud brought the armored corpse in his grasp to block the open face of his carapace helmet, but that only protected his front. From every other direction, Grud felt the impact of arrows, spears, and maybe even rocks, but most of those projectiles merely plinked off his armor that he pumped mana into to empower.
But even if none of the projectiles penetrated his armor, Grud still felt the sting of getting hit between the gaps in his armor, the only one that worried him was a spear that managed to hit him right below the armpit while his arms were raised to guard himself.
Grud knew he had to end this fast because a highly coordinated group was attacking him. Because even as powerful as he knew he was, he was deeply familiar with the predator/prey dynamics, and since he was the one who walked into an ambush, he was currently the prey, and he needed to flip that dynamic fast.
As Grud rushed toward the nearest group of copper-clad warriors while yanking out the spear stuck in his side, an unseen person called out from one of the huts, “Keep your distance from the Monster! Don’t think of fighting it like a man, fight it like a dangerous beast!”. Hearing these warriors being commanded to treat him like a monster, Grud did not know if he should take it as a compliment or not, but that did not save a group of four elite warriors from being cut down in a few savage strokes.
But the death of the four elite warriors was not in vain, it did give the other elite warriors time to exit the huts they were hiding in and distance themselves from Grud while pelting him with arrows. And when Grud went after the next group, the group he was pursuing would abandon all attacks and run while other groups would focus fire on Grud, despite how close he was to the group he was chasing.
Another thing Grud and his enemies started to realize as Grud chased them, was that as fast as Grud was, he was not as agile when maneuvering turns around the cluster of huts, so the elite warriors used that to their advantage as they zipped between huts.
This cat-and-mouse game went on for around three minutes and was making Grud truly frustrated. With all his running around, he had only managed to kill two of these elite warriors, one of them was just too slow and got caught, while the other seemed to have made a wrong turn and bumped into Grud where he received a hammer fist to his head, partially embedding his head into his torso.
Seeing that he had played into their game, Grud decided to start doing things his way.
During this cat-and-mouse chase, Grud noticed that these elite warriors were using whistles to communicate their location so others could come and back them up. So Grud decided to play along for the moment until his chance came, and it did not take long.
The current target he was chasing let out a whistle as he turned right on a hut that had its door opened. So Grud doing what only he could do, ran into the hut, estimated where his target would be, empowered his body and armor, and ran directly into the wall.
The result of that endeavor was Grud smashing through the wall and running over the man he was chasing. When Grud hit that elite warrior, he went flying like a deer that got hit by a truck and sent his body through the wall of another hut, killing him on the spot.
When Grud heard another whistle, he went charging in that direction, pretty much ignoring the flimsy mud and wood structures in his way. By the time Grud killed the fifth elite warrior by smashing through walls, that same voice that had been occasionally shouting instructions from somewhere in a three-hut radius shouted, “We are losing cover, break the teams and scatter, everyone to the next location!”
‘They are running to ambush me somewhere else, I need to kill the leader before he comes up with more bright ideas.’ Grud thought as he turned to the general direction of the shouted instruction and came to a decision. ‘This is going to burn a lot of my mana, but if it takes out the leader, it would be more than worth it.’
Grud rushed in the direction he thought the leader of the elite warriors was in while gathering mana in his offhand. He smashed through the first hut and trusted his palm forward with as much physical and magical force as he could.
This caused a cone of mana force that sent everything three huts down to go flying, and in the debris that went flying, he heard shouts of surprise and pain, followed shortly by some elite warriors behind Grud shouting “Chief!” or “Chief Tovak!”.
Hearing this put a smile on Grud’s face, as he just hit the jackpot of opponents, he recognized the name from his briefings and knew that the Blazebringer Village Chief was somewhere on the ground, right in front of him, and all he had to do to put a big hole in enemy morale was to kill their Village Chief.
***
Tovak, Village Chief of the Blazebringer village, groaned as his world stopped spinning and he tried to get up but found that his leg was pinned under a mud wall.
As he was trying to remember what led to him lying on the ground covered in debris and pinned by a mud wall, one of his men shouting “Chief!” while running toward him jogged his memory. He and his fifty elite warriors were hunting the Monster, and while in the beginning, they had five deaths almost immediately, they managed to form a working strategy to try and whittle the Monster’s strength down, but they had grossly underestimated the Monster’s strength and endurance. When the Monster started showing its true strength, it was too late, and the next thing Tovak knew, the wall he was hiding behind exploded and sent him flying.
“Get this off me, we need to move!” Tovak instructed the warrior who made it to him first. But as the assisting warrior got his hands under the wall and heaved up, Tovak felt a gust of wind that carried the unsettled dust along with it, and when he opened his eyes, the warrior helping him no longer had his head, and it took his body a few seconds to realize it before it collapsed, adding the weight of a body to the mud wall.
When Tovak next looked up, the only thing he saw was a huge hand grasping his head, and he knew no more.
Comments
Hildisvini
Nice , looking forward to the next chapter 😀!
