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FG: Chapter 12
🕑 Added 2024-03-26 14:34:32 +0000 UTCJump-Jump! Little Yip
Catch the sun-sun in your hands
Jump-Jump! Little Yip
We will be here when you trip!
- Popular Kobold rhyme
The sounds of the Kobold raider’s war cries pierced the air of Knifegut’s cavern.
The defenders of the walls took aim and fired as they had been instructed. Their arrows had barely flown before the cavalry was upon them, digging their claws into the remnants of their walls and charging towards the Martello towers.
The vicious teeth of the starving Skogs gleamed in the darkness of the cavern and found the hands of the ratman archers within mere minutes. They tore through skin and muscle like carving through butter, relishing every morsel of rat-flesh they swallowed, while the defender’s bodies crumbled beneath them.
For a short, two-minute duration of pure agony for the defenders, the towers held. The archers relinquished their bows and drew daggers to pierce the soft underbelly of the rampaging Skogs. A few of them found the vile beasts’ hearts before the rats were forced back in the face of a wall of gnashing fangs.
“Be retreating!” came the general shout from the walls.
Klegga heard their desparate cries and pushed forward, getting in amongst his units where the fighting was thickest. By this point the walls and towers were filled with rampaging riders struggling to edge their way into the fortress past each other. The raiding party had become nothing but a wave of living, undulating death.
The defenders were pushed back into the courtyard of the fort, with Klegga’s screams becoming the manic shouts of a warlord seeing his enemy crumble beneath his might. The Yips surged forward, urging their Skogs to leap over the battlements and crush the fleeing rat defenders under their bipedal feet. Some of them let the rats die a slow death – poking at them with their rusted machetes while their Skogs licked and chewed away at their flesh, stripping them of their putrid hair and swallowing them whole.
“Skogs are hungry, yes-yes?” Klegga shouted over the chaos of his whooping warband and the squeals of pain from the rats they trampled. “Give them food-food! Let them munch, crunch, chew-chew all night!”
By now the courtyard of Knifegut had become little more than a bloody feasting ground. Like carrion birds the Kobolds descended upon the meagre force of ratmen archers and guards that remained, dispatching them with little care even for their own unit formation. It became difficult for Kelgga, in the confines of the walled-in courtyard, to even recognize his line commanders in the mass of writhing flesh and ichor. But no matter, he thought to himself. Even if his 70-odd Yips were packed in here like cattle, all he had to do was watch them munch.
Klegga took his time to inspect the remains the rats had left in the courtyard – nothing but torn boxes and empty crates that reeked of ratmen filth. They had obviously been in a hurry to leave.
The chaos of the one-sided battle spilled into the barracks where the Kobolds found nothing but deserted straw bedding and filthy piles of dung stewing in the heat of the claustrophobic cavern. The armor – a similar situation. Klegga was becoming convinced the coward rats had run, leaving only a token defence to face his onslaught. It was funny. Klegga had never known ratmen to be brave, or capable of thinking. Perhaps their Shai-Alud had convinced them to stay and die so that his forces might leave?
The Shai-Alud…
Come to think of it, Klegga had not spotted a human anywhere within these walls. In a sudden panic, he ordered his men to search the place top to bottom, but those finishing off the defenders reported nothing outside but the dingy, smelly boxes the ratmen had left behind.
“They stink-stink!” one of his Yips shouted. “Like everything rat!”
“Head-Yip Klegga, we should push on!” another raider declared, filled with the fervor of bloodlust and battle victory. “We go-go to Fleapit and crush King Shrykul!”
The raiders whooped and cheered him on, and Klegga’s sword arm began to twitch of its own accord. Covered from head to toe in ratman blood, he felt fearless. Brutal. He was ready to knock some sense into that screaming Yip when he heard the distinct sound of something flying through the air just above his sharp ears.
Something had just happened…
“Quiet-quiet!” he called out to his still rampaging horde licking at their fallen prey. “Quiet!”
It was useless. His voice was lost in their vindictive celebrations.
And then he heard it again: a sudden rush of air. A flurry of swift cuts being made through the dark cavern skies.
He looked up, scanned the stalactites that glistened above. His eyes strained to pick out movement, anything that could tell him what was –
SNAP.
The sounds of a dozen impacts nearby. The sound of wood splintering into pieces. Sounds that were unheard by his men enjoying their victory.
But their effects were felt. The dozen or so bozed and barrels that lined the courtyard were suddenly split open, revealing their viscous, dark-green contents.
A cry went up from his men as the explosions wracked their minds. The contents of the creates burst out and covered them, coating the Skogs’ salivating mouths and sticking to the limbs of the raiders like glue. Even Klegga had to reel back, struggling to keep his mount under control as he shook the thick, sticky mucas from his eyes.
“Filthy-filthy rat-rats!” he heard his men scream. “They think to mock us while they run-run!”
But Klega was barely listening to them, now. Instead he was preoccupied with staring at the mucas that dripped from every pore of his skinny claw, and looking up to see it covering all of his men like a cloak of vile poison.
His eyes shot wide open when it finally dawned on him what it was.
And by that point, it was too late.
“Head-Yip?” a rider said beside him, spitting out clumps of the disgusting fluid. “Why you look so pale-pale?”
Klegga wasn’t listening to his men now. Now, he was feeling the thunderous vibrations beneath his feet.
He looked around him at the puzzled-looking Kobolds and Skogs, who had now stopped their feasting.
“H-Head-Yip? Wha-“
Cracks appeared across the fortress courtyard, tearing through the boxes which still lay unopened and spilling more of their vile payload across the ground, so that the chicken-claw feet of the Skogs started slipping around uncontrollably.
The courtyard had become little more than a bloody skating rink now. A skating rink composed solely…of Gutmulcher blood.
“Y…Yip-Yips!” Klegga called out as the sounds of the vibrations reached fever pitch. “Fall back! FALL BACK-BACK NO-“
The Head-Yip’s command was cut off by the storm of pincers and serrated teeth that launched themselves over the wall battlements and landed in the middle of the raiders. Before the first victims were able to scream they were torn from their Skogs and chewed clean through, leaving their mounts to flail about helplessly in the viscous fluid that kept them stuck in place. Klegga looked up to see a legion of the screeching, eight-legged horrors of the tunnels descend on them from above, tearing through the already disrupted ranks of his horde with even more ease than they had employed against the ratman defenders.
“Group-group!” Klegga called out in vain. “Pack-leaders, fall back-back!”
It was useless. His eyes saw nothing but Kobolds squealing in despair as they were lifted from their mounts and ripped to shreds, their blood raining down on their comrades who turned tail and tried fleeing, abandoning their slipping Skogs altogether. Some of them made it to the walls and scrabbled up the sides to see nothing but a sea of waiting Gutmulchers on the other side – an ocean of crimson eyes that stared back at them before enveloping them within their flesh-ripping teeth.
Klegga watched his men die not with a heavy heart, but with a mind wracked by fury.
This…he raged. “This is not how it is supposed to be-be!”
The men around him looked up at their rage-filled leader spitting such anger at the chaos that unfolded around them. It was the first time they’d looked to him as a leader since they’d set out from Grindlefecht.
He looked towards the metal gate that the ratmen had defended with their last, putrid breaths. The gate, Klegga knew, that led to Fleapit.
“Yips!” he yelped above the din of the dying and the paralyzing screeches of the infernal arachnids. “Move towards big door-door! We push to Fleapit! Spiders cannot outrun us! Let cowardly ratmen face them!”
Slowly, Klegga saw his own insane resolve build in the small contingent that could hear him – those boxed in at the edge of the fortress.
“How we get to big door, Head-yip?”
Klegga kicked at the side of his Skog and raised his short sword high.
“How we get everywhere!” he squeaked. “We fight-fight!”
The little creature surprised himself with the ferocity of his candor, leading a breakout charge of the 30 or so Yips that weren’t ground to pulp and intestine in the Gutmulcher’s toothy maws. With him at their head his cavalry charged forwards, slashing back at the beasts in their way, aiming for the legs and managing to wound the arachnids that broke off from their feast.
“Keep push-push!” the fervent Klega called out. “We still win-win!”
They would come back, he told himself as he slashed through the talons of a snarling Gutmulcher and then forced his Skog to barrel right past it. They would come back later and take the place properly. They would bring poisons with them. Boss Skegga would understand. Klega would bring him this vital information that the fort was now home of Gutmulchers only. The rats had tried to trick them into being spider lunch. But they had failed. They had failed because Klega was strong leader – strongest leader in all Under-Kingdom!
And with such thoughts raging in his skull, he and his dwindling force finally reached the wrought iron gate at the back of the fortress.
“Open-open!” he cried to one of the raiders beside him, who forced his cog to jump up to the ratmen’s primitive winch on the wooden platform that teetered beside the gate.
The ‘mulchers from behind now surged towards them, having finished supping on the rest of his men.
“We are next-next!” a shaking Yip called behind Klegga. “We – we run-run! We go –“
A slap from the Head-Yip brought him back to his senses.
“Coward Yips never make big jumps!” he roared as loud as his puny larynx would allow him. “We will make biggest jump in Kobold history! We lead Mulchies to Fleapit! We strike blow-blow against rats!”
The iron gate finally came down, and when Klega turned towards the dark expanse that opened before them, he did so with certainty in his eyes and glory in his heart.
Until he saw what was waiting for them.
NEXT: FG: Chapter 13
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