Free Web NovelChapter 41: First Wave
The first wave hit the treeline and kept coming.
Three hundred strong, a tide of goblins and hobgoblins and orcs pouring through the forest toward the settlement with the disorganized aggression of an army that had been told where to go and trusted numbers to handle the rest. They moved loud, weapons clattering, the smaller goblins scrambling between the legs of the larger orcs, the hobgoblins forming loose clusters at the flanks with their polearms leveled.
Above all of it, Ren circled.
He wasn’t attacking. Not yet. He kept himself high and wide, his Dragon Vision locked on the distant mountain where the Calamity Orc’s cave sat, watching for any secondary movement, any signal that a second force was being deployed while the first wave occupied his attention. Nothing moved there yet. He kept watching.
Below him, the aura pulsed outward, he activated Dominion Aura
Dominion aura settled over his subordinates like a change in air pressure, and every one of them felt it the moment it reached them, a sudden clarity in the muscles, a sharpness behind the eyes, the particular sensation of being more than you were a second ago. The wolves moved differently under it.
The lizardmen stood differently. The strength flowing through them was not borrowed so much as unlocked, Ren’s presence above them acting as a key that had opened something that had always been there.
Two to three times their baseline output, channeled through bodies that had already evolved once.
The first goblins that reached the settlement’s perimeter found out what that meant immediately.
Remu met them at the front line.
He moved through the initial cluster with a controlled fury that scattered them in every direction, not wild swings but precise, heavy strikes that used the full weight of his evolved form, each one finding a target and sending it down without wasted motion.
A goblin leaped from a low branch and he caught it by the throat mid-air, drove it into the ground, and was already moving to the next before it landed. Three hobgoblins formed up and came at him together, polearms forward, and he walked through the gap between two of them, took a hit that would have stopped him a week ago and didn’t stop him now, and dismantled all three in the space of four seconds.
On the eastern flank, Silas was already running.
His wind technique had evolved into something significantly more dangerous than the speed boost it had started as, leaving visible trails of compressed air in his wake as he cut through the goblin formations with the clean efficiency of something that understood exactly where to hit and in what order. He didn’t fight the way Remu fought, he moved through the battlefield like a current moves through water, finding the paths of least resistance and converting them into paths of maximum damage, pulling the attention of the larger orcs away from the smaller wolves who were using that distraction to work the flanks.
Among the lizardmen, two figures were cutting their own lines through the chaos.
The young one from the meeting, the one with the barely contained energy, had found his expression of it in the fight, moving with a recklessness that shouldn’t have worked and kept working anyway, his strikes improvised and instinctive and somehow landing exactly where they needed to.
Beside him, the female whose evolution had pushed her toward something more human was fighting with a precision the younger one lacked, reading the battlefield three steps ahead, directing two other lizardmen with short clipped gestures between her own attacks, running a coordinated small-unit action in the middle of the larger chaos.
Ren watched them from above.
’Those two are pretty outstanding I have to say’
The wave was not breaking yet but it was bending, the initial momentum of the three hundred absorbed and redirected by a force that was smaller but operating at a level the Calamity Orc’s scouts clearly hadn’t anticipated. The goblins that had come expecting to overwhelm through numbers were finding that numbers weren’t mattering the way they should, and the ones at the back of the formation were beginning to read that in the behavior of the ones at the front.
Ren’s eyes snapped back to the distant mountain.
Still nothing moving there. The Calamity Orc was watching. Waiting to see how the first wave resolved before committing anything else.
Fine.
Below him, the tide was turning fully now, the wave beginning to fragment at its edges as the pressure from his subordinates found the seams in the formation and pushed through them. Silas came out of a spinning pass through a cluster of hobgoblins and locked onto the largest orc still standing on the eastern side, the biggest target remaining in that section of the battlefield.
He hit it at full speed.
The impact drove the orc back three steps, which was more resistance than most things offered Silas, and for a moment they traded blows at a pace that cleared a circle around them as the smaller monsters instinctively got out of the way. Silas took a hit across the shoulder that left a mark and answered with a wind-enhanced strike to the chest that cracked something audible and dropped the orc to one knee.
He finished it.
The eastern flank went quiet.
Silas straightened, breathing hard, and looked out at what remained of the three hundred. Still a significant number, but no longer an army, something closer to a crowd that hadn’t decided to run yet.
He looked at them.
They looked at him.
At that same time, Ren sensed something shift in the mountain ahead, the calamity arc was making another move.
[Update]
[....]
Leon hit the guild hall doors at speed and didn’t slow down.
The hall was exactly what every guild hall in every town that had one looked like, long tables, mismatched chairs, the smell of old food and pipe smoke baked into the walls over decades, adventurers of varying rank and sobriety occupying the space with the particular leisure of people between jobs.
Every head in the room turned when the five of them came through the door.
"There’s a dragon," Leon said, loudly enough to reach the back of the hall. "In the forest. A real one. Right now."
The hall took about two seconds to process that.
Then someone laughed.
Then several people laughed.
"Kid, if there was a dragon in the forest, we’d know about it," someone called from a table near the back. "Dragon presence doesn’t exactly go unnoticed."
"I saw it," Leon said. "With my own eyes. From the top of a tree. It was massive, crimson markings on black scales, wings wide enough to block the sky."
The laughter faded.
The hall went very still.
