Chapter 170: The Terror of Demons
While Ashlynn led Heila and her companions to do battle with merchants in search of new outfits for her lady-in-waiting, a very different battle was unfolding in the forests outside the Vale of Mists.
"How many of them are there?" Owain Lothian snarled as he hunkered behind a large tree and glared at the Inquisitor who had forcefully joined their hunting party.
When they entered the forest, Owain brought four knights, including his new Steward, Sir Hugo, plus thirty soldiers and a number of camp attendants. As hunting expeditions went, it was already sizeable. Inquisitor Diarmuid, however, had nearly doubled the size of the party, arriving with three templars including Sir Tommin, twenty more soldiers from the Church’s private army, and their own collection of under-priests and deacons.
Yet now, this mighty force of over fifty men had been pinned down by a small group of demons and their devilish traps.
"I count six of them," Diarmuid said from his own position behind a tree. A bandage wrapped around his upper arm where he’d narrowly dodged an arrow fired by one of the demons and sweat soaked his brow after his attempt to use sorcery to locate their enemies. "Even with the Blessing of Illumination, they’re very hard to locate," he said.
"Useless," Owain spat, looking around at the state of their soldiers.
Of the fifty common soldiers they possessed, twelve had already fallen to a combination of devilish traps and demon arrows. The first trap they encountered had been simple and crude, a stack of fallen tree trunks that came tumbling down a hill at their exposed column as they followed a game trail through the forest.
While it was simple and crude, it was still absolutely deadly. Each rolling log weighed at least five hundred pounds and when they slammed into soldiers who couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, they shattered bones and crushed bodies.
Worse, half of the hunting party’s scouts had fallen victim to cleverly disguised pit traps filled with sharpened stakes or ambush by demon archers who fired with enough accuracy to place an arrow through a person’s eye, even if they were wearing a helm!