Chapter 103: Orcish Combat 2
We walked back to the still-growing group of people in silence. I had no idea what to say to her, and she didn’t really want to talk to me. Even the end of the world couldn’t change that. Too much had passed between us to ever really bridge that divide again.
“Good luck, Dave, and I really mean that,” she said as she broke off from me, heading toward one of the soldiers who’d come with us. I instead found Cecil and Elicec to check in with.
“Any new issues?” I asked, looking around. Nothing seemed to have changed other than more people showing up.
“No, just more and more people coming out of the woodwork,” Elicec answered.
“Yeah, this is probably the first sign of real hope they’ve had since the orcs showed up, which means we can’t let them down. Any ideas as to where the leader might be hiding?” I asked, only to get two headshakes from each of the brothers.
“Elody, are you busy?” I yelled over some of the noise to where she was standing. She gently excused herself from the people gathered around her and joined us instead.
“What can I do?” she asked the moment she was clear of the crowd.
“We need to track the orcs, and considering what you and Elicec managed to do in the Arena, I was thinking it might be possible to apply that here,” I said.
“I already tried it myself, but, I assume it was more a matter of distance being the issue. If you can overcome that, yeah, we can probably find them,” Elicec said, smiling at the idea.
“As Elody opened her book and began to read, an idea dawned on her on how best to utilize the young twinoges’ ability. Looking into the sky, she commanded the mana flow, direct us to your target!” Elody ordered a burst that had emanated from Elicec as she spoke. While similar to the Arena incident, in this case, it was a single arrow that fired off without a trail left behind.
“Can you follow that?” I asked, unsure if this was actually going to work.
“I can. Essentially, Elody just managed to turn my skill much longer ranged at the cost of her own mana. Everyone who came with me, follow me!” Elicec yelled at the crowd, his voice growing much louder than normal, thanks to some mana amplification.
By the time Elody and I had chased the brothers down the first alley, the rest of the squad had already caught up. Spotting them behind us, Elicec moved into an even faster run, helped by a new upbeat melody, thanks to our resident opera singer. Without our previous crowd in tow, we were now moving through the city at a breakneck pace, only stopping briefly to take out any orc we passed. Few crossed our path.
The reason for that soon became obvious as we exited an alley into a large open street, finding more orcs than I could easily count gathered together, waiting for something. That something was almost certainly us. “There,” one of the front ones screamed as we looked at the horde.
“That’s it? That few? Kill them!” a voice from the center of the horde bellowed out in anger.
“Uh, that’s a lot of orcs,” I said, which was not my proudest battle cry, but I was sure I had plenty of time to come up with something so much worse in the future.
“Yes, it is. Now, kill them before they kill us!” Rabyn yelled as a flurry of knives erupted from his body. While each of them found a home in an oncoming orc, the charging mass didn’t seem to shrink at all.
I quickly sent a message to Corey.
| >Dave: Corey, I’m keeping my shield and going all out. Take as many down as quickly as you can! >Corey: Understood.
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