Chapter 50: A Quiet Life
It turned out not to be goblins. The villagers seemed to know that too, of course, but Simon hadn’t bothered to ask them. Instead, after a quiet ride to the source of the problem, he just tried the same trick he’d used last time. Suffocating them in their lair would be a fairly bloodless victory. Unfortunately, he found out the hard way that this wasn’t going to be like last time when half a dozen hobgoblins staggered out of the dank hole in the ground. Other than their dark olive skin, they had little in common with the goblins he’d fought so far, and they were definitely going to be a little tougher than their smaller cousins. They scattered the fire in all directions as they charged through the smoke looking for something to kill.
Simon hadn’t been ready for a counter-attack or the larger-than-expected opponents. None of them were. Still, he charged in before he remembered that this was the very last life he wanted to die in. He was just so used to fighting now that it was his first impulse, and he regretted it as he moved toward the opponents that were almost as large as he was.
They were vicious, too, but his boldness surprised him as much as it did his opponent, and between their coughing from the smoke and their squinting from the sun, he was certain that he and his men could make short work of the bastards. He was mostly right, but partway through the fight, when there were only three of the green skins left, Simon took a club to the back while he was gutting his second opponent that sent him sprawling. It hurt, but he didn’t think that anything was broken. He would have almost certainly been stomped to death if two of his fellow warriors hadn’t shot it with their crossbows, though.
After that, Simon was about to order his men to start rebuilding the fire when he noticed that one of them was hurt pretty bad. “The rest of you start the bonfire back up unless you want to go in and see if there are any of those big bastards left while I tend to Trav,” he said. From the expression of the other men, he realized that they probably thought he meant he was going to end his suffering with the point of his sword, but Simon doubted it would come to that.
The man had been raked across the belly with the foul claws of the hobgoblins, and he was bleeding badly enough that Simon was sure the abdominal wall had been ripped, which meant there might be all sorts of internal damage as well. Simon wasn’t much for science, and he barely remembered his high school biology test book, but still, he struggled to remember those crucial details as he soothed the wounded soldier.
“Easy there, man. The worst is over. You’re going to be okay,” Simon said, struggling to find something to say that wasn’t so generic and coming up empty. He’d shared a campfire with these men for all of two nights, and he knew next to nothing about him.
“I-I’m dying, aren’t I,” the man gasped as he lay there in obvious pain.
“Nah,” Simon lied. “I’ve seen way worse than this. It’s just a flesh wound.”
“A flesh wound?” he moaned in fear. “What is that? Does that mean it’s already diseased? Gods protect me!”