Chapter 37: Missing Patrol
As Wiz collected all the ears to turn in for the reward money, Dominic and Bella went to greet the guards, who were jogging down the road toward the site of the battle.
"Gentlemen, thank you for your timely response, but we have already taken care of the Goblin breach of the boundary patrols. Do we have any idea what went wrong? They so rarely miss anything, much less a patrol with Hobgoblins in it." Bella asked.
The guards shook their heads. "We have no idea. There haven’t been any reports of strange activity today, and you took care of the last big incident a few days ago. I suspect that we won’t know what happened until someone fails to come back tonight." The guard replied.
That was a harsh truth, but he had a point. The most likely reason that they didn’t get a warning about this patrol was because they had overrun the guards who were supposed to be holding them off.
The leader of the guard team went forward to take a note of the number of ears collected by Wiz, as well as any damaged property on the affected farms, in case they were going to need some sort of relief. The guard did the best that they could to protect the farms, but there were no guarantees, and a particularly bad attack could cost them everything, even if they managed to escape.
In those cases, the locals would chip in to help the family get set up again, but it would normally take years for things to really get back to normal after a crop was lost, and a home was razed.
"We need to head back to the gate, we’re on standby for the next attack, but can you keep an eye out on the forest for us? We could use as much advance notice as we can get if there is another attack." The guards asked.
The farmer scoffed at the notion that he wouldn’t be watching for more attacks today. "I don’t think I’ll be sleeping anytime soon, so that isn’t a problem. I’m just thankful that these fine folk showed up on time to deal with the problem. We thought it was just a couple of goblins at first, then suddenly there were Hobgoblins running at us, and it was chaos."
The leader of the guard team looked over the familiar faces of Wiz and Bella with a trained eye, making sure the local adventurers were ready for battle and weren’t injured, and then nodded.