Those who Dungeon Together — Part Five

— Bong! —

Goblin Siege I

If the goblins breach the town fortifications, they will slaughter every man inside. The women will be forced upon and the children will be enslaved — or possibly the other way around, or possibly both. Goblins do not discriminate.

Hold the walls until reinforcements arrive.

No pressure.

Unlike the other prompts, this one wasn’t read out by the Satyr.

A roar of rage from all around Max shocked him out of his horror-filled reading. Every archer was staring at a point a few feet in front of them with a look of utter fury on their faces. Did everyone just get that prompt?

“Alright, men!” the sergeant barked.

Out on the planes, the goblin army broke into a trot.

“This is it!”

A higher-pitched roar came from countless goblin voices.

“Arrows on my mark!”

Max’s hand flew to his quiver. In a swift movement that astonished him, his fingers wrapped around an arrow, whipped it out, circled it in the air and notched it to the string of his bow in one elegant curve.

He felt his muscles groan open like a vice as his pecks and back drew the bow back.

“Wait — for — it!” the sergeant shouted.

The lightening at the arrow’s tip crackled and popped. All along the line, a hundred such arrows joined his, linking together to form an unbroken chain of flickering magical power.

The goblins broke into a run. The ground rumbled.

“Fire!”

Max released. A rain of lightning arced across the sky. Several seconds later, it fell right in the goblin’s front line. There was an almighty squeal as hundreds upon hundreds of goblins were either impaled on arrows or fried by released lightning magic.

— Ping! —

You have killed seven goblin fighters.

You have gained 70 experience

Max stared. He’d just killed seven enemies with a single arrow!

But it wasn’t nearly enough. Compared to the swarm of goblins even now trampling their fallen comrades into the dirt, they might as well have thrown pins at an ant's nest.

“Fire at will!” The sergeant bellowed.

Max whipped another arrow out of his quiver, knocked it and fired. Then he did it again. And again. And again.

— Ping! —

You have killed eight goblin fighters.

You have gained 80 experience.

You cannot level up in combat.

— Ping! —

You have killed four goblin fighters

You have gained 40 experience.

You cannot level up in combat

— Ping! —

You have killed five goblin fighters

You have gained 50 experience

You cannot level up in combat

— Ping! —

You have killed four goblin fighters

You have gained 40 experience

You cannot level up in combat

More and more goblins fell. But even as waves of enemies melted and shrieked in pain, more and more replaced them. They were getting close now. There were about to reach the walls!

“Brace yourselves!” the sergeant yelled.

Max felt a power behind him grow. He glanced behind and saw all the mages standing there with their hands glowing yellow.

There was a mighty thud as the press of bodies arrived below. Max shot another arrow down to general shrieks and auto minimised his prompts to get rid of the distraction. Ladders started to be raised all around him. One smacked down over the parapet in front of him, barely a few inches from his face.

“Now!” the sergeant bellowed.

Max felt the ground rumble. He almost collapsed when the earth started to shake violently back and forth. His reaction was nothing to the goblins below. Screams and roars of rage came from just beyond the walls. Finding his feet, Max leaned over to peer down. The mages had caused an actually gods damn earthquake! A huge fissure had opened up at the base of the wall, swallowing up all the goblins unfortunate enough to standing above. But it was only a moment’s respite before long planks of wood started to be laid over the chasm, and the horde reached the walls again.

Max saw ladders being passed up the ranks of the enemy.

“Keep firing!” the sergeant yelled. “This is only the first wave! We’ve got a long way to go before we’re done here today!”

The sergeant wasn’t wrong.

The goblins swarmed around the walls like cockroaches. For every one that fell, two more took its place. They raised ladders that Max and the other archers were forced to push away with long pike-like tools. They fired grappling hooks that they desperately cut away. But every moment they were distracted was an extra moment the force below had to dig in. Soon, physical shields were erected to block their arrows and Max and the others were ordered back.

Max watched in awe as the mages took their place and started hurling fireballs down onto the forces below. The magical flames didn’t care about shields, and soon the screams and shrieks began again.

The defenders didn’t have it all their way.

Not long after the attack began, enemy projectiles began to zip by their heads. Arrows, sling-shot, and nasty-looking barbs coated in poison all arrived in their midst. Max actually took one arrow straight in the chest, but his armour held fast and all that resulted was his getting the wind knocked out of him.

He was lucky.

Max watched one defender further down the line get a similar arrow straight in the eye. There was nothing that could be done to save him. Another man was pierced straight through the chest, armour and all, by a magical shard of ice longer than a javelin.

The mages quickly erected magical shields after that, but even then, the occasional nasty piece of magic found a mark among the defenders and a man would go down, screaming in pain as blood went everywhere.

The battle went on for hours. Max had no idea how he was supposed to help decisively win this thing. He became a machine. Draw arrow, fire, watch it hit a goblin magic shield and dissipate its magical energy uselessly around the battlefield. Draw arrow, fire again. Occasionally get a hit in, watch a half dozen goblins shriek, twitch, and burn to a crisp.

Max couldn’t believe that this was only half the enemy attack force! What the hells would this battle have been like if they’d had their entire army here?

Nevertheless, once the catapults were brought up, things started getting a bit too real for Max’s liking.

The sergeant’s face paled as large crystalline blue spheres were loaded onto them.

“All archers!” the man bellowed. “Focus the crystal balls! Don’t let one—”

His order came just a hair too late. A catapult released one of its loads and five blue spheres arced towards the defenders like cannonballs.

“— get through!”

Max instantly drew another arrow, aimed at the one heading for him, and fired. It connected with the sphere and caused it to explode. Not explode in fire, mind you — explode with a shock-wave in the air that caused Max’s ears to momentarily lose all hearing. Where the blue sphere had been, appeared a hundred black house cats. They all plummeted into the goblin horde below in the muffled silence.

Three other archers had also been quick enough. Their blue spheres produced a small torrential downpour, an anvil the size of a cart, and a love song about trolls, respectively, which Max only caught the end of as his hearing slowly returned.

The final sphere hit the walls with a loud boom, and moments later, green leafy tendrils started creeping all over the vertical surface, providing easy climbing for the goblins below.

Not good.

“Fire on the vines!” the sergeant shouted.

“No!” the commander cut him off. “All mages to the vines! First company alone focus your fire on the climbers! All others focus on the spheres!”

Max’s attention switched from the goblins below to picking off the spheres as they arced in the sky towards them. His arrows found their targets with unerring precision, but he had no time to marvel at his newfound prowess.

The random results destroying them produced everything from flights of songbirds to a hunger for cheese.

One particularly nasty explosion resulted in flying liquid magma, which gushed over both defenders and attackers alike, causing all it hit over to scream in agony. Luckily Max was standing to the right of the splash zone, or he’d have suffered a similar fate.

No doubt the mages could have shielded them from the effects, but they were all now busy desperately trying to burn away the gigantic growing plant that had already reached the top of the wall and was now continuing on high up into the sky.

Another defender was impaled by a magical ice-lance.

Max spotted where the deadly projectile’s origin and lined up one of his lightning arrows to take the goblin mage clean in the head.

A rush of feet behind him turned out to be a company of swordsmen rushing to aid the mages at the plant.

A blue sphere above exploded and a car-sized bar of chocolate slammed into the mage’s shield. Just for a second, the shield winked out.

Max fired.

His arrow travelled straight and true and impaled the goblin mage right through the eye. The goblin fell, screaming and twitching, as did the several around it.

“Good shot,” the archer next to him said, drawing back his bow for a shot of his own.

“Thanks.”

That was all Max managed to say before a goblin arrow covered in flame smacked into the man’s head.

Max immediately ducked behind the parapet and watched in horror as the man stepped back and flailed helplessly for a second before his entire body whooshed in flame. The beginnings of a scream were abruptly cut off.

A second later, he’d been reduced to ash. A small green gemstone fell from the air where he’d been standing and clattered on the ground.

More so than anything else, that single moment brought home to Max just how real what he was experiencing was. He might be in a dream, or a vision, or whatever, but that didn’t mean there weren’t consequences. He remembered the prompt he’d first read when finding his first dungeon.

Permanent status remained after a dungeon run. Did that include burns? It would certainly include trauma. Max whipped another arrow notched it, and prepared to fire through the small hole in the wall’s floor, directly down at his attackers.

All around him, the tide was starting to turn, and not in their favour. Goblins were now fighting in hand-to-hand against the swordsmen at the giant plant. The mages still couldn’t burn the greenery away faster than it was growing. And the large number of catapulted blue spheres was stopping Max and the other archers from concentrating their fire on the forces below.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, another goblin war horn sounded, and the huge mammoths, which had been held back all this time, slowly started to make their way forward. They carried dozens of goblin archers on their backs on platforms made of strong wood, and a few even had catapults of their own. They were more than tall enough to give the goblins direct access to the battlements and now that the mages were distracted, would have little problems in reaching their targets.

In short, shit was not looking good.

That’s when Max heard the sound of celestial dice roll again above. Three rectangular cards whipped around Max like leaves in a storm before settling in front of his face.

— Bong! —

You have three options, Master Builder.

Choose!