Random fighter from the Matriarch’s village

“Shit, shit, shit.”

There are magical explosions and all kinds of dangerous crap just being thrown willy nilly all over the place around me.

Soaking wet from the sudden rain, the very first rain since we were dragged from Earth I muddle through blocking the enemies and trying to eliminate them as quickly as possible while not tripping or sliding in the rough stone walkway.

Bashing my mace on the goblin's heads while they are climbing is really satisfying. The problem is that most of the time they manage to mitigate most of the damage. Throughout the fight, only one of my blows was a fatal one, and that was only because of a bad fall.

I try my best to hold on as more reinforcements arrive in those magic flying vehicles that Charlie’s village makes.

Landing crippling or killing blows in is difficult, but I continue to do my utmost on the revolving door of climbing enemies.

-----------------------------

Nash’s POV

The fight advance way more slowly than I had expected. The tactics from the enemy goblins are not that different, but their innate resilience and overwhelming numbers force most of our fighters to put their entire strength forth to just barely keep up and their numbers only see a slow decline.

When a third of the enemy’s forces are on the ground, the goblin chief’s agitation becomes more apparent. Even the people without the perception field, AKA everyone else, notice its change in demeanor.

Feeling a chill down my bones that has nothing to do with the weather, I start paying more attention to the chief.

Fear slowly creeps up as his change builds and builds in a crescendo. With each failed attack on the pair in front of him and every one of his troops that falls being another strike in his heart and mind.

He looks at the sky again looking for something then at his fallen troops before letting out a scream, a loud and deep guttural scream that shakes me to my core.

With a suddenness I can only expect of long drilled preparations, most of the shamans begin marching backward leaving a few closer to us to continue their harassment and avoid us having free reign of the magic battlefield. Along the entire wall, the efforts of the surrounding combatants are redoubled.

A greenish faint glow with red streaks wafts off the goblin chief which slowly but surely rolls on the ground covering the other combatants.

With a sudden large jump in speed, Alex and Greg are put in their back feet, retreating in every clash instead of barely holding against the beast. Just a second later with almost telepathic coordination both of them activate their class skills.

A faint white glow comes from the dancing light footed Alex as he spins the Aether around himself as an oppressive aura covers Greg even as his own white glow comes to the forefront.

I hope you know what you are doing Greg… Last time you activated both skills at the same time you had trouble just keeping on your feet.

While forming small shields between them and the Goblin chief I think about getting up, but even as the thought crosses my mind, the red light streaks in his aura and he moves way faster than before almost taking off Greg’s head.

Reminded of the last time a Goblin chief got upset with me and got in my face with that same red aura, I resist my impulse to go physically help. The stat and skill level difference is too large. I don’t want to spend over a week with a hole in my side, and that is the best case scenario.

That doesn’t mean I can’t help in other ways.

Leveraging my inner world, I put a few more layers of defense around me before strategically positioning the mobile shield generators and fireball turrets all above everyone’s head.

With a dexterous hand, I try my best to accompany the fight and limit the goblin’s options. It uses its short spear mostly in trusting attacks, moving in and out of engagement range with overwhelming speed.

Alex’s skill is clearly on the same level. In beauty and fluidity, it can even be considered superior, but his stats, raw power, and speed aren’t a match. Even while expertly dancing and harnessing every smidge of his momentum like an ice skater, the bursts of speed from the goblin chief constantly trow a wrench in his attempts.

Though as Greg advances, the gobblin chief is careful to dodge each of his blows by a wide margin, as even the glow in his own heavy spear can peel off the goblin’s skin. A few of Greg’s missed attacks end nearby enemies or pulverizes chunks of stone demonstrating his absurd damage potential.

Palm sized furrows on the ground, shattered weapons and bisected enemies mean little if he can’t hit the goblin.

If he ever manages a full on hit, the Goblin chief won’t be able to survive long. Pushing his entire strength in short but strategic bursts the goblin chief tries to catch either of the two unaware and off position, but the best he manages are glancing blows against their +4 armor sets.

I try different strategies like ensnaring him with my roots or growing freezing formations underneath, but those attempts are also unsuccessful.

The seconds pass until their skills are about to run out. They both get slower and the extra sharpness in the tip of their spear is gone, the Goblin however is still kicking in full force with its twin glow. If before they had to take half a step or even a full step in each confrontation, now they are constantly retreating. All thoughts of beating the goblin chief seem to flee their minds and only frantic survival consumes them.

The all encompassing desire to keep living is all there is, otherwise, a single mistake would be their end.

The goblin chief doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity to kill any others around him. He is probably guessing that if the two before him fall, no one else would have a chance and he would be able to sweep up the entire village by himself with the rest of the army distracting the other defenders.

I knew things wouldn’t be that easy, but if they did fall without inflicting serious damage to him, we would be screwed.

In best case scenario, we escape with more than a tenth of our village left behind to the goblin’s tender mercy.

Alex lowers his center of mass and starts taking bigger risks even in the slippery wet ground. Usually not a good option, but he doesn’t other choices. Even with the reinforcement brought in, there were a few critical points in the battle and I need to come up with a solution to the dilemma in front of me.

This is a critical juncture. We needed a decisive win against the goblin chief, and the sooner the better.

Cringing in anticipation of the headache I would get, I start to work on the only plan with half a chance to work.

As I update both of them on what I’m going to try, runes spin around my head as I take any of the unnecessary ones in the freezing formation distilling it down to its most basic constituent parts. I quickly arrive at 30 runes for a basic and inefficient design, but it works.

That is still more than double the largest and most complex spell I can cast without the help of engraving or other aid. Any time I try to grow runes in his vicinity of the Goblin chief just moves away, so I need the speed and flexibility of a proper spell.

If I push myself to the limit, I might be able to cast something with 18 runes, and with that in mind, I start cutting pieces and replacing sections with even simpler ones in the formation. Each rune I cut out adds an inefficiency, places that mana leaks, increasingly wrong conversions, and unregulated flows, but that is the price I pay for transforming it into a proper spell.

Twenty-five, twenty, nineteen runes, and that is where I stop. Taking even one more rune will surely brick the entire formation. I have no idea if I can even cast it, but I have to try. It’s the only chance we have.

I take a deep breath and draw the symbols on top of the Goblin chief. With a faint form and not feeding any mana to it, just bracing myself for what is to come.

Alex falls to the ground after an attack but quickly transforms the splaying mess into a simple well executed back roll bleeding off the momentum that would have thrown him against the wall if he were a lesser fighter. All the while he keeps a steady hold of his spear, which easily comes up and paries the next attack from the goblin chief.

In a rare moment where the goblin chief is not perfectly on its feet after its spear enters the wall and needs a good yank to get out, I yell:

“Now.” Both in wait for what is to come to do their best to attack him.

A pulse of mana. My entire will. A complex runic formation based entirely on my understanding of magic instead of any testing.

The goblin chief freezes... for a fraction of a second.

Any other time, it could easily have gotten the spear out and retreated a foot or two to get its bearings like it did dozens of times in this fight, now… it pays the price of fighting against our village. With a powerful arc bearing Greg’s entire weight, the chief's spine shatters.

Falling to the ground without control of its legs, they don’t let up and dive full in until there is nothing left but a bloody chunk.

I keep helping them for a few more moments, but then the pain sets in and I fall unconscious in my root cocoon protected from all remaining threats.

-----------------------

A thunderous sound deafens me, pain shoots up my left leg, a pounding headache assaults me, and to top it all off there is a queasiness in my mana control. I open my eyes to see nothing in the darkness of my cocoon, then I turn on the screen connected to the feeds outside along with the perception field looking all around me.

There are some 6 thousand remaining combatants, a good portion of them are wolves.

In the back of the army, the group of 80 shamans who retreated about 100 meters chant together, and another bolt of thunder trembles even the solid walls.

I widen my eyes as what just happened sets in. The flash hits the enemy before they redirected it to Merlin and his entourage. The large shield of the wall falls, but their second layer manages to hold.

Both shields take only a few seconds to return to full power, and I let what is happening away from anyone else’s magical range drive me to action.

Struggling through my mental state, I open four portals in the air in front of Merlin and put my mobile shied generators out once again. Though this time they are not empowered by my will, just on the automatic mode being recharged by the enormous batteries buried in the inner world.

Forming a single large shield stronger than even the one in the wall, a few of the mages are free to concentrate on something beyond the shield.

With the remnants of my will after my stunt with the gobbling chief, I look at the shamans harnessing the powers of nature for devastating attacks. I should disrupt that. My fine control of mana may be gone, but I can still brute force my way for a little longer.

In their exact spot, there are no mana disruption formations, so I start growing one as fast as I can. A minute later I power it and start expanding and growing it until it reaches the epitome of my design forcing all mana not tightly controlled to go Berzerk.

This exercise only comes to show my limits more clearly. I pushed too hard this time.

Still, I put a decent portion of my will behind the disruption formation to cause mana fluctuations. Not quite to the level I expected if I was at full power, but enough that a few of the less experienced Shamans lose control and the power of the attacks drops off a little more.

“Any small edge, I will take it all,” I say lifting my arm.

Ouch, ouch.

A few stop their work to fight me, which is in one word: painful. But I will keep to the course as long as I’m a nuisance to their efforts.

More and more are injured in the fight and only a few of the dedicated magic users can work helping the rest of the fight, but without the shaman’s interference and with their slowly dwindling numbers they no longer stand a chance. Two thousand, one thousand, five hundred enemies.

The remaining two hundred Orcs left for last are particularly annoying. The tough bastards simply won’t quit and take a long time to finish with the few mostly uninjured fighters we have.

Soon enough as the last enemy falls and silence settles on the battlefield in an instant. Even through the gruesome scene and dead companions, every single one of the fighters still around looks back and forth searching for the next enemy, but there are none. None but a maneless arch shaman.

Despite the strangeness, a wave of relief passes over everyone even as the last droplets of rain die off and the hundreds of fighters still at the walls start laughing. The comradery from people who survived regardless of any rivalry between them as together we stand against the real enemy.

Most keep at it for a few minutes before filing in the village and heading to the tavern. Though a few stay behind and accompany me to the arch shaman.

He starts a small lightning bolt slowly, which I respond by surrounding him in mana shields from the inner world.

I had long hidden its capabilities, but after what I pulled during the fight, any attempt to continue doing so would be a moot point and frankly ridiculous. Hell, it might have been an unfounded fear all along, but the milk had been spilled either way.

As I surround the strangely acting elder goblin with the shields, he looks at copper protrusions and then focuses on the portals with a twinkle in his eyes.

So that is what called your attention…

Everyone arrives by my side and the slowly forming lightning bolt strikes from the tip of his marvelously crafted staff and collides with the shield draining a few more mana points, but nothing dangerous, not yet.

“Well, what do you think is happening?” Asks one of the commanders from our reinforcements.

Merlin takes the lead for a moment and starts speaking: “Exactly what Nash has been hoping for a long time. Finally a chance to talk with one of them.”

Everyone looks straight at me and I grimace before turning to the Shaman.

“I don’t suppose you can talk?”

The goblin’s response is just what I expected.

“Arghh, killatra murdrapha.”