Brigand Kyrel

Kyrel looked around at what was left of his unit shortly after separating from the Ostlind guards. All 6, including himself, of his original party members were present and not much worse for the wear. This didn’t apply to all the other mercenaries of course, nearly a fourth of their original 100 had fallen during the battles inside of Annahmia.

Kyrel regretted, from the bottom of his heart, taking this mission without thinking too far ahead. He and his group had been hanging around the port waiting for work. Usually, they sold their services to protect cargo from pirates going to and from the Brakken empire, but business was slowing down for some reason. Looking back on it, Kyrel realized that the trade was slowing because the Mayor of Ostlind was recalling all his forces to prepare from this invasion, but at that moment Kyrel had not been able to recognize it. All he knew was that he was running low on funds and needed a fix.

One day, a day very much like every other day that week, a very official looking man approached their table in a tavern and asked how they felt about Non-humans.

It was a weird way to start a conversation, but Kyrel had already been deep into his cups for the day, it was already 2 in the afternoon on a day where he had no work after all.

“Their gold spends as well as the next, who gives a fuck how long they live or how tall they are. Hell, some of the colorful ones seem like they might be exciting in the sack, no?”

“A pity, never mind.” Said the gentlemen, but Kyrel quickly recalled him before he could get too far. He explained that while he had no animosity with the other races, he was running low on money and had few morals. He hadn’t always been a cargo guard after all, like most other mercenaries his background was less than clean, and he’d robbed more than a few caravans during the down seasons.

That’s when he was given the details for the current mission, which after his group agreed too, they accepted both the pay and the job.

‘What a shit decision,’ Kyrel thought to himself as his eyes gloomily followed various tree trunks up into the sky and back down. He shifted the deceased captain’s head under his arm and extended the torch he was carrying farther into the shadows, hoping to beat back a bit of the murkiness that was bogging down the group.

Although they’d turned around almost instantly after entering the forest, they seemed to have been caught up in some spacial enchantment anyways. This made escaping the forest a little more complicated, but not impossible. From what the captain had said during their pre-raid brief, a middling adventuring party had managed to enter and leave safely. Why would a group of seasoned and prepared mercenaries fair any worse?

Of course, Kyrel had no clue that at that point, Manning had just finished creating the area and had yet to populate it with traps and many monsters. Neither did he know that the forest he was traversing was specifically targeting him.

After walking for nearly ten minutes, Kyrel’s surroundings began to morph into something that looked both less sensitive and more foreboding at the same time. The trees began to lighten in color and increase in size, making them many times bigger than any tree he’d seen before. While holding hands, it would probably take at least five grown men to encompass one of the trees.

The gargantuan trees were spread far from each other, giving the illusion that there was much more space to operate than before, and the trail died off leaving them standing on a bare forest floor. This was both a blessing and a curse. The mercenaries were no longer confined to a tight forest trail and could walk several men abreast, but they no longer had any sense of direction.

Large bushes filled in the forest floor between trees and ivy grew upwards, clinging to the trunks of the goliath trees. Upon further inspection, Kyrel found that most of the bark below chest height had been stripped from several trees around them. He was no ranger but even Kyrel knew that this meant there were beasts in the area. Beasts with either very sharp claws, or very sharp horns. Perhaps they even had both, but either way Kyrel wanted nothing to do with it.

With a low whistle he informed the rest of his party that he spotted a potential ambush and allowed them to prepare themselves. Although he’d only regularly worked with five of the men here, the signals his group used were almost universal. The separate groups had their own signals, of course, but most mercenaries learned the common ones as well. One never knew when they would have to work in a larger party and expeditions that required the hiring of a merc party usually wouldn’t stop after only one.

As they prepared themselves for battle, the air suddenly shifted. The insects stopped chirping and the branches overhead stopped swaying. The group was greeted with an eerie silence akin to them having stumbled onto a funeral service uninvited. Everyone there had been on enough ventures to recognize the killing intent that slowly filled the air. Muscles tensed and pupils contracted, weapons were brought to bear as everyone settled in for a battle.

Instantaneously the sound in the forest resumed at almost a deafening level. Birds screeched, branches snapped, and insects flew into a frenzy. The wind whipped away at the torches, snuffing them as the mages in the party simultaneously cast their magelights. Had this been the Ostlind guards, or even if they had been there with the mercenaries, the group might have been overtaken with panic. Such petty tricks would not work on the seasoned veterans, however.

Bushes began to part, and a crazed beast came bursting forth from the darkness. It was a four legged, hoven creature with fur blacker than the night and small beady eyes that seemed to pierce the gloom and lock onto one’s soul. It was armed with two massive tusks and a gleaming metallic horn twice the size of Kyrel’s arm.

If one could look past the rippling muscles and gargantuan size, they would recognize the base species of the beast as a boar, albeit a boar that was at least three times the size of the largest Kyrel had ever seen. Suddenly the wide spread trees with stripped bark made a lot of sense to the mercenary. Without checking, Kyrel already knew that none of the men in his group had brought any polearms with them, the movement of such weapons would have been too restricted inside of the buildings of Annahmia or the forest itself.

Many of the mercenaries trained their ranged weapons on the creature that had come to a halt not too far away, but nobody took the first shot. Each of them, much like Kyrel, were running the odds of them winning the fight and the best route to victory. The chances were slim for winning, but they did not fool themselves into thinking they could escape either. Even if everybody scattered in a different direction, at half of them would perish. Nobody knew which half they would fall into, so they stood their ground.

As if it could read their minds, the great beast let out a dismissive snort from its massive snout, the hot breath creating a misty dragon in the cold winter air and stamped its hoove once. The bushes started rustling again and more large boars began wondering out on either side of the alpha as well as behind the group of mercenaries. The boars shared the same features but were significantly smaller than the first, probably only 60% of the size both height and width-wise. The most concerning feature, however, were the creatures perched upon the back of the hogs.

“Hog-riders,” snarled a man on Kyrel’s left who was distorting his face into a grimace that caused his scars to ripple across his cheeks and forehead. The man had been working the front lines against goblin invaders for the past dozen years and knew how formidable a mounted foe could be.

The monsters mounting the overgrown swine were not goblins, but they were also not anything that Kyrel recognized apart from where he’d read about them in news on the dungeon. They stood a couple heads shorter than the average human and had varying facial features. Some had one large eye set in the center of their forehead, others ranged up to four or five eyes. Some had scales below their eyes and on their arms while others were covered in thinning brown fur or thick black fur much like the boars they rode upon, all set upon a canvas of a sickly yellow-green skin tone.

One thing was consistent though, they were all equipped with a spear that looked like it had been crafted by savages and they were all smiling down at the mercenaries, their long-forked tongues darting in and out of their long, needle like teeth.

They, too, did not charge at the mercenaries straight away. Kyrel took his time to trail his eyes along the group and spied an opening. It was slim, but there was an area between a few of the trees that was not covered by a boar and when the fight broke out, he could probably escape in that direction. At the very least, if the group backed that way it would funnel the beasts behind them, and they could fight in one direction rather than on all sides.

Whereas they could have won against the large boar by itself, with some losses, they had no chance of winning this battle. Their opponents were all riding war mounts and were carrying weapons with a longer reach than most of the mercenaries. The few crossbows they carried would not be able to even the odds fast enough, even if every shot was a one-hit kill.

Subconsciously, the merc closest to the gap took a step toward it, having spied the same opening that Kyrel did. The troglodytes watching them narrowed their eyes and nudged the boar’s side with his knee, causing it to take one step forward. Just like that, all hell broke loose.

Crossbow bolts whittled through the air, most flying wide as their originator fired over their shoulder while they turned on a dime and sprinted toward the opening. The majority of the group had spied the same escape route and all of them intended to capitalize on it, none of them eager to die in the god-forsaken forest they found selves in.

By the merit of the moonlight and few remaining mage lights, Kyrel could see the savage spears whistling by the group and embedding themselves in the trees and dirt around the group making its hasty escape. Accompanying the spears, several nets were also thrown out. However, each of the nets seemed to have been better aimed, ensnaring various mercenaries with each toss. Kyrel did not spare much thought to those caught, knowing that they were already dead, and he would die with them if he slowed, so he sprinted forth and ignored all the women squirming beneath thick nets of spider web.

Apart from the nets, most of the projectiles tossed toward the fleeing group went wide, with only a few causing a scrape here or there. Slowly, the sounds of the chase faded away as if the aggressors were content with their catch or couldn’t keep up. Kyrel didn’t believe it for a second, and neither did the rest of the group. They could all hear the distant crashing on either side of the group, the boars had spread out to either side and were waiting for the mercs to tire.

As if, when a human’s life was on the line, they could push past all their previous limits and pull on energy sources that usually went untapped. As Kyrel overdrew his vitality, he saw the mercenaries ahead of him slowing dip out of sight as if they were heading down a hill. As he was already going forward at a full sprint, he had little time to adjust and instead prepared himself to slide down the hill while maintaining balance. The mage lights that had been cast died out a long time ago and never performed well at high speeds anyways, so in the lack of light Kyrel could not accurately judge the incline.

Step after step, he drew closer to the incline, until he was finally upon it. He prepared to slide down at the last possible second, only to slide straight into the open air, suspended only for a second before plummeting down.