Shade sat in the darkness of a treetop watching the light of the Avantian camp from afar. Beneath her sat a dozen kobolds in similar black garb to her own. Their faces covered, bodies armored, all blending into the shadows around them. Ahead was a small force of the main Avantian army that had finally gotten mobilized after months of their borders being under siege. The assassin didn't know if their lack of speed was being caught off guard or deliberate, but that was what she and her team were hoping to figure out. Those below her were trained by her personally from the orc capital, city-dwelling, free-living kobolds that had volunteered for the impromptu spy corps she had established to lead the third prong of her verakt's offensive strategy.

Miles behind their position was their own camp, stationed out of sight from the humans and their forces, who were marching to meet Grot's legions. The chief-of-chiefs had an army, several thousand of the best orcs they had. Merdon, the kobold whisperer, the human champion of the non-humans, marched with a couple thousand of their elite warriors; a strike force capable of dealing with any Eyes of Ethral soldiers that might have been left. Shade, the spy, the assassin, the dark-scaled kobold mate of the orc chief-of-chiefs, had less than a thousand at her back, and perhaps half as many of them in kobold numbers. They were the least trained of their numbers, but the loudest braggarts she had ever laid ears on. This was their choice to prove their worth to the cause. Stir up trouble, prod defenses, sweep along the edge of Avant that bordered the sea, all to hide the fact that she was there to steal intelligence.

No army marched without orders, the chain of command was sacred to lifelong military men. Finding the right officer with the right letter from the king meant the difference between death and salvation in this war. A weapon they had that the Avantians no longer did. Their spy network was crippled, their assassins and recruits dead, buried under rubble. There was no better time to strike than the dead of a moonless night. Starlight was more than enough for kobolds to see by, while the humans would wander with their bright torches held high. Lights that bright were beacons in the night for Shade and her assassins. By morning, the camp would be a graveyard, and whatever orders they had would be theirs. Then, the orcs behind her would come up and desecrate the camp, making it seem like a battle had raged fiercely fought and lost.

Shade dropped from the branches and landed silently before sprinting forward. A second later and she caught the sound of her team fanning out around her. They needed no signal, this wasn't the first time they had gone after the humans like this. Their assault would be as deadly as it was quiet, and a force of thousands would fall to the blades of a dozen. Most of the camp would be asleep. Once the guards were dealt with it would take only a couple hours to slit the throats of the sleeping army. Brutal, effective, and quite fun for the dark-scaled assassin.

They started with the walls. Avant had begun repurposing their old forts into staging areas for their march, which meant the forces had shelter, most nights, from the weather and other things, but mere stone was no match for Shade. Kobold claws could sink into stone, sharp and durable as they were, and it made for easy climbing with how easy it was to place them into the mortar between blocks. Shade watched, waited, and pounced on a flame as it passed her position under a parapet. The guard sounded stunned as his last breath gurgled out of a new hole in his throat. She left the torch burning, setting it in a nearby rung for such things, before moving out across the wall. In moments her team had secured the top of the fort and then came the tricky part. Half of them would descend into the courtyard and silence the men on the ground before circling the outpost's outside and taking care of any patrols that lingered. Meanwhile, she and five others would enter the fort proper and take care of the remaining conscious guards.

Her force was completely silent as they went about their bloody task. While the others went about making sure the only person the guards would alert was their goddess, Shade went snooping for the commander's room. Their primary mission was intelligence gathering after all. The trick to Avantian forts, she had discovered, was that none of them liked to put the commander in the same room. It was a scavenger hunt each time, and the giveaway was the pair of well-armored guards standing outside the door. No other room had two guards standing idle in front of it. As far as obviousness, they may as well have painted her a sign. Which left splitting them up to take care of their leader. Shade took her claw and raked it along the wall, making a very loud, distinctly unhuman sound before scurrying up the wall itself and clinging to a wooden support beam.

She heard the door open and a pair of voices talking. One guard had gone to inform their commander of the noise. That only made her job easier. The first guard came around the corner and looked around. His eyes were naturally drawn to the marking that Shade had left on the wall beside him. As his fingers raised to drag along the wall and test the mark, to see how fresh it was, Shade dropped from above. A clang of armor and muffled shout were all that came from his lips before a dagger snaked its way under his helm and into his throat. The collapsing corpse caused a commotion that sparked his ally to come running, only to be blindsided by the kobold assassin. Shade bounced off a wall and hooked her knife into his throat as well, turning and landing on the ground behind him as her blade split him from ear to ear while preserving her momentum as she dropped.

The Avantian commander was not wearing his helmet, making him an infinitely easier target than his guards. A middle-aged man, the lieutenant, or whatever pointless position he held, turned to run while shouting about intruders. He might have gotten some attention if his guards weren't taking dirt naps. Shade didn't let him get far either. Only the lightest of sleepers, or anyone stationed near their leader's room, would have awoken from his shouts. Before he could round the corner, Shade leaped up and threw one of her daggers with expert precision. The man turned as the assassin's weapon sunk into his head. He slammed into the wall and slumped over, his eyes glazing as what life he had spirited away back to the ether. The black kobold strode over and pulled her blade free from her target's skull, wiping it off before tucking it away. Now came the boring part, sorting through paperwork.

Before morning came the fort was a better tomb than anything else. Shade lingered, documents in hand, to make sure that everything wrapped up as intended, and set out with the rest of her group. Despite the silence they traveled in back to their own camp, there was an air of accomplishment and confidence about them as they ran through the grass. This was their third detachment of troops. Between her two teams, Shade's assassins had racked up hundreds of kills per kobold. By all technicality, they were the most experienced killers in the orc armies, as long as the enemy was asleep. There wasn't any fanfare to be had when they returned to camp, however. The orcs would have rather rushed an army twice their size than let the kobolds wrap things up quietly, and Shade suspected that some of the armored kobolds were feeling the same way, maybe due to their inexperience.

Whatever the case, Shade made for her tent to find Red. The mage had only just returned from Verist's tower, she knew, but what the assassin had found was too important to ignore. Shade slapped the papers down on a table in the center of the tent with a sneer on her face. Ever curious, Red picked them up and skimmed the contents for anything meaningful. It became dreadfully obvious before she even reached the second page, which could only make things worse. The papers detailed the king's plan for dealing with the invasion, and it would have riled up the peasantry for sure.

“We have to get this out there,” Red told Shade without hesitation. “This is the key to making Verist's plan work, to getting the people of Avant on our side.”

“If they believe it,” Shade told her. “I'll not get my hopes up so quickly that a group of commoners will wrap their minds around the political intrigue happening here. At best we might get some resistance away from Grot and Merdon.”

Red sighed and sat the papers down. She tapped her claws on the wooden table irritably before getting herself under control. “Yes, you have a point,” she admitted. “The common folk of Avant aren't the sharpest swords in the armory, but let's think about it like this. If the towns on the outskirts of the nation start to doubt the king then we can show them how peaceful we want to be. We can get them out of their towns, away from the bloodshed, and in the process claim the edges of Avant for ourselves.” Strangling the nation itself, in essence.

“It's a bold proposition,” Shade shrugged, “and one I'm not so sure will work. We can try it though. Ultimately, I'm more concerned with the Whisperer and Grot getting their hands on this. It changes our early plans significantly. The king is sacrificing these outer towns to fortify an inner circle. Our three-pronged approach isn't going to work if the enemy is just placing traps in our way. We're going to need to bulk up and surprise them, slam through one route and make the other fortifications a waste of resources.”

Red shook her head and held up her hands. “I'm not leading an army,” she reminded Shade. “None of that needs to convince me of anything. My point is that we should do everything to try and weaken the king's hold. Every human that doubts their cause is one less body they can throw at us.”

“Aye.” Shade agreed with that much. “Either way, we need Verist to get this and spread it around, to our generals and to the Avantians through her spies. Take Ironhide with you as well. I imagine we'll have a meeting to attend shortly after she reads those.”

Before Red could so much as nod in confirmation, the tent flap was thrust aside and one of Shade's team burst in. His mask down and eyes blazing as he shouted, “Why does that tail-less failure get to sit in on meetings between the generals?”

Shade cocked her head and momentarily debated knocking this kobold flat, but Red did so verbally before the assassin could come to a decision.

“That tail-less failure is a dozen times the 'bold you will ever be,” Red hissed at the intruder. “The last time I checked, he lost his tail participating in a raid on an Avantian military hideout you city lizards were too cowardly to join up on.”

The kobolds of the orc lands hadn't been confident about the group's success rate going up against the Eyes, and it shown in how this assassin recoiled at the memory. “We were playing it safe, yes, but now that we're all out here in the middle of the war surely there's someone with more skills, more knowledge of the field.”

“Like you?” Shade suggested with a firm look. She knew all sorts of kobolds like this. It was why she had two separate teams that she alternated between. To try and avoid making them think that sneaking into a fort in the middle of the night made them great warriors like the orcs. Some would never learn.

The kobold fidgeted and looked away while mumbling, “Not specifically...” He didn't want to be in trouble.

“You realize eavesdropping on our meeting doesn't exactly look good for you?” Red added with a frown. “Even if we did take your suggestion as more than arrogance, it would never be you.”

Shade smiled and started idly looking for a blank piece of paper. “I wonder if a court marshal is in order for this,” she said aloud, making the assassin go pale. “Grot would just love to know why one of our own felt it necessary to listen to our plans without invitation.”

Realizing his own grave was being dug before him, the kobold in question fled the tent without so much as an apology. The ladies stood for a moment before looking at each other with smiles.

“It's been a while since I got to be that open,” Red whispered. It was liberating to be as angry as she felt sometimes.

“Maybe we'll put you on the tribunal,” Shade suggested. “You can shout down the rafters at all our wayward military members. Maybe bring in some little girls to compare their bravery to or lack thereof.”

“Tempting,” Red joked.

While the two were joking around, something was brewing outside the tent. Ironhide, formerly Thickhide, was on guard duty around the edge of the pavilion. With the surge of ore from Avant to work with, the kobold knights had been properly fitted. Their tails were now adorned with steel plating that made them even slower than usual but protected them from the same fate that Ironhide had suffered in the Eyes training camp. Which made him stand out all the more. Ironhide now fit into a more normal armor shape, and if one saw a halfling-sized armored creature with no tail, they knew exactly who it was without a second thought. Exiting the tent in a huff, Shade's assassin saw Ironhide from a distance and made his way over with his teeth set. If he couldn't convince the kobolds in charge with words, he would just have to prove his stance with his fists. These armored kobolds were slow and helpless against a real kobold like him, one that was trained in speed and agility.

Shade and Red's attention wasn't caught until the fight grew into a camp-wide spectacle. The low chanting rising up into an arena of voices got them to leave the tent, hearing Ironhide's name being the one repeated caused them to break into a run. A crowd had gathered around them, and the two kobolds had to force their way to the front to see what was happening. In the middle of the circle was Ironhide, as expected, and the assassin that had just been thoroughly dismissed by the pair.

Red growled and raised a claw to help, but Shade caught her arm and shook her head. “I don't think that's necessary,” she told Red over the roar of the crowd.

The assassin was on his knees while Ironhide stood with a clenched fist. There was some blood on the ground already, and a splattering on the armored one's gauntlet. With a surge of rage, the assassin sprung up and lunged at the green kobold before him, striking furiously and rapidly. Yet, despite his speed, despite the armor slowing him down, Ironhide stood his ground and avoided the more serious blows. Any punches and kicks to his abdomen and legs were pointless, he was wearing full steel plate. His face lacked a helmet though, it having been torn off by his attacker before the crowd gathered. Each swing was directed at his face, and that made the assault predictable.

Ironhide stood ready and shifted from side to side, deftly evading every blow that came up high until the opportunity arose to turn things around. He fought grounded, ready to counter when the time came, while his opponent was going at him with every limb he had available. One kick was all it took, a roundhouse that Ironhide blocked with a bracer, making his opponent shout in pain before the real hurt kicked in. With the attack stopped, the knightly kobold wrapped his arm around the offending leg in his face and pulled the assassin in close. Off-balance and without a choice, the other kobold hopped closer and into Ironhide's waiting punch. Blood and a couple of fangs went flying as Ironhide leveraged his weight and strength to raise the lightweight killer and slam him back to the ground in a terrific fashion.

The offending kobold coughed and groaned as he hit the hard earth, while his target stood proud over him. All around them the sounds of an arena, of a hundred orcs and half as many kobolds, rose into the night air. Ironhide had single-handedly bested one of Shade's personally trained assassins in single combat. Even with the disadvantage of taking the first blow, a less evident punch to the face that had caused infinitely less damage than either of Ironhide's gauntlet assisted strikes, he had put his opponent on the ground without issue. Orcs loved a good brawl, and the kobolds in the armored division hadn't forgotten what a hero Ironhide was to them. Seeing him triumph in action once again only steeled their resolve, lit a fire in their hearts to keep going. Ironhide had beaten a kobold that was using all of a kobold's natural advantages, and he'd done so without a tail.

Shade had to break everyone up and get them back to their posts, a less than friendly reminder that they were still in the midst of enemy territory and were supposed to be stealthier than a coliseum. Red stepped out to talk to Ironhide, while the knight picked up his defeated challenger and moved to take him to the healers they had stationed in their camp.

“We're going back to Verist's tower,” Red told him.

Ironhide nodded, “Let me just, uhm, drop this guy off.” He was as unsteady with his words as ever.

“That was a good fight,” Red noted. Not that he needed the affirmation with the orcs around them still congratulating him.

The green kobold blushed and shook his head. “It was kinda pointless, wasn't it?” he asked. “We're supposed to be allies.” He didn't even realize what he'd done. Typical Ironhide.