They carted away the unconscious men to the sleeping bags lined under market stall tents.

With a shock, I realized that the wet ground wasn’t mud-colored red from iron deposits. It was blood. The explosion's aftermath covered everything in blood. The dragged men were dead. The bags were body bags. I stood there cupping my mouth, horrified.

I puked.

Moments passed and I couldn’t stand there forever. That would stick out more than running and screaming nonsense. I squirmed closer to hide behind the next cart a few feet from the mine.

“Orc!”

I looked up to the source of the young voice. It came from a boy a little older than me, with spiked hair the shape of a candle’s lit wick, standing precariously on a scaffold above the mine entrance.

The boy shouted louder, “Clear out!”

He pulled a spiked ball on a stick from his side. Pulling the stick, he extended the length. He held a mace with sharp spikes with a telescopic hilt. Purple light emitted through the junctures of the hilt, and through the metal spikes. A magic mace!

Yelling theatrically, he jumped out and my heart stopped for a second. He jumped from twenty feet above the mine, to fall to his death.

But, from the shadows of the entrance, a huge green and squarish head emerged and the boy’s mace connected with the skull.

A bulky green giant with a humped back stumbled forward, howling in pain. It… He was 7 feet tall, the tunnels had stunted its… his growth.

The forms of a bodybuilder and Quasimodo mashed and twisted together to mold the monstrous figure. The swamp green creature had thick, acid green stretchmarks. It trailed up his torso to his face. He wore nothing but a poor excuse for homemade shorts and was riddled with old pink scars.

The orc donned a new sizable dent in his protruding forehead. Blood from the holes from the mace’s spikes leaked onto his orange eyebrows. The wound area and his blood turned a moldy gray. When he yelled out in pain again, all I could do was stare at his sizable jaw that was part piranha with huge yellow teeth.

Everybody else stood watching in equal fascination and horror as I did. Some curious and daring souls approached to take a closer look at the fallen orc, pushing and jostling me. Worse, in the frenzy, I felt a yank at my shoulder, and following that, my shoulder pack started to slip. I’m being robbed!