Alyssa hopped into the shower while Carly hung out on the balcony for a little bit and practiced her magic. When Alyssa finished her shower she immediately pulled the self healing coal colored unitard on and a pair of work out shorts then stepped out on the balcony with Carly. The slightly older girl smiled up at her and they enjoyed a companionable silence as they watched the sun slowly dip behind the bunkhouse painting the horizon in deep orange and yellow hues. Smoke still rose from the city, though much less than the prior days. She watched as Samantha directed her squad on the wall as they rotated occasionally amongst each other. She moved between her squad members alternately keeping them company and conversing with them.

While in the shower she decided that she would have three of her squads in rotation on the wall duty, while one squad would go through the former kobold dungeon. She conveniently composed a message in her head and sent it off to Lord Shubin, the Daemon people’s leader, requesting how he was doing and when the dungeon would be available for her to send people through it. More of his people had come through the portal that was still thrumming with power, though the numbers were dwindling with each transition and she suspected by tomorrow no one else would make it through.

She looked around from her perch and saw Johnny directing the people that had fallen under his wing at some task she wasn’t sure of. A crack of a rifle drew her attention to the right and she saw that Bill was still on his tower and had apparently eliminated another animal in the distance. She smiled and Carly came up to the railing next to her.

“So what’s the plan?” She asked.

Alyssa looked at her quizzically, “What do you mean? The guard force is up and running, I’ve run off the remaining assholes, and we got walls to keep the monsters out.”

“Girl, Karl wouldn’t have left you in charge of the defenses if you were the type to only think that far ahead. So what’s next?”

Alyssa looked at her for a long moment, began chewing on her lip in deep thought and considered the question. Karl stated they planned on clearing more dungeons, and securing the rest of Winslow as his. So…. “I suppose I just want to take a break from murdering, killing, and watching people get raped and eaten for a couple hours, then…”

“Then?” Carly pressed.

She sighed and continued, “We need to start securing resources. We need to take more dungeons and claim more cores so we can upgrade our settlement. We need to get stronger. A lot stronger.”

Carly considered her for a bit, then looked to the side. “So what happened to you before Karl?”

Alyssa looked out to the darkening horizon and sighed deeply, “I was -”

Something moved. By that building. Her eyes focused hard on the horizon, she could see what appeared to be man sized shapes slinking through the shadows between the buildings that remained in the distance. She suddenly understood why Karl only used half the area for the initial settlement build. Nothing could get too close without being spotted, and that something was headed towards them from the city.

“You were….?” Carly asked with an arched eyebrow.

“... under attack. We're under attack!” She stated quietly and Carly’s view spun in the direction Alyssa was staring. She didn’t have the perception to see the individual shapes but she thought she could make out an amorphous blob of black movement by the Firestation.

“SHIT!” She cursed and dashed through the building to the wall.

Alyssa began scanning the horizon and thought she saw several more formations of humanoid shapes shuffling at the edge of their perimeter to the North. A new interface appeared in her vision as she pondered how to send out the alarm.

SooHoo Settlement is currently being attacked by a Gnoll Warband. Initiate settlement defense and use automatic quest distribution? (Yes/No)

“FUCK!” She swiftly selected ‘yes’.

No sooner than she had sent out the automatic notifications, bolts of energy and arrows began streaming through the dark space between the settlement and attacking force of gnolls. The attacks smashed against the wood wall and Alyssa held her breath. The wall absorbed the impacts and flexed but didn’t shatter. Samantha was already gathering her people and deflecting projectile attacks with her psychic energies. The other defenders streamed out of the bunkhouse and mounted the wall and began launching attacks of their own.

Alyssa turned and entered her room and retrieved her armor and changed into it frantically. She chose to head back out to the balcony and leap to the ground. Lulu was there in a moment and she leapt to the wall next to Samantha.

“How many are we facing?”

Samantha turned her attention to the young Guard Captain, “A couple dozen out by the fire station, I haven’t had time to check the north. Bill is still up there.”

“Thank you.” Alyssa left the woman and ran along the wall and jumped up to the tower where she heard Bill's rifle bark steadily.

“Hey Boss, I’m assuming you want a sitrep, yes?” He looked up, without letting her speak he continued, “Got a couple dozen ranged fighters taking cover in the housing development there. I can see their frontline fighters forming up behind them.”

“Thank you, keep it up.” She dropped from the tower to the ground and took a moment to check the situation inside for more ranged fighters and found two of her magic users. “You two! Get over here and help Bill.” The two indicated ran to the wall and began supplementing Bill’s rate of fire effectively stemming the flow of incoming attacks on the settlement.

She looked around and found the two people she was looking for on the southwest corner of the wall flinging ice bombs and mana charged arrows into the gathering horde of monsters. She mounted the wall once again and observed the battle on the west wall. The fuck do I do? An arrow zipped past her shoulder and she ducked and looked up at Nandi who flashed her a smirk.

“Oi! Having fun yet!?”

WHAT!?!? “TONS!”

“Buggers don’t wanna come knock on the door just yet!”

Alyssa raised her head and could now make out the warband which was now lit by the magical fires burned on the ground around them. She analyzed them and got a general feeling of their levels, all between 10 and 15. Ok, that’s doable, we can definitely hold out. But there’s no one coming to save us.

“We need to hit them and stop this attack!” She roared as a fireball exploded above her head and the two girls ducked behind the wall. Carly smiled at her and tossed a basketball sized ball of ice backwards over her head.

“What’s the plan, boss?” Nandi asked as she rose up and worked her bow from left to right and released a trio of arrows into the darkness.

Alyssa looked over at the attacking Gnolls and made up her mind. “You, Carly and me, with a healer and another fighter slip out of the settlement and hit them from the south side. I’ll be right back!”

She looked around and found the closest fighter and whistled loud to get his attention. He looked up in surprise and headed over to the base of the wall. “Just a sec, we need a healer”. She found one that had just finished healing a man who had caught an arrow in the leg, the man moved back up to the wall and began unleashing magical attacks back at the gnolls. She called the healer over and then indicated to the girls she was ready.

Lulu walked up next to the wall and Alyssa dropped onto her back, she informed the new arrivals what her plan was and they slipped over the wall and melted into the dark shadows of the buildings that remained standing on the next street over. As they came around the edge of a white two story building the group got their first close up look at the gnolls.

She considered them briefly as she slipped off Lulu, drew her swords and slipped into the shadows. The gnolls looked much like the kobolds only bigger, they ranged from roughly five and a half to seven feet tall. They had dark fur and canine like features, unlike the kobolds they sported no scales. They had short tails that curled up behind them and wore leather armor with strategically placed metal plates. The group they had turned into were some of their up close fighters and they appeared to be getting ready to charge the wall.

She slipped through the shadows and emerged in the middle of the trio of gnolls who yipped in surprise as her swords flashed out and tore through their necks. They grasped at their throats in panic then fell over dead. She motioned to Nandi and the rest of the group rounded the corner and they pressed forward down the street. And through a parking lot behind an abandoned building. They came to the cross road that the fire station was located on. Her group pressed against the back wall of the building and she looked around the corner into the field where the attack had started.

The gnoll fighters were gathering behind their ‘artillery’ line. Where they gathered she could see the path they had followed to get there and determined that they had come from the direction of the school. She counted almost 50 warriors spread down the line. She leaned back to her team and began to give orders.

“Alright, uh, dude..” She pointed at the other fighter with her.

“Uh, name’s Greg.” He responded while hefting an aluminum bat to his shoulder seemingly irritated she hadn’t remembered his name.

“Right, Greg, you and I with Lulu will smash into them, everyone else support us and make sure they don’t get around us.”

The group verbalized their agreement and Alyssa dropped into the shadows as Greg and Lulu rounded the corner of the building. Greg bellowed a challenge and charged forward in a surge of light and brought his bat down onto the back of a gnolls skull with an ear splitting crack. Lulu snapped at another’s legs while attempting to pin two others to the ground. Alyssa spun a sword out of the shadows and removed an ugly gnoll head before slipping back into shadow and lashing out fatally when the gnolls turned their backs to her. Spikes of ice and empowered arrows streaked by the trio of frontline fighters as the gnolls turned to face the unexpected assault.

Greg seemed to pick up forward momentum with every swing of his bat and the healer threw a green energy barrier around him as he pressed forward. Nandi and Carly struggled to keep the press of gnolls from surrounding him as he quickly sank into the throng of enemies.

“GREG! SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!” Alyssa yelled to him as she skewered another gnoll through the stomach.

“I can’t heal him without line of sight!” Their healer called out. She could still see him but knew the distance the healer stood at made it almost impossible. She spun out of the shadows and removed a gnoll's feet from his legs and rose up with both blades and shoved them into another’s guts. The curved blades sprung out of the ugly beasts upper back, then she forcefully twisted and removed them and flicked its blood to her side.

She turned to take a swipe at another gnoll when Greg’s body streaked between Alyssa and her next victim. Fuck! He landed with a thud at the healers feet who immediately knelt next to him and attempted to heal him. She lunged at the equally surprised gnoll and spilled its guts on the ground before it could react. She looked at the path that Greg had carved and sighed as the gnolls quickly filled the gap in their formation.

The gnolls took the instant to press their advantage and attacked with renewed vigor. Alyssa dropped Shadow Walking altogether and opted to leave Calculated Strikes active for the bonus damage it conferred. She was already at half stamina and wanted to keep some in reserve. Lulu kept the gnolls unbalanced while Alyssa scythed her way through their ranks. Meanwhile she realized that the bombardment on the settlement had begun to wane as her group worked through the throng of gnolls. Carly was providing direct fire support to Alyssa while Nandi was alternating arrows between the gnolls she now fought and the ones who were dedicated to attacking the walls. She saw Samantha in the distance pull two of her squad and reposition them on the northwest corner to help on that side of the settlement.

“Looks like we’ve taken the pressure off.” Nandi yelled into the chaos of battle.

The gnolls that were pushing her and Lulu were now broken and bloody on the ground and a new group was moving forward to intercept her group. Greg surprised her as he stepped up next to her, bent over and grabbed a shield and axe from a dead gnoll and smiled at her. His shirt was torn and blood where he had caught a similar weapon in his stomach.

“Don’t get ahead of us again!” She reprimanded him. Who am I?

“Yeah, yeah, pain is a good teacher, and that shit hurt!” He responded. “That’s about half on this side, let’s get the rest.”

With her stamina largely regenerated during the fight she slipped back into Shadow Walking and went to work. They murdered their way through the next two dozen gnoll warriors and picked off the artillery line as they moved. They paused when the remaining half dozen gnolls on this side of the wall realized they had been overrun and retreated back to the other group attacking on the north side.

“Bastards are running back to their friends.” Nandi cursed and released an arrow into the back of a slow moving spell caster.

“That was fun, but I’m low on Mana.” Carly said, looking a bit weary and spent. She squatted down on the road to catch her breath and the others agreed they needed a short break.

When they were ready they ran north along the previous gnoll line around the west side of an old hotel that had been converted into trashy studio apartments. As Alyssa, Greg and Lulu turned the corner a large gnoll descended from the air and cratered the ground around them in a booming explosion of force. A shockwave rippled out from the impact and all three were sent tumbling to the ground several feet back. While further back from the attack, Nandi, Carly and the healer stumbled swayed from the force of the shockwave.

Alyssa quickly gained her feet and analyzed the gnoll that dropped the sudden attack on her party.

Lieutenant Groma’kul, The Slayer, Warband Leader. Lvl 15**

“Ah shit. Found the boss.” She announced to her unsteady party.