Clopping hooves, creaking wagon wheels, and crunching pebbles were the only sounds in the covered cart being pulled along the road to the Capital. Four Wardens sat in the back, resting as they were trained to. The coachman wasn’t any more focused on his surroundings than usual, as simply dodging ruts in the road was already a full time job. The lookout felt the task was beneath him, but he would never say as such under any circumstances. He felt a cool breeze tickle his cheek and he flinched, afraid that ‘she’ could read his mind. Regardless, he kept his attention strained to its absolute maximum capabilities, minus the occasional misplaced thought on whether he should even be out here.

The route was well travelled every day by merchant caravans, soldiers, and civilians alike. An additional team being sent on a week long expedition just to ‘clear the road of undesirables’ was completely unnecessary. It was already cleared multiple times a day. Why even bother when the Young Master’s far nicer carriage wouldn’t be treading these paths for another two days? Apparently, yet another warden team would be coming tomorrow once the path was ‘made satisfactorily safe’ with a civilian contractor with an earth shaping aptitude. It isn’t enough for the Young Master to avoid danger. He must avoid ‘bumps’ in the road too. At least the coachman was excited about getting the road repaired.

One of the Wardens in the back stirred her head. She was cute, but too young for the lookout’s attention. She appeared to be barely sixteen, and already was a fully ascended Warden. The youngest Wardens were the ones that you had to be especially careful around, as that frequently meant their aptitudes far more than made up for any deficiencies in experience they might possess. One couldn’t guess someone’s aptitudes based on just appearances, typically, but based on the girl’s sword and parrying dagger, she was specialized in combat against armed opponents. After all… why use a parrying dagger when facing a monster with arms the size of tree trunks? She was armed to kill lightly armored targets that fought with small to medium sized weapons… like humans. Was this Warden a bandit slayer?

The lookout’s eyes caught some movement in the grass fifty meters from their position. He knocked lightly on the wooden frame to get the Wardens’ attention and gestured in the direction of the disturbance. Three of them perked up and became more alert, exiting the wagon to fan out and investigate whatever the lookout thought he saw. He quickly strung his longbow and knocked an arrow, though he waited to draw while he looked everywhere other than where he saw the movement from before. If it was bandits, they would be spread out, so there was no use in focusing on the movement he already spotted. If it was monsters… well, the specialists were already investigating it… all but one anyway. The girl with the parrying dagger still sat in the carriage like she had no intention of getting out, her head down with her hair fallen and covering her face.

Thwip! An arrow thudded into the wooden frame of the roof, missing the lookout’s head by centimeters. He grabbed the coachman bodily and dove into the wagon, landing heavily on the floor. One of the boards cracked ominously with the sudden strain, but the coachman didn’t mind as two more arrows flew through the wagon right where he had been sitting previously. The Warden girl just kept sitting there, like these issues were of no real worry.

Outside, the sounds of heated battle raged while blood thundered through the lookout’s veins. He could hear what sounded like clashing steel weapons, so it was bandits after all?

“Nelia! We’re getting overwhelmed!” The coachman looked up from his laying position at the face of the female Warden still sitting in the wagon, unperturbed by the arrows whistling by her head. Her eyes were shining in anticipation and she was grinning like a demon about to devour a baby.

“Nelia! Now!” The voice from outside screamed again, this time a little louder as the wagon shook from a body blow to the side. The girl looked around a bit like she had just come out from a trance, saw the terrified coachman, lookout, and arrows protruding from the woodwork… and vanished with another sound of cracking wood. The flap of the wagon blew outwards with enough force that it strained the cover of the wagon slightly.

“Thiiiirty secondssss!” Nelia sang out childishly. The lookout risked raising his head up to watch the battle unfold, and immediately regretted it as fluids splashed into his open mouth and he started choking to spit it out. A few moments later, the blood started to vanish from his face and body into wisps of light.

So it’s monsters after all huh? What kind of monsters ambush wagons with bows and arrows? Those arrow heads look steel tipped!

Gut wrenching cries of pain, metal clashing, and loud cursing in gobbledygook now replaced the sounds of the wagon from earlier. Also… wind howling? It was coming and going so rapidly, it almost sounded like something was whooshing past the wagon at high speeds but the lookout had no idea what it might be. He risked looking out again to see the grassy prairie lands torn to shreds by magic and fierce combat of only three wardens and nearly three scores of heavy armored and armed kobolds.

At first the lookout felt the odds were helpless, as the three Wardens were rather bloodied and on their last legs… until he noticed the peculiarities. The first strange thing was the weapons and armor. They were just laying all around the road and nearby fields. The other strange thing was that even though the three Wardens had been corralled into one area and were surrounded, the kobolds had their backs to them. The Wardens were even taking the time to drink expensive health vials while one of them that apparently had a self-healing aptitude did their best to recover a bit of their lost vitality. The circle of kobolds were facing away from the center, and instead were frantically looking about the grasslands around them, trying to spot whatever was worth ignoring the three trained monster killers behind them. The three monsters killers the wolfmen already had dead to rights… they just had to commit to the kill. And then another five heads separated from their furry bodies with a passing whoosh.

“Fifteen secondssss!” The girl sang again with a trilling flourish at the end. Her voice seemed to come from far away and right next to the wagon at the same time. More bodies hit the ground and evaporated into wisps as the whooshes started to pick up speed and grind the circle down smaller and smaller.

Time was up when there were only two dozen remaining enemies, so the lookout wasn’t sure why the girl was counting. She seemed to pop into existence from the side of the road, her legs bent and her body spinning slowly while she slid to a stop in the pebbly dirt. Her arms were fully extended from her body with her weapons unsheathed and covered in vanishing blood and light.

“Hahh… times up! Doing the rest the hard way!” She called out as she charged into the thickest grouping of steel plated wolfman warriors. The first she encountered held an axe with a blade as big as her head that it swung with ease at her now slow moving body. She twisted her torso in a strange jerking fashion so that the axe blade passed through only air, her only nimble body dodging the axes trajectory by a pinky’s width of margin. She cut the kobold’s carotid artery with her parrying dagger as she passed, the heavy monster falling to its knees as it held its throat before collapsing. This monster didn’t have the pleasure of dying instantly like its predecessors.

The next kobold thrust a spear point at the girl, but she flipped forward over the steel bladed tip, using her dagger’s guard to push the spear downwards as she wrapped her legs around the far larger monster’s neck. She finished her flip by doing a sit up as the kobold started to fall backwards, blood spraying from the open wounds on its thighs.

When did she cut the thighs?!

She stabbed the kobold once in the head with her dagger before pulling her knees up and standing on the falling kobold’s shoulders. She then dove between two more kobolds and spun in the air, her sword whipping out and disemboweling them as she rolled back to her feet. More opponents rushed at her to stop her, but it was pointless. She waded through the armored foes and cut through their armor like it was cloth instead of steel, the lot of them falling within moments of crossing her.

By time she had slain another dozen, the other three Wardens had joined the fight and quickly mopped up the remainders. An open-mouthed smiling, manic looking and disheveled woman was clutching her sword and parrying dagger while she took heavy labored breathes. Her chest heaving up and down with her breathing. When the three other Wardens made it over to the girl, they all smiled and clapped her on the back like some sort of drinking buddy. The lookout stopped watching outside the wagon and just laid his body back down on the floor.

“Is… is it over? Did they win?” The coachman asked, panicked.

“Yeah, it was kobolds. A lot of them too. The Wardens wiped them out. Stay down while they make sure there aren’t any more archers.” The lookout sounded as calm as he could so that the coachman wouldn’t see how much he was freaking out. From outside the wagon, he could faintly hear the girl’s voice.

“Do you think the Lady will praise me?” The girl sounded excited in a way that children sound excited when you promise to play with them. The lookout could even imagine the huge smile that probably plastered her face.

I knew ‘she’ was powerful… but just how strong do you have to be to take in a monster like that? Just how powerful are the Wardens of the Woods if a killer like her is still begging for scraps of attention from its leader?

After a few minutes, one of the Wardens said “Alright, good enough!” and then lifted their palm to the sky. A ball of fire launched several hundred meters into the air before exploding.

“We can’t just leave all these weapons and armors on the ground, so we’re delayed until a caravan large enough to help us transport all these comes. Let’s go ahead and set up camp. Nelia, Franz, and Delailah, you three start piling up all the gear together so we can load it quickly when the time comes. I’ll get a fire and soup going. Coachman, look over your mount and make sure they are uninjured. Lookout, take the top of the cart. With a warband that large and well equipped, they might not be alone out here in the prairie lands. I’ll switch you after I’ve eaten and finished collecting those armaments.”

The Warden then turned towards the girl, a frown evident on his face.

“Nelia, you did good work once you got going… but your delay nearly cost us Delailah. Get your head where it needs to be or you’ll be off my squad. It was cute as an initiate. It’s some straight up bull shit now. Don’t do it again.” The Warden finished lecturing the girl. She turned red from embarrassment and went back to collecting the steel bits. The lookout saw the girls reddening neck and cheeks and couldn’t help but remember her face from before. He had difficulty reconciling her face from then and her face now. Now she was just a girl embarrassed in front of her peers and perhaps superior officer? When those arrows were flying and she was just smiling though? That wasn’t a young girl, anxious about battle. That was a devil, reveling in the joy of her coming carnage. The lookout felt another breeze tickle his cheek and he flinched again.

Damn mindreaders.