One moment, the only noise present in the taught silence of the waterways was the sound of workers in the tunnel, and the heartbeats of some fifty men, women, and beasts as they worked at a fevered pace. In the next, the guttural howling of goblins filled the damp darkness, and Niko didn’t need night vision to be able to see the dozens of sets of red eyes in the gloom.

They cried out in words that Niko didn’t understand, and all at once the headache that had been growing seemed to explode. Wincing, the Phorus wavered on his feet from side to side, only to be caught by a pair of hands from both sides.

“Niko?” Skye asked quietly, eyes darting from the horde coming towards them and to her companion, along with Ronald who helped keep him up from the other side.

“M-My head feels like it’s getting a pick-axe shoved–” Niko started, before the pressure suddenly vanished, and the weakness in his body receded like it’d been a lie all along. “Uhh… It’s gone?”

Confusion washed over Niko as he stood up straight, unable to help the bewildered expression on his face. It was only then that he realized he could hear the shouting and jeering of many people. Niko, confusion blooming anew, turned his gaze towards the other guild members and guardsmen, expecting to see a riotous crowd if the sheer noise was any indication.

Instead, all he saw were gazes transfixed, staring down both sides of the hallways with a mixture of dread and resolve. It was then that Niko realized what the sounds were, and he found where the noise was coming from.

“No pecking way… I can understand them?” Niko felt his heart beat hard at that. To himself, he thought, ‘Does that make them actually sapient? Can they be reasoned with?’

The thought was dashed as he heard the words, “Meat! Eat warm blood, cut the bones with your teeth! Please the Great Warrior! More gore! More!”

“Can you understand them?” Skye asked, and Niko found himself glad to not be listening to that any longer, because they were beginning to say much worse things.

“Yep. Really wish I couldn’t, though. They’re… uhh… Let’s just kill them, yeah.” Niko nodded to himself as a particularly revolting voice said something that Niko was fairly certain he would be remembering the next time he had a fever dream. Skye and Sasha didn’t say anything to that, but he guessed that something showed on their faces, because their expressions held fractionally more disdain for the goblins than before.

The first mine exploded then, set off by an unwary Dawr Goblin. A shower of gore and incendiary fragments erupted, tearing through the first wave of monsters. Shockingly, though, half of them got up, screaming bloody murder. Niko nodded to himself in satisfaction, before realizing they weren’t screaming in pain, but in rage. Those that could continued to charge forwards, while those that couldn’t were simply trampled underneath the proceeding goblins. Explosion after explosion rang out in short order, and Niko felt himself go a little lightheaded at the fact that the goblins didn’t bat an eye in the face of wha, surely, they must have realized was guaranteed death.

“Kill for the Great Warrior!” A scratchy, hoarse voice cried from deeper in the horde, and Niko felt a pulse of essence ride the noise, along with something that set his skin fiercely itching.

“What the hell was that?” Ronald asked, tone even more on edge than before.

Niko glanced to him, noting the wide-eyed way he searched the horde, and realized that whatever it was had unsettled not only him, but everyone on the defense. Briefly, he debated telling him what was just said, but he wasn’t sure that was a good idea. Something about being able to understand the words felt… dirty, somehow. Like he wasn’t meant to be able to hear them, more like he’d crossed a line that intrinsically he knew he shouldn’t have been capable of crossing.

Yet, Alterra had blessed him to be capable of listening and communicating to all things, so the question became whether this was intended, or if this was the influence of Venris amidst things.

‘Questions for someone far higher on the scale than myself.’ Niko shook the thought off, another explosion sending hot air buffeting towards their formation. Every mine, which Niko thought would have torn through the goblins easily, often only culled a third of the charging combatants. Suspicious, Niko focused his eyes, doing his best to parse apart the horde as they charged, estimating the quality of essence in their bodies as best as he could.

The charging goblins had essence within their bodies, seemingly rioting wildly through their veins. Niko tried to keep track of them, but it was strangely difficult, like there were somehow multiple images, or bodies, overlapping on some of them. Trying to look at them was like looking into a kaleidoscope, and the explosions that hit them somehow seemed to tear away at the essence bodies first, leaving their flesh less damaged.

Instead of flooding into the environment, though, the essence simply vanished into thin air. It was utterly unlike what the hornets did, requiring some control and focus to do. What was happening here didn’t go to some other goblin, it just blipped out of existence, seemingly gone the moment the goblin was dead.

‘That’s… weird.’ Niko clucked to himself, but pushed the inspection aside. They were now in his range, and Niko wouldn’t allow them to approach unharried.

With a deep breath, Niko cycled essence through his Carrion Call, projecting his voice and attempting something new. He tried to lace his voice with the feeling of impact, a physical force like hitting a wall. Even as he shrilly screeched, Niko knew that it wasn’t going to be very effective. The sound was accompanied by thousands of light slaps, like rain, but little else. Still, the front ranks of the horde on the left side faltered for the first time, albeit only for a few a second.

“Dachna, do you have any more firestorm grenades!?” Ronald shouted over the din of explosions and screaming.

“The regular kind? Yeah!” Dachna shouted in response, “Here, have some!”

Ronald caught a small satchel, nearly dropping it in the process. After that heart-skipping moment, he turned, not having enough time to scowl at Dachna, and pulled out a flask and whipped one as far as he could into the horde. At the same time, Dachna was throwing out his own supply, and together a twenty meter stretch of tunnel suddenly was engulfed in flames. Heat blasted the emplacement like a bellows, and Niko couldn’t help but wince back from the gaps between the carts at the surge.

On the other side, a team of mages were working, and Niko felt the essence between them coalesce into something much larger than what they could operate on their own. Chilling cold flooded through the tunnel, chasing the heat, and pummeling through the frontlines on the right side of the tunnel.

Instead of pained screaming, Niko could hear laughing coming from their side of the tunnel, and he couldn’t help but spin on his heel to search for the source of the sound. No matter where he looked, though, he could only see more goblins, scorched, some burning alive, and pushing on nevertheless, a wild, feral glee on faces that should have been contorted with pain. Niko felt his blood cool at the sight, and realized that every single one he could see was covered in blood. Even those uninjured were covered in red blood, and while Niko knew they were certainly doing a great deal of damage to them, he did not think for a second that they should all look like they’d just bathed in a city's worth of slaughterhouse gore.

“They’re all blood covered, does that mean anything!?” Niko shouted, hoping to get an answer from anyone at all.

“Nothing to us,” Sasha answered for herself and Thokk, the ladder of whom was busily pulling earth up to more firmly affix the carts into position on both sides.

“They’re psychotic, I don’t know that everything they do has a reason, Niko!” Skye shouted back, sweeping sweat out of her eyes with a quick swipe of her hand before continuing to release arrow after arrow from a second quiver, the first now lying empty on the ground.

‘Well, that’s fair,’ Niko conceded the point, but couldn’t help but think that there was something more significant at play.

He would have to contemplate that later, though, because in spite of the firestorm flasks and the many mines, the goblins were almost to the wagons.

“Stand your ground!” Ronald shouted loudly for everyone, “We cannot falter!”

Niko saw at that moment when the nearest goblins’ attention snapped to him, and heard one of them shout, “It’s a leader, kill it dead!”

Niko immediately began moving forwards, thinking, ‘Well, that’s just great. Ronald’s just painted a target on his own back.’

“Bird! Chicken dinner! Chicken dinner!” A not inconsiderable number more goblins began snarling and cheering as Niko moved to stand closer beside Ronald.

Niko scoffed as the first one, half-dead already, lumbered before him while wielding a rough metal short sword that smelled much like the partially cooked goblin holding it, “Did you just call me a chicken?”

The goblin didn’t understand what Niko was saying at him in the slightest, and instead swung with all of its might and lacking finesse. Niko barely had to lean back to dodge the swipe, but his return kick was true, striking its chest with a crack, though he felt the bones resist a fair bit more than he’d expected in doing so. “Nope, they can’t understand me. Unless they’re just ignoring me.”

“Why would you even wa–” Sasha began, before ducking a blow with a club as a Dawr Goblin pushed between the carts and swung at her. In a flash, she had it disemboweled and pushed backwards into the throng. Whatever she was going to say vanished as she ducked another strike, and Niko was simultaneously forced to focus on the goblins before him, climbing over the upturned wagon.

Niko pecked hard at one, a solid ‘thunk’ as he broke its skull open, only to turn and simply thrust the next one off of the wagon top with his arms. He was tall enough to do so, unlike most of the humanoids around him, though to be fair they still didn’t fare any better. The third goblin, for example, flew backwards with an arrow sticking out of its eye. Regardless of how durable they were, the headshots seemed to overcome whatever strange resistance to being damaged they had.

Ronald cut into one's chest, before reeling back as the blade failed to sink in nearly as much as it should have. The goblin, trying to push an advantage that it clearly thought it had, charged into Ronald and the tip of his glaive. Niko had to return to his own defenses before seeing what he did, but he more than clearly heard the crunch of the haft of the glaive as it crushed the goblins skull.

“Aim for the heads! They’re weaker on the heads!” Ronald shouted out.

Someone on the other side snarled back, having just finished bisecting a goblin horizontally and still having to keep fighting the top half afterwards, “No shit they’re weak in the head, they’re goblins!”

“Their bodies are reinforced somehow,” Ronald explained in the background as Niko reared back, keeping a goblin from jumping on his teammate, “They don’t go down from other wounds. Hit the head!”

“Oh.” The previous man said, barely perceptible over the din.

Niko did, however, hear someone next to him shake his head and say, “That’s why everyone thinks you’re an asshole.”

With a snort, Niko knocked a goblin over and crushed its head under his heel, ignoring the half-disgusting sensation and trying to pretend it was just a really big acorn and not gooey at all. Niko swept his beak upwards once more, essence churning through his sharpness pattern as yet another cluster of goblins tried to climb the cart wall. Given that they only had three carts, they were rapidly swarming over one another, so when Niko sliced, he guesstimated at least five pairs of goblin hands were now without their owners.

“Grenade out!” Dachna shouted, a glimmering, star-like object suddenly drawing Niko’s eyes as the man lobbed it over the wall. Unwillingly, Niko called out shrilly in dismay that Dachna would ever throw something so gorgeous over the wall into the goblins, and as it crossed the barrier out of sight he–

‘Oh holy peck, that was one plucking strong Lure,’ Niko startled before looking around, only to see that much of their defensive line had similar expressions of shock on their faces.

Yet, when they collectively looked at Dachna, the man was currently huddling on the ground with his hands covering his ears and eyes clenched shut.

“Oh, pluck–Sasha, Thokk, get down!” Niko screeched as he threw himself to the floor along with the vast majority of the other defenders. On the other side of the barrier, Niko heard the goblins absolutely lose their minds, seemingly tearing eachother apart to get to the thing Dachna had thrown. Niko didn’t dare look, and instead buried his head beneath his wings.

A second later, it was like a thunderbolt had suddenly been birthed deep in the earth. A sudden percussive sound and a bright flash of light illuminated the tunnels, and even with Niko’s eyes closed and his wings covering his head, he could still feel his vision swarming with afterimages. An electric, burning ozone scent invaded Niko’s nostrils, and the stink of charred flesh only grew ever more potent. A ringing sound filled his ears, and as Niko tried to bring himself to a standing position, he realized that his eardrums were what was ringing.

When Niko did manage to drag himself to his feet, he forced himself to look through the cracks in their defenses, curious to see what had happened.

The goblins' advance had nearly completely ceased in the wake of the charred, blackened mess that was once dozens, if not hundreds of their kin. In Niko’s time in this world, he’d come to see and expect much, but the sheer slaughter and corpses piled atop one another, some still twitching, was something that he knew he’d see in his nightmares.

Niko shook his head as his hearing finally began to clear somewhat, hearing people shouting out, some in near-panic as they struggled to get to their feet.

“Dachna, bloody Bant’s arsehole, what was that!?” Skye veritably screeched, still holding one of her ears where blood was clearly trickling out of it.

“Thunderbolt.” Dachna shouted simply, “Mithel called it Thunderbolt.”

“Well I can rightly see why,” Someone else said, “Venris’ teeth, tell me you have another?”

“I do, but… uhhh…” Dachna glanced down the tunnel, “I think we shouldn’t do another one. Might bring down the tunnel.”

Niko and the others followed his vision, only to realize that several bricks on the ceiling were glowing with heat and deforming from the heat exposure.

“Hold onto it as a last resort. A second one of those is liable to bring the waterways down on our heads, but if we can’t hold long enough to set the poison going, then that’s a good Plan C.” Ronald called out, tilting his head towards the group while assuming his defensive position once more.

“Plan C? What’s Plan B, then?” Skye asked, “Because I thought this was pretty much it.”

“Well, Plan B was to swap spots with the forward team and try to distract any other underground threats long enough for them to clear the rest of the waterways.” Ronald stated quietly enough that only a few people nearby could hear him, “Given how that would include distracting tier fours and below in unknown numbers, Plan C has a lower chance of getting us all killed, but a higher chance of making a hole up into the sewers anyways and making all of this pointless.”

Beside Niko, Sasha gave a low rumble, “Then we’d better not have to resort to another option.”

Niko agreed, even as the goblins began to push inwards once more, somehow seeming even more committed than before. With a deep breath, he prepared himself for the second wave, adrenaline pumping through his veins.

‘Alright, then, gobbo’s, let's see how far you’ll go.’ Niko glared at the creatures as they picked up speed, ‘Because I’m more than willing to play a game of chicken here.’