The following day I woke up feeling uneasy. I knew that I needed to head out, but there was a pack of wolves that needed to be dealt with that the undead were letting roam the woods. It might have been a thing of them not mattering and leaving the undead alone, or they might have been on the same side.

I wasn’t sure, and that was part of the unease. The rest of the apprehension was not knowing what to do. I hadn’t left my waterfall before because I wanted to know how everything worked. I was the type that could get laser-focused on something, and now that I wanted to get to Lannah, that was all that I was thinking about. However, I needed to be smart about this.

I couldn’t press on south from this point because of the undead. Even though I had been winning, I wasn’t making much headway, and the resistance was getting more significant. If what Brunt had told me the night before was true, and this place was called the Wretched Wood, and it was the size of a kingdom full of undead, then I wasn’t about to try to push my way through it.

I needed some way to confirm what I had been told. Sam had never lied to me in the past, but he also hadn’t told me anything straight up, either. So I was a little worried that he brought a head to tell the story and that he traded for it. I wasn’t sure why he would do that. It almost didn’t sit right, and so I was looking for the petty angle.

“Okay Blink, we are going to push out of here today and try to make it past the town. That way we can do some real hunting and figure out where to go from there.”

“Bait wolf,” She replied in my head with her big toothy smile.

“Right the wolves, we are going to take care of them first if we can. Or at least a big chunk of them. If we can I want to bring them in here so that I can take them at the door. Then if I need a break we can close the door and regroup. I don’t want to try to fight them and move at the same time.”

Blink gave me one of her great lizard nods with a gummy smile and a snapping of lips. Then she tossed her head around and walked to the back door. I finished suiting up, which was all sorts harder now that I was missing a finger.

I grabbed the bundle of dead wolf and moved it to the back door. I knew that once we opened the back door, they would come in, and so by having the body there, it would act to trip them just a little. Then I triggered the door release, and it opened. Blink slipped out, and then I started to click my sword on my small shield.

It was less than a minute later that the howling started, and the wolves started to come in. As soon as the first jumped into the hall, I commanded the door to closed. Two wolves had gotten in with me. The first was landing, and the second one was in the air when I struck. My sword went in the eye of the first wolf before it could even move. My short sword skill had reached twenty, which gave me enough aim that I could make a blinding shot on a moving target.

We were cramped up in the hall to the back door. The hall was only four feet wide, which made it so the two of them couldn’t come at me at the same time. After I blended the first’s eye, it pulled back. I followed up with a kick with my metal-encased foot, and its head snapped up far enough for me to slide my sword in.

As I dispatched the first one, the second, which was a horned wolf, came over in a jump like a ram would do. In the middle of its head was a glowing eight-inch long horn that impacted my chest plate. Where other things had been turned aside, this horn cut right through it, and I felt the horn punch my left lung.

The good thing about this was that the wolf wasn’t able to dodge. The bad thing was that I had a horn collapsing my lung. I plunged my sword onto his back, right between his shoulder blades. My sword deflected off to the left, which drove the horn deeper in. Then he yanked himself back off my chest.

I gasped and stepped in, driving my sword forward and up, catching him mid-snarl. My blade broke his teeth as it went down his throat. Then I yanked it to the side and out and watched his neck bulge. The wolf whimpered and died.

I had blood dripping out my chest, and the weighted skirt that I now had under the tassets kicked in with healing. My breathing eased, but the movement was strenuous as I had bits of metal poking me with deep breaths. It was the type of damage that would keep on giving until I got a chance to fix it.

Round two started as soon as I opened the door. I caught a group of three with me, and this time Blink had returned. So while I blocked the first one, she killed the other two. By the time the one in the lead realized that it was the prey, it was dead.

“How many more?” I asked as I caught my breath.

Blink just sent me feelings of being excited.

I shook my head and let more in. This time, however, when the door went to close, there was an armored wolf that got caught, which caused the door to not close all the way. It wasn’t wide enough that many of the others could get through, but the idea of only having a couple in here at once ended.

The stuck wolf activated some skill that caused it to grow, and the door groaned open another eight inches. The rest of the pack was able to come in without anything stopping them. I fired a stone sphere at the armored wolf, which knocked it out of the doorway, but it seemed like the damage was already done, and it wasn’t closing again.

So I fired off the other four shots as I backed down the hallway. Then pulled out my wand of sparks. If they were going to fill a hallway with bodies, I was going to let them. I dropped all the mana into the wand and let the fire shoot forward down the hall. I heard the howling of the wolves being set on fire and the popping of cooking meat.

Blink rushed forward, hoping from one mostly dead wolf to the next, finishing them off. The battle was over, or so it felt, but the room was full of smoke. I would rather have finished the fight and had a place to rest, but now I needed to head out the front and make my way to the next room.

I sheathed my sword and snagged my bag. While I had been planning on taking a break before heading out, I had packed everything so that I could go when I needed to. It turned out that need was without the break as the smoke from the wolves was making it hard to breathe. I put my hammer in my right hand and opened the front door.

When last I had been here, there were undead waiting for me. I was happy to that that they weren’t falling in this time as I charged out front. However, my victory over the wolves wasn’t as complete as I had thought it was. There were still several around that came at me.

I had traded out weapons from my bleeding weapons to my bashing weapons, and so I was less skilled and slower than I wanted when the first came up and over at me. It wasn’t a unique wolf. It only had normal claws and teeth, which didn’t seem to do so well against my plate armor.

My chainmail glove on my left hand, however, did great against its face as I bashed it away. Then my knee took it in the head as the next came up. From that point, it was all claws and teeth verse hammer and knees. Blink was out there cutting them down from the back as I cleared through from the front.

When the fur finally settled, we had moved a good ways away from the room, and the fight had attracted the undead. We now had skeletons that wanted their turn on my dance card, and I was already out of mana with no place but forward to go.

I shifted my hammer into my left hand and snagged out my mana potion from my shield, downed it, and returned the vial. Then eying the small party of skeletons, Blink and I advanced to meet them.

* * *