Born a Monster

532 Journey to the South

In the end, I made my way south alone. In spite of thirty five new quest points, it felt somehow as though I had failed. It was two days before I crossed a stream. I drank myself into a coma, and then drank my fill again when I woke.

[Well Fed] was in remission, but none of my other traits seemed impaired.

The road was only a little beyond that, littered with naked corpses both sun-brown and red. All were hobgoblins. Looking about, there were pieces of leather straps and wooden splinters, and even a discarded leather boot (It was only sixteen nutrition, but it was more than nothing).

The tracks showed that one group had fled south, and the other had proceeded west.

From what little damage the crows had done to the bodies, it was only a few hours past. That or the crows had reason to be picky.

I smacked my lips, but was strong enough of will that I didn’t need to share their food. Let the crows have their meal, mine was further along the road.

The good thing about having so many evolutions to choose from is that most avians had astounding vision, even at ranges where normal people could see nothing. I lingered at the edge of that range until late dusk, and then crept into their camp.

I would like to say that my time with their logistics provided me with a map; in truth, scent guided me to the wagons bearing food, bearing oil, bearing armor and weapons and shields. <1 >

As a shape changer, I officially recommend never eating anything you can’t chew down to the size of your throat. Or smaller. That said, I spent remarkably little time in their camp. I loaded up on the contents of a food wagon, took two stacks of the subpar shields, enough mail to make myself a decent suit <2 >, tools for crafting wood, leather, and metal, and just because I had barely enough room, a few weapons that took my fancy.

.....

It wasn’t the destruction of the convoy, nor even a significant part of their wares. But it was far from nothing, and it was almost as easy sneaking out of the camp as it had been sneaking in. Come dawn I was already six or seven miles away.

[You have traveled 4.8 miles since starting your journey.] my System confirmed.

Damn it, I thought, activating [Fleet of Foot]. Not far enough.

I made good time southward, as the scrub became more common, and larger bushes began to appear. As the ground sank lower, and the space between folds in the earth became moist, eventually became slick and muddy. As trees began to mix, almost obscuring the circling... birds.

Those were vultures. Carrion eaters.

And some brave members among them were already descending.

You will remember when I said that the migration of the desert hobgoblins clashed with the northern settlements of the Kamajeen? To summarize, they sacked and burned the northernmost colonies, and then the rear guard of the humans killed eight in ten of them. I’m sure I must have passed by those survivors, but I saw nothing of them.

Maybe they had chosen another route home? <3 >

Although I found the corpses of riding lizards, I saw no sign of riders, or of living lizards for that matter. These corpses were two to three days ripe, what remained of them.

The battlefields I came across were enough for the creatures that fed upon them. None needed my flesh enough to cast more than brief looks in my direction. It was unusual for the ghouls, and just creepy from the one family of morlocks I passed.

One day, then two, I made my way through the bogs, and marshes, and stands of trees.

I passed the swamp of the hydra, but saw neither it nor its new crustacean neighbors.

Finally, I came over a rise and saw distant smoke.

Civilization.

And I paused there, lay myself upon the ground to think. These were probably still the Kamajeen, a people who did not like me. It had been a week and some days, but they’d only progressed far enough south to establish a new camp. For an army on the march, they were making terrible speed.

Maybe they were no longer on the march? Perhaps the attack by one faction of hobgoblins had been blamed upon the other?

No, I decided. The Fates hated me too much for such a simple resolution to the problem the Kamajeen posed.

But, I’d have to face roving patrols of not-quite-incompetent guards if I continued that direction.

I camped without a fire-pit that night, swinging to the west in the morning. Narrow Valley was... quieter than it had a right to be. Among the eastern farms, red skinned landlords shouted orders or abuse at lighter skinned humans. From what I could see, every guard tower had been cast down or burned to the roots. There were patrols of soldiers, so lazy about their duties that they were easy to avoid.

At first, I didn’t realize the emotion I felt at realizing I could probably infiltrate Narrow Valley. Then I did. I was sad.

And that grew only worse when I thought of visiting the guild, checking up on Kismet. Hobgoblins had plundered the city of five towers when she was just a child. How much worse had this siege been for her? Had she even survived? There were more patrols, and more alert, the closer I got to the town.

In the end, I turned southeast, toward the Graveyard of Hattan.

I began to pick up the trail of the hobgoblin army. It seemed much reduced after Narrow Valley, which hardly made sense. It seemed to me that they would have suffered almost no losses. They outnumbered the citizenry by a factor of at least three. They had superior mana, and absolutely more military supplies.

They’d gotten more from their homeland... or had they?

They must have, at the pace they had marched. They were already outside the walls of Rakkal’s Glory, once called Montu’s Glory, by the time I caught up with them. The woods were... there were patches that looked like an orchard for stumps. Their wood for their siege engines was coming from east and from south.

And, counting the flags, only five thousand of them remained. It seemed to me that the walls of stone rise up, defiant as always, and that volleys of arrows responded to the slightest advance of...

It wasn’t a noose. They hadn’t even finished surrounding the town yet.

Five thousand, six hundred was my final count. Far too many for me to break, even though I was now at my full health, my full sanity, and down only two points of serenity from where a hornet swarm had just been territorial buttheads. Hornets, by the way, are bitter and it takes four or five of them to generate a single point of nutrition. In case you were in danger of forgetting, it’s bees that make honey; hornets and wasps exist just to make people miserable.

Okay, not ecologically true. But seeing the ruins the invaders had made of the farms east of Rakkal’s Glory, the wasted crops? I wasn’t in a charitable mood. I entertained methods of vengeance that would have certainly gotten me killed if I’d tried them.

Whether from their experiences at Whitehill and Narrow Valley, or just the thrill of knowing this was the third of three cities, they moved quickly. By dusk, the town was all but surrounded. There were skirmishes with what looked like scaled children with mis-shapen heads. Odd to find kobolds this far east, in numbers enough to delay infantry.

I had climbed into the foothills, to better get line of sight on what I’d been hoping would be the start of the siege. I was disappointed, save for a failed attempt to bar a string of carts from entering the city before the circle of soldiers was complete.

All night, there were hammers and saws and the sounds of idiots working in the dark. The screams of an occasional arrow striking a soldier at just the wrong time.

But in the morning, there were sloped wooden walls, covered in loose dirt to discourage fires. Two sets, one facing inward and the other facing out, as though...

As though they were afraid of finding themselves besieged by another army.

My heart skipped a beat and a third, and then came back fast enough to make up for lost time and then some. It wouldn’t be the Kamajeen, not this far south. That meant, somehow, that Rakkal had raised an army of the Uruk, an army large enough to give the invaders reason to defend themselves.

An army that large, though... where had he gotten it? How? Had he depopulated the entire remainder of Achea?

If not, then what WAS going on?

<1 > Small round metal ones, forged of black iron that wasn’t quite steel. The rivets on some were... let’s just say that whomever had filled the commission on those shields cared little about the details.

<2 > No, I didn’t have the skills I needed, not at the levels I needed them at. One of many times that I had more confidence and not enough actual experience.

<3 > In point of fact, they were in foothills some twelve miles east of me, treating wounded and dying. Their numbers are still recovering to this day, so far as I know.