A Village Burns, A Hero Yearns

“Halliyah! Wake up!”

… Who… What…?

“Wake up, you fool! The village is under attack!”

“Ipas…?” I said wearily. The strength in my body had not yet come back to me.

“Glad you recognize me. Now, get up! We gotta get moving!”

I woke up bent into a rather uncomfortable position on the rocks. Must have gotten sent flying by that last fireball… Ipas was right, though… we needed to hurry back to the village.

I noticed something… odd about the way I ran towards the village. For one thing, I could actually run. Hadn't been able to do that in years. For another thing, I was running faster than a Lyko. That was actually impossible. And yet, here I was. I wondered if Ipas noticed it as well.

“We're almost at the village!” I shouted at Ipas.

“Just be careful to not let them see us!” Ipas shouted in response. “We want to have the element of surprise!”

•

We arrived at a village engulfed in flames and overrun by demons. What had once been a peaceful village, or about as peaceful as a village could be these days, had turned into a scene from the Keeper's poems. Demons were a fair bit smaller than humans, but they were much more adept at magic than we and had comparable physical prowess. With their pointy ears, whip-like tails, and rotted wings, they appeared as evil given physical form.

Smoke filled the air as far as the eye could see. The smell of burnt brick and ashes attacked our noses once we reached the village. Fireballs fell upon the village at regular intervals, more so than usual for their kind, and at peculiarly specific targets. The village master's home, the barracks, the tavern, the shops… the tavern! I started towards the tavern when a quintet of demons intercepted my path.

“Ayya wants this one alive!” one of the demons, presumably the leader of this company, shouted upon spotting me. The other four demons armed themselves with magical binding chains and inched their way towards me. Capture me, eh? Was that their plan?

Once I unsheathed my sword, the demons launched their attack. Bronze swords were not the best at cutting magical objects, but they proved quite useful at swatting away the demons’ chains like flies. The demons’ strategy was simple: attack me one at a time, and when one failed, another took their place. Wash and repeat. Them deciding to fight one-on-one gave me the advantage. All I had to do was force an opening and then jam my blade into the poor soul, if demons even had souls to begin with. I was quite fortunate to remember that demons faded into mist upon dying. It saved me the trouble of having to clean up any splatter.

While fighting the demons, I had noticed my technique improved greatly, even from just six nights prior. My posture was straighter and the blade felt like much less of a burden on my arms. Even my footwork, as I danced around the demons despite their attempts to ambush me over and over again, had improved quite a bit. Ah, right… I remembered the necklace, that large metal decoration dangling from the base of my neck, and wondered whether it had something to do with that.

Once I had vanquished all four chain-bearers, their leader scoffed at me, “Looks like you got some fight left in you after all. Ayya will be very pleased to hear about this.” Instead of fighting, he opted to run off, leaving the rest of the demons with a single command, “Destroy everything!”

Ipas had finally caught up to me, asking, “You got a plan to defeat all these demons?”

“We first need to check for survivors,” I told her. “We'll need all the hands we can get.” I pointed to the far end of the village. On the roof of a large building stood a rotating catapult. “If we can get someone to secure that, we should be able to fend off those terrons.”

She nodded, and we split up in order to search for survivors. The village's master, I believed Pittas was his name, set up a plan to gather the villagers under one roof, the large meeting hall on the outskirts of the village. I headed there first.

My path, however, was blocked by a wall of demons, up to thirty strong, making themselves busy by raiding any house they could find, and even raiding from the village dump. They armed themselves with swords and axes and spears, certainly a smarter course of action than the earlier demons. Perhaps they started to coordinate themselves better. In any case, I could not defeat all of them on my own.

First, I attempted to sneak around the demon wall, hoping to avoid being seen or heard. This failed within mere moments as I narrowly avoided an arrow to the neck. Time for Plan B, using the steps and roofs of the buildings to sneak above them. That also failed due to a demon spotting me and blocking my path at the first large rooftop I got to. Another one moved behind me to prevent my escape. One by one, they surrounded me, their sole intent being to capture me, presumably to send me off to the Demon Lord. They were learning.

Each demon I fought off was quickly replaced by another, and then another, and yet another. No amount of resistance I could give allowed me a chance to escape from them. They just continued to come at me, closer and closer. One of them jumped on top of me, trying to claw and scrape through my clothes and into my flesh. Another joined him, and several more piled on top soon after, each one clawing and grappling and trying to strap binding chains to me. Whatever additional strength the necklace might have given me proved insufficient to deal with a steadily growing pile of demons.

The nails digging into my flesh… The sounds they made as they hissed and sneered at me… The pain… I had to ignore it, but I could not… They just kept coming…

Was it really to end like this? Nothing remained that I could do other than to wait for my body to give up. But it refused…

I heard a great roar erupt, this one much louder and deeper than the battle cry of the demons. It came from the north, in the direction of the outskirts of the village. The infernal creatures heard it as well, causing them to freeze in their tracks. A few of them went limp, falling off of me in the process. They may have been afraid of what caused the roar, but if my assumption was correct, it may well have been our salvation.

One by one, ogres appeared in the village, armed primarily with large mallets and occasionally with other weapons. These were large, powerful warriors clad in dark bronze shells, much taller than the average human, let alone the average elf, and built with considerably more muscle than either. Born with a voracious yearning for the field of battle, one ogre could level an entire defenseless village. Appearing before the battlefield was an entire company of them. As soon as an ogre spotted a demon, they moved to deliver a thorough annihilation to the infernal things.

“Secure the village!” one of the ogres shouted. “Make sure none of the demons escape!” He sounded quite familiar. I wondered…

True to the ogre’s command, he and his comrades worked quickly to ensure escape would be impossible for the demons. They secured every possible exit and walloped every demon they could find. The one who shouted, who I assumed was a commanding officer, leaped onto the roof of the building I was on and, using only his bare hands, fought all of the demons that remained on me.

“Destroy the ogre!” one of the demons shouted, and at once, they began latching onto him just as they had done to me.

But the ogre had a trick up his armor-plated sleeves.

As I flipped my tired, weary body onto my back, a purple mist erupted from the ogre’s mouth, a sort of special magic that some people could learn. The mist he created had little sparks inside of it. Once the mist came into contact with a demon, the sparks began to fly, zapping the demon into an early grave. Within moments, the demons that attacked him had either fled the scene or died trying to do so. The mist had blanketed nearly the entire roof of the building we were on.

The battle had, more or less, been won.