Intermission Part 8

Mub felt uneasy when he finally passed through the tunnel’s threshold into the keep of Dornwich. Uneasy and excited. The thrill of an oncoming battle had always caused a strange twisting sensation in his gut, but it wasn’t the only reason that he felt off this time. He was used to battle and pain, used to dealing with the twisting sensation. Pain was easy to deal with. He just wasn’t accustomed to the use of magic. Even if it was supposed to be some kind of good magic, Mub couldn’t bring himself to get past what had happened. His arm was supposed to be gone. That was the natural order of things. He had lost in his fight and because of his loss nature had demanded a sacrifice, yet it wasn’t given.

Instead, a couple of free Gnomes said a few words and waved their hands about and somehow nature had to take a step back. His flesh was stitched back together with the help of a few medics, and whatever pain he might have felt from the dying limb was instead replaced with a faint tingling sensation that lingered at the wound on his shoulder. He was uneasy because, when he gripped at the rusted iron blade he had brought with him and hefted it up with the arm he had nearly lost, it only felt… difficult to lift the blade up. It didn’t hurt, as long as he didn’t lift it too far up. It was just heavy.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have to use it much.

Since he had been unfairly banished to the back of the raiding party, Mub didn’t get the opportunity to test his arm against any other warriors. All the Gnomes and other little men his Alpha had brought with him weren’t fast, but they were efficient. Their weapons were the tools of cowards; things that were used at a distance, but as far as Mub was concerned, the Gnomes had become efficient cowards at least. Any Elf that the Orc did actually manage to stumble across was already so packed full of bolts that they were unrecognizable but often surrounded by just as many Gnomish corpses.

Mub didn’t even get the chance to try and fight against one of the crystal rock monsters and prove himself again. Every single time he came across one of them, they were already smashed to pieces, surrounded by the exhausted bodies of blind Gnomes, Dwarves, and Goblins left lying in the army’s wake. On a few occasions, he found strange metallic beasts lying crushed and smoking next to the defeated rock monsters, but none of them seemed useful to him. He recognized them as the magic coppery monsters that the Gnomes had brought with them, and the knowledge of the fact that they were made with magic helped him to turn away from the potential loot. They had failed and fallen, like so many of his brothers, but it did raise questions for him. If magic was able to create such monstrosities and heal people, then… it should have been a small change to make to use it to actually bring people back from the dead… right?

It occurred to him briefly that it was that exact same train of thought that sent the Elves down their dark path, but what followed it was the immediate assumption that perhaps they had done something to fuck it up. They could have used the wrong type of magic to do such a thing or perhaps it wasn’t possible to resurrect a dead body, but maybe it could have been possible to make a new one?

Eventually, he decided that the thoughts were distractions and pushed them from his mind with a huff. He reached the lowest levels of Dornwich’s keep, past the floors for servants, slaves, and civilians, but stopped before he reached the dungeons. He came out past the kitchens, which had been left as nothing more than smoking clouds stuck to the ground in the wake of the Gnomes’ metallic monsters, and stepped out onto the marble streets directly outside the palace. He got only four feet away from the door before the screaming started. A flash of red light dashed across the sky and caused the orc to jump and bare his teeth in the direction the flash had come from. His eyes darted to the closest tower on the city walls, and he locked his gaze to it with a wicked focus… but it didn’t stay there. He shook with the explosion that came when the red light slammed into a group of Gnomes within the city gates, but it was the only one that came from that tower. The brazier at the top of the tower was lit but before Mub had a chance to charge towards the sentry, he found his gaze drawn back down to the base of the tower where half a dozen different metallic beasts began climbing up the side of the building with new sharp coppery limbs. They scaled the walls like massive spiders, brown ropes hanging from the belly of each beast like webs, and on those webs, the Gnomes and Dwarves began to climb too.

It didn’t take long for the machines to reach the top of the tower where the red light originated, and it took even less time for the light in the brazier at its peak to be snuffed out. They weren’t the only group of Gnomes to stay ahead of him, to beat him to the thrill of battle even with their cowardly weapons. If the group still had a commander or a leader of some kind to keep their squad focused, then they were rushing ahead of Mub and charging straight for the closest watchtower or city gate. Many of them didn’t seem to get far. As soon as the Elves noticed that John was attacking, they rung the city bells and civilians were cleared from the streets. Soldiers rushed to their various watchtowers, braziers were lit, and the purple glow that pervaded the entire area was slowly offset with dozens of other red lights. When the red light on the tower that the Gnomes had taken flared with the new power that came from its new users, Mub let out a growl without even thinking about it. His gaze hardened on the little mages standing at the top of the tower now. He wondered what type of magic it was that they were using now. Since they were using the same defensive system that the Elves had used in the first place, did it mean they were using the kind that his Alpha had said was bad? Or were they using a different kind of magic to fuel something created from the darker sides of the Jabari’s Abyss?

In the end, it didn’t matter. While Mub was watching the Gnomes reactivate the tower’s defenses to try and take out the other towers, another explosion went off and rocked the city a second time, and then a third, and a fourth. Red lights flashed out past the outskirts of the city walls where the rest of Bulgebottom’s army was waiting, and more screaming echoed across the city. The air closest to the walls gradually took on more of a red hue while a fifth explosion went off, and a sixth, and then the tower that the Gnomes had taken over was hit with a flash of red light and, like the soldiers that had been attacked by the sentries previously, it disappeared under a blanket of scarlet flame as well.

As much as he would have liked to keep his focus on the tower, Mub’s gaze flinched away from the blast as soon as it happened. His instincts were still set upon pulling him away from any source of magic, stopping him from facing his fear and rushing into an avalanche of broken stone bricks and fire. He felt the pieces of rock falling from the sky hit the wound he had taken in his last battle, but knowing that the rubble had been sent his way because of magic was enough to make him turn his back before that piece of Dornwich’s fell on him as well. The lingering pins and needles sensation in his arm from the healing magic was shocked out of his system when the corner piece of a brick dropped onto his shoulder hard enough to bruise him and caused the Orc to yelp and growl again. The pain was so bad for a moment that it was almost blinding… yet it was the magic still that made him uneasy.

Pain… Pain was easy to deal with again. He was used to pain.