Shoot it down

I had the risk of hitting the priestess, but it was the most reliable way of making sure they didn’t clear the hills.

“Shoot it down! Get the air out of the balloon!” I call out.

I hear the clacking of arrows being notched followed shortly by a hand full of arrows firing into the sky. one or 2 arrows hit and pierce the basket, while several more hit the balloon causing a hiss of air to start flowing out. I smile until I see some smoke start to rise and I realize one of the arrows hit the fuel cell. A short second later and a small explosion shot out form the faloon followed by a large flame jetting from the back and propelling the balloon into an uncontrolled motion. As air escaped and the basket swung the balloon spun and jolted all over as it fell from the sky. We catch a small glimps of somebody being flung from the basket, but it’s too hard to tell who or what it was. Finally the basket falls behind the tree line out of sight towards the base of the hills.

“Shit!” I hear a couple of us call out.

We head in the direction that we saw it falling, keeping an eye on a cloud of billowing smoke in the distance. We catch up to it after a couple of minutes of riding and search the wreckage to see there was no sign of either the goblins or the priestess.

“Well, they’re down.” I hear the rogue from earlier say behind me.

“Able to track where they are?” I ask him.

He glances around and shakes his head. “The ground is too rocky and there’s too much debri. I can definitely say there looks like human sized footprints heading that way back into the woods.”

“Wouldn’t that be the priestess trying to get back to the village?” One of the guards asks.

“If I were a goblin, I’d go the path away from danger.” The rogue chimes in and points up into the hills.

“There’s also the body we saw get thrown from the wreckage.” A guard states.

“Are you sure it was a body?” Someone else asks.

“I don’t know. Looked like it had arms.”

So we have 3 possible directions, and there’s 7 of us. We’ll have to split up. We need to follow the footsteps into the woods for sure, but we also should check the hills and where that one body fell. The question who goes where.