Chapter 147 - Waging War

It was finally time to strike. My minions were in position. The small band of ratkin and humans we’d brought along were gathered around me, too. All we were really waiting for was the sun, which continued its slow creep higher in the sky.

“Fighting goblins is weird,” Farnsworth groused under his breath.

“How so?” I replied, keeping my voice soft. The goblins were probably out of earshot, but they’d certainly have scouts about. We wanted to remain low profile.

“A proper enemy, you’d want to hit them at dawn or dusk, right when the light was changing. Gives you maximum advantage in the assault,” he replied. “Usually dawn. For centuries, maybe longer, soldiers would stand to at dawn, so they’d be ready for the coming assault. But trust stinking goblins to not be anything like us.”

“Clay, it sounds like you don’t like goblins much,” I said, grinning. He was right, of course. From prior experience we knew that goblins were more nocturnal than otherwise. They were often active during the day. It wasn’t like they had to hide from sunlight, or anything like that. But they definitely preferred the dark.

“That would be a good guess,” Clay said, his tone dark. There was something in his eyes, too, which told me this was an enemy he hated in particular.

I leaned in close and lowered my voice so that only he would hear me. “You okay?”

He sucked in a deep breath, blinked once, very slowly, then gave me a nod. “Yeah. Sorry about that. These things piss me off a lot. Bad memories, from back when all this started.”

I nodded back. “I can understand that. You going to be all right for this fight?”

“Oh, yeah. I know how to put it away. I’d be more worried about your friends. Alfred in particular.”

We shared a grimace, because he wasn’t wrong. As soon as Alfred heard we wanted to hit another goblin fort, he was on fire. I hadn’t realized how much hate he still had boiling inside him from when the goblins attacked his people, but he was a heaping pile of antipathy. While Kara and I were off scouting the Guard base, Alfred was fighting desperately to keep his people alive against a horde of the little green assholes.

He succeeded, mostly anyway. But he left a lot of dead behind that night. I thought he’d gotten most of it out of his system when we took revenge by smashing through the wall around their fort and killing every goblin we could get our hands on. Hey, I was pretty mad at the time, too. My roommate at college was one of the people they killed. I thought Alfred had done a bang up job, keeping as many people alive as he had.

But he clearly still had issues around goblins, and I hoped that wasn’t going to bite us in the ass today. I’d considered ordering him to remain behind, but Clay gave me a bit of advice that hit me hard. He told me to ‘never give an order that I knew wasn’t going to be followed,’ and he was totally right. Alfred would come anyway, and all that would happen is he’d be in greater danger sneaking around rather than fighting with the group.

That, and it would make me look weaker in front of everyone else. If Alfred could get away with ignoring my orders, who else might try?

So I let him come with us, even if I wasn’t thrilled by the idea.

I checked my watch. It was already eleven in the morning. It took us a couple of hours to get to the spot, and then we’d sat around for a good hour longer, hoping to catch the enemy pretty close to noon. But the sun was high in a cloudless sky. “I think we’re in good shape, in terms of lighting. What do you think?”

“We know they can fight in daylight anyway,” Clay replied. “I doubt waiting until full noon will matter too much.”

I stood up from where I’d been hidden behind some bushes and made upward motions with my arms to the rest of our troops. In another moment, noise discipline was gonna stop mattering so much, but there was no sense giving the enemy more advance warning of our attack than we had to.

Once everyone was rising, I sent out mental commands to the rest of our forces. I’d stationed the bigger, noisier elements of our fighting force a good distance back, knowing that they could make good time and get to us pretty quickly when we were ready to strike.

Smiling, I pulled a small plastic cup from the pack I had slung over my shoulder and filled it with water from a canteen. Then I set it carefully on the big rock Clay was hiding behind.

“What’s that for? I have water,” Farnsworth said.

“Don’t drink it,” I replied. “Just give it a sec.”

It took about a minute. Then I finally saw it, there in the cup! Little ripples in the water’s surface, running from the center to the outer ring, then back again. One after another. And they were getting bigger.

“Seriously?” Clay said, glancing at the cup and then at me.

I sighed contentment. “I’ve always wanted to see if that scene from Jurassic Park would really happen or not.”

He rolled his eyes at me, the savage. Then he drank the water! But it was too late. I’d already seen the ripples from the foot impacts of our two heavy hitters as they approached.

With thudding footsteps, Sue came running up toward our position. Smoke curled from the dino’s nostrils. Right behind the dinosaur came Plum, which was what I’d named the giant skeleton chicken. Named her after a chicken from a goofy Minecraft video I saw years ago. Plum was actually a little taller than Sue, and looked like terror on two legs. If the kaiju chicken had been scary alive, it was doubly so dead.

Thanks to my tier ten Animate Dead, I was even able to bring her back at the tier she’d had in life. That was a tier eight skeleton kaiju stomping her way over to us, and I was very glad to see her.

With just Sue, we’d wrecked the previous batch of goblins. Even though these ones were tougher, mostly tier two and three, I had confidence that with two giant undead, we’d have a good shot at an easy win here.

Even so, I’d also brought a dozen Abominations and a dozen fire skeletons, all of them tier five. It was a solid fighting force, especially when augmented by two dozen living warriors. I hadn’t brought any of my tier one zombies; they were still at the farm, continuing their efforts to build up our walls. I had hopes that at least the inner wall might be complete before the next meeting of the alliance, but I wasn’t counting on it.

The time for silence was obviously well and done. I raised my voice to carry. “Okay, folks! The fort is directly ahead. Plan remains the same, no changes: the undead hits the fort. The living fan out in teams of three to make sure we catch any goblins trying to flee.”

Their fort was in the middle of a forest, close to the lake shore. It was a rocky, wild place, a preserved area. A few trails ran through the woods, but a lot of it was just wilderness. The best part was they’d built close to a point, where the land stuck out into the lake a bit. We had them hemmed in, with the only way out either through us, or swimming.

I glanced at Clay, who nodded. It was time. With a mental command I ordered the undead forward. Plum and Sue led the way, with the Abominations forming a skirmish line around them, and the fire skeletons in support right behind them.

“Clay, stick with Kara and Alfred.” I looked at all three of my friends. “I don’t want to lose anyone in this fight, but I especially don’t want to lose any of you three. Cover each other. Stay safe. Don’t die.”

“And where will you be?” Clay asked.

“Like you need to ask?” I replied with a grin. Then I shot skyward, soaring on my Flight power as I sped to catch up with Sue and Plum.

I caught up easily enough and landed gently on Sue’s back, patting my dino’s vertebrae. “You ready for another one of these?”

Sue roared in response. I guess that meant they were ready. I cast Augment Undead on Sue and Plum to give them a little fighting boost. We crashed on through the trees, moving at a slower pace so the smaller undead could keep up with us. I wanted to make sure the big tanks didn’t outrun our fire support. Those fire skeletons were going to be pretty useful against a defensive wall.

Then we broke through a set of trees into an open space, where the trees had all been chopped down so the fort’s defenders could see anyone coming their way. That’s when I finally got a good look at what we were up against.

Like the previous goblin fort I’d seen, this one had a wooden palisade around it. This one seemed stronger, though. The logs which made up the wall were incredibly thick, for one thing. But I was pretty sure they had double-layered the thing. I darted back into the sky for a moment to check, and sure enough, they’d added a second wall layer, stacking them against each other. It was going to make tearing through the wall just a little bit harder.

I landed back on Sue. “Hit them with a Fireball. I want to see how tough that wall is.”

Sue complied, spitting an orb of flames directly at the wall ahead of us. Screaming goblins dove from the wall-top, taking whatever cover they could. The flames smashed into the wooden barrier with a boom that I could feel even at a distance. It didn’t break through, but the outer wood was damages, at least. It was going to take more than a couple of hits to bust through that thing, though.

“Fire again,” I said. Sue roared, then shot another blast. This one hit the same area as the other, further scorching the bark off the huge trees holding their wall together, but not doing a lot more.

We were going to have to get up close and personal if we wanted that thing taken down, damn it. I passed the order to my undead—charge!

Sue and Plum led the way, rushing forward with a speed that made my heart race. All at once, what looked like a massive spear shot past Sue’s head. It narrowly missed both of us, sailing onward to embed itself in the ground twenty feet behind us.

I knew instantly what it had to be, and quickly scanned the walls, looking for the source. I found it fast enough. There were two of them, mounted half a dozen meters on other side of the fort’s gate house, each able to aim in our direction. The one which fired was already reloading. The second was taking careful aim in my direction.

“Shit, why does everyone have ballistas except me?”