Chapter 41 – Trolls

  Spotting the Vaelian patrol wasn’t hard. The soldiers carried lanterns that gave them away and reflected off the metal laths of their crossbows and spear tips. Even being a world with primitive firearms, it looked like these more medieval weapons were much the norm, here. There was little chance of them spotting the squad of night-vision-wearing Kickers. But Cole wasn’t worried about the basic troopers. There was a taller man with them in robes and a mask. Taking a calculated risk, Cole moved closer, enough to confirm that it was not the same style as the mage he’d found on Curahee, so this was probably a local. Still, no telling what a mage here might be capable of or how high-level they were. Vael was a Risk Index 2 world, but the soldiers looked well-trained and well-disciplined. They’d been at war for the last hundred years or more, so they’d been born into battle.

  One thing Cole was coming to terms with was that almost any humans they found on any of these otherworlds would be hardened veterans. Each of the men he watched had armor and weapons that didn’t look like they were smith-forged. Without LF enhancements of their own, how quickly would this gaggle of medieval armed guards and their mage tear through Cole and the others? Not as quickly as the heart-eater demons, surely. But the Lewis Field attunement really did seem like the bare minimum required to be able to survive in these worlds.

  Cole waited for the patrol to pass, then waited another five minutes before leading them across the beaten trail and deeper into the forest. The further north they trekked, the more the air took on a metallic, acidic tang. Lingering effects of the chem-warfare spells the two sides had resorted to slinging at each other’s trenches, no doubt. A lot of the local plant life had signs of deterioration or putrefaction—thankfully, no invasive fungus, that he could see.

  When his watch hit 1800 hours, the sky started to brighten. He unpacked the multiband radio to do his check-in with Moriarty. But the distance and the woods limited the line-of-sight radios. To mitigate that, he burned one of his Meteoric Leap charges and launched himself to the top of a tall tree. That boosted his range enough that he could at least get a broken status check across to the other team.

  “We’re making decent time,” Cole whispered into his radio.

  “We hit a snag on our end,” said Moriarty. “Currently watching some sort of festival that has what looks like five hundred villagers marching through the woods in a line with paper lanterns. We’ve been here two hours. No choice but to wait for them to pass.”

  “Does that affect your timetable?” asked Cole.

  “We’ll have to hustle—travel a bit by daylight. Less setup time.”

  That had to sting for someone who was, by all evidence, a meticulous planner. Cole looked out over the woods to the east, barely able to discern a snaking, glowing trail off in the distance. Funerary ritual? Harvest rite? Birthday? No way to know. Termlink wasn’t heavy on anthropology details, local customs, or anything that didn’t concern threats they might face.

  “Alright, I need to keep my squad moving,” said Cole. “Next check-in at 0600.”

  “We might be out of range by then,” said Moriarty. “If so, proceed as planned. Execute your objective, and then head south for the extraction. Over and out.”

  Cole looked down from the top of the tree. With his current stats, his class passive let him reduce his fall speed to something like thirty-five percent of normal. At that point, he didn’t even think a fall from the top of a tree would be dangerous. But he stepped down in increments anyway, using branches that were ten feet or more apart as simple stairs until he floated the last twenty feet or so to the ground where Howie and Roxy waited for him.

  “Bet that ability would have been nice if your parachute ever didn’t open,” said Roxy.

  “Or if you ever fell out of your treehouse,” said Howie.

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  “We’re moving on,” said Cole.

  An hour of rucking later, something itched at Cole. He thought it might be his imagination until Besson closed ranks.

  “Something’s on our trail,” he said. “Several somethings. Wind shifted just enough for Nutmeg to get a whiff. And they’re gaining ground on us.”

  Considering they weren’t exactly dawdling, that was no mean feat. Even with the rucks, they were moving somewhere between a double-time march and a light run.

  “Human?” asked Cole.

  Besson shook his head.

  Cole bit his lip and looked around. This area was in a depression, with short, choked sight-lines less than ideal for a fight. “Come on, let’s find a better spot to fight on our terms. Best we pick up the pace a bit.”

  Taking point, he kept his eyes open until he found an area with some high ground, where he set Howie and himself up, draping a camo net over them. With his suppressed otherworld rifle and Howie’s boop-tube, they had the best chances of shooting without the sound carrying. Roxy and Besson stayed below. Beside him, he felt Howie burn a charge and slide back the bolt on his launcher. Hopefully he’d conjured something fairly stealthy.

  Their pursuers didn’t keep them waiting long. A pack of… not quite wolves, at least fifteen strong, came out of the woods behind them, sniffing at the ground. They were front-heavy, red-furred things, like someone had picked up an Earth wolf by the back legs and swung it until eighty-percent of its mass had ended up in its head and forward haunches and the flesh had become taut from the extra bulk, leaving wide, bloodshot eyes and a stretched, rictus grimmace. And also unlike Earth wolves, they had a set of nearly human arms coming from their shoulders in addition to their four paws. Some of them carried primitive weapons—spears or old, discarded swords and battered shields. One of them had a net. All of their eyes were filled with hateful intelligence.

  “What the fuck…?” asked Howie beside him.

  Cole had seen these on the Termlink report for Vael. The entry had called them hunter trolls, though they didn’t look like any kind of thing he would associate with either word. They were monsters, but smart as all hell—compared to mindless beasts, anyway. Enough so that the Vaelians sometimes used them as quasi-mercenaries and thief catchers when they weren’t being too picky about actually making live arrests. These ones had obviously been on the prowl for enemies of the state, or maybe an isolated lost child no one would miss, before they picked up the Kickers’ trail.

  Sighting in the largest one whose fur had darkened to the rust-brown of dried blood, Cole whispered into his microphone as quietly as he could. “Hit ‘em.”

  In his reticle, the alpha’s ears twitched as he spoke, and the thing looked directly at him and growled. That’s when Howie’s launcher foomped and a blast of blue lightning arced between at least eight of the things around the impact site, filling the clearing with the scent of scorched flesh. Cole followed it up with a rapid set of shots from his rifle, putting three rounds into the alpha before it got an old, battered shield facing the right direction. Then he switched to one of the other targets, and then another. When the lightning died down, the survivors advanced, barking and frothing at the mouth, weapons raised as their paws tore through the soil. Cole continued to fire as he reached up and dropped his scope magnification to its minimum.

  Before the cluster hit the rise, Roxy and Besson threw off their own camo netting. Roxy rushed forward with a shield and her cavalry saber while Besson had his axe and his toughened skin ability. The red-furred trolls hesitated when they saw Nutmeg, who dwarfed most of them. But only for a second, and the two lines slammed together, with two of the trolls running afoul of Roxy’s shield rebounding ability.

  With the two forces too jumbled for another grenade, Howie switched to his close-range spellcasting, striking individuals with bolts of sharpened ice, brow knit in concentration. The Alpha followed the source of the ice shards and barked. Several of the smaller trolls backed off from the clash against Roxy and Besson, circling around the flank of the rise and charging up the incline on Howie’s side at an unbelievable speed for creatures moving uphill.

  “Oh, shit!” said Howie. Cole was already throwing off the camo netting. He put a boot on Howie’s back to keep him prone instead of jumping up through his line of fire and angled his gun down the rise, firing off more rounds as he stepped over the prone mage. He killed two of the trolls, but the alpha had a shield with the sheen of a Lewis Field armament that the rest hid behind. At least until Howie burned yet another spell and the hillside under the trolls’ feet turned to running mud that slipped out from under their paws. Cole paced left to clear Howie and let the marine bring his PDW to bear. In tight, controlled bursts, each of them fired across, taking advantage of the shields’ blind spots to knock out whatever creatures they could.

  No matter how many rounds they fired into the alpha, it just seemed to keep coming—and Cole felt the tell-tale sign of the monster itself burning ability charges and figured it must be healing its own wounds, somehow. It bounded at Cole, raising its old, battered sword just as his bolt locked back on an empty magazine.