272 The Snowy Village
It was only when Luke was facing the first Orc in line that he realized just how big this creature really was.
The monster was surprised for a second, but reacted immediately afterwards. He opened his muscular arms wide, showing how large his wingspan was, to cause fear in his opponent, and roared.
That roar was loud, and ferocious enough to make the snow on their feet shake. Had Luke not cleared much of the snow on the ground above, that vibration could have been the trigger for an avalanche.
In the village a few hundred meters below, the person guiding the other Orcs thought he heard something coming from the mountains. Still, the wind was always blowing so loudly with the echo caused by the mountain ranges, that he thought it was just storm noises.
Luke, who was standing very close to the Orc, felt some of the monster’s spittle fly in his face, but he didn’t care.
He threw his coat up in the air, as he charged toward the first of the five remaining monsters. In the midst of this swift movement, he brandished the Obsidian Sword that once belonged to Nebezial. In one swift, clean and frightening movement, Luke sliced the first Orc in half.
“One down.”
The short man’s startled expression at the neck of the last Orc changed in the same hour to anger, and he shouted, “Attack that savage bastard!”
In his conception, the wolf ears of that half-beast, and the environment they were in, pointed out that he was perhaps a local resident. After all, only half-beasts or monsters could survive conditions as extreme as those of the mountain ranges.
When Luke saw the second Orc begin to try to run towards him, he realized that the monster’s movements were naturally slow, and with a thick layer of snow the creature became even slower. So, Luke didn’t hurry, he brandished his sword once more and in the midst of this movement he threw the sword.
The thrust of the sword into the Orc’s broad skull spurted blood, and before the monster’s body could fall to the ground, Luke had already jumped up, removed the sword from the skull, and charged at the third monster.
Watching those movements, the man wondered who the hell that savage was. Then he remembered something, a rumor that reached the monster troops.
This rumor said that a half-beast was the main target of the high rank, and that his capture was of top priority. However, this was not the duty of ordinary monsters, but of demons, so the short man had even forgotten about it, until he saw that half-beast kill four Ice Orcs in less than a minute.
With his face covered in black blood, Luke stopped in front of the last Orc, and noticed that he was acting differently from the others. While all the others attacked without thinking, this last Orc was still, motionless, with an almost catatonic countenance.
Behind the skull of this last monster, Luke saw a man, who was neither smiling nor looking angry, he was just quiet.
In the thoughts of the short man, he was determined to survive, but he also could not underestimate his opponent.
However, Luke was so furious with the monsters and demons after the First Wave of attacks on Broteforge, that he didn’t even give the man time to try to negotiate. He regenerated the roots in the giant’s feet, and pulled him hard to the side with them. The ice aided in the task of draining the Orc, and as the thing slipped, Luke ran his sword through the giant and the short man. Their bones could not even withstand the obsidian blade.
[A horde of Ice Orc’s were killed, Orc’s don’t drop cores].
Luke found the information from the voice saying that Orc’s didn’t drop cores strange, because he had never encountered a type of monster that didn’t at least have a chance to drop a core. So his confusion soon found an answer: the Orc’s corpses were not disappearing.
Since the half-wolf had no knowledge of which Orc body parts were the best to sell, he just ignored the corpses.
Luke walked over to his coat lying on the ground, and as he picked it up he patted it down a bit to get some of the snow off it.
As he approached Meredith, who was a little further up that trail, he said:
“Let’s go down to the village. If this really is a Battle Outpost, we have to destroy it.”
The half-wolf had learned a lot about wars and their subtleties during the meetings he had before leaving the Broteforge Empire. Most notably, the emergency meeting with Seculars and Mage-Sensors that taught him about the franks, the tactics, troop formations, necessities for maintaining a war, all complex aspects. It is also true that this meeting made Luke realize how weak he still was compared to the Seculars and the Magus-Sensors, and this made him understand that he could expect no less than this level of power for the high-level demons he might encounter.
At no point did Luke stop evolving, and he always had a lot of help from luck, but going into enemy territory he would need to start abusing his instincts, his luck, and also the things he had been learning little by little.
As soon as they got close enough to the village, the half-beasts noticed that everything seemed quite empty. To avoid first contact so early, they didn’t go into the courtyard, but instead circled the buildings a bit, looking for more monsters or people who might be sheltering from the cold. All they found in this brief search were dozens of boxes like the ones the Orcs carried up the mountain.
With this information, Luke deduced that this was not an outpost of the Melki Empire yet, but this old and decayed looking settlement would soon become at least a resting place for the monsters.
Anyway, Luke should destroy this place and the supplies, so he asked Meredith to look for a high point where she could give him cover with her bow, while he would attack the Orcs head on so they could have a peaceful night, after all it would be dark soon.