Chương 66: Chapter 67: Ambush!

I wait until they've passed me by before taking aim at the lieutenant. He's got enough hit points that I can't kill him with a single blow, but I can do a lot of damage to him very quickly. Maybe enough to kill him before he can shout out orders. I watch him and the others move past me, keeping my eye on the lieutenant. I half hope that he'll fall into one of my traps, making himself an even more obvious target. But I find that I don't want to wait that long. I don't want to wait until he passes everyone else.

I want to shoot now, to maybe get them to try to move back to the base more quickly and recklessly, so that they set off the pit traps. So I take aim at the lieutenant and I fire a Sniper Shot. I hit him for 1883, and immediately fire Rapid Shot to follow up with another 1479 damage. Between the two, the bleed does kill him. But not before he shouts out "Ambush!" They all draw their weapons, and start to take up formation around the carts. They're trying to protect the supplies. Well disciplined, as we suspected.

They aren't even trying to move forward anymore. They're just stopped, holding up large shields to protect themselves and the carts, gripping their swords and looking for the source of the attacks. I fire another Sniper Shot into the midst of the orcs, and I see other arrows come flying at them from the others. The orcs seem to take one hit without really complaining, then adjust their shields so that future arrows from the same direction aren't able to do anything.

They're trying to force us to leave cover and attack them head on. And if I'm not careful, it's going to work. I take careful aim and shoot one of the orcs in the foot. Then I shoot another one in the leg, hitting the parts that are exposed from the shield cover. It doesn't do as much damage, but it does some, and it hopefully will stop El and the others from just charging out. Storm clouds form above the group of orcs, and lightning starts to strike down among them. Still, they don't break ranks and run.

They start calling out to each other, yelling to see who spots the mage. I keep shooting around the shields until the orcs hunker down where they're standing, protecting every inch of themselves with their shields. I cast Magic Dart on one of them. The dart flows around the shield to hit the orc. The orc then moves a bit, enough that the shield is out of the way and I can hit him with another arrow.

I would continue like that, but as I take the shot, everyone else seems to give up on the concept of shooting orcs and instead charges out to take the fight directly to the soldier orcs. When El comes out, the soldiers quickly surround her, but there isn't a backlog of orcs waiting to fill in the spots. The remaining orcs just spread out around the carts to keep them protected. By the time Gigi and Ash are out and fighting, there are still a dozen orcs standing around the carts.

I switch my bow for my sword and step out, casting Mab's Rage as I go, to get that damage going as I engage with the orcs. The whirl of cold air sweeps around me, and I can see the shards of ice whipping through the air, moving to wipe out the orcs still surrounding the carts. The orcs move to surround me, but I don't just let them the way the girls did. I keep moving around, trying to stay free and stop them from surrounding me.

I chop at one, use Bleeding Strike on another, then focus on dodging the attacks from two more. They do eventually hit me, and my Shell goes down by 48 points. I can take a lot of hits like that. Over the course of a minute and a half, Mab's Rage does 4, 320 damage. Add to that the damage that I'm doing with my sword, and I kill two of the orcs. From the look of it, Ash, Gigi, and El have each killed three in the same time.

And Mab's Rage is covering the whole road, so we're getting every one of the orcs down by that much, leaving the rest of the battle relatively easy. The orcs try to regroup, but they can't get out of the range of the spell, and every time one of them tries to break off he is hit by streams of acid that burn him away to nothing. Vincent is apparently playing catcher, just stopping any of them from escaping. We don't want word to get back to the fortress, or they'll be waiting for us.

I end up taking about 700 damage from the orcs before we finish them off, but it's nothing my Shell can't handle. I can really tell the difference that my strength is making. It's effectively 62 right now, and that's making a huge difference in the amount of damage I'm dealing with my sword. I also gain a level of sword and a level of dodge from the fight, making me think that I should look into getting another shield like the one I used to have.

It was small, but it was effective and it helped improve even more of my skills. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with my skills improving. I don't even know that there's a secret quest waiting for me when I hit a certain threshold. But I'm betting that there is. I'm past 250 skills, I think. Yeah, I have 309 right now. But I think that when I hit 500, I'm going to get some kind of huge bonus. It won't happen fast enough to get me to level 30, but it might be enough to get me a level or two after that point.

I don't know how much it'll be worth, but I'm counting on the fact that it's there. And skills never go back down, so there's that. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. We finish off the last of the orcs and start collecting their weapons for sale in the city. The shields are too big to fit through the opening of my spatial bag, and too big for me to want to use. They're a lot closer to tower shields than they are to bucklers, and just not my style.

And apparently not good enough shields to be worth replacing what Ash and Gigi already have. We go through the supply wagons. They're mostly food, but with a good number of arrows and swords as well. I end up putting about fifty swords into my bag. They aren't great individually, but I bet I can get some money from the bulk order if nothing else. We also each get seventy gold from the wagons, where apparently a pay day was waiting for the soldiers in the fortress. And we get a lot of arrows. Like a lot.

A siege worthy number of them, I'd say. I am not going to have to worry about making my own arrows for quite some time. And everyone else is flush with arrows to fire as well. There are a few orcish bows, which seem unnecessarily heavy, considering they max out at a hundred damage each. But I take half a dozen of them anyway, so I can take them apart and have the pieces to help make my bow stronger. You have defeated orc x25, orcish lieutenant. You gain (143, 500/5) 28, 700 experience.

That still leaves me about twenty three thousand experience from the next level. I could probably gain that if we took out the fortress, but I'm honestly not sure that's a good idea.

"We need to think about this," Ash says as we finish looting the wagons and start loading them up to burn. We remove the wheels so that the fire won't roll off the road and into the forest, and we spread out extra arrows as kindling before Vincent sets a bonfire in the middle of each of the wagons, and they start to burn.

"Do we want to wait for another patrol to come out looking for this one, and just ambush that one?" Ash continues once the wagons are burning.

"Or do we attack the fortress itself?" Looking at the way the wagons were lit up, I wonder if we can just do that.

"Can we set the fort on fire?" I ask. Vincent shakes his head.

"They'll have treated the wood of their walls to not burn," he says.

"I might be able to get a few fires started anyway, but it won't spread right, and it would expose where I am."

"Maybe exposing you isn't the worst idea," Gigi suggests.

"We could get them to sally forth from the fortress to stop the mage, and then ambush them once they've left."

"They'll be firing down on us from the fortress," I point out.

"They'll try to shoot us long before they try to come out and kill us by hand."

"But they don't have their arrows yet," El says.

"We have them."

"That's assuming they don't already have a stock of them," Ash says. She looks at me.

"How long before you can do that ice storm thing again?"

"Two hours," I say.

"We can get a lot done in two hours."

"We could take the information back to Elmspire," Vincent says.

"We might get a reward for the information. At the very least, the scout guild might be interested."

"Definitely a valid option," Ash says. She sighs and shakes her head.

"I'm not sure we can kill all of them in a straight fight."

"How many can there be?" El asks.

"I can take on ten to one, no problem." I'm reminded of the tracks we saw earlier, of the battle with the bear.

"They'll break into two lines," I say.

"One will fight you with sword and board, the other will use spears to stab you from a distance. It'll be like fighting ten people at the same time."

"And it's not ten to one," Gigi says.

"It's fifteen to one."

"I can handle that," El says, though with a little bit less confidence. She may have more hit points than an orc, but even she would go down eventually. And the rest of us couldn't survive as long as she would.

"I'm all for a fight that we can't win," I say, though it isn't even the least bit true.

"But I'd much rather hold on to my equipment if I'm going to die. I can't afford to keep buying new stuff." Also, I don't want to die until I hit level thirty.

"There has to be a way we can reduce their numbers, or we have to just call it a day and move on."

"I don't like leaving this big of a bastion of enemies so close to Elmspire," Gigi says.

"Seventy five orcs might not be a big threat, but they're clearly making room for reinforcements. And not just a few reinforcements. I think this is the beginning of a war camp. In a few days, there could be a thousand orcs here. Maybe more."

"All the more reason not to wait," El says.

"If we can take out the force that's already here, it won't be ready when the reinforcements come."

"We'd get better intelligence on their plans if we got into the fortress," Vincent says.

"Maybe we could sneak in and steal their plans from the commander's room?" All eyes turn to me. What did I do to deserve this? Oh, right. I got almost thirty levels of sneak.

"You guys want me to sneak into the fortress and steal the plans?"

"It's an idea," Ash says.

"We could provide a distraction while you do. We could attack the front gate while you sneak in the back. We keep up the fight while you're searching, and then retreat when you get safely out." The timing of that is going to be bad. Sneaking is something that takes time. I might be able to get into the fortress and find the commander's office or whatever, but it'll take me five minutes, maybe ten. It might even take me twenty to get in and find what I'm looking for. Plus another ten minutes out.

Thirty minutes is a really long time to provide a distraction. It's a long time to keep fighting. We defeated the twenty five orcs in under five minutes. I've been in battles that last longer than that, but they're always exhausting, dangerous, and usually against something with a lot more hit points than I have.

"Okay," I say.

"Let's say I sneak in, then you guys attack to give me cover to get back out. That way you won't be fighting the whole time."

"That sounds like a plan," Ash says.

"Do you really think you can sneak in?"

"If I can't, I'll send out a signal to attack," I say.

"Then we'll do what we can, and I'll do my best to get out."

"Let's wait until your spell is off cooldown," Vincent says.

"Just in case." I nod.

"Yeah. That was going to be the signal."