With the he runner brought to him, Jerald quickly came to the clusion that he had to ge his pns. Things were not at all going anything close to how he pnned. Instead of the rge line formation fag simir amounts of resistance across the entire front, it was tered more towards the right hand side. And what was even worse was that it wasn’t just twisted creatures.

  There had already been numerous casualties from simple birds going for peoples’ faces. Herds of deer were charging madly into the troops. Even squirrels and rabbits were attempting to attack, and one of the refugees had died when a squirrel threw itself from a tree and tore into his throat.

  Redireg the ruo spread an order to retreat, he then urged his mount forward into a group of deer that had approached, slig oh his saber while his giant lizard mount tore another into scattered ks of gore.

  Several mier, he received an update that the rest of the formation was heading back towards the vilge. After a quick order, his se began to withdraw as well, fending off occasional attacks as they did so.

  Upon arrival back at the vilge, some discussiohe exact ditions that were resulted in Jerald rearranging the groups. Each would now pose of two soldiers, twees, one of Durok’s men, and one of the ‘militia’ as he was calling the standardized group. The soldiers could provide the frontline defense, refugees could strike with their polearms from the back, and the men with clubs could swat down the birds. Then Durok’s men would just roam around doing what they do best; rushing into battle.

  With the new anization, they also decided on a far more paation so that groups could easily reinforce each other if needed, using three rotating lio give the front line some rest as others took their pbsp; This would also allow a much more trated push into the area of highest resistahat they had located.

  After sending a ruo inform Leanna of the issues faced, and to prepare for anything, including waves of small targets, they set off bato the wilderness.

  Almost immediately, the ges paid off. They were hit with a small swarm of birds, and, having learned from earlier, most ducked their heads as those with clubs began smashing the flying menace from the sky.

  Shortly afterward, they began fag more squirrels and rabbits, the soldiers up front stopping the ones dropping from trees easily with their shields. No longer surprised by such attacks, everyone found it retively easy to kick or stomp the small creatures before they could do much.

  Further on, a fox shrieked and bolted at them, boung off a tree onto the head of a soldier, biting and g at her helmet. Shocked by the direct attack, she hesitated for a moment before an axe smmed through the creature just close enough to her helmet to make her jump in surprise. Looking back, she saw the rager assigroup smiling and giving her a thumbs up before he grabbed his axe with both hands again.

  Later, a sed fox also madly charged anroup, yet again without even attempting to use illusions. For some reason, none of the mutated creatures seemed to be using any of their abilities besides cws ah, even those with obvious alterations like bded shells as sacks.

  A further oddity was seeing both predators and their prey attag at ohout turning on each other. It was very odd to see wolves mixed in with deer charging into bat together. Another unusual thing was that there had only been one se, despite everything else attag them. If the pattern held, there should have been dozens of sacks in the area they had passed through, yet they had only evehree, two of which fled immediately.

  While p this, Jerald spotted an overly rge bear charging towards one of the groups nearby and quickly directed his mount to intercept it, the two smming together hard enough to unsteady the groups closest to their impabsp; Dug a wild swing of a cw, Jerald sshed upwards with his saber, slig a rge k of hide from the side of the bear while his lizard savaged one of the hind legs.

  The other front cw smmed down against the side of the lizard, skittering off the scales without doing any apparent damage. Iurn, the bear was bowled over with a sudden surge forward from Jerald’s mount, followed by a vicious bite to the throat, leading into brutal shaking that tore the flesh free.

  As it was starting to get dark, the order to withdraw was given, groups rotating back towards the vilge as others kept watch deeper into the forest. Remembering the earlier versation with Leanna, Jerald had several of the deer they had sin brought back with them to serve as food.

  Their emergence from the forest gave them another shock, seeing dozens of creatures, almost half of them mutated, appearing as though they were pincushions. Jerald nodded in approval, immediately notig that nothing had made it within two dozeers of the camps, and thus Leanna’s archers had kept the vilge secure during their absence.

  It turned out they did not any of the bodies with them, as the smell of cooki wafted towards them as they approached the camps. Each had at least one deer or boar cooking on a spit above a tral fire, one of the archers keeping an eye on it as the others remained as vigint guards.

  Even as the exhausted forces filtered into the various camps, the archers remaieadfast in their guard duties, simply nodding to each group as they arrived before fog back outwards.

  The m, after eating some of the prior evening’s leftovers, everyone reassembled, ready for arip into the woods. The archers had rotated shifts, keeping the guardian forces active all night, which Jerald had been worried about, fortunately without need.

  Uhe former day, there were barely any attacks from small animals, seemingly exhausted iacks before. They did, however, face many more twisted creatures, causing more of a challenge. Fortunately, their teamwork had been improved siderably during their first expedition, and they swiftly surrounded and wore dowronger creatures.

  A few times, however, the beasts were too heavily armored for most to do signifit damage, and the blood mages began to act, causing minor cuts to bleed as if they were rivers, rapidly weakening the creatures.

  Eventually, they reached a point where the attacks were essentially endless, requiring the resting groups to join the front, slowly pushing forward. In a clearing ahead, they entered an incredibly mutated beast, carried on the backs of several bears. It had peared to be a rat’s head, but the skull stretched backwards, fused into a dense shell that covered its entire body. Clearly, it was incapable of movement on its own, and the animals around it fought fiercely to protect it.

  As the formation slowly worked forward towards it, suddenly several people screamed, clutg their heads, then attacked their fellows madly, throwing their ons aside and attempting to d bite them instead. While shog, it was not difficult to subdue unarmed humans with so many ued by the madness. Those who were not thus occupied tinued forward, rapidly cutting down the bears carrying the monstrous rat.

  Unfortunately, it appeared that the shell it had developed was incredibly strong, even Jerald’s mount finding itself uo break through. This, however, appeared to seriously piss off Durok, who shooed everyone away before r and smming his axe into the creature repeatedly. With each swing, he hit harder and harder, eventually shaking the ground and lifting himself into the air with every strike.

  Eventually, he swung his axe upward instead, tumbling the creature onto its bad leaving a cra the shell. Seeing the successful hit, he then switched to upward strikes, throwing the beast into the air multiple times until cracks spiderwebbed across the entire shell. With a mighty overhand blow, a rge k of shell he front shattered, exposing a shog amount of brain matter that extended down along the spine and bato the remaining shell, even ing around the ans.

  Exhausted, Durok fell to a sitting position. A moment ter, he called out that he was fine again, and his ragers stopped holding back everyone else. No longer restraihe forces rushed forward, mauling the beast’s exposed brain. Despite this, it tio hiss at them, eyes fog on individuals before they fell to their knees screaming. One of the refugees ended up being the oo finally kill it, having decided to throw caution to the wind and jumping into the shell, tearing through the brain matter all the way into the back of the shell, at which point it finally fell silent.

  With a nearly eg intake of breath, all those who had been turned mad recovered their se onbsp; Those engaged in battle found their targets suddenly fused, often tearing into each other or fleeing. Unlike before, predators began attag their prey, whi turn attempted to flee.

  Surprised by the rapid ge, many of the groups allowed their targets to flee in their shock before moving to cut off and kill as many as possible.

  Satisfied with the progress they had made, Jerald called for another withdrawal towards the vilge, whided up being much smoother than the prior day, as they were not tinually attacked this time.

  Oddly enough, it appeared nothing had attacked the vilge during the day, though that certainly wasn’t a bad thing. Once again, Leanna’s archers had food already cooking when they arrived, raising the spirits of the tired troops.

  The day, however, they found that while attacks were far less on, and limited almost exclusively to twisted creatures, those creatures actually used their abilities. Over a dozen were badly burned by a fming bird before it was taken down, and seven were injured by poison gas, though fortunately, they survived. Uedly, they also entered another fox, this one using its’ illusions to terrifying ability, causing three groups to attack each other before they realized they were in an illusion.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, the fox fled and attacked them four more times before finally making a mistake aing too close. One of Durok’s men had lunged forward, furiously cutting into apparently empty space before the illusion ended with a spray of blood. When asked how he found it, he simply remarked that he had always ehe smell of flowers and food, and thus had sharpened his sense of smell numerous times, instead of only fog on strength.

  Fortunately, after the fox was dealt with, nothing else proved nearly as much of a challenge, and they swept through the forest with ease. Seeing this, Jerald had them split back up into the longer lihey had started off with, finding no major issues even after three days of doing so.

  Ohey were retively certain of the safety, wood axes were taken from the supplies and passed around to the stronger individuals. Half of Leanna’s archers split from the vilge and followed to the edge of the forest to help defend the logging as they progressed onward.

  Two weeks passed quite peacefully this way, the forest being pushed back to a half-day’s walk away from the vilge. During this time, multiple wagons of preserved meat arrived from Blightfall, helpihe makeshift army ohey had run out of fresh kills to cook.

  Having finished pushing the forest back so far, they said their farewells to the vilgers and began to return to Granitehill. Jerald found himself quite satisfied with the as of the bandits, havihem stepping in to save others regardless of their group or source, even the soldiers. Overall, he didn’t expeywhere hat level of cooperation, and was quite willing to offer the pardons for their behavior, while he had previously expected to at least be hesitant about it.