One of the twin mages woke Karl up a few hours before dawn to begin his watch, Gently shaking the net beside his head to get him motivated.
Karl smiled at her and whispered. “Did you learn that from Rae? She gets upset when people shake the whole net instead of just a small bit near the head to wake people up.”
Danni smirked. “She woke me up that way. She’s down below somewhere again, but she will likely come back up when she has caught whatever appeared in her net.
We haven’t seen any action so far, but the new wave of monsters should be here by morning, so keep your eyes peeled.
Nobody really knows when they will show up, and it doesn’t seem to be a set time, but we do know that there are new ones daily.
I’m going to get a bit more sleep, wake me up for breakfast.”
Karl sat in silence and looked out over the hills and forests, letting time pass by as he scanned for signs of movement and life in the predawn darkness.
With Hawk’s low light vision, and Rae’s thermal vision capabilities, the movement in the forests was easy enough to track, though the canopy of leaves blocked both in many areas.
However, it was not enough that Karl didn’t notice when there were suddenly hundreds of new heat signatures in the area.
They didn’t come from one spot, like they were coming from a cave, they just appeared all over the forest, all at once. Some even appeared right next to Rae’s webs, and walked right into them before they realized they were in danger.
Her sense of victory as the prey flailed and shouted for someone to come save them filled Karl’s mind, but the noise also woke everyone else up.
“The monsters just appeared everywhere. They’re not coming from a cave or a set location, I saw them just appear all over the forest.” Karl explained.
“What do you mean? How many can you see?” Bob asked.
“With the gifts of low light and thermal vision I gained from Hawk and Rae, I can clearly see for nearly two kilometres. There are hundreds of goblin sized creatures, a few dozen larger ones that I can see, and that’s just what isn’t hidden under the trees.
I can’t see through solid objects, so I know I’m missing most of them, but Rae is going wild killing the ones that are in her webs down below. That would be the noise that woke you up.” Karl explained.
Doug sighed. “And that means that we are about to have a lot of unwanted company, drawn here by the noise. Fortunately, it is still dark, and their eyesight isn’t any better than mine, so they’re not going to find us in the trees, but we need to make sure that Rae doesn’t get ambushed.”
Karl nodded. “It’s still dark, but it should start getting light soon, when we can go down and start cleaning up the ones trapped in the webs. Do you want me and Hawk to go start silencing them now? Three of us in the dark will be faster than just Rae, and we can all see what we’re doing.”
Doug and Bob both shook their heads. “No, either we all go or we all stay. Safety protocol says don’t send group members alone. Attack what you can without going so far from the group that we can’t see you.”
Karl thought for a second, then nodded. “Alright, I will head down a few branches using the ladder, as I can’t attack through the fort without damaging it. But once I’m there, I can hit a lot of the nearby webs, and you’ll be able to see me.
Hawk, you go help Rae. Make sure she gets rid of the loud ones first and doesn’t make them sing for her. We will hunt them all day long, there is no more need to bait in prey.”
[I got a good thing. There is a tasty scaly biped here with snappy jaws and a shiny poking stick.] Rae informed Karl.
That made very little sense, but Karl congratulated her on her find, and asked her to bring back the shiny poking stick when she had a chance.
What he got in return was a thread of silk sprayed his way from where she was hunting, which he had to assume was attached to the prize.
With a practised motion, the same as coiling up a power cable in the mines, Karl began to pull the item up, and found that she had recovered an obsidian headed spear, attached to a bamboo handle with excellent workmanship.
It wasn’t magical, but to his eyes, the translucent spearhead sparkled, reflecting the minimal light from both sides.
Then, she put the body in her space, and Karl finally understood what she was talking about. It was a lizardman of some sort, currently missing a head, but larger than anyone in their group, with a powerful looking tail and a few crude bone ornaments.
Karl whistled to get the others’ attention. “There was a lizardman in the web. It might not be all Goblins in the group today.”
That got the group talking, making a plan for their hunting and defence based on the knowledge they had of how lizardman behaved. They were a common monster in the swampy areas, on the high side of Common to the low Awakened Rank, but often gathering in large groups that would challenge the smaller teams who went to hunt that level of threat.
“Are there still Goblins and Ogres?” Bob asked quietly.
Karl looked around, verifying the few monsters in the region that he could spot from his vantage point now that they had mostly moved under cover of the forest.
“Yeah, I still see Goblin sized creatures, and humanoids too big to be lizardmen. I will point them out on the map for you when I get back up.” Karl agreed.
There were other beasts caught in Rae’s web, and he was using Rend to dispatch them quickly before they could make too much noise and bring a force that the five of them couldn’t deal with.
Rend’s range was limited, and they were well up into the tree, but with Rae and Hawk moving lower through the forest, it only took a half hour before they had everything in the immediate vicinity dead, butchered and collected.
They had gathered what they thought might be loot, but there were probably some things that didn’t catch their attention. Nothing magical, though. Beasts could sense the magic on the items, and they would have brought it back if they had found anything.
The pair returned to the fort, and Karl climbed back up to join the group as soon as he smelled Doug start cooking breakfast.
“The loot is at the bottom of the tree. We can collect it later. But first, I will show you where I saw the Ogres appear, and any other groups I remember. The Ogres are still our primary target, right?” Karl asked.
“They are. We need to keep the population of everything down, but the Ogres are the strongest beings that we have been informed of in the area.” Bob agreed.
“Alright. Then we should check here, here and here. Plus near the ridgeline there.
Those areas all had multiple large creatures, and some of them went behind the ridge. Then we had large groups of Goblin sized monsters here and here, with scattered monsters everywhere else.” Karl explained, tapping the map as he went.
Bob nodded. “Alright, that’s good, I will come up with an efficient route for us to cover today, and we will start hunting after we eat.”
The meal was similar to the one that Doug had made the night before, heavy on the potatoes, but this time Karl donated some of the Awakened Rank boar meat that Hawk had been ignoring.
“Now we’re talking. Pork belly and potatoes is the real breakfast of champions.” Bob chuckled.
Doug rolled his eyes as he cast a spell that created some sort of white sauce in a pot on his camp stove, and began to rummage in his pack until he found a tube that cracked open to reveal rolls of dough.
“Biscuit dough takes less room uncooked. The sauce is a form of coconut gravy, but with the pork grease, it should be pretty good.” The cleric explained.
It sounded a bit sketchy to Karl, but who was he to argue with the cook? There were chopped mushrooms in the mix with the potatoes, and he already knew they tasted like steak, so there was a good chance that the white sauce didn’t taste like raw coconut.
