Henry squeezed the firing control, bracing against his seat as Ron accelerated to the vehicle’s limit.
The grenades hit the King across the chestplate in a string of bright flashes – fairly devastating under normal circumstances, but not in a situation as extreme as this. Against the Goblin King, the grenades were no more threatening than firecrackers against a car, leaving only scuffs and scorch marks that did little more than irritate him.
So rather than burn through ammo he might actually need later, Henry pulled off the trigger. The obvious play now was getting Sera topside with the red rounds; well-placed shots through the joints or visor gap could probably deal some proper damage. And even if she missed and hit the mithril instead, the rounds would still impart more energy than the grenades – not enough to punch through thick-ass mithril, but hopefully enough to at least stagger the damn beast.
He was about to make the swap when the King leaned low mid-sprint, one oversized hand scooping an ore cart off the road without even breaking stride. Once it had the cart squarely in its hand, the creature dropped into a crossover step, torso whipping back like an NFL quarterback off a rollout.
The King launched the cart an instant later, the projectile clearing like, five fucking football fields in the span of two seconds – half a klick, give or take – before arcing down almost on top of them. It crashed around ten feet behind them, exploding in a spray of ore and splintered wood that shot across the lane in every direction. Some of the shrapnel pelted off against the MRAP, but overall, it was nothing the armor plating couldn’t handle.
Unfortunately, surviving this round didn’t actually buy them much breathing room. The asymmetry was attritional: the King held a practically infinite supply of attempts against their strictly finite reservoir of luck, which meant it’d hit eventually, however cleanly they slipped each individual throw. Just one big fat ore cart landing on their roof and they’d be cooked.
True to form, the King had already recovered into a full sprint by the time Henry’s attention came back to the RWS. It hammered after them with the same loping efficiency it had shown before the throw – having lost some ground, sure, but not so much that the gap looked safe. Its top speed clocked in just over theirs, near as Henry could tell.
The monster wouldn’t be able to close the distance for a good while, as long as they didn’t lose speed through this obstacle course. Or round a corner that the monster could just cut through. Or eat a direct hit from a weaponized cart.
Henry pulled off the RWS for a second to check the windshield – just to make sure the former two possibilities wouldn’t come to fruition. The cargo lane tightened about a hundred meters ahead, narrowing from its current width down to barely two lanes of clearance. In about a minute, they’d be flanked on both sides by standard industrial wreckage ranging from scaffolding to abandoned carts to the bombed-out husk of some hauling rig still smoldering halfway across the road.
The bad news was that any throw that landed close enough to crater the lane would leave Ron without a single yard of swerve to work with. The good news was that Hayes’ next TOW should be ready in just a few seconds. With the Goblin King staggered, Sera should have a window to clear the hatch and engage.
Henry glanced at her. “Sera, get up top. Use those reds wherever you see an opening. But the second it winds up for a throw, you get back inside – no hero shit.”
“Aye, Captain.”
She popped the hatch behind his seat, wriggling her way up. She settled just as Hayes’ voice came over the radio.
“TOW out.”
The missile launched a split second later, streaking past Henry’s peripheral on its white contrail.
By the time he even registered the missile’s motion at the edge of his sight picture, the King’s left arm had already come up. The TOW detonated against the bracer in a blast that washed over the King’s shoulder and chestplate without slowing it by so much as a half-step.
Sera opened fire before the dust had even settled, semi-auto shots cracking off in a measured cadence that echoed into their vehicle. Through the RWS, Henry watched sparks come off the mithril in bright flashes. The result, predictably, was nothing to write home about: minor warping in a couple of places along the chestplate, the existing TOW cracks in the bracer widening a hair. And that’s all he could really see from half a klick out, even at max zoom.
If there was one thing to be gleaned from that encounter, it would surely be that mithril really was every bit as resilient as the literature suggested – and then some.
But more than the cosmetic damage, it was honestly quite interesting how the monster carried itself under fire. It had staggered under the opening volley, clearly taking some damage from the sheer kinetic energy Sera had delivered.
Alas, as expected of a Tier Nine, it didn’t remain staggered forever. Even under sustained fire, the King gathered itself back into a sprint within seconds, absorbing Sera’s hits across its plate as it accelerated.
She likewise adapted. Rather than trying to thread the gaps in the armor – a near-impossible shot from a moving vehicle at this range – she’d adjusted to center mass and legs, trading precision for sustained impact. Of course, the shots had no chance of penetrating that thick plating, but every round that caught a knee joint or hip transferred enough energy to visibly hitch the King’s stride.
Maren’s voice came over the radio. “Captain, do you require our aid?”
Henry thought about it for a bit, but honestly, he preferred them where they were. “Negative. Hold formation, conserve your energy. If we hit a blockage ahead, you gotta clear it.”
“Aye.”
Sera kept firing throughout that exchange, but the damn monster simply ate the shots. It pushed through the impacts with the blunt indifference of a runaway truck, each hit registering as little more than a flinch before the creature surged forward again.
It even tried going for the cart maneuver again, grabbing one with its right hand mid-sprint.
Sera immediately dropped back through the hatch in response, using the time to reload her enchanted M7.
Henry returned his attention to the RWS to keep track of the Goblin King, but for some reason, it hadn’t wound up for another throw this time. Instead, it chose to clear out the cargo and hold the cart out across its chest like an oversized riot shield. With its left hand, it pulled out a wooden staff with a blue gem set into the top – though scaled against the King’s grip, the proportions read closer to a wand than anything that should’ve been called a staff.
Just because it didn’t want to throw a cart didn’t mean it had gone on the defensive. Henry knew exactly what came next, his hand finding Sera’s leg before the thought had fully formed. “Wait.”
And just as his instincts predicted, the staff’s tip flared white-hot before bursting in a fire spell. The projectile that launched from the staff rose in an arc, fattened with globs of liquid flame that sloughed off the main body as it soared ahead of Hayes’ MRAP. The spell splashed on impact rather than detonating, napalm-style: a rolling bloom of liquid fire that spread across the road surface and clung to everything it touched – yeah, even the dirt and snow.
Yen had to swerve hard to dodge the worst of it, throwing off Hayes’ next TOW shot entirely. The missile corkscrewed wide and slammed into a warehouse facade some fifty meters past the King, the detonation sending pulverized stone flying all over the lane behind them.
Worse, it accomplished nothing when they needed something the most. Entering the narrows Henry had clocked earlier, Ron’s margin for error had all but disappeared.
The King recognized the very same thing, pressing the attack. A second fire arrow followed suit, then a third, then more.
Henry got on the radio. “Maren, intercept!”
“Aye, Captain.”
The first counterspell went up immediately – a bolt of snow gathered from the nearby surroundings and launched at the closest fire arrow. With impressive accuracy, it made impact and dissipated the projectile into an explosion of steam.
As more blobs of snow rose to shield them from the Goblin King’s spells, Henry looked back at Sera.
“Go. Lucan’s people have the spells handled.”
She was through the hatch and firing before he’d finished the sentence, red rounds hammering into the King’s legs and lower torso now that the cart-shield had shifted to guard against the residual slag overhead. More dents, more cracks, more sparks – the cumulative wear had begun to show in the surface of the plate, though calling any of it real damage felt generous. Every hit amounted to another scuff on armor that seemed purpose-built to fend off anti-materiel impacts.
Hayes’ voice cut through. “TOW’s up again, sending.”
The missile caught the King mid-stride just below the left greave, right where the plate met the joint. At a full sprint – sixty-plus miles an hour, easily – the effect was immediate. Its left leg buckled on impact, allowing momentum to do the rest. The King went down hard, plowing into the stone road in a grinding, tumbling crash that scattered ore carts in every direction and tore a trench through the lane surface for a good thirty meters before it finally came to a stop in a cloud of dust and shattered stone.
Henry let himself grin for a moment. Hell, he could’ve cheered. After everything the damn beast had absorbed, finally watching it eat dirt was, for absolutely no lack of a better phrase, fucking glorious.
Naturally, that was right about when the other shoe dropped.
“Captain, Lucan turns for the King!” Maren said.
Henry checked the RWS feed. Sure enough – Lucan had broken formation and peeled off for the downed Goblin King at full speed, sword already leveled to engage.
“I could not stop him,” she continued.
“For fuck’s – fine. We’re coming to help.”
In hindsight, Henry shouldn’t have been too surprised. Murphy’s Law just seemed to apply with particular reliability where Lucan was concerned. Capitalizing on a window someone else had cracked open was about the most Lucan thing Lucan could possibly do – bonus points for fucking up a perfectly good plan.
Prince Asshole pushed on without a care in the world, tunnel-visioned on the King. The creature itself lay in a crumpled, supine heap at the end of the trench it had carved, legs bent at angles that couldn’t have been good for its knees. Its right arm was crossed over its chest, still holding tight to the cart.
Ron pulled up behind Lucan and held there, keeping a hundred meters between them. Henry was still pretty miffed about the whole situation, but if Lucan could actually pull off this little stunt, then fine – he’d take the win and save the ass-chewing for later.
Lucan reined in his dradak about twenty meters from the King and swung down. He approached on foot, dawdling for some fucking reason – maybe savoring the moment, maybe working up to whatever speech he’d probably been rehearsing since the operation began. He took his sweet time lining up the shot, too, standing directly over the King’s head with the sword raised for the killing blow like he was posing for a Guild recruitment poster.
Henry had just opened his mouth to tell Maren to hurry him the fuck up when the King moved. Its torso twisted sharply at the waist, the cart in its right hand coming around in a flat backhand arc that caught Lucan full across the chest before he even had time to flinch.
The strike launched him off his feet, kicking up dust from the sheer force of the impact. He flew a good forty meters before slamming sideways into an ore cart – which didn’t even appreciably slow him down – and ricocheted off the frame with most of his velocity still intact.
From there, he traversed another twenty meters, ending up on the other side of the street and punching clean through the front wall of a warehouse further down the lane, his body vanishing into the dark interior in a cloud of pulverized stone and shattered timber.
Henry’s stomach dropped as he tried to process what the fuck had just happened.
The realization landed a moment later: the Goblin King hadn’t been nearly as hurt as the crash suggested. It had played possum – convincingly enough that Henry couldn’t even blame Lucan for falling for it. Of course, he never would’ve put himself in that position in the first place – but still.
The Goblin King rose slowly, rolling its shoulders, making a whole show of it. Deep, punctuated huffs rolled out of its chest as it pushed itself up, the whole sequence accompanied by a wicked grin. It took Henry a second to realize the bastard was… laughing.
He might’ve laughed too – particularly at the sight of Lucan getting humbled like that – if the situation weren’t so damn grave.
Lucan’s Chosen snapped out of their stupor quickly, closing ranks and readying weapons as Maren broke off at a dead sprint toward the warehouse Lucan had just been slammed into.
Meanwhile, the Goblin King reached behind its back and drew a sword – though it didn’t seem worthy of the appellation. The blade was jagged, uneven, and generally an insult to the art of blacksmithing. But it was pure mithril from hilt to tip, and that alone made it a substantial threat.
Doc’s voice cut through on the radio. “Eight contacts coming up behind us – it’s the Honor Guard.”
Henry checked the RWS and confirmed the sight of eight hobgoblin elites arriving from the direction of the Rune System. As irredeemable as the enemy was, he had to admit the goblins had pulled off a brilliant play. Down their strongest asset and trapped in dire straits, he had no choice but to fight it out and hope Maren could bring him back before things fell apart entirely.
He addressed his team over the radio. “All elements, let the Chosen handle the Goblin King. We’ll focus on clearing out the Honor Guard. Buy Maren the time she needs.”
God willing, she could get Lucan back on his feet before it got any worse.