It was surreal seeing the bat-winged silhouette of night haunts against the blue afternoon sky. The creatures that hunted forest goblins asleep on their bluffs were night-time terrors, Rava boogeymen. The stuff a mother goblin would whisper to her child to keep them straying too far, if goblins had discrete mother/child relationships.
“Steady!” I shouted. Beside me, non-variant goblins quaked behind hastily erected barricades made primarily from the remains of structures that had already failed to stop the elf’s bewitched night haunts once. I didn’t imagine the second time would be the charm—and I doubted there would be a third. Above, the rapid whump-whump-whump of circling choppers echoed the pace of every goblin’s heartbeat as they looked upon the coming storm.
I didn’t take much comfort in the helicopters. Helicopters are an air support tool for when you have air superiority. They’re not dog-fighting vehicles (because they’re dumb). You need planes for that. The night haunts were closer to fighter planes themselves, fast and nimble with the ability to turn tightly and out-climb a rotor-wing aircraft.
I counted the silhouettes in the sky, but it was difficult to accurately gauge their numbers because their formation twisted and folded in on itself as they approached, flying with that strange coordination the elf magic gave them. But I put their number at somewhere between 18 and 24. Half of the formation split, climbing up to gain an altitude advantage on the helicopters, while the others came straight on. I grit my teeth. The elves actually knew some fundamentals of aerial combat.
Our choppers moved forward to meet them, and the pop of gunfire and the whoosh of flame-throwers came down. The night haunts smashed into the air support like battering rams, sending several choppers spinning out as the weight of the predators sent the light aircraft careening out of control. One of them, still spraying flame, looked like a fiery pinwheel in the sky as it dropped. The night haunt separated to look for a new target while the ruined chopper continued down to the forest floor.
“Here they come!” I shouted. I chambered a rockette in my lever gun.
They were close enough now that I could see the glint of silver in several of their manes. The night haunts that had been harassing us practically since I’d arrived on Rava must have been juveniles, while the silvermanes must have been the adults. The first few came within range of the barricade, and a few over-excited goblins let loose shots that fell woefully short.
“Hoist the colors!” I yelled.
Behind the line, the Red-Rock natives shouted and heaved at ropes. A pole went up, carved with Tribe Apollo iconography, and sporting the head of one of the silvermanes killed in the initial attack.
A strange calm came over me. My hands steadied and a pressure I hadn’t even felt mounting vanished. My chest felt lighter, and I took a deep, gasping breath—not even realizing that I’d been taking half-breaths. So, the all-encompassing fear goblins felt wasn’t just an in-baked prey response. It was a skill inherent to night haunts. And now, we had an answer. A cheer went up, and it quickly turned into a war-cry.
“Fire!”
Rockettes blasted out of every gun on the line, tiny contrails criss-crossing the air on their chaotic gyro-jet trajectories. What we lacked in individual accuracy, we made up for in sheer volume as dozens of shots turned into hundreds, which turned into thousands. The night haunts began to juke and dodge, but it seemed like the air was becoming more bullet than not. To either side of me, noblins with recoilless rifles fired. The shots arced out, and one of them struck a night-haunt and erupted into a drogue chute that stalled the flying predator out. It fell behind the pack, fighting helplessly against the drag. Two others fell to the rifle fire.
But the rest of the night haunts came on.
The better part of a dozen silvermane haunts smashed into the barricade, sending up gouts of dust and splintered wood. The war cry turned to squawks of fear and alarm. I dove for cover as one of the enormous predators impacted directly in front of me, and rolled through the chaos, tossing goblins through the air.
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It straightened, lifting its head and scanning left and right across the line with eyes possessed of unnatural intelligence. Red bugs buzzed around its snarling beak-like muzzle. I grinned underneath the ceramic skull-mask I’d traded my bone crown for. It was looking for me. But right now, I looked like any other goblin—except for my legs. But lots of veteran goblins were missing appendages now that had been replaced with prosthetics.
My fellow barricade goblins turned and continued firing, or dropped empty rifles to charge with cleavers or spears. The wranglers had net launchers and hooked poles, and they moved up to menace the night haunts. I charged along with them, shouting and thrusting my ceramic bayonet at the underside of a thrashing silvermane. The haunts lunged forward eagerly, unafraid of the goblins on the line. The silvermanes were at least half again as big as their juvenile counterparts, and bowled through the non-variant goblins like a set of 10-pins. Claws and jaws flashed, sending blue fur flying through the air. A heavy tail whipped just over my head, and a back claw shattered my bayonet and sent me spinning down to my back. One of my secretive service hobgoblins pulled me back.
The scrappers, who had stayed hidden up to this point, burst from the ruins to join the fight—adding their surprise attack bonus as they hit the night haunts from a new angle. Two of the night haunts went down under their spears and cleavers. More scrappers opened up with guns taken off the choppers. Recoilless rifles fired heavy projectiles down and the new self-cycling guns I’d designed fired with a slow c’thunk-c’thunk rhythm. Two helicopters, held in reserve at the back of the bluff, lifted off and flew low over the village. The goblins aboard added their fire to the mix, and more night haunts fell, thrashing and howling.
The night haunts reacted by spinning toward the new angle of attack. One of them launched itself up at the improvised machine gun nest, collapsing half the damaged tower as it clawed its way in to the scrapper. Two of the night haunts still in the air dropped and hit the choppers from above—one of which was killed instantly by the chopping blades of the main rotor, but the other of which shattered the rotor assembly. Both the reserve choppers went down.
I got back to my feet. Not exactly eager to rejoin the melee, I grabbed a discarded rifle and checked it. Predictably, its owner had been all too eager to rush into cleaver range. I knelt down to line up the sights and scanned across the night haunts, looking for a green, mossy bundle atop one of them.
“There he is!” I shouted, swinging my barrel toward a spot of green amongst the silver of one of the larger haunts’ manes.
I fired. The shot, of course, spiralled off at a strange angle. But my secretive service was keen enough to spot it as well. They added rifle and pistol fire of their own, and the night-haunt flinched back as a rockette nearly took out the last of the elf invaders.
“Pour it on him!” I yelled.
The goblins still on the barricade began to concentrate their fire. In response, the night haunt vaulted over the melee, and smashed into the back of the barricade, claws reaching through and beak snapping. It was close enough that I could see the evil little glimmer of the elf’s eyes through his mossy disguise, and he waved a floral bough at us.
“Look out!”
I dived to the side as an emerald ray split the barricade, cutting down through the loose pile of junk like a knife through a cake. Where it hit, the edges of the material sizzled as though melted by strong acid. With an opening, the night haunt squeezed into the narrow space within the barricade and snapped at me with its jaws. I pulled out one of my spare poppers and threw it. It burst against the side of the haunt’s beak, and it recoiled in pain. My secretive service rushed in with spears and cleavers, but thorny vines sprouted from the ground and trapped several of them. The night haunt kept coming. I pulled the revolver from my belt and fired all five shots at the oncoming beast.
A shout mounted, and the familiar form of Armstrong barreled through a gap in the barricade, smacking the night haunt with the butt of the gun he’d pulled out of the chopper. He brought the muzzle around and started firing the self-cycling gun at point blank, filling the tunnel with rockette trails. The night haunt recoiled from the larger, rapid fire shots that peppered its thick hide, back pushing up against the top of the barricade. But it lashed out with a claw and sent Armstrong tumbling towards me.
“Armstrong!”
I dashed forward to try and arrest the larger scrapper, but that went about as well as you’d expect. We both went down in a tangle. Armstrong got to his feet first, and hauled me along as the silvermane clawed after us. Ahead, down the improvised tunnel, another night haunt was pulling its way inside. It snapped at us with its beak, and we stopped.
“Out, out!” shouted Armstrong, pushing me toward a gap in the barricade. I squeezed through, and then pulled the larger scrapper out, just before the elf splattered the gap with a ball of green goo that sprouted a tangling moss. We kept moving. The haunt who had been forcing its way in to cut us off, pulled out of the tunnel and bounded down after us, but a dozen goblins charged it with zap-sticks and spears, giving Armstrong and I time to retreat.
“It’s not looking good, boss,” said Armstrong, surveying the battlefield. We’d taken some of the night haunts down, but there were lots of goblins down as well. Worse yet, only a small number of helicopters remained overhead, while close to a dozen more night haunts still circled and harried them.
But I noticed a sound—distant, but growing. A rushing, low rumble that I’d first heard at an air-show when I was 6 years old that ignited a life-long fever. I’d felt it then as I did now, deep and resonating in my chest as it mounted. My ears and eyes swiveled to the south.
“We did what we had to, Armstrong,” I said. “We held out. Now it’s our turn.”