After another day of this training routine continuing throughout the village, Rose and Wulfarth returned from scouting out the Lizardmen village and brought the relevant information back with them.
The room with the stone slab within was used as a makeshift meeting room once again. The same figures were sat in roughly the same places, only with the addition of Rose to the group. Getting the meeting itself under way, Rose and Wulfarth began to describe what they had found within the village.
They explained their theories on the positioning of the village and the lack of defensive structures. Due to its fairly naturally defensible location near to a mountain, they could only assume that it was a military outpost of a considerably larger village in some other location, which was further supported by the fact that there was no ordinary citizens in the village, only those to be used as military personnel.
The lack of defensive buildings could only be because the camp was fairly new, which was in itself supported by the untrodden and fresh grass around the outskirts of the village. Though, as Faruth himself discovered, they were a fairly weak race, their number far outstripped that of Faruth's side. The forces pressing the attack on the village numbered only 12, Faruth included, whereas the forces of Lizardmen defending was largely unknown.
As Faruth began to angrily question him, the two blushed and explained that they couldn't tell the differences in a race they had only recently discovered, though they believed that there couldn't be more than 40, judging by the number of houses there were, and providing there wasn't anyone to reinforce them.
As the two also found, only the ones that seemed to be higher ranking in the village were allowed to use weapons such as spears and the like. The majority of those living there only used crude weapons such as sticks and clubs, meaning that Faruth's force greatly overpowered them in terms of technology.
The next part of the report was in regards to the most critical element of the attack on the village, what was the number of captives held within the village's centre? Lining up with the theory that the village was only a smaller camp for a larger location, the two believed that the captives were transported from a separate location, as some of the captives appeared to be too fierce for their military might alone. They reported that there was roughly 20 captured Gnolls, as they didn't know if any were in the buildings. Along with them, were 7 Goblins locked inside similar cages to the others.
The strangest part of the report wasn't that though, it was the remaining captives that caught Faruth's interest. The two claimed that within the village, there was at least 6 creatures of races that they had never seen before. Two were locked in a much larger cage than the others and were described to sit at around the height of Faruth with bodies completely lacking fur, yet fur covered their lower half while horns sprouted from their heads. Faruth knew that they were almost undoubtedly Satyr.
One was described to stand in much higher than Faruth himself and had double the width. Similarly to the Satyr, it had two horns sprouting from its head, yet it's face was much longer than the others. Faruth had his suspicions with this one, but he believed it to be a Minotaur, or at least something related to it
Another two were solely female, but looked similar to Faruth in height and stature. The only real disparity that they could find was their heads, whereas Faruth had a face more like a wolf, pointed and sharp, the two had rounder and flatter faces in comparison. Just based on this alone, he wouldn't have really been able to figure out what they were, but it was Wulfarth's next bit of information that drove him to his conclusion. They were described as having orange and black striped covering their entire body, so Faruth could only relate them to something akin to a tiger beast for the time being.
The last of these peculiar races to the Gnolls sat in a cage solely on its own. Wulfarth's description of the man nearly made Faruth cry out in joy. He was seen to be fairly short, probably reaching the chest of a smaller Gnoll such as Rose herself, along with him being short, he was described as having a long beard, reaching down to the middle of his own chest. In his mind, Faruth was elated whilst constantly repeating 'Please don't be a Gnome' as if it was a mantra.
As the report was beginning to wrap itself up, Faruth discussed the information he was given with the rest of the important figures, Rose included. Similarly to the first meeting on the subject, they agreed and disagreed on certain aspects, but eventually came to a result in the end after several hours of deliberating to one another.
It was decided that Faruth would lead his forces out in two days time to assault the Lizardmen village.
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After the meeting had occurred, only a single day had passed of the same training regimen, which was starting to become slightly boring for the group that had a life or death battle ahead of them, but they put up with it anyway, lest Alneth beat the discipline into them forcefully.
Night had long since fell, leaving Faruth sitting on the crest of the cave opening. All were exhausted after the training of that day, leaving little choice but to rest up their muscles for tomorrow, where it was no longer a simple sparring match. Faruth, being a Stage 2 evolution, didn't need to sleep as heavily or as frequently as those in Stage 1 within his village.
This effectively left Faruth by himself during any hours of the night, causing a gnawing loneliness to bite at him during that time usually. But tonight was different. He couldn't feel sorry for himself when his blood was burning up this much, when his energy was at its peak. Instead, he sat, fist to his chin, watching the sun peak over the forested horizon.
Dawn had come.