The shadows looked like a human outline in a spacious cloak without a hood, created from a black translucent haze. It was hard to make out a face, but few sought to do so.
Gathered together, the people settled in the woods, set up huts, and began to build a protective wall: a wattle and daub with thorny branches of some shrub that looked like a mixture of thorns and thorns, bound together sharpened stakes in hedgehogs, stakes driven into the ground at a slant, shallow narrow holes that were meant only to break or at least injure the trapped man's leg. The same prickly twigs were thrown on the roofs of the huts to make it more difficult for the flying creepers to get in.
The most unpleasant thing was that they were preparing to fend off animals and zombies with chimeras, who were not very smart, but they had been hit by very different enemies.
Three days later, when the slim wall was less than half done, they were attacked at night by small, puny dwarves, immediately dubbed goblins for their height, their big ears, and their viciousness. Each of these creatures was about the waist-length of a grown man and weighed ten or twelve kilograms, the largest two or three kilograms more and five centimeters taller. The monsters died from a single blow with an axe or club, and the weak muscular corset and thin bones did not protect their bodies from a simple kick that could cause serious injury.
But there were an unreal number of goblins!
After ten minutes of battle, they were swarming everywhere like an army of ants, covering every square meter of space.
Even buckshot seriously wounded these creatures, and buckshot made a hole in the attackers' ranks. A good machete blow sliced a goblin in half.
- There really were thousands of them," - Alex said, his voice hoarse from the long and emotional story. - And us four and a half hundred. Half of them were women and teenagers. Sturdy, young women and teenagers who had escaped the clutches of zombies before, but here we had to fight and kill, and few could stand the sight of those rivers of blood, the smell, the screams and shrieks in the darkness. And few were prepared for that.
Of the four hundred earthlings, one hundred and five remained, those who had realized before the others that fighting off the horde of vicious runts would not work and they had to flee, leaving everything and... everyone behind. Once again, the survivors were mostly those who were loners in life. The largest group was led out by Sashka, whose fire spells scattered the goblins in different directions. Thirty-seven people escaped with him, the rest later found themselves.
Wandering, the group of survivors came to the village, which stood at the very edge of the forest and was hit by goblins. All the houses had been looted, most of them burned. Five brick and iron-roofed cottages remained, with shutters on the windows, which the goblins could not get inside and set on fire. In one of them, Eduard and his comrades found seven people, former inhabitants of the village of which the ashes remained.
In the surviving houses, they had procured weapons or made their own from improvised materials. The worst thing was the firearms, the ammunition for which had been almost completely burned in the firefight during the night. A few cartridges for hunting rifles, an incomplete magazine for three automatic rifles and a magazine for a policeman's PMG, who had no time to change his gun before the fight turned into a melee, he would have lost his gun too, but it was strapped to his belt and dangled in his legs the whole time. It was only when he caught it on a snag while running and fell that Alex realized what was always hitting his shin and tangling in his legs.
They had to walk away again in search of a safe place.
Then they saw car tracks near the village and followed them. They were told by survivors that on the day of the accident, an ambulance had stopped by and the driver had asked about the area, the roads and talked about zombies and mutants.
The track was very winding, so the survivors did not reach the village until yesterday evening. They saw a large settlement, a vibrant life, and no one seemed afraid or cautious. Traces of a protective moat only convinced the people that it was safe here.
Alas, they were not received kindly, to say the least. Yes, the mage and his companions, with whom he had gone to negotiate and tell the settlers about the enemies, themselves talked tough. Loss, hunger, fatigue, fear, and constant nervous tension were no helpers of diplomacy. And the sight of well-fed faces, clean clothes, carefree children peering out of the surrounding yards, despite orders to stay behind walls, added fuel to the fire of resentment and feelings of injustice that burned people's souls. For how so? Why did their friends and families die, and why did these... these... these... THEM live here and not give a damn? And they look with suspicion and meet them with guns in their hands!