AN: If you like what you are reading, you can help by giving my novel Rating.
As Grud watched a line of enemies charge toward his debilitated men, he turned and shouted "Shamans! Find out what is causing this!" and charged out of the treeline in hopes of drawing as much attention as possible.
Between Grud and the charging enemies, it was roughly a hundred meters, and at his speed, Grud met the line of charging warriors before they were even halfway to the tree line.
As he swung his spear, he bisected four men at the waist. Unlike the other warriors he had faced before, all of these charging men were only wielding one-handed weapons, no doubt it was for them to hide in their concealed holes properly, but that gave Grud a great advantage of superior reach as he chased and struck down more men, the only other difference he noticed besides that was that all the warriors had a small leather pouch necklace around their necks.
But despite his chasing and killing of enemy warriors, the charging warriors mostly ignored Grud and ran ahead to the tree line, it was then that Grud knew there were just too many of them to kill fast enough and he knew that no matter what he did, he would not make it in time to prevent the enemy from coming right up to his men and executing them, so he needed to find a way to minimize the damage.
Thinking and trying to look for a solution, Grud looked around while cycling through his many enhanced senses, it was when he filled his eyes with mana that he saw lines of mana coming from the center behind the dirt mound line, flowing to points along the tree line.
"Got you." Grud whispered to himself and bolted to where the mana was flowing from, 'Let's see who can kill each other faster.'
As he closed in on the dirt mound line, he saw heads peaking up from behind the mound and shouts rang out, followed by archers standing up from the dirt mound and shooting directly at him.
As the hail of arrows sped toward Grud and adrenalin pumped through his system, time seemed to slow down for Grud as he brought his free hand up and pulsed a wave of mana just before the arrows hit him, this sent the arrows weakly falling away from Grud as he charged.
By the time he reached the mound, only a few of the archers were quick enough to get off a second shot, but Grud either swatted the arrow out of the air with his hand and spear or let them plink off his armor.
When he got to the top of the mound, he saw a scene that was only ever described to him by his teacher, Shaman Dhuk. There he saw five Witch Doctors sitting in a circle, within that circle were sticks driven into the ground in a line, and on one side of the sticks, were entrails, and if his nose was not deceiving him, they were human entrails. On the other side of the sticks was the same leather pouch necklace he saw the warriors wearing, and it was then he saw the Witch Doctors stabbing the entrails with sharpened bones.
Immediately, Grud recognized it for what it was, in the center of the Witch Doctors was a top-down representation of the treeline where Grud's men were on the side with the stabbed entrails.
'They Hexed the whole tree line!' Grud thought as an arrow plinked off his armor, but he ignored it and pounced at the Witch Doctors.
The enemy warriors tried to intercept him, but Grud was too fast and powerful for these few ordinary men. He bowled over two men in his way and he was upon the Witch Doctors.
With a couple of swings of his spear, the Witch Doctors were dead, and as he turned to face the archers who dropped their bows and drew their melee weapons, Grud swept his foot across the hex circle, sweeping the sticks and entrails away.
Soon enough, the enemy was upon him, coming from both sides, Grud chose the side that was closer to him, raised his hand, and released a concentrated mana pulse that sent men flying back into each other, then he turned to the other side that was closing in on him and charged it.
As he plowed into the line of archers turned warriors, Grud was a flurry of spear thrusts, swings, punches, kicks, and even a headbutt. With every attack, men fell, either broken or dead, and when he was done with one side of the charging men, he turned around and started making short work of the men that had recovered from his mana blast.
But as he was halfway done with what was left of the attacking men, Grud noticed the general area around him suddenly became dimmer, so as he hopped back a step to dodge a wild sword swing, he took the chance to glance up at a scene that made his eyes widen.
Falling upon his position, was a literal rain of arrows that blotted out the sun. "SHIT!" Grud cussed as his exclamation while looking up, causing the men attacking him to look in the same direction, causing them to curse and panic because they would not make it in time.
Not wasting any time, Grud reached down, grabbed the corpses of two men he had slain, and jumped back over the dirt mound, directly into the camouflaged trench the ambushers were hiding.
Grud crashed into the bottom of the hole with a heavy and painful thud, but he did not have time to care. He curled up and made himself as small as possible, then pulled the two corpses he brought along on top of himself.
A second after doing so, Grud heard the small thuds of hundreds of arrows embedding themselves into the ground around him, he even felt some of those arrows hit the bodies he was taking cover under and felt a few pricks of the arrows that penetrated and poked as Grud, the only thing stopping him from getting any serious injures was his tough skin and muscles, and also because most of the energy from the falling arrows were absorbed by the corpses he was under.
After more than ten seconds straight of raining arrows, when all was silent, Grud pushed off the pin-cushioned corpses, crawled out of the trench, and peeked over the mound. On the other side of the mound, were a bunch of very dead men that he did not kill, all of them in a worse shape than his impromptu meatshields.
As Grud looked up, he saw the walls of the Blazebringer's village walls bristling with archers, and as much as he would have liked to charge and tear down those walls, he knew that even if he succeded, he would most surely die under the power of the number of warriors that would swarm and kill him, even at the cost of their own men as shown by the pin-cushioned corpses before him.
'Those crazy bastards actually killed their own men and wasted so many arrows… just to kill me. So stupid and wasteful.' Grud thought to himself.
But what Grud failed to do was to see things from the Balzebringers' perspective. They saw the biggest armored man they had ever seen running out of the tree line, unaffected by the hexes their Witch Doctors set up, easily blowing through a line of charging warriors at superhuman speed, warriors that Grud did not know were hopped up on drugs that made them aggressive, extra strong and able to ignored pain, displayed his ability to defensively use mana when he blew away the volley of arrows, charge straight for their Witch Doctors, butchered them, showed that he could also use mana offensively, and started butchering their men with the strength and speed of a monster, and the skills of a seasoned warrior.
From atop the walls that were less than 200 meters away, Head Warrior Voka, saw and knew that Grud was too dangerous to let live another second, and so did the other Head Warriors. So when Voka called upon all the archers under his command to fire upon Grud, the other Head Warriors followed suit with their own men, only to be disappointed as a head peaked up over the dirt mound and ran back to the tree line.
When Grud got back to the tree line, what he saw was not a pretty sight, not to him at least. There were dead men everywhere, including the enemy, but what made the sight not pretty to him was because, with a glance, Grud estimated that for every one of the enemies that were slain, four of his men had been killed.
From what he could see, most of his dead men could not even muster any form of defense due to the hex and were quickly cut down. To Grud, this did not bode well, it was their first encounter and the enemy had already given him a bloody nose.
Besides that, another thing was bothering him, 'How did the Blazebringers go into their own hex without being affected by it? From what I know, hexes are rather indiscriminate on who they arrected.' Grud thought to himself as he started flipping enemy bodies to see if he was missing anything, and Grud almost missed it for a useless trinket, around all the enemies' necks was the same leather pouch necklace he saw in the hex circle he destroyed.
He reached to one of the corpses, plucked the leather pouch necklace, and opened it to see some hair, a small clay figurine, and a small bone, 'If all of them have the same thing, is this what was protecting them from the hex?' Grud asked himself but decided there were more important things to handle.
Grud called for his people to secure the area, remove the bodies, make camp, asked the shamans to study the hex and see if they could do anything about it, and lastly, for someone to get him a count of their dead.
"A minor setback, but one the Blazebringers will pay back in blood." Grud whispered to himself as he went off to gather the chieftains under him to do some planning.