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Adana, the youngest daughter of the Blazebringer Village Chief, made it to the wall just in time for the command for the archers to fire upon the monster, and the air was filled with the twang of bowstrings and the sound of more than a hundred arrows flying through the air.
When the dust from hundreds of arrows being fired for a minute straight settled, the light from the walls of the Blazebringer village's walls revealed only the bodies of the warriors who sacrificed themselves to hold the monster down and buy time for others to close and bar the gate.
But as much as the people on the wall looked, they could not find the monster that cut a path of blood and death through their village in order to open the gate for the invading army. The only sign of the monster was a blood trail going off into the darkness toward the sea of torches that stopped their advance when the gate closed.
This meant that the monster still lived, and the only thing Adana could do was pray and hope that the monster of a man died of his wounds, or at the very least be put out of commission for the rest of this war.
Because she and everyone who witnessed the monster's might knew that the only reason they managed to wound him as much as they managed to, was because he was forced to defend the gate and keep it open, if not, he could have gone on a rampage, and Adana could not think of any warrior strong enough to best the monster in combat.
Adana could still remember the scene now. When the commotion started, she was still awake and wanted to see what was going on, and because her family home was the only one in the whole village that was three stories tall, she got to the roof of her family home just in time to see the monster arrive at the gate and throw off the square beam barring the gate.
At the time, she was confident in the martial prowess of her village's warriors and was sure of their victory against this powerful enemy warrior who actually managed to unbar the gate. So, being that she was curious about this soon to be dead enemy warrior, she quickly changed out of her nightwear, grabbed her bow and dagger, and made her way toward the gate to take a closer look.
By the time she got to the gate, there were more than a hundred men dead or dying, a lot of them lay dead with wounds she would expect to be inflicted by powerful beasts or monsters. At the sight of that, Adana almost lost her dinner.
Just then, the elite warriors of the village came running back through the gate carrying the gate beam, and archers were rushing to position themselves above the wall where the gate was, so Adana followed behind them to see what was going on, and that was when the order to fire upon the monster was given.
After waiting for a few minutes at the wall to see if there would be any response from the enemy, one of the head warriors called the warriors to stand down but triple the guards and started calling for the rest to assist the wounded and clear the dead. So since Adana found herself at the scene, she decided to make herself useful and help.
As she walked among the dead and dying, she thought to herself, 'If that monster shows up again but with help, there might no longer be a Blazebringer village.'
***
Grud stumbled back into camp looking like a pin cushion, he had arrows sticking out from almost every place on his body not covered in armor, with the exception of his head of course. As he made his way into camp, currently had his arms slung over two of his men who were assisting his movement.
When they got to the designated area for the shamans and medicine men to take care of the wounded, Grud found that he was not able to lie down for treatment due to all the arrows sticking out his front and back, so the men had to keep him on his feet while the healers tried their best to remove the many arrows from Grud without making it worse.
Through the procedure of extracting the arrows, Grud was gritting his teeth at each arrow removed, and as other healers were going about checking and cleaning the arrow-free wounds, he heard them talking about the wounds he sustained so far and it did not sound good, he even caught one of them describing a place he remembered getting shivved multiple times as "Looks like minced meat."
That was not very encouraging for his prospects of healing, he had gotten many wounds over the years, but never one was described as minced meat, and he was pretty sure that was not the only minced meat looking wound on his body.
But despite all his wounds, Grud was grateful for his armor keeping all the important parts protected, especially his custom codpiece to protect his dangly bits.
'I wonder if there is an armor that is flexible enough to cover my joints or anywhere that my body bends, they took the most damage when they stabbed me.' Grud thought to himself, but it was too bad to him that chainmail was not invented yet, so he would just have to wait.
More than an hour later, all the wounds on Grud's back were cleaned and patched up, so they laid him down and continued with his front.
When they were done patching him up, Grud was still feeling light-headed from all the blood he lost, Grud knew there was only one thing he needed to get back into top shape as soon as possible, and that was meat, a lot of it. So he called out to a nearby healer, "Hey… healer…"
The rather young looking healer turned to Grud at his call, he was most likely one of the apprentices who was left to watch over Grud now that their masters were done with the heavy lifting of patching him up, "Yes Chieften?"
"I am hungry… bring me meat… a lot of meat." Grud said weakly.
The young healer looked nervous as he replied, "B-But chieftain, in your condition it would be better to eat some gruel, I will go get the-"
"Boy… if you come back with my food and it is not meat, injured or not, I will get up and put my foot up your ass, and I can assure you, you will find no pleasure from it." Grud said weakly but with enough intent that made the young healer scamper off with utmost urgency.
An hour later, Grud was cleaning off a whole ribcage of a Tusk Pig while the apprentices left to watch him, watched in amazement as they wondered where all the food he was eating was going.
When Grud was done eating, the exhaustion from the night's activity took him, and he crashed hard.
The next day, after the healers changed his dressing for his wounds, Grud was once again surrounded, but this time it was the leadership of his army.
Among them was Chieftain Thagrak, "Grud" Thagrak greeted, "You look like you have been trampled by a herd of mammoths."
"Yeah, I know. I have seen better days," Grud said as he lifted one of his wound dressings, saw that it had already scabbed over nicely, and praised the Great Spirits for granting him his powerful body that was healing at a speed beyond any man should, "But I should be up and moving in a few days."
Thagrak and the others around him were mildly shocked by his declaration, but they had seen his superhuman prowess, so they had little doubt what he said was true. Thagrak could only shake his head, "You truly are a monster, and I am glad you are on our side, but all that aside, what happened last night, you were too injured and the healers threatened us with violence when we tried to come and ask you."
Grus chuckled, "As well they should, with the amount of arrows sticking out of me, I was in no mood to give answers, but now that I am feeling much better, let's get on with it." Grud then told them of what happened and whatever detail he could remember of the internal layout, number of warriors, and the such.
Toward the end of his recounting, Grud tried to reach for his mana, but found it unavailable, 'I will need to meditate on this to see if I can overcome this Hex'. Grud may have been too busy to see the incoming hex, but it did not take a genius to figure out that the blood they took from him was used in some kind of hex that was responsible for his inability to feel his mana. Seeing this as a danger to the shamans he included this in the debriefing of last night's failed attack.
When Grud was done with the debriefing, he finished it off with, "Needless to say, I am not doing what I did last night again, especially now that I have no access to my mana… So we need to come up with a new plan."