I stood alone before the horde of goblins that surrounded Eluth Village. I smelled the putrid air and felt the thick miasma of wickedness around me. It was scary, it was terrifying, and nothing could be more exhilarating. My friends had agreed to my plan, and as the one who proposed it to begin with, I willingly took on the most dangerous of all duties.

  Not that anyone could pull it off but me.

  I did not look like myself today. My eyes were out, and so were my hooves, but those were the only things that were familiar. I was wearing a costume over my mythril armor that made me look like some sort of demon-bat-bird monster.

  I snickered.

  It was my idea. I had explained what cosplay was to my friends, and Moonwash readily agreed to make it. She made this costume for me in a hurry, so that if someone were to somehow see what I was about to do, they wouldn’t make the connection that it was me. The final product looked intimidating and far from humanoid, despite barely hampering my movements at all. It was amazing.

  I stepped forward. I jumped. I flew and took off.

  I took a moment to appreciate the wonder of flight, before souring that beauty by looking at the fields of putrid green down below. Some of the goblins saw me and began to go crazy, jumping up and down like children trying to reach for a bird high up in the sky. They were the smart ones. The others didn’t care, they were unaware, content to frolic amongst their corpse piles or torment those who still lived.

  The air around me ignited.

  The blood-red blaze descended like the end of the world.

  It rained of hellfire and agony.

  And the goblins below burned upon the touch of my flame.

  They reacted. The goblins snarled and shrieked and rolled in pain, but their tantrums achieved nothing. They jumped and threw stones and crawled all over each other in an attempt to get back at me, but their pleas went unanswered.

  Their behavior only made them better targets. Their mounds of birthing flesh combusted. Their outrage fueled the greater wrath that was myself.

  Fire continued to fall like snow, and the ruined landscape was cleansed by a hell of my creation.

  Spears of wrath then dropped down from the sky like the judgment of an angry god, but it was actually my mercy. These projectiles ended the lives of those people who had so cruelly remained alive, but could no longer be saved. I did my best to kill them instantly and painlessly, so they didn’t have to suffer the excruciating pain of the furnace that was hell.

  The goblins did not deserve the same mercy. The storm of fire assaulting them grew progressively stronger as I circled around the village, coming ever closer to the center with every revolution. I memorized how high these creatures could jump or throw their weapons, and I remained just high enough to be out of reach so my waves of fire could reach them at maximum power. I continued to carpet bomb them until their dying screams finally reached the attention of the cowards who stayed hidden behind their walls.

  A dense tide of green spilled out of the broken gates. I merely snarled and shot massive concentrated fireballs towards them, to take advantage of their congestion. Stronger goblins joined their ranks, from both within the village and without. Many had died from my earlier assault, but there were also many that survived. They were the goblins fast enough to run away, or those durable enough to survive the fire rain.

  I could have killed them better if I had concentrated my attacks more. I decided to vary my approach next time.

  I continued to bombard the entrance and exit of the village for a short while. The goblins congregated below me for I could not kill all of them, though I could slaughter big chunks. The shaman finally stepped out of the gate, and I considered for a moment if should engage. I could definitely take him one on one… but this was definitely not a 1 on 1 situation. He was surrounded by too many allies for me to kill.

  I turned around and flew away.

  ~~~

  I came back for round two sometime later. I flew circles around the outer ring of the village like before, and then left when the elites showed up. They did try to give chase, but eventually gave up for I was far above their reach.

  The same thing happened again the third time, but the fourth saw me getting attacked by a Hulwark on my way back. It was a big bird monster, and I barely reacted in time to its approach, but I managed to have it seize up for a few seconds when I instinctively released my aura and the power of my evil eyes.

  That gave me the opening I needed to swing my sword and blast my surprised enemy with two extremely destructive elements.

  We both fell. I had admittedly freaked out. But I flapped my wings once, stabilized, and then continued the rest of my fall with grace. I then walked back to my friends from there, and I rested in our camp as I recharged my hidden wings.

  This place was in the opposite direction from Karron village. I had made sure that if the goblins were to follow me, then I would not be leading them to the village we were supposed to save.

  ~~~

  The ring of goblins around the village had shrunk. I flew to the air uncontested once again, and the goblins suffered a fiery death like before. Their screams were music to my ears, the scent of burning flesh an intoxicant, and my blood forced me to unilaterally slaughter more.

  But I did not let my guard down. The goblins had responded faster each time I did this, and today proved no different. They reacted almost instantly as I heard them shouting inside the village the moment I began raining down punishment upon their brethren. They soon spilled out of the ruined gates, and I flew away.

  They followed.

  That was not unusual, but they kept following.

  Only the shaman could potentially hit me from here, and I could rain down bullets of wrath and fire upon their massive horde with impunity. But my options were also limited because I could not escape higher into the skies. There would only be more monsters to contend with there, with allegedly some really scary ones permanently in the air. Additionally, I was quite a slow flier, and I knew that I would eventually have to land upon the waiting maws of the goblins.

  The green fuckers did not give up the chase like every other time before.

  I was not surprised. I knew this was coming, so we had long prepared for this eventuality. If anything, it was insane how long I was allowed to just run amok along their ranks, before the goblins finally wised up to my tactics.

  I kept flying. I led them to a small valley between two shallow hills. By this point, most of the weaker goblins had already fallen behind, but there was still a sizable horde on my tail, plus all of their elites. And then a goblin lord fell into an abyss. Another followed the same fate. This place had been lined with pit traps according to our design!

  The goblin lords climbed back up. The spikes at the bottom did little damage to them. Another one of them had been born yesterday, making for a total of four lord-class enemies. They weren’t even duped by the next pit traps, and the shamans only followed in their steps. The weaker goblins were at least further diminished, either by the traps, or just because they fell behind, but the true threats continued to thrive in the long chase.

  That was fine. This was still fine.

  I fell from the air. My wings retracted as I purposely hastened my descent. I landed on my two hooves, and immediately broke into a furious run.

  I pulled ahead insanely fast. The goblins behind me rushed harder upon me entering their reach, causing them to fall into more of the traps. The crucial elites were still alive and kicking, but even they found themselves falling behind as I used wrath magic to make myself faster. I could not keep this speed up forever, however, so I paced myself properly until I made it to a field of very tall yellow-green grass.

  I shot fireballs in front of me. It spread through the plantlife like wildfire. The goblins were still hot on my heels and wicked projectiles were shot my way, but weaker now because there was less ambient wicked magic to draw on with their diminishing numbers. I chose to dive through the flames of my creation rather than face any of them.

  The hellfire burn me. It was a hell of blood-red fury. I felt the heat, and the excruciating pain that came with it. The real thing was worse than the phantom sensation of my blood.

  But I was still fine. This was nothing. My pursuers on the other hand smashed into the same wall of sinister fire, and their grunts of pain and suffering stoked the everlasting embers of my bloodlust.

  I continued forward.

  I swam through the burning grass, and then through the normal ones, which I quickly set alight in as well. I made it to the other side, then chanced a glance back to see the smoke rising into the air. There were no signs of the goblins, but I wasn’t going to wait for them to show themselves.

  I kept on running.

  I finally saw signs of the goblins again.

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  There were some scattered in the landscape in front of me, but they were few and weak.

  A few came out of the burning grass, and they were the elites, except for one lord-class that I managed to shake off.

  I shot a hellfire flare into the air, and then kept on running.

  Even as blood poured out of my legs from sheer overuse, I kept on moving.

  My arms swung in front of me to take care of the few dregs that dared to stand in my way.

  I shot streaks of hellfire and wrath behind me without even looking back.

  One of the shaman’s projectiles managed to hit me in the shoulder, causing flesh to slough off, but I just forced that limb to keep moving too.

  I neared my destination and shouted, “WHY SO GREEN? CAN’T KEEP UP!? ABOUT TO PUKE!? YOU PATHETIC FUCKING GOBBERS!”

  I reached the final cliff, I did not slow down, and I fucking jumped.

  “THREE LORDS ONE SHAM!” I shouted as my friends and a large pit that we’d dug came into view. I plummeted towards the ground, and I only deployed my wings at the last moment to arrest my momentum.

  I immediately ran to my workstation.

  I grabbed my paintbrush by our parked wagons, and started to paint on a slab of stone. The ink was basinfuls of my own blood, and I used it to hurriedly draw ritualistic illustrations of fiery cyclones and burning people. Moonwash did the same, she had started before I’d even arrived, and our two slabs arrayed around the spike-filled pit right below the cliff became heavy beacons of art as the very fabric of magic watched our creations with bated breath.

  This plan all hinged on whether the goblins were dumb enough to follow my lead and make the fucking jump.

  They weren’t.

  But it didn’t matter.

  They were dumb enough to look over the ledge.

  “Earth Javelin!”

  It wasn’t a ritual, but Granuel shouted anyway as he shot a spear of earth into the air.

  The ledge leading down had already been weakened, and it fell along with the four goblins looking down at us once Granuel’s spell struck the lip of the cliff.

  They screamed. The shaman drew on his own wicked mana to attack me, and the goblin lords tried to grab hold of something, but I met them all with both fire and wrath. Some of my magic was lost to the level 40 shaman’s, but Berry and Therick took the remaining blast for me as I had never stopped working on my masterpiece of a ritual.

  “Noon Star!”

  Moonwash finished her own artwork first, and a miniature sun dropped into the pit with the goblins just as they were forced to land.

  Heavy thuds followed as Angerly used a heavy earth staff to strike against the ground, collapsing it into a grand avalanche that included the massive boulders were had collected beforehand.

  The pit was buried in fire and stone, but two lords still managed to crawl out of that destruction.

  “Hellstorm!”

  Scattered blasts of hellfire shot out from my own ritual, to make sure that every goblin was dead, and finish off the few that remained.

  One still managed to reach the walls of the pit and climb. He scaled the earthen walls with bloodied claws faster than we thought possible. The goblin lord was breaking his body to push past his limits like I always did!

  Therick stabbed the hand that crawled out of the pit and managed to put the monster off balance. Berry soon caught up and crushed a part of the other already deteriorating hand. The goblin still managed to recover from this coordinated assault and get out of the pit. Therick and Berry clashed with him briefly, wherein the former could barely keep up and do damage, while the latter had chunks of her carapace torn off. The monster was on its last legs now… but so was I, apparently. I had tried to rush over there, only for my hooves to actually give out on me. They’d been running on sheer wrath for a while now already, and now, at this crucial moment, they truly fell apart.

  Everyone else managed to help, abandoning our next wave of attacks toward the pit. Projectiles flew from Granuel and Moonwash, and my own rounds followed a few moments later. Angerly reached the desperate struggle, but not in time to save one of Berry’s two remaining hands from being torn apart. My ogre friend’s angry mace smashed through the goblin lord’s torso, but he still managed to take an ear from Therick.

  “GAH!” My friend shouted in pain as he raised his sword, and delivered the finishing blow.

  ~~~

  “Shit, I’m sorry,” I said as I contributed to the fields of flowers that healed both Therick and Berry. I was also slowly getting healed as I literally couldn’t stand right now.

  That fucking goblin lord was insane. I didn’t expect it to pull a… well, me.

  “It’s okay, Haell.” Berry looked at the stump of her hand. Unlike her third arm that was entirely missing, this one was only cut near the elbow. “We all agreed to the plan. But hopefully, this allows Karron Village to survive.” She thought back to the things we had seen of the goblins. “No one deserves that…”

  “Yeah…” I trailed off, still sitting on my ass as I also received a little bit of healing for my overused legs.”

  Therick finally spoke in the ensuing silence.

  “What’s done is done. We should just finish the quest so it isn’t a waste.”

  “That’s true,” I looked up the cliff. A goblin looked back and fell. It died without the need for our intervention. “There’s still one lord there that we need to knock off.”

  ~~~

  We rested for a while, everyone got healed, and then we started to move out once more. We easily took care of the goblins that approached, and the few that chose to plummet to their deaths were very entertaining. It wasn’t rare for goblins to just die by themselves like that. I would be surprised at their continued survival if I wasn’t aware of how they reproduced.

  So we waded through scattered hordes of the goblins, made it back to the village, and then commenced a wholesale slaughter of those that remained. We hunted down those on the outskirts outside the walls, and then we used our wagons to box in and slaughter the goblins that remained inside and wanted to go out. They broke and fell after an afternoon of struggle.

  Huge pyres were made to burn down their corpses, and I had half a mind to just do the same for the entire village. It was lost anyway.

  “Haell, you can’t do that,” Granuel argued.

  “I certainly can,” I shot back, haughty and offended.

  “You know what I mean! People will want to reclaim this place at some point. They wouldn’t want that.”

  “Ehhh. It’s all ruined by wicked miasma anyway, right?”

  “...Still. They might at least want to recover some stuff.”

  “Eeeehhh. So no looting for us either?”

  “Well… A little bit of looting is fine.”

  “Hell yeah! That’s what I’m talking about!” I unfurled my wings and flew happily inside.

  There were still goblins left in here, and I had fun hunting them down. I even asked my friends to let me spot some on my own, so I could get just a little bit better at tracking. It was starting to get dark so I really had to challenge myself to find my prey.

  I snapped my fingers and summoned a ball of hellfire to illuminate our surroundings once the sun had truly set. Moonwash then made her own torch using fire magic and some alchemical agent, as the color of Hellfire was quite strong, and not the best for banishing the dark.

  We went inside people’s homes in search of our valuable loot, but the small subpar paintings they could afford of their families, the toys that were left behind, and the blood on the walls made me want to actually back off. So we went to the larger businesses instead, and took a chunk out of their treasuries!

  I couldn’t take it all though, and we prioritized the ones in places that were thoroughly smashed, so that we would not be ‘suspected’ or whatever. Booooring.

  “Oooh! The manor!” We made it to the center of the village, and I immediately wanted to rob the late lord of this place, but Angerly put a stop to my dastardly plans.

  “Haell. That would really be horrible for our reputation. They’ve got the resources and the means and the reason to investigate. And even if they can’t prove it, they would just know it was us. And then we won’t get personal quests anymore!”

  “Boo.” I pouted. “Booooring!”

  We went back to cleaning up the remaining goblins. There would still be many left to roam around, but it was best to at least try to be thorough here since that was part of our mission, and every little bit helped.

  “I found the goblin lord,” Granuel said, pointing to a random intersection where a larger goblin than the others had just woken up. I skipped over to where he had indicated, killed those in our way with ease.

  “You know… I was going to suggest that we take one of them by ourselves without Haell,” Angerly hedged, and I totally sympathized.

  “I… would rather not, honestly,” Berry said. “Unless if Haell doesn’t want to fight it by herself! But otherwise, it’s just too risky. I don’t think it’s worth it, especially since I don’t think I’m at my best right now.”

  “That’s true.” Therick nodded. “I’d love to test myself against the beast, and the risk is just part of the job… but I don’t feel up to it right now either. I just lost my ear. It’s affecting my balance and my senses. Haell can at least recover from that if she messes up.”

  “I’m not going to,” I simply said and stepped towards the goblin lord. “But it’s an important experience. How about I take the lead and you all support?”

  They debated my suggestion for a little bit, but eventually decided that I was correct. This was as safe as things could be.

  The following battle was just pitiful for our opponent. I pushed towards the creature and then held it back by engaging in a duel of greatsword against spear. I stepped into the optimal range for my weapon at the start, and I did not give up that advantage. Not that the goblin even tried to circumvent my advantage and retreat a little to use his spear to its fullest. The pilfered weapon was just a pokey stick to him, and for that reason, I easily deflected away his stronger thrusts and sweeps.

  My friends unleashed their overwhelming offensive while I was having this duel. The monster was beset by their weapons and spells from all sides. I struck him hard at the opening created whenever he tried to go after them instead, and my friends very quickly retreated while I stalled the level 40 enemy.

  The goblin lord had no chance, and it died a helpless death.

  ~~~

  In the end, we went back to Karron village and told them the crazy tale of our most recent adventure. We had omitted a lot of the even crazier parts, but they still doubted our story, so we presented the guild with the few remains of the goblins lords and shaman we had managed to salvage. Specialists were called to identify the bodies and confirm our claims, and while some were too mangled to be easily identified, the few intact remains were enough to convince them of the veracity of our tale. It was perfectly understandable for us to have used a trap to kill most of the goblins: a part of the story that we hardly embellished at all.

  The guild was sent into an uproar. The village was horrified at the extent of the danger they were in. And we were hailed as heroes as an entire party was thrown in our honor.

  The village lord got involved. He gave us some additional rewards and medals. I noticed in the distance that expeditions were already being sent out to try and hunt down the surviving goblins and secure the lost land.

  I didn’t pay much more attention to the brewing ripples in this part of the world.

  I just enjoyed our downtime.

  So someone actually completely called what was about to happen. Aerial superiority! I guess it was kinda obvious, and this was an opportunity for people to remember that Haell has wings!

  They weren’t able to completely just earn her the victory, but it was still a very important part of that plan. Which kind of fucked up at the end, because… How dare that goblin pull a Haell! Only Haell can Haell!

  AAAaaaAAAaaaaaAAAaaaaaAAaaaaAAaaAAaaAAAAaa!!!

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