Fang could hear the screams, shouts, war cries and manic laughter as Mac Lir burned. No doubt, something had gone horribly wrong while he and the others were away. Now, he had one more thing to deal with upon the return.
“It just never ends,” Fang said to himself, before turning to Lobo. “I need you to stay here guard the gold. If any of that’s gone, you’ll be repaying it with your teeth. Understood?"
"Yes sir,” Lobo nodded.
Before Fang could pronounce the first phonetic of Karns’s name, the gluttonous griffin was already charging ahead screaming bloody fucking murder.
Fang always appreciated enthusiasm, and followed quickly behind.
Pandemonium spread like the flames that engulfed the village. Nopony knew precisely what had happened. But, it was clear to the villagers that they now had to defend themselves.
One villager armed himself with a crossbow, and took shaky aim against the raging barbarians.
A loud shout stood out to him above all others, and the villager saw a large griffin with an equally large ax charging him.
Quickly raising his crossbow, the villager fired a bolt right at his opponent. His aim, however, was not true, as his projectile simply bounced off of the pony-hide chest plate.
Karns repaid the nick in his armor by grabbing a bolt from the pony’s quiver, gouged his eye to hold him in place, and severed his head from his shoulders.
The villager’s body slumped dead, followed by his severed head sliding from his own bolt. Yet, his eye remained stuck to his own ammunition.
One last insult, and Karns ate the pony’s eye.
Another pony charged Karns from behind.
Karns did not even stop chewing, when Fang dropped from the sky and impaled the villager.
“Eating? Now?” Fang said, pulling his spear free.
“It’s not often I get fresh meat. I want this before the dogs and maggots get him first!” Karns said.
Three villagers charged at once.
Fang rolled his eyes and readied his spear to offer a demise that would spare them the wrath of Karns, when they interrupted his meal.
In a flash of steel, Fang was beaten to the punch.
Blackheart swooped from the sky and cleanly sliced one villager from his neck to his flank with her daggers.
The second villager swung his club.
Blackheart wove around the attack, and stopped face to face with her opponent.
The pony never even saw the dagger that gouge him.
Blackheart dropped to her knees and crossed her daggers above her head, stopping the third villager’s sickle.
She twisted to her feet, and spun with her daggers outstretched.
Try as he did, the villager could not keep track of the whirling blades through the ribbons attached to their handles. And it two flashes of steel, he could see only two words glaring on the engraved blades before the jammed into his temples.
FUCK--
--YOU
And in a flourish, Blackheart sliced outward, spilling what was contained in the pony’s skull across the cobblestones.
For a moment, Fang saw the engraved words on the blades. For the longest time, he had wondered why Blackheart named her weapons the way she did. Now, the name ‘Last Words’ started to make sense.
“Hello, Fang,” Blackheart said in a tone that was all too welcoming and friendly.
Fang knew better than to be fooled by such a friendly greeting from Blackheart. She was still hot from the three consecutive kills, and wanted to keep her drive going.
“Hello, yourself,” Fang dismissively said. “You know where the captain is?”
“You mean, you don’t want to dance? Must you be so cold?”
Without taking his eyes from Blackheart’s gyrating figure, Fang held out his spear and stuck a charging villager through the face.
“Sorry, but I really have to talk with him. It’s about the mission he sent me on,” he explained.
“He’s in the square, having some drinks with what’s left of the village chief. He’s probably expecting you to drop in,”
Blackheart said, feigning disappointment.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t be a stranger, Fang.”
With a flap of his wings, Fang was high in the air and landed on the nearest rooftop, just as another villager charged Karns with a kitchen knife.
Karns had not finished his meal. A terrible rage filled his mind, making him boil over with bloodlust.
Taking his ax, Wolf Blood, he sliced off a leg of the pony he had been eating, picked it up and smashed the face of the villager who approached him.
Over and over he swung, beating the life from the villager until his eyes rolled back into his head.
Once he was finished, Karns continued decimating the villagers, ax in one talon, and whatever he could butcher from his opponents in the other.
In the relatively more quiet village square, a gigantic sword stood planted in the side of the village chief. A gruesome makeshift grave marker for the unfortunate pony.
The captain leaned casually against his own blade, sipping quietly of some wine he had found.
He waited. And finally, an arrival.
First came the flap of wings. Then, the familiar heavy clop of Fang landing from the sky not ten feet from the captain.
“You want to tell me what happened here?” Fang asked.
“The dead chief or the village burning?” the captain replied.
“How about both.”
“Only a simple example of cause and effect,” the captain explained. He glanced down to the dead chief, “This greedy fool threatened to withhold the money he would pay us for information about the minotaurs. Try as I did to negotiate, things turned sour quickly. When it became clear he wouldn’t be swayed by reason, I assured him that I would not be taken for a fool. In no uncertain terms, as you can see.”
“And the villagers turned on you as a result,” Fang said, finishing the explanation.
“Exactly.” The captain took a heavy drink from his jug of wine. “Now, tell me about your mission. Are we fighting the minotaurs? The yuan-ti? Or will we have to kill them both?”
“Just the minotaurs. Me and the others worked out a deal with the yuan-ti. By the end of the week, we’ll be eating prime rib,” Fang said.
“That’s what I like to hear,” the captain said. He finished his drink, smashed the empty jug on the village chief’s head, and slid on a leather cestus. “Let’s go and help the others. And when we’re done here, we’ll raid the chief’s wine cabinet.”
“Good stuff?” Fang asked.
“Exquisite. You can always count on the greedy to have fine taste in drinks.”
Smoke rose from the ashen ruin that was once the village of Mac Lir. What was once a humble fishing village was now a mass grave, doomed to be forgotten.
The captain stood before his company, surrounded by the smoking ruin of the village. Standing tall and proud, he spread his one wing widely.
“Before we head out, I want to remind you to never hold the line. You take the line!”
A refrain of shouts rang from the other soldiers.
“You hold your weapons!”
Fang and Karns both brandished their arms.
“You hold your cocks!”
Blackheart lustfully eyed the captain, silently reminding him who held what.
“But, the line be damned!! There will be no mercy for the cows!!” The captain raised his mighty sword high. “For blood!!”
“And gold!!” Lobo refrained.
That was exactly what company had needed to hear. All at once, they spread their wings and took to the sky.
What began as a wobbly trip for the captain soon smoothed out when he suddenly found himself caught in Blackheart’s loving grip.
The battle was about to be on. And the captain was looking forward to every bloody moment.
In a hilly plain overgrown with grass, the yuan-ti strategically placed spikes within the towering blades of green.
It was the perfect battleground for them. The minotaurs would never see them slithering through the grass. Nor would they see the spikes that had been set to gouge them through during their bull rush attacks.
One of the yuan-ti recalled how he was met by a bat-pony before, and kept a wary eye out for him or any of his comrades. There was no sign of them, and he began to think that they had not kept their word to help with the minotaurs.
But, he could not have been more wrong.
Up in the sky, the one-winged captain ordered his company higher into the clouds.
The company knew this drill. They all did as ordered, but Blackheart kept her grip on her captain.
Once the others had all disappeared, Blackheart remained level as the captain scoped the landscape for the yuan-ti leader’s tent.
“There!” he called.
With a devious smirk, Blackheart released the captain and swooped upward out of sight.
The yuan-ti overlooking the battlefield from beyond the chief’s tent saw something come suddenly plummeting from the sky. Readying to take on whatever threat was coming, they watched as a one-winged griffin spiraled to the ground, and landed with a thud that shook the earth.
“Are you friend to yuan-ti?” one of the guards hissed, as he brandished his sword.
“You can only wish I were. Now, let me in to see your chief. Unless you want to see how unfriendly I can be,” the captain said.
“Unless you are friend to yuan-ti, you are enemy!!” the guard threatened.
“I’m not your enemy either. But, unless you want it so, I must insist you let me see your chief.”
Far from compliant, the two guards both readied to fight.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, the captain had hoped for such a thing. He gripped the hilt of his own blade and readied to attack.
“Hold!!” a voice sternly hissed.
The yuan-ti chief slithered out of his tent and shoved his own guards aside.
“He is the one the bat-pony said would come! Let him in, now!!”
Both guards were shoved to the ground by their chief, and the captain was admitted into the tent.
Inside the tent, four other yuan-ti were gathered around a strategy table. By the look of their uniforms, the captain guessed that they were lieutenants.
“So, this is the leader of bat-pony visitor,” one of the lieutenants said.
“I am. And I assure you that whatever embellishments Fang told you are completely true,” the captain said. “On to business: when exactly are you expecting the cows to arrive?”
“Today. They will be here by noon,” the chief grimly said.
“That doesn’t leave us much time,” the one-winged captain said.
“Enough to bring you up to speed of our plan,” another lieutenant said.
The captain merely huffed at te yuan-ti.
“You worry about your plan. I’ll be doing things as I see fit with my own company of soldiers,” the captain said.
The hours passed.
Silence permeated the camp.
The yuan-ti constantly inspected their armaments and artillery, keeping sure that everything was as it should be.
Among them, the one-winged captain sat idly sharpening his own massive blade. He knew that any moment the peace would end. It was only a matter of time.
A distant rumble rang to his ears. One so soft, it seemed only a stone rolling through the grass. But, soon the rumble grew to an unmistakable cacophony that would chill the spine of others.
The beat of war drums rang across the plains, sending all the birds and mice and other things living nearby to flee the scene.
With the sounds of the drums, the incredible crash of falling timber joined in.
Looking to the nearby glen of trees, the yuan-ti saw the treetops toppling to the ground. And with a flash of steel, the trees at the very front of the glen were felled with the single swing of many axes.
The minotaurs had arrived.
The captain smirked. The minotaurs were clearly confident they were going to win. Otherwise, they would not have announced themselves so brazenly.
The minotaurs were not through being so brazen, when all of a sudden a boulder flew from over the treetops.
Somewhere, a shout for cover sounded.
All yuan-ti scattered, as the boulder crashed to the ground, leaving a deep indent in the earth.
“Archers, ready to fire!” a lieutenant ordered.
The serpentine archers dipped their cloth-covered arrows into a vat of oil, ignited their arrows on a torch and took aim.
The marching minotaurs continued on, the shadow of another boulder flying over them once more. Nothing was going to stop their steady progress.
The closer they came to the yuan-ti camp, the more they noticed a strange smell. A familiar smell that they knew all too well after a successful campaign. The pungent smell of alcohol.
Ahead, a blazing line of orange shot from the ground and cut through the sky.
The minotaurs realized only too late they had stepped into a trap.
The fiery arrows peppered the ground, setting the grass ablaze.
The bellows of the bulls filled the air. Some succumbed to the fire, but many of the brothers in arms were only driven by the flames.
The first wave of attack charged through the fire, the blaze fueling the fury that drove them on. One particularly large minotaur charged with his horns flaming atop his head, ready to drive them into who or whatever was in his way.
“In spite of your best efforts, you only succeeded in making them mad,” the one-winged captain said to the yuan-ti chief, still sharpening his blade.
“Then you must do as you were hired!” the chief retorted.
The captain said nothing. But, with a slight turn of his wrist the broad side of his blade caught the sun, sending a glare of light into the sky.
From above, the clouds burst.
First came Fang, Rose in hoof pointed directly downward.
After him, the entire company of mercenaries followed, landing on the raging minotaurs like a hellish downpour.
“And now, the fun truly begins…” The captain said, as he brandished his massive blade and charged into battle.