Marcus stepped out of the trees and stopped.
The village sat in a wide clearing about fifty meters ahead. Maybe thirty wooden huts clustered together, walls rough cut from dark timber, roofs packed with dried grass that had seen better days. Dirt paths ran between them in no particular order, the kind of layout that had grown without planning, each new hut added wherever there was space.
Under normal circumstances it might have looked peaceful.
Right now it looked like the inside of a nightmare.
People were everywhere, pulling weapons from racks nailed to walls, grabbing bows from barrels near doorways, shouting names and directions across the chaos. Some of them carried glowing wands that crackled faintly at the tips. Players, Marcus questioned. Mixed in with what looked like actual villagers who had never planned on fighting anything today.
Then he saw what they were fighting.
They poured in from the eastern side of the village in a loose wave, short and green skinned, maybe four feet tall each, with wide flat faces and yellow eyes that caught the light wrong. Their mouths were too wide for their heads and packed with teeth that overlapped each other at bad angles.
Crude weapons in their hands, chipped blades and jagged clubs, and they moved together the way water moved, filling every gap, flowing around obstacles, never quite stopping.
Marcus watched them for a moment.
"These aren't Velnias," he said quietly. They were nothing like the creatures he'd spent two years fighting. Those had been wrong in a fundamental way, things that felt like violations of natural law just by existing. These were just small and mean and numerous. "They don't even feel the same."
Some of them were already pushing toward the edge of the village where he was standing.
He looked at the chaos spreading through the dirt paths, the green health bars floating above the creatures' heads, the defenders going down faster than the gaps could be filled.
If I stay here doing nothing I'm going to be next.
He moved to a fallen defender near the nearest hut and crouched over the body. A spear lay in the dirt beside it, old wood with a crack running halfway up the shaft and a head that had been sharpened too many times and was now more of a suggestion than a point.
"Better than nothing".
He picked it up and moved into the fight.
A creature spotted him immediately and came in fast, weapon raised, teeth bared. Steeling he's resolve Marcus planted his feet the way two years of combat training had burned into him and drove the spear forward with everything this small body had.
The point hit the creature's chest and bounced clean off.
The impact traveled back up the shaft and knocked him off balance and he sat down hard in the dirt with the cracked spear in his hands and a goblin standing over him looking at him the way something looks at a mild inconvenience before it removes it.
"What are these things made of?".
The creature raised its clawed hand.
Clang!.
A blade came from nowhere and caught the strike and shoved it sideways with enough force that the creature stumbled. A girl stepped in front of Marcus and her sword was already moving on the return, smooth and practiced, and she took the creature's head off in one clean motion. Green blood hit the dirt and she was already scanning for the next one before the body finished falling.
She glanced back at him and Marcus got his first proper look at her.
Liz was around his age, maybe a year older. Dark curly hair pulled back but losing the fight, thick coils escaping around her face and neck like they refused to be managed. Warm brown skin, sharp features, the kind of face that made you forget what you were supposed to be doing.
Her outfit was doing a lot of work.
Dark leather hugged every part of her that it covered, which wasn't everything. The top cut across her chest in a way that left little to imagination, her figure full and curved in the places that counted, a chest that pressed firmly against the leather like the material had been fitted by someone with very specific priorities.
Her waist pulled in before her hips flared back out and the fighting trousers she wore sat low enough that the strip of skin between them and her top appeared and disappeared as she moved.
"You trying to get yourself killed?" She looked him over quickly. "You don't look like you're from around here."
"I just came across this village," Marcus said, getting back to his feet. "This was the welcome I got." He let out a slow breath. "Thanks for the save. I don't want to think about what happens next if you hadn't."
She almost smiled. "Stick close to me if you want to survive the next five minutes." She kicked a dead creature out of her path and moved left toward a group of defenders getting overwhelmed near a hut wall.
"My name's Liz."
"Marcus." He fell into step behind her, watching her work. Clean footwork, efficient cuts, no wasted movement. "Where I'm from women didn't fight. Looks like that's not a universal rule."
"Dunno if that's a compliment or not," she said, and cut down a goblin that had been about to stab a fallen archer without breaking her sentence.
Marcus stayed close and let her carry the fight. He wasn't happy about it. In his previous life he had stood at the front of every engagement and the idea of sheltering behind someone else let less a woman while they bled for the village was the kind of thing that would have eaten at him.
Lukas!, he's thought went haywire, watching another defender go down twenty meters away. You reduced me to this.
Now having the intellect of a teen he's instincts were dulled survival was top priority.