The defenders held. Barely and slowly and at significant cost but they held, and ten minutes later the last creature dropped and the village went from screaming to the particular silence that followed something terrible ending.
Then someone started cheering and it spread and within seconds half the survivors were celebrating like they'd won a war.
Marcus sat on a wooden crate and looked at the bodies in the dirt and felt nothing that resembled celebration. "Only God knows which afterlife I would have ended up in next",, he thought, looking at the broken spear still in his hand. Around him people were hugging each other, slapping backs, laughing the loud relieved laughter of people who had genuinely not expected to be alive five minutes ago. Someone was already passing around a bottle of something that smelled strong enough to clean wounds with.
Marcus watched all of it with the same flat expression he'd worn through the entire fight.
He had done nothing. Contributed nothing. Stood in the middle of a battle with a broken spear and gotten saved by a girl who hadn't even asked his name before stepping in front of a claw that was meant for his face.
Liz walked over wiping her blade on a strip of cloth. She looked at him with the slight tilt of someone trying to figure out what category a person belonged in.
"What's your class?"
"Summoner," Marcus shrugs. The word felt strange in his mouth, borrowed from a system he didn't fully understand yet.
Something shifted in her expression. Mild interest.
"Haven't seen many of those. After this I can introduce you to a few, help you get your footing." She sheathed her sword. "Everyone starts from nothing. Don't beat yourself up about today. Come on, let's get inside. I'll explain how things works here and find you something to wear that isn't made from tarred leather ."
RAWRRR!.
The sound came from the forest and it was not the sound the goblins had made.
It was deeper. Heavier. The kind of sound that travelled through the ground before it reached your ears and hit something older than thought in the people who heard it.
Everyone stopped.
Four shapes emerged from the tree line and the scale of them took a moment to process.
Eight feet tall each, maybe more. Green skin stretched over muscle that had no business existing at that density, thick enough that it changed the shape of the body underneath it.
Crude armor across their chests hammered from scavenged metal, dented and scratched and clearly functional. A tree trunk in one of their hands, stripped of branches, used as a club the way a person might use a walking stick. Axes in the hands of two more. A chain weapon in the fourth's fist that dragged along the ground and left a furrow in the dirt.
Then the fifth stepped out.
Taller than the others by a full head, broader across the shoulders than two men standing side by side. His body was covered in scars layered over each other the way experienced soldiers collected them, each one a story, the collection of them a statement.
He wore actual armor, not crude metal but real pieces, a breastplate, pauldrons, greaves, all salvaged from different sources and fitted together into something functional and deliberately intimidating. A massive sword rested on his shoulder like it weighed nothing.
His eyes moved across the village with the slow patience of something that had never once in its life needed to rush.
"You pathetic worms." His voice was rough and clear and completely unbothered. "You refused to surrender this village and serve me like the peasants you are. Seems I've been too kind, sending only my babies to soften you up."
"Babies?!" someone shouted from somewhere in the crowd, looking at the goblin corpses scattered across every path. "Those were babies?!"
"Kill them all," the leader said. The same tone you'd use to order food. "Leave nothing standing."
The four massive creatures charged.
The village threw everything it had. Fire from the mages, arrows from every bow still functional, swords from every fighter still upright. The attacks landed and did nothing. Fire splashed off green skin like water off stone. Arrows bounced from the crude armor or snapped against thick hide. Swords drew shallow cuts that closed before they stopped bleeding.
Then the creatures hit the defenders and the fighting stopped being fighting.
The first one grabbed a man by the skull and bit down. The second swung its club and three people went airborne and landed wrong. The third swept its arm across a line of archers and cleared them like a man clearing a table. The fourth drove through the center of whatever formation the defenders had managed to form and the formation became individuals and the individuals started running.
"Run!"
"We can't stop them!"
"Someone help us!"
Panic does more damage than the thing causing it. People who would have held their ground dissolved and the creatures moved through the gaps they left with the comfortable efficiency of things that had done this before.
"Stay back!" Liz was already moving, sword out, charging the nearest creature with the absolute commitment of someone who knew the odds and had decided they didn't matter.
It backhanded her without looking.
She hit the hut wall hard enough to crack the timber and dropped. The wood splintered around her and she lay in it and didn't move.
Someone was crying behind Marcus. "We're dead. We're all dead."
Marcus stood slowly.
Around him what was left of the village was dissolving into chaos. The creatures moved through it like they owned it, which at this point they essentially did. His face showed nothing. No fear, no panic, no horror at the blood soaking into the dirt around him.
Just cold thought moving through a very simple problem.
If the power the system gave me is real then right now would be an excellent time for it to prove that.
One of the creatures found him in the chaos. A big one, carrying a club the size of a young tree, grinning with too many teeth, walking toward him with the unhurried certainty of something that had already decided how this ended.
Marcus felt something shift.
Not in the world. In him.
His hands moved before he decided to move them, coming together in a gesture that felt like it had been waiting his entire life to be made. His mouth opened and the words that came out weren't words he'd learned or chosen. They came from somewhere underneath language, older than vocabulary, the kind of words that existed before people had names for things.
"Hear me, betrayed one. I call upon your rage. I offer you vengeance. Answer me." He spoke this word like he has been on rehearsals for this moment.
Swish!
The creature's head left its body.
Clean and instantaneous, before the echo of his words had finished dying in the air. The body stood for one impossible second with the club still raised and the threat still on its face and then it dropped and the head hit the dirt separately and rolled twice and stopped.