Chapter 8 – Part 13

Delegado sat atop of his horse, firing his longbow at the fleeing Carrion Tribesmen who weren’t able to get out of range quickly enough. He’d come on the scene as Orphan was slamming the hag’s head into a boulder that jutted out of the ground. Her infernal strength has made her almost as good of a wrestler as the warforged, and her sharp teeth had done a number on Orphan’s neck and sides almost as fast as he had damaged her, even with that resistance to weapon damage that all the fiends had. Almost, almost, and almost added up to a dead hag and a living, if seriously damaged, warforged.

Foallus using the last bits of his magical strength to repair Orphan during the fight hadn’t hurt either.

“Hey hero, I’m running out of arrows, here,” Delegado chuckled. “You want to hunt some of these guys down?”

“I’m not a hero,” Orphan said quietly. The battered and gouged warforged was helping the survivors and the other Tharashk servants who had arrived on horseback shortly after Delegado clean things up. This generally meant searching the bodies of their slain enemies and putting their corpses in a pile to be burnt. Despite Orphan’s condition, he bore the brunt of this duty for obvious reasons.

“We say you are hero, Dancing Orphan!” called out a beefy half-orc who was using a silvered saw to remove the dead hag’s head.

“Don’t argue with orcs, Orphan, you could lose an arm,” chuckled Delegado. He sent another arrow into the back of a fleeing Carrion Tribesman.

“I couldn’t get here faster, Delegado,” Orphan said.

“No,” Foallus said, hobbling over. Aside from various minor bruises and cuts, the human had lost a couple of teeth, and his left arm was broken in two places. He’d barely been breathing when the druid had showed up and put some magical healing energy into rebuilding Foallus’ lungs and ribcage. “You couldn’t. So stop blaming yourself. You’ve slain our greatest opponent here.” The sorcerer looked at Delegado, then a the warforged. “Word is that Del is going to Yrlag. I’m guessing that you two will want to stay together, but if you’re not, or you swing by again, we could use you here. Good pay.”

“I go where Delegado goes,” Orphan said.

“Figured I’d ask, no offense to either of you,” Foallus said.

“None taken,” Delegado grinned. “Where do you sleep again?” To his credit, the human sorcerer laughed.

The Tharashk people hurried in their task. It would be dark soon, and it was cold enough as it was when the sun was out.