Smoke blackened the air.
"I still don't see why you had to get HIM involved." the gruff voice snarled.
The battlefield was littered with fires and fallen trees.
"This again, I can't believe you. I've already explained it. It was our masters' orders that he be a liaison between them, and that goes for us too. He must be the go between for us as well. One on your left." The woman's smooth voice explained.
The shriveled trees offered no cover and the fires and smoke threatened to choke everything.
"Still, you call me away for a whole year and leave that rat in charge. If a single stone from my castle is out of place I'll kill him." the gruff voice grumbled while cleaving the 'One on the left' in half. "Why didn't our masters just kill him when he spoke to them. He tricked them into his position and their power." he continued.
Their opponents lay on the ground lifeless. The battle had been waged for quite some time leading to much of the field being filled with bodies.
"He got less power from all of our masters combined than we did from each of them alone. He shouldn't be a problem to dispatch if needed." She calmly stated while drawing her bow to pierce through the skull of one of her foes and the one behind it. She lowered her bow and motioned that the next opponent was to be dispatched by her aide. "Though you are right it worries me that out of the four of us he is the only one to actually approach our masters."
Through the blackened sky not much was visible, just two masks. Glittering white despite the ash and soot that swirled around them.
"That's right, how is 'old whitey' doing?" he asked, while plunging his gauntlets into the heart of his opponent.
The two figures stood at the top of a small hill, a path worn from traffic into and out of the gate they were defending.
"Good, I guess. Something about tricking the people into believing he is a religious leader and summoning spirits to build chapels." the sweet voice recalled. She shot a bolt of light from her bow causing vines to spread through her opponents where she pierced the skin.
This path was the only access through the wall that the two warriors guarded. "Huh, sounds about right. Leave it to him to fight against minds instead of like a real man."
The man was short and hunched but had large muscles that contradicted his stature.
"Oh, really, fighting like a real man? How has that worked out for you in the past? How many got destroyed because of you?" she snarked while blowing a hole through the shield of the soldier charging at her.
The woman was tall and thin but moved fluidly and never wasted energy while attacking.
"Three, alright. But the fourth one worked and..." He paused, something had caught his attention. He jumped into the air and caught a boulder aimed at the wall that they were trying to defend. His gauntlets glowed a bright red as he flung the rock back at the catapult demolishing it and bowling over the soldiers in between. "But you called me away from the fifth one, and let him show up and take over."
The man's mask, while having no eye-holes, had pits where they would be and spines at the top for an intimidating presence.
"Sorry, I thought you would be happy."
The woman's mask, also without eyes was clean and elegant, smooth and symmetrical. At the back of the mask was a set of curved horns that held her long hair and kept it from her face.
"Happy, to see HIM!?" he looked quizzically at her while smashing two opponent's heads together and welding their helmets together.
The man wore regular clothes, for a goblin. His armor was a set of arm braces attached at the shoulders and connected to a pair of bladed gauntlets, all made of the same material that his mask was.
"No, not about that. About leaving that place where you have to tiptoe and be careful, to come here and let loose." she responded. The next arrow she launched grew in size so that the shaft of the arrow became as wide as a tree trunk by the time it barreled through a squad of knights.
She wore traditional elvish garb. It was a green dress with armor plating around the legs. She also carried a long bow nearly as tall as she was, crafted of the same material as her armor and mask.
"Let loose?" His gauntlets glowed fiery red. He scraped the dirt sending red veins through the ground at his opponents, melting the ground into magma, engulfing his enemies. "If that's the case then can't I,"
"I figured you wouldn't want this to be over so fast." she interrupted. "Not that you can't take out nearly as many as I can." She pierced five soldiers through the chest, taunting her ally.
"NEARLY!" He growled. He jumped into the air and fell back down gauntlets first into the ground. He vanished under the surface, tunneling.
She chuckled having seen this move before. She lowered her bow not wanting to be distracted for the oncoming fireworks.
Ginrokk had gotten past the outer lines and defenses and now he could see his target. He had seen her before,the elf girl, preaching in town about a better energy source, and she supplied it. Her energy source was pure mana in a condensed liquified form. It worked wonders, but she said to make more she would need space, a lot of space, the land currently behind her, behind that wall. She was given that land to create more of her wondrous elixir, but that wall was the problem. Sure she delivered on her promise, but once that wall went up there was trouble.
The space was cleared for her building projects but the wall went up first, she started buying land for more building space, and more walls. The ground around the walls began to dry up and die. The ground dying served two purposes: no one was able to climb the dead trees to see over her wall, and it allowed her to buy land at a cheaper price allowing her projects to expand.
Ginrokk dove to avoid an arrow of light and the vines that sprouted from its path.
She began asking for people to join her, help in her work of providing more elixir to the public. She told them the work would take a lot of their time, that they would live inside the wall. Few joined her at first but the quality did improve so more joined her and the quality improved further.
The people that joined her almost never returned to town, but when they did they were wearing a white mask and could not be identified. they stayed only long enough to pick up supplies and left again. When the families became frustrated with not being able to see their loved ones the elf girl decided that their families could move in with her workers. More people left town, more land was bought for working, and more walls were built.
Now the people she had hired, and their families, all wore the masks, all fought alongside her. Ginrokk had just fought against a swarm of masked people. He wondered how many he knew, used to know. Whoever was guarding her was the enemy now, he tried not to think about it as he slashed the neck of a masked enemy in front of him. Their movements were slow, not shambling zombie slow, just civilian slow. These people all lacked military training. The elf didn't want these people to win a war, or to make her elixir, she wanted them to slow down intruders. This was even more clear when he saw the elf shoot an arrow through five soldiers, and three of her own. What Ginrokk was intruding on he could only guess. The goblin the opponent had hired left her side, dug underground by the looks of it, was this a trap or a chance to strike?
Ginrokk heard a battle cry from behind him, his squad had seen the goblin leave her side and had decided this was the moment to charge. Ginrokk began to run towards his target when he tripped. A masked warrior that wasn't finished off was clinging to his heel. As he raised his arm to slash at the fiend a hand reached out and grabbed his. Another masked warrior tackled Ginrokk and brought him to the ground. More and more attackers gathered around while he saw a few others chase after his squad who were still charging at their target.
He regretted not being able to join in the fight against the woman who had done so much to destroy his home, but that thinking was cut short. At only a spear's throw away, the ground beneath his squad began to shift violently. The ground lurched upwards, heat increasing with every second, and began glowing a deep red. The earth exploded launching his squad along with magma and boulders high into the air. He tried to get into a covered position while still being pinned under the masked attackers.
The writhing above Ginrokk stopped as rocks and lava fell on the people that had pinned him, crushing and burning them. As Ginrokk pushed his way through the bodies piled on top of him, heaving them off to the side, he saw the destruction laid out in front of him. His squad was gone, buried beneath the now cooling rocks and ash. And he saw that if he was not covered by all of his attackers he would have surely fallen along with them. He looked around and saw that the large circle of death had decimated much of the surrounding area, a gaping hole in the ground still boiled with magma at its core. The dried dead trees had caught flame, threatening to block the sun with their smoke. Amongst the devastation something had caught his eye, a pristine white mask. With the dull red glow of the lava, the falling ash, and the smoke blackened sky, he almost couldn't see who it belonged to. He got a good look and realized that it was the goblin.
The red beast that had allied himself with the elf girl stood on a small rock at the center of the lava pit. He had caused this destruction, he has created this death. Ginrokk had seen geomancing before, the ability to move rocks and shape stone with magic, but nothing this violent. The creation of a volcano had to take a lot of power and this short, muscular red-skinned thing had done it.
Ginrokk surveyed the battlefield; the goblin, the elf, and himself were the only ones nearby. Ginrokk knew the next squad would be here in just a second. He checked the ground with his boot, testing its heat. He found that it had cooled enough for him to walk on.
He charged at his target, hearing footsteps behind him reassured Ginrokk that the next squad had arrived to offer assistance. The goblin had seen that not all of the opposition had been cleared out by his attack and ran to cut them off, but stopped suddenly. Ginrokk looked and saw the elf girl hold up her hand in a motion to stop her aide. The goblin backed down and allowed Ginrokk and his company to pass. The elf made another motion with her hand, but it was too late, thought Ginrokk. Another few seconds and he would have his blade at her throat, or so he thought.
The wall behind the elf, the wall she had been defending for the past couple of days, crumbled. The soldiers charging at her looked on in awe as not only did the wall shatter but so did the air. She had cast an illusion over the area behind the wall so no one who looked over the wall could see anything. Now, however, that illusion was gone and everyone could see what laid behind it.
Large floating ruins dotted the sky behind the walls. Ginrokk couldn't be sure what they were for but he was sure that it wasn't good. On the ground was something else entirely, hounds and behemoths all wearing white masks filled the field behind her, they trampled across the ground past the elf and towards Ginrokk and his men. Ginrokk was told that this was a battle to take back their land and exile the elf that had destroyed so much of his home, he was wrong, this had been a battle for survival the whole time. He had lost.