Chương 49: Chapter 48: The Odds of Battle

Ren watched as his sister's face went pale, her eyes following every movement below with the awful concentration of a child who understood enough to know people could die but not enough to stop watching. Bringing her upstairs might have been a mistake. But it was too late now. Ren leaned down and squeezed her hand. She looked back at him before squeezing back. Another explosion cracked through the village. Ren turned toward the sound in time to see one of the larger goblins react before the charm detonated.

It raised an arm and turned its head, bracing before the flash reached it. The creature still staggered, but recovered faster than the others had earlier. Another goblin charged through the confusion with its club already swinging. The charms were helping, yet the goblins were learning what to expect from them too. Ren's fingers tightened around Tessa's. He hated being trapped in a baby's body. He could walk, speak, manipulate mana, and do things no infant should have been capable of.

Despite all of that, Elna still had to carry him from one window to another. If he had been older and strong enough to fight properly, he could have stood beside Bren and taken some of the danger himself. Perhaps even train enough to be able to take care of the goblins without worrying anybody else. Instead, he was here. Elna moved to the next window, and Ren leaned forward against her arm. If he was going to be stuck watching, he was going to remember everything he could. He started counting.

The village held roughly two hundred people, as far as Ren knew, but only a fraction were involved in the fighting. Children, women, elderly villagers, the injured, and anyone unable to defend themselves had been moved behind the line into the church. Ren focused on the people who remained outside. Around fifteen looked as though they had any real combat experience. He recognized a few guards among them, along with people who handled weapons comfortably enough that Ren could tell they had done this before.

Among them there were only three who handled bows with some obvious skill. Presumably village hunters. Ren checked again as Elna adjusted her position beside the window, but found nobody else using bows. Most of the others used whatever they could manage from behind the line. Stones flew often enough that Ren could track where groups of villagers had gathered to throw them, and Little Yara's charms appeared whenever a larger cluster of goblins pressed too hard.

Altogether, behind the experienced fighters stood perhaps another thirty able-bodied villagers, mostly men with a few women among them. Some moved with enough control that Ren suspected they had trained before. Others reminded him of Bren only days into his training, holding weapons with determination because the alternative was letting the goblins reach their homes and families. Ren kept trying to build the rest of the picture as Elna shifted from window to window.

He counted people, positions, weapons, groups, and the gaps between barricades. He tried to remember how quickly defenders moved when one section became threatened, but the battle refused to stay still long enough to make the work easy. People vanished behind roofs and walls, smoke obscured parts of the road, and goblins dropped, regrouped, disappeared into alleys, then emerged somewhere else before Ren could be certain whether he had already counted them. Every mistake felt expensive.

He corrected whenever he noticed one and kept going. [Skill Level Increased: Calculate Lv. 3 -> Lv. 4] Apparently desperately counting combatants through narrow church windows while his village was under attack counted as excellent educational material. The System had quite a morbid sense of humor. Ren did not laugh. As Elna crossed to the next window, Ren noticed that the defenders were not spread evenly. Hadrik appeared again near one threatened section, while Tovin held farther along the line.

Neither man chased every goblin that came near them. They moved only when something dangerous reached their part of the defense, dealt with it quickly, and returned before the next opening formed. Hadrik stepped into one gap, killed something Ren barely had time to identify, then pulled back instead of following the retreating goblins. Tovin did much the same farther down, even if a tad slower than the grizzled veteran.

Both of them wasted very little movement, yet every time the line around them started to bend, the invaders died before it could become a larger problem. Ren watched until a third person caught his attention. The old man looked ancient from this distance, with white hair and a posture that made him seem almost bent. Up until a goblin charged him. The man stepped sideways. That was all. The goblin rushed past him, and the old man turned with it, struck once, and dropped the creature before it could recover.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. Ren blinked.

"Who?" Elna followed his gaze.

"That's Old Mavren." Ren stared at him. That was Old Mavren? The candy man? Tessa brightened for the first time since they had come upstairs.

"He does that!" Ren looked at her, and she pointed through the window.

"When we play with him. If you catch him when he dodges, you get candy!" Ren remembered hearing something about that before. Back then, he had assumed it was simply an old man entertaining children. Apparently the old man entertaining children was also one of the strongest fighters in the village. Strangely enough, that made sense. Tessa kept watching as Mavren sidestepped another goblin.

"He never lets Niko catch him." Ren could believe that. From the windows, Hadrik, Tovin, and Mavren seemed to cover different parts of the defense without ever staying completely fixed in one place. Whenever one section started struggling, one of the three usually shifted close enough to give the other villagers room to recover. They could not reach everything in time, but they were keeping a lot of people from being overwhelmed. Ren committed that to memory. Then Elna moved again, and they found Bren again.

He was fighting near Tovin with two other villagers now. Ren leaned forward against Elna's arm. His father looked exhausted. The confidence Ren had seen during training had narrowed into sheer concentration, with Bren watching the people beside him and trying to match their movements while keeping his spear ready. A small goblin darted toward the line. Bren thrust and missed. But the man beside him caught it. Another goblin came almost immediately, and Bren adjusted in time to stop that one himself.

He pulled the spear back without looking around or celebrating, reset his stance, and waited for whatever came next. His arms were trembling badly enough for Ren to see it even from above. Still, Bren remained with the others, and none of the larger goblins were pressing his section yet. Ren let himself breathe again. Then he forced his attention back to the problem he had been trying to solve. How many goblins were actually attacking the village? How big of an invasion was it, really?

The answer changed every time Elna moved. Bodies already covered parts of the road and the spaces between barricades. Living goblins disappeared behind houses or crowded together until Ren could no longer separate one shape from another, while the increasing amounts of acrid smoke obscured others farther back.

He counted whatever groups became visible through each window, adjusted when he recognized the same creatures moving between positions, and tried to include the ones that had died before he began keeping track properly. The safest number he could reach for the smaller goblins was around sixty. There were almost certainly more. If he included those already dead, the ones hidden between buildings, and any still waiting beyond his sight, the total could easily reach eighty. Ren swallowed.

Eighty small goblins capable of reaching his family if the village line failed. The larger ones worried him even more. He had underestimated how many there were. The second wave had already brought a substantial number, and the third was adding more. Ren counted what he could see and added the groups he had already watched disappear into other parts of the village. Already dead goblins included, there had to be at least fifty of the larger ones.

Then Elna reached the eastern window once more, and Ren saw their leader. Even at a distance, it dwarfed the creatures around it. The other goblins crowded near without pressing too close, moving when it moved and stopping when it stopped. The hateful monster really stood out, even among his monstrous kin. His skin crawled. The System flashed at the edge of his vision. [Skill Level Increased: Calculate Lv. 4 -> Lv. 5] [Skill Level Increased: Memory Lv. 8 -> Lv. 9] Ren barely paid attention to it.

With numbers like these, calling the attack a raid no longer felt accurate. Between the smaller goblins, the larger brutes, and whatever else remained beyond his sight, the village was facing something closer to a small army. If they truly massed together, one good opening could put enough of them inside the defenses to tear everything apart. He shook the terrifying thought away, catching onto another number instead. The knights still had not arrived.

Two weeks had passed, and every time Elna's movement brought the road into view, Ren checked it again. There was still no sign of them. A crash tore through the fighting before he could dwell on it. Ren twisted toward the sound as Elna moved closer to the next window. Two barricades had failed almost together, one near Hadrik and another farther along the line. Hadrik reached his breach first.

A large goblin forced its way through, and Hadrik killed it before the two smaller creatures behind it could follow properly. The nearby defenders closed around the opening and stabilized that section. The second breach went worse. Two goblins pushed through before anyone reached them, and Ren's stomach tightened as the villagers scattered. One defender stumbled backward while another raised his spear too late. Then the people behind them reacted.

Stones flew into the opening, striking one goblin from the side, forcing it to turn, and a charm landed between the pair. The blast struck hard enough for Ren to feel the echo through the church floor. Both goblins staggered. The defenders rushed them immediately. One went down quickly, while the other pushed farther into the village before several people surrounded it and finally brought it down. Ren watched until it stopped moving.

The village was still holding, but the third wave was already changing the shape of the battle. Smoke covered more of the streets, broken barricades left openings where the defenders had once been able to stand and wait, and people were constantly shifting to meet whatever reached those gaps. The goblins were getting farther before they were stopped, and every success seemed to require more people and more effort than the one before it. The leader remained behind the others. Watching.

Ren disliked that far more than he would have liked seeing it charge blindly forward. That monstrous creature was just too clever. Another charm exploded somewhere below. The huge goblin flinched at the blast. A grim satisfaction pushed through Ren's anxiety. Little Yara's work could bother even that thing. He looked toward Elna and noticed that her hand had slipped into the basket. She was already holding the two charms his Master had given them. Ren stared at them.

If one of the nearby defenses failed or something reached the church, those two charms might buy the defenders the few seconds they needed. Another roar rose from outside, and Ren turned back toward the window. The village was still holding, even as the goblins kept learning. And up above, they had two chances to help keep it that way.