>>5318724Your wounded pride gets the better of you.
“Sssilence yoursseelf, Ignorant One! I am NO kobold!”
“Then… What are you?” he asks.
“What ELSSSE iss being ssaid of thiss place?” you ask, ignoring his question to ask another of your own.
“Just that the kobolds—and whatever YOU are, I guess—are in need of putting down, and are mustering a small army. That and the dwarves here…”
He goes quiet, but a pointed look and a tapping of the blade on the side of the wheelbarrow gets him talking again.
“…That the dwarves are refusing to ask for aid, even though they need it, because they don’t want the humans down below in Redwell to use it as an excuse to come up this way to ‘help’, then renegotiate their mining contracts as ‘payment for assisting’. I guess the greedy bastards found SOMETHING they like up here, enough to risk dealing with the likes of YOU alone.”
You can think of nothing else to ask, and so you order your prisoner re-gagged and return to the head of your procession to ponder what you have learned.
Eventually, as the sun rises bloody red, you draw near to your ancestor’s ruins once more. The passage to the kobolds’ mountain-home grows too narrow, precarious, and uneven to bring the wheelbarrows and carts you have been using to move your slaves and loot. Luckily, you are able to signal a kobold lookout, hidden amongst the spikes and spires of the Bloodrise where you know to look for him. Not long after, several kobolds descend to meet you, with the Bastard towering in their midst. The half-elf’s eyes go wide when he sees that there are yet more of you ‘not-kobolds’ here.
“Here,” you say when the bastard is close enough, and hand him the berserker’s maul. “I have noticed you enjoy your weapons with a great deal more heft. This should suffice.”
He takes it, bowing slightly in thanks, and then still more in surprise at the weight. He takes a few steps back, gives it a few swings, and looks back to you with redoubled appreciation.
“Thank you, Superior One,” he says.
“Use it well,” you say. “And now, report.”
It seems that of the three scouting parties—the Infiltrators down in this ‘Redwell’ place, and the Thief and Cartographer’s mission to spy upon the dwarves deeper in the mountains being the other two—you are the first to return. Everything has been well here, though the kobolds were apparently quite agitated last night.
“We saw a bright red light, down at the village,” the bastard says, “as if you had burned the entire place in a great fire.”
“I did,” you confirm.
“…Ah.”
