Adeen woke up suddenly. She calmed her breaths, trying to remember her dream or to figure out what noise had waked her. Then, she heard a bubbling yet horrifying burst of laughter. It sounded familiar, which made her even more uneasy. Was it...? Adeen creeped out from the bedding, carefully passing a sleeping Violet, and stepped carefully in the direction of the noises, swiftly grabbing her toolbag as she did so. She glimpsed firelight through the leaves, and slipped up a tree with low-hanging branches.
It felt strange to be a dozen feet in the air, she mused, shifting carefully to a closer tree. Glimpsing a sight of gray, hefty humanoids in a clearing, she was glad to be up a tree. Sneaking around in trees would be stranger for an Orc, who would be much heavier. She edged closer.
Adeen surveyed the scene with growing horror. A woman was strung over an enormous fire, seemingly paralyzed with fear. The fire was burning her alive and even from the tops of the trees, Adeen could smell her burning flesh. A group of Orcs sat around her. From this vantage point, she could only see four Orcs, but there could be more in the shadows around the fire. She now understood why the sound was familiar. Adeen had heard Violet speak the language when they were children. She still cursed in the language.
The four sat in a circle around the fire, speaking in their rough language. They grunted occasionally and pointed at the slowly roasting woman. Adeen could hear some Speirman thrown in, and strained to listen. Something about several human men and a shed? Was it an Orc joke or something that had happened? No, something something sorcerer? Prison? Or was that poison... Adeen wished Violet had taught her the language.
The woman looked close to death, the suffocating smell of burning flesh getting worse every minute. Adeen decided that she had to act now. She could not wake up Violet for fear the woman would die. She reached into her tool bag and pulled out a hammer. Adeen contemplated the hammer. Rubbed her thumb over a scuff on the handle- remembered that had happened when she tossed a bag if tools out the window by accident several years back. Without a second thought, Adeen hurled it through the air and landed a solid blow to the Orc. She winced as he went down.
She hadn't expected to hit anything.
Her first kill.
The sound of the hammer's dull thump and click on bone resonated in her head as the hammer went pierced the eye socket. As the orc's eyes drooped closed, the wide gray discs reminded her too much of her sister. Another shudder was in order.
Strangely, the other Orcs seemed to not have noticed that one of their own had gone down. They continued to talk casually in their strange grunting way. Although a bit alarmed, they didn't seem to realize he was dead and not abruptly napping, despite the liquified eyeball running down his chin, aqueous humor dripping into his shrivelled ears.
Adeen took aim once again and knocked another Orc (TO THE AFTERLIFE AND BACK OH MY GOSH HE'S SO DEAD, SO DEATH THE HAMMER'S SPINES ARE IN HIS SKULL) unconscious. Unfortunately for her, this one was in the middle of a sentence to the others immediately got up, roaring and trying to find the source of the flying death-weapon. A fifth orc came running out of the woods shouting and grunting. She was older, larger and uglier than the rest.
At least they had a sense of camaraderie, right? She pulled out another hammer and rustled around in her bag. She felt nine nice, sharp hammers left. Sounded about right, she owned twelve hammers and had brought them all. Pretty pointy, those hammers.
Adeen pulled out another hammer with her other hand. She hurled them both. Thunk...thunk. Each hammer solidly buried themselves in between two grey eyes. Now she had eight left. Both throws thudded against a meaty head and punctured the tough grayed skin.
Another hammer ready to be tossed, this one much heavier than the others. Adeen spinned it around in her hand. Adeen tried to ignore the orcs littering the ground like prey unceremoniously dumped on her workshop table. Johnathan never understood that blood actually stains. Like seriously Johnathan, you are a hunter, for Huevo's sake. Violet felt a wave of sadness hit her like a tsunami. She took a deep breath to focus herself and aimed for the next Orc, her hand shaking slightly.
The orc she was aiming for made eye contact. With a small intake of breath, Adeen flung the hammer. Had it seen her? It had seen her. It dodged her hammer and came crashing through the trees towards the one she was in. Adeen's beloved sturdy hammer skidded in the dirt and into the campfire. She hoped it was still salvageable.
Adeen drew out two smaller hammers speedily to make up for lost time, sending them spinning towards the orc's eyes. He shook his head to make them miss. One clipped the orc's head and the other hit the forehead between the eyes. He stumbled and fell, but Adeen couldn't tell if he was dead. The other downed orcs seemed to be twitching longer than they should have been, and one was trying to get back up.
Adeen couldn't focus on them because the largest orc had followed the gaze of the one Adeen had just downed and was barrelling inexorably toward Adeen. Maybe she had seen the big hammer. Adeen knew this orc lady was unstoppable because Adeen tried. Adeen tried A Lot. Adeen tried three whole times and the hammers were just sticking out of this crazy lady's skin like unnatural antlers.
The orc woman roared- or bellowed, Adeen couldn't be sure which- and Adeen's shaking hands removed the final hammer from the bag, the one she didn't want to use a few minutes ago when she had a choice. Nothing special. She just polished it more recently than the others and didn't want to get it all gorey. Adeen closed her eyes and flung it with all her might into the orc woman's gaping maw. Adeen threw it so heavily she swayed on the branch afterward, almost losing her balance. She kept her eyes shut. Adeen never heard of any gnome protection gods, being raised away from and abandoned by her real family, but she prayed to any listening that the orc was dead. Also, she sent a prayer to Huevo for good measure.
Nope. The tree started trembling harder than Adeen. The orc lady shook the trunk vigorously enough to make Adeen slip and fall down a couple branches, getting caught in a matted mass of twigs, banging her head on a branch as she fell. The cluster saved her life, Adeen was too numb and shaky to grab onto the tree on her own. The Orc woman looked up in pure hatred. In that moment, Adeen saw the similarities in this woman Orc to Violet. It was startling. The shape of the large eyes and crumpled ears. Their eyes were the same shade of grey. This was self defense right? Adeen was only protecting herself.
"Did I just take on five orcs?" Adeen asked herself aloud in disbelief, "I just took on five orcs." She leaned back against the tree. A lot more than you would expect from a domestic little gnome-girl. Johnathan's fault. He used to underestimate her so much.
The orc-woman was going to kill her. She had no weapons, no tricks up her sleeves that she hadn't already used. She had nowhere to hide and nowhere to flee. No one could save her, like a damsel in distress. Violet was asleep- and she slept like the dead- and it's not like this area of the jungle was teeming with intelligent life. Adeen closed her eyes, thinking of Johnathan, Father, and Violet and the family they once were before Violet disappeared. She wished that she had left with Violet when she had the chance. She wanted to follow her sister on all of her wild adventures. A shot of indignation suddenly made Adeen change her mind. She couldn't die like this, Violet wouldn't let herself die like this either. It was embarrassing to be killed from an orc, they were so stupid (no offense to Violet). She took one glance in her tool bag and knew what she had to do. She was going to fight to get out of here. Alive.
The orc woman growled. She didn't seem to be in the talking mood, not after Adeen killed her comrades. Actually, that hammer in her mouth probably hurt a lot. The lady started to claw twigs from the bottom of the leafy clump, the work passing quickly with her strong, talon-like nails. Adeen flicked the bag open again. She didn't have any hammers left, but if those were the only tools she had, she couldn't call herself a tinker.
The orc woman turned to spit dark blood and clawed at the hammer in the roof of her mouth, confident that Adeen's small tired form was not going anywhere soon. Not a bad assumption. Adeen quietly retrieved two screwdrivers, one long and daggerlike, and the other quite heavy. Turning the cold, slick metal over in her hands, Adeen squinted at the lady's crumpled ear, wondering if she should aim for the jugular through her neck or the brain through the ear canal. Then, realizing this was a very cold thought to have about someone's mother, she immediately stopped. Before she could decide, Adeen saw Violet on the other side of the orc, looking small and young compared to these hulking monsters. Adeen readied her screwdrivers, one in each hand.
Eye contact. A nod. Violet's look told Adeen that she also saw similarities in the orc's faceknew who the Orc was, but she had to save her sister. The woman stretched up to claw at the leaves again. Her blood was dripping out of her mouth again, and Adeen doubted this orc would survive. She seemed to know this as well. She roared angrily up at Adeen. A blink of light, and a horrible revelation. The orc lady shot up in the air. Adeen was ready, stabbing downward with both hands. The chunky screwdriver punctured and bounced off the skull, but the slimmer screwdriver slipped through to the brain. With one last horrible gurgling, choking noise, Violet's relative crashed into the ground. They didn't even know her name.