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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lars Frehse" data-source="post: 372182" data-attributes="member: 1674">A new hope- part 3 of 5His friends were stunned. They would have been ready to deal with any pirates if they would have run into them, but undead soldiers who were acting like a troop of pioneers, now that was something completely different.Jan was agitated:” What are we waiting for then? We should attack these abberations right now!”“Are you insane? There are a dozen of them, and we don’t know anything about their strength! Attacking them could turn out to be suicide!”, Trepat exclaimed.The heroes debated heatedly under their breath whether to attack the undead or not, until Donnangar interrupted them, his deep and calm, yet strong voice silencing them for the moment:” I think the elf is right. It is unwise to attack an enemy about which you know nothing. You see, right now, we are at an advantage: We know they exist, but they don’t know we do.“So far, we don’t even know anything about their numbers or their organization, if there is any. But from what you describe, the ones you saw behave like pioneers. Were they alive, this would mean that they would merely be specialists within a much larger organization. In any case, we should watch them, and maybe find a better opportunity to destroy them this way.“Ultimately, though, the mission Gortak assigned to us is more important than ridding an uninhabitated part of the world of undead. If possible, I would like to make sure we get the cure and get it back to my people. Everything else is secondary to that.”.Even Jan aknowledged that the orc was right, and they agreed that he had a good point. They left the path for good now and went deeper into the wood, where they settled down for the night. Time went by without much happening, until around midnight, when Trepat and Donnangar were on watch, they saw torchlight on the path.Trepat sneaked up back to the path, and now he saw more of the undead himself. There was a nightpatrol of what appeared to be six regular soldiers and one officer. Two of the soldiers were carrying torches and they were marching with the routine of men who were very familiar with their surrounding terrain. He pressed his body low to the ground, and when he was sure that he was out of earshot, he crawled back to the camp.On the next morning, they walked southwards through the woods. They found several clearings which were in different states of regrowing. There was the new clearing, where Niklas had seen the undead working the other day but also other ones where no trees had been chopped in years. It appeared that the soldiers had already spent at least decades on the island, carefully using it’s resources.They reached the edge of the forest around noon. Peeking out of it, they saw a plain and about two miles away were the remnants of Hor’Kung. The once proud city that had been a home for a hundredthousand orcs once, was now nothing more than a gian field of rubble, with vines and other plants growing over it’s tumbled stones. From their vantage point, the heroes also saw two wooden forts with marble foundation just outside of the city-ruins, about three miles from each other.All in all it looked, as if the plain was not grown with trees by now, because the vegetation was burned down every few years- the trees behind which they were hiding were slightly charred, and the earth was definetly mixed with ashes.Donanngar, however, didn’t pay heed to those details at the moment. He was speechless and stared at the ruins. Ever since he had heard the legends of the old Orcish culture for the first time when he was a kid, he had dismissed them as nice legends without much truth in it. After all, raiding and herding was all there was to an Orc’s life, while the nicer aspects of it, like a hearth and a solid home were reserved to the winners of the divine war: humans and their allies.Here, however, he saw the proof that Orcs were in fact capable of much more. While the adventurers saw nothing but rubble, Donanngar was able to imagine what this city must have looked like once... Were it still standing, it would be equal to Mithril in both size and splendour…Donnangar was unaware of his surroundings as Trepat shook his shoulders:” Donnangar, you see that there?”He followed the elf’s pointed finger and saw a patrol in the plain. After a while, he saw a second one.“It would be best if we go at night, I think” Niklas said,”After all, they are human corpses, and they were carrying torches. So it is likely that their eyes are not any better at night than Jan’s or mine.”Ben nodded in agreement:” Makes sense.”The adventurers waited at the edge of the forest until nightfall, and once the sun’s last afterglow had vanished, they walked out on the plain, slowly calculating the movements of the two patrols that they could see. When the patrols were the farest from each other, they fell into a slow run, covering the two miles between the wood and the ruins with their bodies bent forward in order to be less visible.Fivehundredyards before they reached the ruins, however, one of the patrols sounded a horn. The adventurers saw the torches of the two patrols bopping up and down- clearly they were now running towards them. Now, the heroes ran as fast as they could in the dark towards the ruins, which were about as far from them as the patrols.As they reached them, they climbed over the rubble of the former city walls, until they found some roads which were still intact enough to run on them, and for an hour, they zig-zagged into the city until they found the ruin of an old house into which they crawled and hid for the night. Outside, every now and then, they could hear several distinct horn signals echoing through the ruined streets.The undead soldiers had sent several patrols into the city, searching for them.</blockquote>

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