A Tale of Grudges and Struggles in the Deeps 1
Joseph grunted as his pick axe buried itself into the flesh of the jumping and bellowing abomination that he came to know as a squig, the damned thing taking way too long to die, considering that he was pretty sure a foots worth of steel had lodged itself into it's brain.
Not that it was his chief concern, no, that was the gobo which rode on top of the unreasonably huge thing, squabbling and squeaking about how 'e killed bita!' Considering it was big enough to fit most of his waist into its maw, it probably had been a point of pride for the considerably smaller green bastard.
For the second time in under a minute, the steel armor, immaculately smelted by a dwarfen master, saved his life as the crude stone knife of the greenskin shattered on it, the thing coated in shit and piss, not to mention multiple other poisons, no doubt.
Johan had mentioned something along the lines that the gobbos of the drakwald liked to dunk their weapons into spider poison and mushrooms, making them extra lethal.
Morr rest his soul.
Letting go of the pick axe with the one arm that was not currently in the death grip of a ball of teeth, he seized the goblin by it's shoulder before it could think to maybe go for his eyes.
Joseph grabbed the thrashing goblin, struggling to hold the thing's arm to the side, keeping a filthy dagger from stabbing him. It snarled, snapping at his helmeted face, darting to try biting his arm. Its mouth was as disgusting as its weapon, maybe worse.
Growling back, Joseph swung his head against the goblin, finally shutting the damn thing up. It was harder than he thought, he felt his skull rattle in his helmet. But it lurched back, looking dazed. He swung his head again, hearing a wet crack and a splash of hot blood on his chest, and again, and again…
When it was finally still he let go of the goblin, heaving and trying to keep his headache in check. The goblin's face was a bloody mush pile, one of it's eyes having burst and an imprint of his helmet where it's nose had been once. To be honest, it looked more like a stew than a living being. A disgusting sight, not that it bothered him all that much.
Blood and gore never had.
He still was stuck with 100 pounds of squig around his waist. For a moment he was resigned to having to carve himself free of it with nothing but his dagger, when something to his left struck the dead monster in the side with such force that it's nerves still managed to shudder, the thing's grip at last slackening and sliding down off him.
This battle began as a chaotic melee and had only gotten worse. Joseph took this job for the promise of a fat payment, not to be stuck in the depths of Karaz-a-Karak with a ton of fellow humans and all too few dwarfs, fighting goblins swarming in the tunnels.
In the dark.
Torches were extinguished in the opening attack, the more esoteric lights dwarfs used -and had never once deigned to explain how they worked to the 'umgi helpers'- followed soon after. A number of miners who spent time in the militias hastily organized the men, so they had a semblance of organization, but it was a mess by any reasonable metric.
Not that Goric, the dwarf who had saved him a significant amount of nuisance, seemed to mind.
Longbeards were grouchy old farts who complained like old men, that was something that just about anyone in the unit had noticed. What Joseph wasn't prepared for was the sight of a dwarf who was practically a square, his broad shoulders and thick gut almost matching his short stature, his thick beard heavily embroidered almost like a dame's, except his arms were thick with muscle. He was built more like a midget ogre than a dwarf, especially since dwarfs were already stronger than they seemed.
Not that this was stopping this particular longbeard from tuning in a happy whistle as he wretched his ax, a huge thing longer than he was tall and an ax head that could split his head like a rotten fruit and still only be halfway imbedded, out of the now super dead squig, a casual flick of his wrist almost bisecting the thing.
Most dwarfs, not just the longbeards, were incredibly stoic and serious, especially as of late.
Goric? Goric wasn't.
The dwarf was grinning, laughing, as if he was in a tavern winning some game while gulping down beer and not in a life or death situation.
Then again, beholding the small mountain of dead goblins and squigs beside him, the threat might not be quite as serious to him than it was to Joseph.
"Are ya quite done resting around, manling? There is ax work that needs doing!" He laughed again in such an uproariously loud manner that another flash of pain burned through his still rattling head, making him blink a couple times in annoyance.
He knew quite a number of people, who, upon cracking, were reducing to laughing and gibbering messes, howling about everything and anything, but their cackles always had something unhinged to them. A hint of desperation, an undertone of Sorrow.
Goric Braveheart, as the longbeard was called, didn't have that, on the contrary.
The rotund Dwarf sounded genuinely happy about the current circumstances.
Joseph Baumann, commonly referred to as Sepp by his friends and family, couldn't quite decide what was more disturbing as he pulled his war pick out of the squigs brain.
They had been on a culling mission, when the slaughter of the latest night goblin patrol they had come across had unexpectedly drawn the attention of a far large group of goblins, the little green bastards boiling out of dozens of holes and sideways in their hundreds and hundreds, accompanied by even more squigs.
The sheer terror and surprise of such a storm would have overwhelmed many different troops of humans, the inherent claustrophobia of tunnel fighting, mixed with the terror of a thousand screaming and shitting monsters?
Many people would have, at least subconsciously, trembled. Found that their fingers holding on their pikes and swords wasn't as tight as they thought they were, their nerves just a bit thin.
But they weren't some peasants, drafted into the army or naive city fools who joined up to impress some girl with fat tits or their father.
Usually when Ulric's hounds fought, there was plenty of bellowing and screaming of their own. Attempts to imitate the mighty wolfs howl.
The veterans of the scouring of Undermiddenheim, the guards who had kept it clean of filth for decades, were utterly and completely silent as they, as one, moved into formation.
With the reflexes and instincts that could only come from the experience of a thousand battles and ambushes they themselves had suffered in the deeps, the front ranks stepped back, their hammers and war picks descending as one upon the front ranks of the mostly unarmored goblins, eviscerating dozens with will placed blows all the while trusting on the steadfastness of their thick, dwarfen forgen armor to keep them safe.
That armor did little to save those unfortunate few that stumbled or slid upon a lose rock or a dead body, their forms swarmed by cackling monsters as knifes slid through eye slides and vulnerable armpits.
That would have likely been the fate of most of the front ranks if not for the fact that the second the ambush had began, the back and middle rank hand fallen to their knees and raised what had been specifically brought for such an occassion.
Well, to be more specific, they usually had them to stop a flood of hundreds of skaven slaves and rathounds, but the tactic was translated to greenskins easily enough.
At least they weren't coated in poison gas this time.
More than two-hundred pikes shot out between the gaps of the retreating men as well as over their heads and shoulders, stabbing and hacking down onto the advancing horde, transforming what had only seconds before been a formation in collapse into a hedgedog of pikes, with the men at the very front swinging their shorter weapons to crush and smash all the various greenskins who attempted to tried to squeeze themselves between their many impaled brethren to somehow break it up, their eyes glowing with fanatic green fervor, showing none of the panic that such a thing would have usually caused amongst them.
The dwarfs reacted even faster than them, the short folk discarding their automatic crossbows they had used earlier to silently dispatch the smaller patrols they had come across, instead picking up their strangely boxy hand guns, called thunderers as Goric had informed him with chagrin at one point, while hurrying in formation besides the hedgehog of Ulric's champions.
A younger, stupider, Joseph would have dissaproved of the usage of such weapons. This Joseph, older, far more scared and filled with 1000 and 1 painful experiences simply moved in with them, his pickaxe whirling back and forth in tandem with then the handfuls of other dwarfs and white wolves who weren't already fighting or preparing a murderous firing line.
It was less to really kill goblins but more to be an obstacle for those that were sallying past the main group of his comrades and towards the thunderers, who noticed them with a single harsh command of their readiness.
The helmet Joseph wore was a thick thing, covering all but his eyes, a gambeson patting and chain armor below it even then. It was more armor than an Ulrican should wear, but it was thick enough to block even direct impacts of jezzails and that mattered more to him. A side benefit of an adequate amount of hearing protection was a nice bonus too.
Yet, he still went deaf for a moment when more than one hundred thunderers fired the literal second of him setting aside, the act mirrored by the firing ranks to the wolves left, the noise of this many guns firing within the constraints of a tunnel sounding more like cannon fire than anything else.
The oppressive darkness of said tunnel was too much for even his trained eyes to make up for the sheer carnage that was unleashed, but the noise of hundreds and hundreds of gobbos being punctured by over two hundred bullets coming their direction was enough. Fired on this short a distance, combined with the relatively humble mass of the greenskins before them, many likely punched through multiple of the bastards before stopping.
As were the infuriated roars coming from dozens and dozens of monstrous throats and the heavy stomping feet charging towards them, each loud enough to be audible even for his ears.
Without even so much as a flinch, he, and every single one of his companions who was not literally busy holding a pike at the moment, reached for their belts.
Joseph had to grimace at the biting stench of alcohol filling his nose, the middenlander barely suppressing his disgust for beer. Why one would ever want to drink something that tasted so horrendous and inhibited one's senses, he didn't know.
But he would be a fool to say it didn't have its uses.
There were greater spectacles, but he could still appreciate the inferno that over a hundred Hohenzollern Cocktails, thrown with all the precision and strength of men who'd been fighting underground for decades, was plenty effective in itself.
The sudden fire exposed a small tribes worth of trolls, some twenty to thirty changing forward, coated in goblin pieces and slime, their own bodies covered in small holes like pockmarks, right before the onslaught of Hohenzollern Cocktails turned the lot of them into screaming and hollering torches, stomping and stumbling into the reforming ranks of goblins, with some even falling to the ground and rolling of scores of their 'allies.'
"Ulric!" An especially tall warrior between them, Siegfried stepped in front of the formation, his hammer lighting up in an ice cold blue flame, a miracle that flared up across the whole line. As if a spell had been broken, their silent discipline broke as they charged, Ulrics how exploding forth from their lips.
The thunderers fired their guns a second time for good measure, but it was the charge of the Stone Wolfs, the guardians of Under-Middenheim, that shattered the goblin mob.
