"Heal," murmured Felicity, who looked half asleep. Thankfully, her questionable level of alertness didn't impact the function of the Skill, and white light pulsed around my arm. "And now it's nap time..."

  She instantly flopped back over, desperate to catch as much sleep as she could before someone woke her up again in another couple of hours to use up her regenerated Mana. Probably Ryan; I was pretty sure it was past midnight already, which meant I'd finished my turn of keeping watch.

  I flexed my hand as I took one final look out of the window, thankful that it didn't seem that I'd suffer any lasting damage from the wound. Night watchmen peered out over a palisade, on guard against anything that might come out of the forest. Thankfully, nothing had. Especially no orcs.

  The village hadn't had any inns—it was basically just a small woodcutter camp—but the headman had taken pity on the group of injured adventurers forced to take on a compulsory quest beyond their abilities. He'd found a barn to put us up in and given us permission to rest there until we were healed.

  Healing was a rather simple process. Wait for Felicity's Mana to refill, wake her up, have her cast [Heal] until her Mana ran out, let her sleep and repeat.

  With a sigh, I gave Ryan a poke.

  "Ugghk."

  Poke poke.

  "Gahh."

  Poke poke poke.

  "Uaah! Who's..."

  His exclamation was silenced by my clamping a hand over his face. "Shh!" I hissed, eyeing up Daniel.

  Lee was fine. Just like my arm, his leg wound had largely healed. He'd be fine by the morning, with one more cast.

  Daniel wouldn't be.

  I wanted to avoid waking him if possible. He'd woken once already, a couple of casts of [Heal] ago, screamed a bit, then fallen back to sleep. Best to leave him that way for as long as possible.

  Felicity had done what she could, but [Heal] was only a C-rank Skill. She'd warned us before we attempted the Meandering Warren that it couldn't restore missing body parts such as eyes. Teeth apparently came under that heading, too. At least the rip in his cheek was patched over, but he still looked rough. Whether he could continue adventuring was an open question; lacking one eye would do horrible things to both his field of view and depth perception.

  Maybe the guild would find us some better healing. They were the ones that forced us into this stupid quest, after all.

  I was rather cross at myself that I hadn't argued against it. I'd thought we could do it, but had things gone even slightly differently, we'd have been looking at a full party wipe. As it was, I was willing to bet Daniel hadn't expected to survive, holding off their attackers with Lee and Stacy while Felicity and Ryan escaped to safety.

  "Nnn!" complained Ryan, reminding me I still had a hand over his mouth.

  "Oops. Hehe."

  "You trying to suffocate me?!" he hissed.

  "No, just to stop you waking Daniel back up," I whispered back.

  Ryan sat up and looked over at his teammate.

  "Oh."

  "Yeah. Anyway, it's your turn on watch. I need to sleep."

  "I still don't see why we need to set a watch in the first place. Wasn't the whole point of making it to a village that we were safe?"

  "Safer than outside it, certainly. But we didn't know if more orcs were following us, or if there might be someone in the village who thinks our clothes might look better on them."

  Ryan sighed. "Yes, we had this discussion earlier. Fine, I'll keep watch. Just go to sleep already."

  I lay down, but found sleep hard to come by. Perhaps it was [Erudite I] making it harder for tiredness to switch my brain off, or maybe it was simply the natural after-effects of suffering a serious injury and almost losing my life, but I couldn't stop thinking. Reliving the battle again and again, trying to figure out what I could have done differently.

  Should I have stuck with the party rather than peeling off? I could still have used [Expert Stealth], but stuck close by, picking off enemies from the rear like I had when I returned to them in reality. But with the orc chieftain there, would that have worked at all?

  Short of a Skill that could reverse time itself, there was no way to know, but I couldn't help but ruminate over it anyway.

  Whether I actually managed to sleep at all, I couldn't say, but I was disturbed from my dozing state by the shrill sound of a horn. The sound was repeated over and over.

  "Whu?" grunted Lee, stirring into wakefulness.

  "It's coming from the fence," said Ryan, who was staring out of the window. "The sentries must have seen something."

  I said a rude word. What were the chances of this being a lonesome slime? Maybe a wolf or two?

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  From the building commotion outside, it obviously wasn't. This had to be the orcs. They'd followed us.

  "I'm alive?" asked Daniel, sitting bolt upright and looking around. "We're all alive?"

  He touched at his broken eye socket, but apparently considered that a minor thing compared to the fact that he'd protected his party.

  "Not for much longer, by the looks of it," said Ryan, who was still staring out of the window. "It's a bad sign when the sentries abandon the wall and run for their lives, right?"

  I looked out of the window, where the sentries had indeed jumped down from their platforms behind the palisade, and were running for the other side of the village. One gave a final blow on his horn, then tossed it aside.

  Stacy sat bolt upright, despite apparently having been asleep half a second before. She didn't even need to waste time getting dressed, since no-one had felt up to the task of prying her out of her armour.

  "Urk... What now?" groaned Felicity, who, unlike the others, was struggling to rejoin the waking world. I couldn't blame her; I knew being low on Mana caused serious lethargy.

  "Probably orcs," I said. "Should we run, or should we defend the village?"

  "Felicity, Ryan, how's your Mana?" asked Daniel.

  "Full," said Ryan.

  "Half," answered Felicity.

  "And Stamina, everyone?"

  Everyone replied they were full, with the exception of Felicity and Daniel himself.

  "Get to the palisade, then," he ordered.

  "Seriously?" asked Lee disbelievingly. "We'll get massacred!"

  "I have no idea where we are, or how we got here, but Robin mentioned orcs. If I had more time, I'd share my entire thought process, but suffice it to say that I imagine we've just led a pack of orcs straight to this village. Am I wrong?"

  Lee peered down at the floor, apparently not having put so much thought into the situation.

  "... It's likely," admitted Felicity. "Sorry. I didn't have much choice."

  "I'm not criticising your decision, but we do need to take responsibility for it. Now, move!"

  I noted his use of 'we' rather than 'you', reinforcing my opinion of him as a good leader. Not to mention that he didn't even mention his lost eye, instead rushing to the front lines personally. It was a pity my growth rate was so far removed from theirs, or I wouldn't have minded sticking in this party long term.

  Assuming it survived this night, anyway.

  All six of us hurried from our barn in the direction of the palisade. We got some disbelieving looks on the way, from villagers who obviously felt we were headed in the wrong direction, but none of them said anything. We weren't from the village, after all. If some strangers wanted to do something stupid, and the result was an improved chance of their friends and family escaping, then of course they wouldn't say anything.

  I was the first to reach the palisade, by dint of being light and agile and hence ignoring the ladder in favour of jumping straight up.

  Orcs.

  Lots of orcs.

  I said another rude word.

  Lee was the next up. He took one look over the row of tree trunks, then echoed me. Despite that, he instantly slung his bow off his back.

  "Wow... There must be... eighty? Ninety?" said Ryan, joining us on the platform.

  The two party members with ranged attacks had come up first. Probably not coincidence, but in the end, it didn't matter. Ryan could cast [Earthquake] twice, or fire off a dozen or more [Rain of Stones]. Lee had maybe three dozen arrows. Even if he took an orc out with every arrow, and Ryan took out half a dozen per [Earthquake], we'd only take out half the horde before running out of ammunition.

  Stacy pointed wordlessly, having arrived at some point while I was busy despairing. I followed her metal-encased finger to a pair of larger orcs at the rear of the formation. The moment I looked at them, they turned to stare back.

  Chieftains. Two of them. This was the combined forces of the other two villages.

  I was really regretting letting those eleven get away, but I'd been over this in my head enough earlier in the night. There was nothing I could have done.

  "We loose all our ammo, then we run," said Daniel, the last member to join us. "Slow them down and thin their numbers as best we can to give the villagers time to get away."

  "Then I'm going down there," I said. "I can't do anything from up here."

  Daniel looked at me, then nodded. "Avoid the chieftains. Run once your Stamina reaches half. We know you're faster than them. Don't get killed, and we'll meet back up in Tyle."

  Stacy turned her helmet to point in my direction, stared wordlessly for a few seconds, and then uttered, "Don't die."

  "Wow, two words at once. You must really be worried."

  She didn't respond, taking position next to Lee instead, presumably to deflect any ranged attacks that came his way. The orcs hadn't displayed any weaponry thus far, but that didn't mean the other villages didn't have any. Even if they didn't, they could simply start throwing stones.

  "Okay, I'm off," I said, jumping off the platform.

  ... Off the village side, obviously. Jumping down in front of all those orcs wouldn't give [Expert Stealth] much to play with. Instead, I needed to do a bunch of running before I could even stab my first orc, slipping out the back of the village along with the refugees then curving around and heading into the forest. I just hoped Lee and Ryan could slow them down enough for me to make a difference in the fight. If the orcs all charged at once, they'd likely overrun the village before I arrived.

  Although, now that I considered it, the forest edge wasn't that far from the village, and the horns had started blowing some time before we arrived. If the orcs had simply charged out of the forest, they'd have hit the wall before we did. They were deliberately holding back. Were the pair of chieftains organising their underlings into a formation of some sort, hoping to minimise their casualties? Best case was that they were arguing over who got the prize. After all, there had never been a suggestion of multiple orc kings, which implied the 'losing' chieftains would become rather less chief.

  As I rushed through the forest, I heard a loud roar. The orcs were apparently beginning their attack.

  I hurried, the roaring of the orcs letting me speed up a little, safe in the knowledge that I wasn't about to give myself away through making too much noise. I could fell a tree and it probably still wouldn't be as noisy as the orcs.

  One down, far too many to go.

  I burst out of the tree line, and stopped dead.

  "Crap," I said, not bothering to lower my voice. There didn't seem to be any point when both chieftains were there, waiting for me.

  How?

  From what we understood of their danger sense, they shouldn't have noticed me. I meant them no harm. Was it enough that I wanted to harm them? Did they pick up on the danger to their minions? Was this nothing to do with their abilities at all, and based on the testimony of the surviving eleven, they expected me to turn up behind them?

  "Oh well. I've heard it said that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Guess I'm fighting two chieftains at once. Two armed chieftains. And I'm down to one dagger. Fun."

  ... Wait, had I heard anyone say that? Or was it yet another random bit of information I shouldn't have? They'd grown a little sparse since I'd obtained [Fragment of the Past]. Or perhaps I'd just stopped noticing them, given how natural they'd grown.

  One of the chieftains took a step forward, sneering at me in his orcish way that displayed far too much fang.

  Then the other chieftain grabbed him by the ears from behind and twisted. Hard.

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