Adventure of Boffo Hardbottle 1

The barricade shudders as more orcs slam into it from the lane. Behind the houses, shadows move low and fast, slipping toward the village heart.

Sawyer Krump braces one shoulder against a post, face pale with strain, while villagers hold their ground in the lane. The breach to the mathom house is still the enemy’s prize.

The Stranger points into the dark between the cottages, where the flanking raiders are trying to bypass the main fight. The lane groans, and the village seems to wait for Boffo’s choice.

The orcs at the barricade press harder, but the moving shadows near the houses are the sharper threat. If Boffo turns aside now, he may stop the raid before it reaches the relic.

Boffo slips along the inside of the lane, keeping low as the barricade jolts behind him. The cottage roofs loom ahead, and the hedge gives him a narrow slit of view toward the moving shapes.

He kneels by a broken cartwheel and settles his bow on the rim of the wood. Through the gap, two flanking raiders cross between the cottages, their boots dark in the dusk.

Boffo looses once. The arrow takes the nearer orc high in the shoulder, and the raider spins into the mud with a cry cut short.

The second flanker halts at the sound, looking back toward the lane, and then toward the cottages, no longer sure which way is safe.

From the lane behind him, the barricade shudders again, but the path between the houses is now broken by one fallen raider and one frightened pause.

Boffo shifts the bowstring, breath held tight, and sends another arrow through the cottage gap.

The shaft strikes the second flanker in the thigh. The orc folds sideways into a vegetable patch, yelling loud enough to echo off the walls.

The lane answer comes at once, a heavy crash against the barricade that shakes dust from the hedge and starts a dog barking somewhere deeper in Greenfields.

The wounded flanker claws at the mud and drags himself toward the nearest cottage step, leaving a dark trail.

Boffo has only a heartbeat before the last raider decides whether to run or rush.

Boffo lets the bow settle, then releases. The arrow hisses across the lane and catches the last raider high in the chest. The orc jerks backward off the cottage path and crashes into the dirt.

The wounded flanker in the vegetable patch stops dragging himself and looks up, hearing the cry cut off. Beyond him, the renewed blows at the barricade slow into a rough, searching hammering.

A villager flinches back from the fence rails, then plants their feet again as the dust settles in thin gray sheets over the hedge.

The cottages are clear for the moment.

From the woods, the distant shouting rises again, harsher now, as if the raiders deeper in the dark have heard the checkmate fail. The flank is broken, but the main attack still pounds at Greenfields' front.