Spring Event? Starting Now? Dev Team, You Guys Sure Know How to Have Fun

The gnolls had recklessly opened a rift in the astral plane. Under normal circumstances, the people in Shadowvale should have panicked, but the truth was, they had panicked—just a little.

That was because the gnolls' big move had gone wide. To put it simply, the rift in the astral plane had opened in, well, a completely unintended location.

It had opened more or less halfway between Shadowvale and the gnoll camp.

All right, old Manson's original prediction had been pretty accurate: it had opened directly above Shadowvale. But thanks to the combined efforts of the goatman Bohr and the silver wolf Hellsong, it had closed. Then that restless bastard Hellsong had turned traitor at the last moment and torn it open again.

All that had managed to shift the rift's location ever so slightly.

As a vast surge of tainted psionic energy poured down, the howling astral wolves came tumbling through, looking like they were "heading out for a picnic." They were like great sharks swimming through a dark tide. Once they hit the ground, they bit anything they saw, like a pack of mad huskies wagging their tails and snapping at everyone around them.

The bad news was that Murphy hadn't expected the silver wolf to be so reckless as to send her pack straight in. Caught unprepared, the Nords who had taken over the forward positions in front of Shadowvale that day were hit hard. The scattered players and the Gorse Kingdom artillery crews stationed on the ridge platforms suffered the same fate.

The astral ambush threw the front of Shadowvale into chaos in a matter of moments.

The good news was that the gnolls didn't take advantage of the opportunity to attack.

Not that they hadn't wanted to.

Hugheson had specifically arranged for an elite unit led