Lying flat on the ground as he crawled toward the laborers' wooden sheds behind the earthen wall, Cool Guy looked up at the flames rising off to one side. Between those and the explosion, he was stunned.
What just happened?
That was a very good question. Call Me Cool Bro wanted to know, and so did the forty or fifty players following him.
"Tweet... tweet, tweet, tweet..."
"Fuck!"
Hearing the shrill whistle from the wooden watchtower on the earthen wall ahead, Cool Guy knew he had been spotted... The flames shooting into the sky had briefly lit up the ground, allowing the sentries to see them hiding in the darkness.
"Charge, brothers! Get over there and cut them down!"
One player shouted as he got to his feet first and sprinted forward. The others followed close behind, and Cool Guy started running too.
At this point, they might as well turn the sneak attack into a frontal assault.
The players participating in tonight's raid came from different warbands, with some unaffiliated players among them. Cool Guy was not their leader, and some of them did not even know him.
So while these players looked like a single group, they were actually divided into several smaller cliques. They did not even share the same objectives for the raid.
Cool Guy, for example, wanted to rescue the slave laborers. Once the charge began, he split off from the players who only wanted to cut people down and headed straight for the sheds.
The violent explosion and shrill whistles had awakened practically all the guards on either side of the earthen wall. They shouted from the watchtower and behind the wall, hastily firing bows and crossbows at the players.
Only a sparse scattering of arrows flew toward the players, and their accuracy left