Chapter 126 - The Ones Hidden in Shadows (1)

The lightning flashed and pushed its inverted limbs down to the battlefield. In one, two, three seconds, the loud boom of the thunderstruck. Light and docile raindrops soon turned heavy and violent. Moments later there came the rumbling thunder and right on cue, the rain began to fall even more haphazardly from the sky as if it wasn't entirely committed to the idea of rain.

"Damn! Just look at that explosion!" Miko, One of the soldiers stationed at the west wing of the Alpha base, said in awe, "I wish I would've been stationed near at the north or south wing, the view from there would've been more exciting, don't you think?"

"Oh just shut up and focus on the task we have been given, understand?" The Noel retorted as he took another drag from his cigarette. Raindrops began getting heavier and heavier as the clouds raged through the heavens.

"Huh, say whatever you want but isn't our Section Chief the best? He's even taking on the entire monster armada by himself!"

"Yeah yeah, he's great and all. But he's still a new fly here."

"I heard he was in a coma for five long years but threw himself right at work the moment he woke up. He's so admirable!" The first soldier continued.

"He is. Unlike the twinkie roll between your legs. Now shut the fck up and focus- wait... did something moved there?"

The guy threw his cigarette and grabbed a night vision enabled binocular, but still, he was having trouble differentiating the figures in the dark as it was already pitch black and the rain was only making it worse. Then suddenly a bolt of white-hot lightning broke the utter blackness, cleaving the night in parts, and lit up the surface but only for the briefest of moments, and in that violent but short period of illumination, Noel saw something their enemy did not want him to. Miko who was still busy gazing towards the direction in which Arnold was fighting in, was completely oblivious to what his partner saw.

"Aww... you never told me how much you hate my 'twinkie'!" He mindlessly laughed at his partner.

"Q-Quick inform the others we have company! We have to- uckk!" The binoculars slipped from his hands, and he fell backwards with a loud thud... he died almost instantly.

"Your cheap pranks won't work on me anymore, bast*rd haha!" Miko thought Noel was trying to pull off a prank of some sorts as usual and paid no attention to it, but when he didn't reply to anything Miko was saying, Miko instantly turned to the other side... only to see that Noel's lifeless body near him... his head had been replaced by a giant wooden arrow and the pool of blood that was subsequently formed as a result of that, but before he could even realise what how it all happened on an arrow hit him too, and he fell beside the person who was his partner in the military as well as in life. It was so dark that even their fellow soldier would not have been able to discover their lifeless bodies until it was too late.

Another streak of lightning traced the path of its predecessor and unveiled the ones who attacked the soldiers. A creature was laying there, blended with the darkness. it's slate grey powdery skin helped in camouflaging him within the darkness, the creature was 15 feet tall, had a bumpy body like a sack of rocks, incongruously small head with scrubby sparse lank hair, an effluvium of rancid lard, legs like tree trunks, great warty feet with hairy toes. He was carrying a crossbow with him, the weapon which took the lives of two humans.

He slowly got back to his knees from his prone position and signalled behind his back and soon, one after another, five more of his kin stepped out of hiding and joined him. These creatures were known as 'Black Trolls'. Their speciality? They could curl up like small mountains and their furry skin turned rocky and which enabled them to absorb the radar waves and hence they didn't show up on radars. That's how they were able to reach the base without being seen.

The looked like a pack of wild King Kong-like gorillas. Three of them were carrying clubs, Two of them were equipped with some sort of a makeshift Battering Ram, while the remaining black troll was carrying a crossbow with him.

Despite looking like gorillas, the behaviour of the monsters was more like a group of cats who instead of killing their prey fast, they preferred to toy with them first. But the situation was different right then because they had to destroy the base once and for all, and expand their territory. They had enough of humans interfering with their business.

They planned to simultaneously attack the base from all four directions and destroy it, not allowing the time to humans so that they won't be able to reinforce every side, thus stretching their defences to its limit. Of course, the trolls couldn't have done it all by themselves. They were huge and powerful creatures but they weren't invincible and unlike other monsters were limited in numbers, moreover, a concentrated cannon fire would've killed them in an hour or so.

That's why they needed to the ogres, goblins and other species of monsters to be the cannon fodder instead, but instead of attacking the base from different directions, it looked like those fools decided to band up together and attack the base from a single direction, but even after that the base was still guarded somewhat heavily.

"What should we do now?" One of the trolls carrying the ram asked their leader, in the monster tongue.

"We need to attack now... it looks like the humans don't know about us yet, maybe because of the heavenly waterfall, their vision is limited. We can sniff them out but they can't. We need to use it in our favour and strike them down while we can." A club-wielding troll chimed in.

Their leader, the one wielding the crossbow nodded in agreement and proceeded to shoot down as many humans as he could before they got to know about their existence and counterattack. While he was shooting down the humans one after another, the rest of his group cautiously proceeded to break through the walls using battering ram and clubs. All the leader had to do was to keep the attention of the humans on himself and keep them busy till the others burst open the wall. After that, the humans were like sitting ducks waiting to be hunted down.