A nightly disturbance

The moment Jay stepped out of Femmel's restaurant, a batch of soldiers rushed past him.

He sprinted after them and asked while running what the alarm was about. As one of them was Ashlock, one of the men he had saved with Keeshan, he explained the situation without stopping to run:

A horde of Gnolls had come from the west and tried to raid Stillwater without any previous signs. The first attack that came out of nowhere was still going on and looked more like it was only the beginning. From what they had heard, their numbers were even higher than with the attack on Three Corners, so they had no choice but to ring the alarm.

After hearing that, it dawned Jay that all the Gnoll sightings before and the setup with the totems might have been because of just this night.

Together with the soldiers he rushed to the front line in the west where he found numerous barricades erected. Soldiers and Adventurers alike kept fending off Gnolls to the best of their abilities and had managed to kill most of the first wave.

Together with the soldiers he arrived with, Jay went to notify the commanding officer there, who happened to be Corporal Keeshan himself. With relief visible on his face he welcomed Jay and gave him a short narration of what had transpired.

Having gotten some information and the general direction from where the attack first came, Jay jumped over the barricade. The monsters in the vicinity were Level 22 at most, so he directly looked for the closes Gnoll to dispose of.

A single (Slash) while jumping over a barricade, stemming on one hand and his feet still in the air separated the monsters head from its still running on body.

Directly behind that Gnoll stood the next and Jay fired off a spell from his quick buttons. The arcane projectiles bore through the burly monsters chest as if it was made of butter, one of them even crashing into a tree behind afterwards.

Following that, Jay passed through the monsters corpses lying around and went to the next opponents. A single (Slash) with a magically enhanced sword was enough for those monsters, not to speak of (Arcane Missiles) and the likes.

After he had gained some distance from the towns border and the barricades got out of sight behind trees, Jay took the chance and summoned his void Max. The opponents strength and quantity was close to perfect for leveling it.

After defeating a few more monsters close by together, he had his summon stay in that area and then took a look at the surroundings.

Thanks to a small cliff up, the western part of Stillwater had a natural border to the adjoining northern forest. With the lake in the south and stretching quite far to the west, the area they had to pass through narrowed just at the point where Jay was right then.

Thanks to the mountain range further north, the only other route the Gnolls could have taken was through that forest.

Like this, Jay rushed to a spot where he could go up there and looked for monsters or tracks. The area was way too big to search it alone and so Jay at first found not a single trace. But just as he was on his way back down to where Max was still fending off monsters, Jay saw some movement even further in the west.

Not believing his own eyes at first, what Jay had seen looked like a human girl that got surrounded from Gnolls.

Instantly abandoning his plan to go back, Jay sprinted over to where he had seen her, but then thought he really had looked wrong.

There was nothing where he stood:

No Gnoll, no girl and not even blood.

Had there not been paw prints on the ground, Jay would have been sure he had just imagined it. After all it was dark, he had been active the whole day and most of the evening, and last but not least he had fought off numerous of the Gnoll before as well.

There was no way even someone like him wouldn't have gotten tired from that after all.

Marking the spot on the map in his mind, Jay finally went back towards Stillwater. Thanks to his log he had seen that Max was still active and decided he could help it a bit, possibly drain some of the monsters souls to refill his Soul-Stone reserves, even if the stock was incredible already.

With his thoughts still going on about the small human girl he thought he had seen, Jay soon arrived with his summon. They killed off the few Gnolls close by and then Jay went back to the barricades where the soldiers still kept defending against the monsters that had passed Max. Even though their opponents had been only between Level 20 and 22, the men had to group up on them.

For the next hour, Jay helped them out and killed off quite a number of Gnolls. The whole time his summon kept thinning out the incoming monsters, though of course a lot of them passed through. Jay kept Max where it was even after the incoming attacks slowed down but it still had brought him some nice extra XP.

When a loud howl from far away sounded out even until Stillwater, the Gnolls pulled back and fled. Though some of the monsters even tried to save their brethen, most of them took off for a run without wait.

Jay took this chance to kill of some more and save two of the soldiers that had dared to leave the barricades.

Even though not one of the Gnolls had been over Level 22, they still had been too hard for the soldiers and a few of the Adventurers to defeat them alone. As he reached the barricades again, Jay left the two men there and directly went to look for the next.

Taking to the northernmost part first, he saw that seemingly a few of the Gnolls had broken through the barricades and laid fires. Some of the citizens were trying to extinguish them, but at the rate they proceeded, the fires were bound to spread soon.

Jay helped there for a while until it was mostly extinguished, though not thanks to him but one of the towns people taking charge.

While his strength might have helped in carrying the buckets faster, Jay still went back to the barricades as his help was better placed there.

All over the western border of the town he found wounded people, be it soldiers, the towns people or even an Adventurer. Of course he checked on the Jainrose's as well, but his worries had been unfounded as the sisters had long left to help tending to the wounded like he heard from a soldier on post there.

On his way to town from there, Jay spotted another soldier that was limping. When he helped her walk back to the piers, Keeshan spotted Jay and accompanied him from there to the towns hall.

This time numerous soldiers got wounded and even some citizens, so the inn had been to small to accommodate them all.

Just as they got inside, Solomon walked over and asked for the situation. He was more than relieved when Keeshan explained that the situation had mostly gotten resolved.

The Corporal continued that once again Jay's help had played a big role in this, even though the final counts were still open. By his estimate, Jay might have killed or played a big role in defeating them for at least a third, may be more, of the incoming Gnolls.

As he heard that, Jay suppressed a grin as in this count his kills in the forest and those from Max were not included. If the two men he stood with knew of that, they'd possibly pass out on the spot.

Instead he inquired if something like this had ever happened before.

Both, Keeshan and Solomon shook their heads to Jay's question. While there had been only seldom attacks on the town before, none of them had ever been this big or even remotely so.

What was more, they all had come from the north along the main road and not once from the forests in the west.

Getting a glint into his eyes, the magistrate seemed to have thought of something. When he uttered that this might have to do with the lost contact to the mine, Jay remembered receiving a guilds request to look into this matter as well.

Still, his first thought was if Solomon couldn't have mentioned it earlier.

But Jay hadn't really been any better, as he had completely forgotten about the two quests he had taken back in Arathor. If he had, he might have scouted the western area earlier as the howling that had been mentioned in the other quest, must have been close to Stillwater. Just like the one Jay heard himself shortly before the Gnolls had pulled back.

As he mentioned the requests Jay had taken back at the Guild, Solomon explained that they never had heard much from the Rethbrand Mine. He did know that the commanding officer had made the request for checking on it quite a while ago, but he had thought it simply got abandoned. While the ore there was kind of special, this one wasn't the only place to mine it.

With the situation they were in, Jay decided to go check on that mine the next day.

Leaving directly was out of question. It was still nighttime and the most pressing matters were helping the wounded, extinguishing the few fires and then disassembling the barricades.

At least the third quest from back in Arathor would get a clearing report soon.

Solomon stated that Jay had more than fulfilled it by eradicating nearly all Murloc settlements in the vicinity over the last days.

Jay left the town hall together with the Corporal and then went to help in the town again. It didn't take long as during their report, most of the work had been done. It still would take day's for Stillwater to be back to normal, but at least the urgent things had gotten done.

After spending another half an hour with guiding lighter wounded people to the town hall and healing some others there, Jay finally made it back to the Inn.

The sun had already begun to rise again, so when Brianna offered him a light meal he thankfully declined and instead went straight to bed.

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.

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Some few hours later, Jay woke up from a tasty smell permeating his nose. He felt refreshed and directly got up.

As he reached the dining hall and asked if he could have one set of the tasty smelling meal, Brianna mocked him a bit if eating out hadn't been that great after all.

He nearly spit out the yummy stew she had served him seconds before.

Once he was full and geared up, Jay left the inn and short thereafter the town as well. The light forest he had to pass through at the western border of Stillwater really looked like a battlefield:

Blood, debris and numerous monster corpses lay everywhere. Only the few casualties the soldiers had seemed to have been collected from there.

From there Jay rode to the place where he had left Max before, then up the slope and onward north through the forest. He had learned the small road leading to the mines was there, and just then understood why he hadn't seen it in the night before.

The path was mostly overgrown as if it hadn't been in use for quite a while. But if the path led around Stillwater so far and the ore mostly went to the north, it was no wonder that Solomon hadn't taken note of there something being wrong with it.

Jay followed the road for about half an hour on horseback along the foot of the mountain range there.

Up to that point the trip had been surprisingly smooth and he slowly started to suspect the raids origin may lay somewhere else. But then, long before he saw something resembling a mine or anything the likes did he spot the first patrol in the woods to his right.

Like many times in the last night, Jay swiftly closed in on them and - without even aiming for it - took the first of the monsters by surprise. The second tried to flee to that, but Jay used that for training his (Arcane Dart) that he had put on quick button after finding out it had practically no cool-down.

After six shots that cost him extremely little mana, the Gnoll fell to the ground.

Normally it would have died with two good aimed or five normal hits, but that was something Jay was still practicing with.

After the second monster died, Jay proceeded towards the north-west on foot. This decision turned out right as the patrol density grew the closer he came to the western mountains that marked the border of the whole region. Though none of the small groups posed any problem to Jay, he noticed that their levels kept increasing with each fight.

Just when Jay thought he must have long come across some kind of camp or settlement, he spotted a relatively small passage north, directly at the western most area one could reach.

Like Jay had expected, it got guarded by Gnolls positioned on higher grounds right in the turn.

The only peculiarity though was, one of the monsters there was a shaman. Of course that was no problem to Jay as it grilled itself with the weak (Lightning Strikes) it fired onto him and got it returned.

After Jay disposed of the other two as well, he carefully went northwards along the passage. The moment he reached the end of the slope up, a lush valley came into view. As it somehow looked familiar to him, Jay checked his systems map and got it confirmed:

It was the same valley he had found when he saved Keeshan and his men.

Barely a minute after Jay descended into that valley, he met the first group of Gnolls again. This time it was no patrol but a group of survivors from the raid last night. Jay knew that not only from the wounds and missing limbs they had, but the looted weapons and gear as well.

About to retrieve those goods again, Jay halted when he once again heard a loud howl echoing out. It reached them from the south where he had come from and the moment they heard it, the Gnolls around their small campfire raised their heads.

On the second howl they got up and began to travel south. Their pace wasn't hurried not did they slack off.

Jay followed the group while staying hidden and soon saw another group of Gnolls fuse with them. In fear of getting surrounded or spotted, Jay rushed up the slope from the valley to reach it before them. At the highest point he looked back and saw that his action had been just right as the horde of Gnolls grew larger and larger.

Down at the other side again, Jay found himself a spot to hide and waited for the train of monsters to pass him.

It took some time for the relatively large group to assemble at the feet of the mountain and then proceed south. While keeping himself hidden, Jay followed them for about one or two miles until they reached a wide cave entrance.

Even from further away he saw numerous Gnolls inside, though a lot less then the horde he had kept following.

While most monsters of the big group entered the cave and soon got out of sight, some went to a spot next to the cave. It looked like an abandoned camp with two tents of which one had collapsed and a broken carriage to the side.

On straining his eyes looking at the entrance even further, Jay spotted some lores and even picking tools lying around, as well as big mushrooms growing everywhere inside the cave. This confirmed what had happened to the mine even before Jay entered it.

From out of his cover he took aim with his bow, killing one of the two guards in a single shot. The other one was one level higher, but Jay had been close enough to behead it before it could ring alarm.

Then he went to the small encampment and took care of the six Gnolls there without letting any of them flee. In the process he came to use his (Arcane Dart) a few times and finally managed to get it up to level 2.

While thinking that it might have been faster to simply search for a female that had the spell on higher level, only to then shake this a little heartless idea off, he checked the camp.

There was neither a single corpse to be found, nor any supply goods, what didn't surprise Jay at all.

But on the broken carriage there were some boxes full of ores which he directly stored inside his inventory.

After checking the Gnolls corpses and finding at least some stolen soldiers weapons, Jay turned around and left towards the mines entrance.

It was time to repay the monsters in the exactly same fashion they tried, namely with a raid...