A LOSS OF YEARS

Forgotten Ruin War Journal

During their first few weeks in the Ruin, the Rangers coming through the QST were instantly seen as a threat by every warlord and dark power in the region. When less than a hundred men successfully hold off an entire orc horde and their magical support monkeys (mages) for days, someone’s bound to take notice.

In comes the dreaded lich, Toth-Azom.

Running thousands of undead as an ad hoc fighting force to wipe out the rangers before they can become a threat, the lich had marched his forces on FOB Hawthorne. The rangers had detected the incoming assault via drone reconnaissance, prompting Captain Knifehand to send out scout teams to probe the enemies. In the ensuing violence to put the lich down, they’d encountered many versions of undead and been forced to learn on the job the differing ways to kill them.

One of the deadliest and hard to kill versions were the wraiths and specters. Malevolent spirits cursed in draining life from the living. Both types appear as wispy shadows on the terrain, like ghosts. At close range, specters appear as a twisted version of their former selves while wraiths are the silhouette of who they used to be. 

Their danger comes in their touch, which in Kennedy’s game of funny dice and books, each strike robs the victim of character levels, making them less powerful on each successive strike. For the Rangers, the wraiths and specters robbed them of years, draining their life force so that a man who might have lived into his sixties or seventies would only make it to his thirties. That’s if he lived through the encounter.

During the assault and due to being woefully under supplied in magic weapons, the ranger force had to rely on high explosives and mortar strikes to rid themselves of the dangerous spirits. Calling down the steel rain on targets seemed to do enough damage quickly enough to destroy the wraiths, while shattering hordes of skeletons and zombies as a bonus. 

To see more of the battle as it unfolds, check out, Hit & Fade! 

[Galaxy’s Edge Insiders have complete access to the audio book for Hit & Fade on their Insiders Launch Pad]