The first sign that anything was wrong was when the war dogs began barking and whining. The patrol stopped, spreading out to take cover in the overgrown shrubs and gorse bushes that lined the old road in Connemara. Automatic pistol-carbines of the dwarves probed the landscape, while the two humans with the long-range rifles hung back to provide overwatch.
Nothing showed itself. For several long moments, they watched, waited, and watched some more. Heartbeats slowly crept up. Muscles tightened. A few muted coughs from behind full-face helmets broke the dogs’ warning noises. But nothing showed itself.
Trooper O’Malley, at the back end of the patrol, faced out to the northwest, back along the road. His head rotated every which way, trying to compensate for the poor field of view offered by the tinted eyeholes of his helmet and felt, not for the first time, a small pang of jealousy at the humans for not being so sensitive to light. Of course, he was a much smaller target and could actually see in the dark.
Nothing showed itself. Had the dogs imagined something, or was there a monster creeping up on them? Some Fomorian bandit itching for blood or Fearnathair snake looking for a trophy or food? A banshee-
Movement caught his left eye. He whipped his head around and focused again. Nothing – there!
A dozen unnaturally tall figures burst out from the bushes they had been hiding in thirty yards away. Long flowing cloaks and flat-faced helmets with round eyeholes, spears or rifles with bayonets held upright in one hand, and inhuman blond skin. Before he could even scream a warning, they screamed and charged.
O’Malley tried to lift his carbine further, but his brain refused as he failed to understand the way they drew closer. Their legs were not moving, their arms remained sticking out to the side in a T-shaped pose, and yet they glided forwards at ludicrous speeds, rotating and bouncing at random without any apparent effort. Then they stopped in mid air.
He smiled with a heady mix of relief and hate, sighted on one, and pulled the trigger. The gun pushed back against his shoulder with a series of loud cracks from the muzzle. Got you-
One of them suddenly appeared in front of and to his right without actually having physically crossed the gap between them, brown mouth open in a horribly blond face. He screamed and threw himself to his left, rolling onto his side to try bringing the carbine up. The monster passed by, its own screaming rising and falling in a harsh, disjointed rhythm that was physically painful.
In horrible slow motion, he tracked it as it homed in on Corporal Mellows and suddenly changed its unnatural pose to bring its spear down into his throat with a fluid stabbing motion. Then another flew past and bounced off Trooper Neachtain’s shoulder with a horrific crack, spinning up and around to come behind the stricken dwarf. The spear lashed out and down into Neachtain’s back, collapsing him like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
O’Malley brought his carbine up again and pulled the trigger even before the sights had fully lined up with the banshee’s head. The gun pushed back against his shoulder again, and this time he had the satisfaction of seeing the banshee collapse in a bloody scream as the bullets tore into its lower face. He swung his head around, looking for another target.
The banshee that had killed Mellows screamed and turned towards O’Malley, back in the cursed T-shaped pose. It didn’t move, but he threw himself into a roll to his right anyway. Whatever unbidden impulse caused that motion saved him as the banshee suddenly appeared next to where he had been causing the banshee’s spear to miss as the beast suddenly appeared next to where he had been.
A dog snarled as it launched itself at this banshee, latching onto the monster’s left arm and biting down hard. It fell to one knee, the other hand reaching for a dagger. O’Malley lifted his carbine and squeezed the trigger again. One round went off. Then a second. And then nothing.
His eyes rolled downwards towards the ammo counter on the top-mounted magazine. Somehow, he’d gone through an entire magazine without noticing. A shaking left hand slapped the release switch, groped for the magazine to come out, fumbled with his pouches to grab another, and slammed it in.
It didn’t sit in properly, so he slapped it again, feeling his legs getting uncomfortably warm and wet. Swearing, he grasped the stubby charging handle, pulled it back with a cha-chick and aimed again.
The only thing that sounded better than chambering a fresh round was the gunshot that finally put the banshee down. Right in the bastard’s mouth. With a wide, cruel grin behind his helmet, O’Malley stood up and swung around to look for more targets.
For a long moment, the only sounds were the wind passing through the bushes and the surviving dog whining as he nosed into Dog-Trooper Mic Amhlaigh’s huddled body. Green-clad dwarves and humans lay where they had fallen to spearpoint, some still clutching their guns. Banshees lay in huddled shapes, some bent into unnatural poses.
O’Malley broke into a run towards Mic Amhlaigh. The dog handler lay in a seeping puddle of his own blood from the stab wound in his neck, but O’Malley checked anyway. No pulse and a head that rolled drunkenly when moved.
“Shit,” he whispered, crossing himself. He stood up again and ran over to Mellows, not expecting anything. The corporal was dead as expected. He hadn’t even managed to get off a flare to call for help. O’Malley felt a sudden, irrational pang of anger at this.
Then something pushed its way past everything to the front of his mind. There had been twelve banshees, but he could only see six! Were they all dead?
He spun around, levelling the carbine in every direction. His breath sucked in and out through the filters on his helmet, necessary deep underground but useless up here without gas canisters to throw. And then a chill ran down his sodden legs as the wind caught him.
The only reason he wasn’t pissing himself now was that he’d already done so. But realising that did not help with the more pressing issue of where the other banshees had gone!
Had they been using their unnatural powers to make it look like there were more than there had been? What else could those monsters do?
He froze as he heard it again. The rising and falling screams. Coming from the southwest this time.
More were coming.
Take the “T-pose to assert dominance” meme, combine it with bunnyhopping to make somebody move much faster than they should, and add lag spikes causing people to “jump” forward. Only one of those is something a player can do in some games, but nobody in-game seems to really notice it. But here they do!
“Banshees” are what the dwarves of Ireland call the ehdis-neab, an “elvish” people who invaded Connemara during the 1840s and have since taken over the old dwarven cities under Mweelrea, the Sheefries and Ben Gorm. If you speak Irish, you may notice something about that bit in italics. If not, that’s “bean-sidhe” in reverse, or “fairy woman”…aka, banshee.
I’ve used banshees as the in-universe name for a reason. They are loud. They use a lot of sonic screaming attacks that, in tight quarters, would echo and disorient dwarves even more than humans. Out in the open, they would not be so effective, but the banshees also have their “jank” magic. Basically, I wanted an excuse to work video game jank into this universe.
If you like this, maybe check out Fomoritis Uncovered!
