Before confronting Draknar you must have at least 60 Defence to claim the Gold Token. You’ve found half of Edesia’s Charm but must defeat the Ogre to claim the other half. A dozen pairs of eyes roamed the country around them, missing nothing as they moved.Objective: After battling with an Ogre you’re left dying and cursed. There was only the objective and nothing else. And in so doing had assured that they, themselves, would not see another day on this mortal plane. By nature terrorists were cowards, using fear and intimidation to force their will upon those too weak to resist them.īut they hadn't known, and so they had attacked a place that was sacred to this squad of hard, violent men. They were not brave men, these thugs known as terrorists. Had the attackers known the kind of men they were offending, it's entirely possible they would not have committed the atrocity. Hard men who pushed themselves to be harder still, banking that toughness against a day like today. They had been in pursuit for hours, running the entire way. Children they had grown to care for taken, herded toward a fate that no one in their group wanted to consider. A place of sanity in a world that had lost it's own.Īnd that place had been violated. The village had become a place where they could relax, even if only slightly, and be people for just a few hours at a time. They did know that the people of the small village known as home had become their friends. The men of CTG 31 weren't sure which was the case. Before dawn a group of terrorists had attacked a small village that the squad had befriended. The squad of men behind him began moving again. “Continue,” Boss-man ordered and waved his hand forward. “Still on the trail for now,” the scout replied. Keeping things strict and orderly helped. Something they had to guard against in their business. Those following halted and spread out without being told. The man known as Boss-man stopped, hand raised in a fist. “We're about twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes behind, Boss-man” Kept them from becoming like those they hunted. No one broke that code, that set of unwritten rules that kept them from sliding over the edge.
They had a code of their own, these men, and they lived by it as if it were a writ from a higher authority. They were the kind of men who visited dark places in the middle of the night, doing violence to those who preyed on the weak and the helpless.
There was no place for them in an enlightened society. The men of CTG 31 were the kind of men that didn't exist in the modern, civilized world. They were known by names their comrades had chosen. And change the face of the world forever. Something that will burn everything it touches. Something that hasn't happened, but will.
Because Clayton knows something they don't. A secret that has pushed him to the brink, forcing him to become a criminal in order to be where his family needs him to be, even though they don't realize it yet. Home carrying a secret that is burning him up from the inside. Home with no warning, no advance notice, no anything after being gone 10 years with almost no contact with his family.
He waited that long only because the Army wouldn't accept him without one.
Clayton Sanders left home the minute he had his high school diploma in hand.