He tried to jump up but only bashed his head on the top of the root cave. His helm clunked dully against the wood, cutting the bridge of his nose as it was pushed down.
Scrot lay on his belly breathing hard. He tried to make sense of the place he found himself in. He had found it during the night but it looked very different in the daylight that struggled through the knitted canopy of branches and leaves above him.
He tried to quiet his panicked panting so that he might listen to noises of the forest that gently assaulted his ears. Creaks and rustles washed around, birds calls stabbed at higher registers. As far as Scrot was aware, they were nothing to be scared of. He lay still nonetheless and tried to out wait the normalness of forests chatter.
A crunch. A snap. Plants being swept aside. More crunches. Footsteps? Metallic jangles.
Scrot felt the fear return to his empty guts, his eyes flicked about in his skull, hoping that to sight the source of the noises to give him an advantage before it spotted him.
"Shhhh!"
"Wot?"
"SHHHHHH!!!!"
"Why?"
A loud thump.
"Ow?!"
"Shut your meat hole! I smell something"
"You didn't 'ave to 'it me"
Another loud thump and the sound of metal scraping against metal.
Silence.
Scrot's panic roared in his ears, his heart beat so hard that he was convinced the owners of the voices would hear it.
Above the din of his organs he could hear the rustle of dry leaves and grass being moved by clumsy feet.
The footsteps drew closer. And closer.
Scrot saw four feet and the calfs attached to them suddenly in front of the root cave in which he cowered. One pair of legs were wearing a pair of roughly made and worn out shoes with the toes of one foot poking out displaying the yellowed, pointy, claw-like toe nails. The other wore what looked like a pair of leather boots with his spindly green-brown legs sticking out the top, like a pair of saplings planted in old pots.
They were Orcs.
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