While the man is creeping closer towards the source of the goblin garble, already well past the small stream, a single unarmed goblin walks through his path a dozen meters behind him from the mans left towards his right, luckily for the man, the goblin doesn't outright notice him but It definitely noticed something and slows down then stops.

"Shi-" the man, realizing what was happening, drops down to hug the ground right as the goblin swiftly turns around to audibly sniff the air. With aggressive breaths inward through Its disgusting yet oddly sharp nose, the goblin picks up on the direction the smell is coming from.

(Right, of course, it has a good sense of smell, think dumb-ass think. Ah, bushes, of course, assassin style it is then. Whooh, ok, you got this, you've played the games so just mimic what you've seen...fuck, easier said than done).

The man crawls through the tall grass behind some bushes with extremely careful soundless movements and slowly crouches up into a ready position, while the goblin draws near, still sniffing.

Once it gets close enough, the man launches his bare upper body from the bush, grabs the goblin by the head with both his hands and pulls It into the bush, before the goblin even has a chance to react much less to resist, then ruthlessly knees it in the throat crushing it along with its spine without it ever making much of a sound.

"That went a lot smoother than I ever thought it would, at this rate living here will be a piece of cake. Alrighty then, store item, Still, you know what those old master geezers in every movie with anything to do with fighting say, never underestimate your opponent" the man says to himself in a hushed tone of voice, just in case more of the green bastards are around.

With the the goblin corpse stored, the man continues following the voices with caution until he arrives at the edge of a small clearing. This clearing has a cave entrance at the base of a small 4-meter-high cliff, the ceiling of which reaches almost halfway up the wall and if the man were to stretch out his arms, he would be able to touch both walls of the cave entrance with the palms of his hands, the cave is also guarded by two goblins on both sides of the opening.

"Hmmm...one of them seems to be armed with what looks to be a bronze dagger and the other is armed with a rundown thick club... I doubt there are more than ten of these green bastards here and I do need a place to stay the night." the man looks up to see the position of the sun while shielding his eyes "I'd say I have generously over half a day before it gets dark so there isn't any huge rush to finding a place, worst case I just sleep in a tree...I guess I could try to take it over, I mean I might as well try since I'm already here." the man thinks things over out loud like this and cooks up a plan of action, while his hand once again wanders over to his sliced up ankle to scratch the small still dripping and reddened cut he received from the first goblin.

(Oh, right, before anything I should see if I can change the settings of those notification things so they won't blind me during the fight. Let's see here: open system settings, and oh here it is Interface settings, window position: Automatic, Lock-on: Line of sight, Pop up notice window: On, Pop up notice sounds: For all Notifications, Background transparency 1% and Window visibility: Private)The man fiddles with the settings for a bit, quickly molding them for his needs.

With the setting options configured way better for comfort and in a lot less annoying way the results look like this: Window position: Manual: moved with Middle fingers, Lock-on: Chest, Pop up notice window: only important notifications, Pop up notice sounds: only for important notifications, Background transparency 85% and Window visibility: user only. "This should do it at least for now"

"Now then, I should take out the one that has the dagger first, bull's eye, and that javelin I got should do the trick. Rushing the other one right after while It is off-guard would probably be the best play...maybe throwing a rock at it would also work but If I miss and it hits the cave wall it would be pretty loud. I wanna do all this fast and quiet without alerting whatever might be inside, don't want to get surrounded after all." the man pulls out the javelin and waits a minute for the perfect moment to throw it.

And so the skill-enhanced javelin soars through the air in a perfect arc, hidden away by the glaring sun, it impales the goblin holding a dagger through the middle of its forehead and sticks its blade deep into the ground of soft dirt in a way that the goblin doesn't even fall over completely, Instead bending at the knees leaning backward, Its meager weight almost entirely supported up by the javelin. Due to the sudden tug backward, its limp hands sway back and forth a few times causing the firmly held dagger to fall. The distinct sound of metal digging into dirt, grabs the attention of the other guard goblin, causing it to look in the direction it came from to see what made it.

Due to the sight it saw after glancing at his incorrectly trephinated guard buddy the goblin goes in to a dazed state. By the time the still living dazed guard goblin catches on to what is happening or even notices the man running at him, it only has just enough time to grab its club, which was leaning against the cliff a little behind him, and then to turns around ready to swing. unfortunately for the goblin, by then the man had already thrown a punch that lands right as the goblin had finished turning Its head, knocking the back of its head hard against the rocky outside wall of the cave entrance it was supposed to be guarding, shattering the back of Its skull in with a sickening crunch.

"Ahhh fuck! my knuckles, fffhaaahk" in his pain caused by his terrible punching angle, the man shakes his hand around a bit, occasionally gently blows at it, then holds it firmly around the knuckles as if that would make it hurt less. Moments after, when the pain subsides a little and the man gets used to the slight throbbing in his hand, he stores the bodies and the club in his inventory, picks up the dagger with his left hand and walks over to pull out the javelin with his right. Unfortunately, the javelin had become useless since a third of the blade had split off and the tip had chipped, not to mention that it was covered in purple goblin blood which seemed to carry a pretty strong smell of blood.

The man takes the club back out of his inventory and grabs it with his free hand, leaving the broken javelin behind to soak in the small purple blood pool it had made. After wiping off most of the blood he had on him with grass, the man heads inside the cave cautiously and on alert, moving extra slowly at first to let his eyes and nose adjust to the dark smelly insides of the cave.

After getting to a point some ten meters in, where the tunnel curves right with almost none of the light from the entrance reaching past the curve, the man resorts to moving along the wall, all crouched up and regularly checking behind him, just in case he'd missed some forking path, corner, or some other form of hiding spot. Fortunately for the man, the cave is only a single ~25-meter long tunnel that leads to a 4×5×3 meter space that the man reached the opening of without problems.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Scouting the room, the man notices that there seem to be no other paths out and he also realizes that he is able notice that only because the room is very softly lit up by some weird glowing blue moss scattered all around the ceiling. Sitting against the wall at the back of the room there is a goblin with stripes of red paint on its face and shoulders it also seems that the paint marks seem to very faintly glow because of the light emitted by the ceiling moss. In the middle of the room four standing goblins are munching on something and at the left back corner of the room, there is a pile of mostly eaten animal corpses and such though one corpse does seem to be that of a young human.

The pile of corpses in the corner also gives off a horrendous stench which the man only understood after he got a large whiff of it once, when he stood up to see the striped goblin better. The horrible smell caused the man to get teary, gag and wince in silence as he fought off the need to cough and held against the instinct to throw up. (Aaargh F-fucking hell! Why the fuck would they keep a pile of corpses around with their sense of smell. Urgh, fuck, breathing through the mouth does nothing, it's so fucking bad I can taste it)

The man, holding his breath and again crouched up to avoid as much of the stench as possible, tries to scout out a bit more to make his battle plan but he just can't focus anymore. The goblins in the middle don't seem to be armed with anything other than their sharp dirty nails but the goblin with dark red face paint and fresh scars has a short sword in its lap.

(Alrighty, screw the plan, I can't even think in this stinky ass cave, have a face full of dagger you filthy fuck!) the man hastily throws the dagger at the painted goblin but this goblin notices it midair as if sensing the looming danger and tries to dodge to the right. However its efforts were too late, seeing as the dagger manages to slash open its left eye, cut up the side of its face and split its ear before clanging against stone. The goblin responds to this injury by letting out a horrible scream less for the pain and more for the loss of its left eye.

The man takes a deep breath to hold and reads the other goblins being distracted by the scream as his cue to sprint towards them with his club raised over his right shoulder. Once close enough the man takes a two-handed horizontal swing down at the small crowd instantly killing the one hit directly and knocking down and out two others that collided with the swing carried corpse.

(Holy Shit! ha haa) the man pulls back the club and quickly swings at the still standing goblin from below, surely knocking it out if not killing it as the force directed at its stomach lifts it a few centimeters off the ground. After that, the man rushes over to the one-eyed goblin that is by now on all fours only reaching for his blade which was knocked off of his lap by the sudden dodging. Before He could grab it, however, the man swung down at its neck hard with both hands holding the club handle, breaking its spine and neck so badly that when the corpse slumped stomach first on the ground, its forehead was facing straight up.

Immediately after, the man takes a few breaths to resupply his lungs before holding his breath again, he takes these breaths from as close to the floor as he could, to avoid as much of the stink as possible, but even then he still had to suffer through some of it. He then grabbed the well-used short sword and rushed to slice open the throats of the leftover goblins to make sure they are all dead. Then he ran out of the cave to throw up however as his stomach was empty, only some stomach acid flowed out, making his bad day even worse.

After taking a half an hour break to calm down and carve a piece of wood in a way that could pinch his nose, the man got up and steeled his resolve. "Phewhh... now...to get rid of that god awful smell." the man then proceeded to bravely clean out all the bodies, corpses and carcasses in the cave by storing them and everything they had in his inventory, after that he ran out of the still stinking cave to see exactly what he'd stored. (There's some male underwear and clothes but unfortunately, they all smelled like shit and were way too small, tattered and worn out.) "I assume this sword was yours so, sorry for stealing your stuff kid, but I need it very badly right now... also rest In peace."

After the man throws all the carcasses far out into the woods and comes closer back to dig out a small ditch to where he could bury the boy, he thinks up a backstory of what might have happened to him.

(The body seemed to be around 150 cm tall, meaning that it was likely a reckless kid of like 12 or 13 years of age who thought he could take out all the goblins by himself to maybe prove himself or some dumb shit like that with just what looks to be an iron short sword, aand since the sword is iron or at least something similar, if we are to assume this world is only at the technological stage of swords, this boy was probably a rich brat since he could afford iron weaponry. No armor of any sort or fancy accessories though which is a bit weird if they were rich, first of all, who would give anyone of that age a legit sword...aha maybe it was stolen. Anyways, off you go)

After burying the body, the man spent the rest of the day cleaning up blood from the cave with the clothes he got which he had to go wash in the small stream after almost every swipe due to being drenched with blood. After getting rid of the blood he cleaned the entire cave which was basically an annoying process of wash the rags, twist them, walk back, wipe and repeat a whole bunch of times. Though occasionally he would brake the work flow for a minute or so by crouching down and scratching the really itchy, red and slightly swollen nail marks above his ankle that he got from the first goblin.

Now that he was done with the clean-up, it was time to see if the lizard was edible. "Damn I'm fucking starving! How do I go about setting up a fire?" piling some dry sticks at the clearing in front of the cave entrance, "maybe like this?" the man bangs some rocks with the copper dagger which every now and then gave a spark. Though it did ruin the side taking the hits, after a half an hour of trying the man finally succeeded in getting a small fire going that spread enough for him to be able to cook some lizard meat. Though the lizard meat tasted like how burnt rubber smells, it didn't seem to be poisonous.

By the time the man had eaten his fill, it was getting dark out, so the man gathered a bunch of those big leaves from before into a pile in the still bad smelling cave room to the right side of the cave exit, then tried to get as much sleep in these shit conditions, scratching at the itchy nail marks ever so often.

At daybreak, The man wakes up to a "bing!"

"Huh? Not now I only got like two hours of sleep because of all the itching and animal sounds" the man had set up the entire pathway to the cave full of some small pebbles while he was bringing in the leaves, those pebbles would easily wake him up from his barely asleep state in case something were to wander in and kick one, because even a small movement in their part would echo like crazy in a cave like that, so the man wasn't too worried about the notification popping up at first.

The man, becoming more aware because of the ding, enough to notice how his ankle feels like the wounds have been smeared with hot sauce, decides to take a look at the notification because he doubts he could sleep again for a while. (I'm Over Halfway To lvl11 at 148/203 Exp so that's nice, let's see unarmed goblins gave 7 Exp, armed 10 Exp & that marked one gave 38 Exp also-)

"Gained knack: Infection damage reduction I,

Gained knack: Infection spread speed reduction I,

Infection resistance up I < II

...Ohohoohh Shhit..."