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3
Through the Weight of the Wind
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WHEN THE GOBLIN CALLED DOS found a mound of flesh hidden by the cliff, he thought he had discovered some secret. When he saw the six-limbed, flesh-skinned monstrosity his first urge was to run, his second urge was to vomit. When he realized that it was missing at least half of its belly, his terror grew away from the beasts and into whoever killed them. And when he realized that the poor, mutilated monster was still breathing, he immediately folded his guitar into a crossbow and loaded a bolt.
Now when Mimic, his goblin companion who was obsessed with locks was told to check the body, she said: “Beast is not dead, boss! But beast can’t move, boss!”
So Dos took his shot, straight between the monster’s eyes, and it changed absolutely nothing.
Mimic looked at him, and he looked at Mimic. He looked at her white, sleeveless tunic as long as her knees, and her belt made of padlocks interlinked together. He looked at the tons of necklaces made of different locks from different chests, and her bracelet made of knobs.
Looking at her always calmed him down.
“Dos, shoot, shoot! Still not dead!”
“I don’t think it’s something that dies,” he said. He had the voice of a young boy who had seen better times. When he spoke, Dos noticed the slight twitch at Mimic’s pair of ears. They blossomed outwards, like a red, soapy flower. Her long green hair that resembled palm tree leaves matched its grace. She had three piercings, keychains that they randomly found on some furless monkeys.
She was fond of collecting anything you can put a key into; and then breaking them. Like a lockpicker who was solely interested in picking the locks, and not what was behind them.
Dos was quite fond of her. Fond, as in he pays a lot of attention to her than he normally would. He noticed little details about the way she moved, like the slight dimple in her smile that was almost invisible, and the way she combs her hair using only two of her fingers.
In Dos' two years of life, he had never found himself more obsessed with a muse than he was with Mimic. He used to sing about rocks, the steady waterfall slicing the mountain and shaping the stones, how the caterpillars look at the sky when it’s raining, and how his feet felt against the mud. Now he couldn’t think of anything but the dark green stripe on Mimic’s shoulder, and the way she drinks water, and—
“Don’t touch it!” his thoughts were interrupted by Canyon, their big leader wearing clanky armor, warning Scaramouche.
Canyon was fat. He was the hard kind of fat, the kind that was more like a wall than jelly. He was tall, with a long, rectangular face and a flat nose to match. The lines on Canyon’s face were already visible.
This makes Canyon boss. Thirteen years and still going, he was basically immortal in Dos’ eyes. The huge goblin had been close to death so many times before, always surviving with the thinnest line.
He heard the stories, of course. Canyon, who used to be the fishermen’s slave, survived the Krakenhook. Survived the sea serpents, the whale-spiders. After that, he became a mercenary and survived the orcs. And now, along with Dos, they survived the backstabbing of their company’s benefactors.
All the humans died, and only Canyon and Dos remained. Who would believe them, should they go back to Pureza?
The clanking of their leader’s full-metal armor distracted him. The steel’s creaking and clanking were making good notes in bad rhythms, sounds with terrible compositions.
Dos used them as drums once, and Canyon reprimanded him with a kick to the face. The entire thing frustrated him, and in times like these he would play a tune to his guitar.
Clink clank. He couldn’t figure out how Canyon could wear it, much worse walk while wearing it. It was twice as heavy as Scaramouche.
“I said, don’t touch it!” Canyon shouted. He was trying to stop their newest companion from messing with the breathing lump of meat.
The main problem with Scaramouche was not that he was new; but rather that he was old.
They found him still nested inside a Gnossienne tree and waited for him to ripe. It took two weeks, and Scaramouche came out as fresh as a baby. It meant that the mischievous guy had once lived centuries ago, then died, then his corpse became a tree, then the tree luckily survived being chopped down or hunted for two centuries.
Canyon said keeping him was good luck. Dos didn’t agree. For one, he had a name that was hard to spell, and two, his arms and legs were longer than normal. It was creepy.
And three, when they retrieved him from the Gnossienne tree, the first thing the goblin did was dig out a chest, which Dos assumed was a treasure that he buried in his past life, and, when he opened it, the chest contained nothing worthwhile.
Nothing but a jester’s outfit sewn in bright red and yellow, complete with the ringing bells at the tip of the hat. It fits Scaramouche's body perfectly, down to the size of his creepy arms and legs. Dos assumed it was tailor-made for him.
The only positive thing Dos could say about it was that the jester could play the flute.
“Eat?” Scaramouche said. Yes, said, because it was less of a question than a suggestion, honestly it was more of a demand.
“Eat?” Mimic mimicked.
“No. That meat’s dangerous!” Canyon yelled, in his old grumpy man voice. He grabbed the two goblins by their collars, then threw them into the river. Then laughed in his energetic old man laugh. And then Mimic laughed, just because.
From a distance, Dos envied his leader’s strength.
Their two new members weren’t used to speaking the language yet. After all, they’ve never been in the city, and they’ve never been with the humans. All those two knew their whole lives were fangs and fruits. Or at least that was true about Mimic. Dos found her himself, being spit out from a boulder.
The rock was her father, her mother, the mineral was the womb where her limbs were made flesh and her heart first beat.
And Scaramouche? Dos didn’t like thinking about him. He was convinced that the gob was absolutely bonkers.
“We need to get away from here,” Canyon told him. He was inspecting the monstrosity’s carved-out belly. “My old boss called this a Sanguine Beast, meeting this creature spelled death.”
Dos resisted the urge to fold his crossbow back into a guitar.
“And then there’s the matter of what killed it,” Canyon hung his huge shield on his back, then buried his hands into the beast’s belly. “This knife work is human. Like the butcher back on Crab’s Locke.”
Dos remembered the restaurant. “I miss eating at Crab’s Locke.”
“And that cliff,” Canyon stared above them. It was at least sixty meters in height. “I think its killer lured it off the cliff, came down, then ate it.”
“Like an orc,” Dos concluded.
“Like an orc,” Canyon agreed.
“Like an orc,” Mimic repeated.
“So a human-orc company,” Dos assumed. “So it can’t be them.”
“Yeah, those pig-dogs who betrayed us are simple rogues,” Canyon concluded. “Whoever it was, we need to get away from here as soon as possible.”
“No!” Scaramouche shouted in anger, his arms cartoonishly pumping an invisible object. “Burn! We—” he pointed at the body“—burn! We burn! Burn! Burn! Burn!”
“We can’t mess with it, we don’t want a human-orc company in our trail.”
“Eat! Or burn! No other way!”
Canyon slapped the jester’s face to shut him up. “We’ll go.”
Dos was used to this. He suffered the same treatment from his boss back when he was new.
Although, the jester’s face worried him. In the past week, all he saw on Scaramouche’s face was a wide, creepy grin. From cheek to cheek and end to end, even as gob slept. Just a wide, wide, smile.
Like the entire world was a joke and he figured out the punchline.
Now that face was twisted in a wild worry.
Dos, immediately loading another bolt into his crossbow, shouted at his leader. “Boss!” his eyes scanned for a bush to hide into, or a tree, or a terrain. He saw it from a distance behind Scaramouche: a figure, eight feet in height, the snot on its face barely be distinguished between the trees’ branches.
But not Dos. Dos had eyes that could find a needle in a haystack with a single look.
“There’s an orc,” he said. “Incoming!”
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VIKTOR ONCE SAW A GOBLIN WEARING AN ARMOR that it stole from one of his dead men. It carried the armor like it was part of its body, knowing that no blade would be strong enough to cut steel. A certainty gained simply from watching. This was his standard of a smart goblin.
In the end they chased it into a lake, so it jumped into the water to swim. Then, it drowned in its own weight.
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So when he saw an armored goblin shouting commands, he was impressed, and then he felt glad, and then he was horrified.
Impressed, because the goblin knew how to carry itself. It stood straight on its back with an eerie pride about it. A calm kind of pride. An aura that wise old men emit. One that spoke volumes regarding experience.
Glad, because a capable lieutenant was always hard to find, should this one prove capable. Commanding through another was good. But an army that could command itself was always better.
And horrified, because of what it implied.
For one, a language signifies a structure, a culture, a system. Something that goblins never had and were never meant to have.
But that was good, that was to his advantage, at least for now.
It was good that he met Fog-Eyes beforehand, who was capable of perfect speech, not to mention the abusive sarcasm. It seemed to him that literacy had spread beyond human control.
Then again, it wasn’t just about the orcs and goblins being able to speak, it was that they were talking specifically in Amanilan tongue. A language that evolved through millenniums of history, context and war.
The place called Pureza bothered him too. He intended to eyes Fog-eyes about it once they got to know each other better. Time reveals all secrets anyhow.
“Wait,” he called the orc, who was already charging with both axes in hand. “I may be able to make use of those goblins. Let me handle this alone.”
The orc looked so relieved despite himself. When he noticed his own expression, he immediately tried to hide it. “I can help you, my father gave these axes—”
“—are just for show.” Viktor interrupted, giving the orc some face. “Your metal’s in pristine condition, doctor. Your scalpels have seen more blood than your weapons.”
And already there was a projectile flying toward his face. He caught it using his hand, and his hand bruised.
It was a padlock.
One of the goblins threw him a padlock. A. Padlock.
“What kind of piss-drinkers …”
I've lost my touch, his thought interrupted him. Immediately he started running at the top of his lungs.
One of the most important things about war was disruption. He didn’t want to let his opponents take their positions. He was alone, and while he was confident with his techniques, opponents in proper formations would be a pain to deal with.
But Already the frontline was taken by the armored goblin, its bulky gauntlets, oversized boots, and hulking chest plate were noticeably too big for it. And the goblin itself was already big, Viktor thought, perhaps one of the biggest he had ever seen.
Getting past it shouldn’t be easy. It was covered from foot to neck with just metal in loose sizes. Beyond all that weight was a thick, iron shield as tall as its height strapped on its one arm, and a hooked sword on the other, which Viktor guessed was for keeping opponents occupied.
Like a castle wall whose sole purpose was to be an obstacle while a rain of arrows tears down its attackers.
“Goblin!” the armored one shouted. “There are five of us and one of him! If you join us, you will have no maste—”
Viktor's hands slammed his war hammer into his opponent, time was against him, his strength was against him. How quickly do his arms tear from the force of his own strength?
In the end it was only the shield that suffered his blow. Viktor was sure that the shield arm should be in great pain after suffering such blunt force, but one look at the opposing goblin and he was less convinced.
His opponent tried to use its hook sword to snare his leg, but just as swiftly Viktor's legs had climbed over his opponent's shield and jumped over the castle goblin's head, his weight on his hand, now pushing onto his opponent’s helmet.
What he didn’t expect was the goblin in a clown suit, who sprung into position by going between the armored goblin’s legs at the exact moment Viktor jumped, and now Viktor’s entire back was open for an attack.
Before he could respond, another two padlocks went flying in his direction.
I’m gonna need a helmet, he noted as he pushed his hand from the castle goblin’s head, essentially vaulting, but he was upside down. He was hoping the padlocks who missed their marks would find their way toward the clown, but the limb-blessed goblin simply deflected the padlocks away with a swing of its flute; which Viktor now noticed was made from steel.
An odd dress and an odd weapon, Viktor noted. He landed on the ground and regained his balance. There was a padlock that flew between his eyes, and he bent his back to dodge it just in time.
He could count three goblins. Where’s the other?
Clearly, they were in positions now and his previous efforts were useless. There was the armored goblin as a wall, the clown to keep him in check, and the padlock goblin to end him from afar.
It was good. It was so good Viktor would’ve been overjoyed if he wasn’t the one suffering their brilliance. Viktor slipped between their bodies to block the projectiles, bashing his hammer again into the armored one, dodging the jester’s flute to the left, then right, crouching to dodge the hook sword, twisting his body sideways to dodge both, then kicking a thrown padlock back to its origin— which the clown, twisting its arm impossibly backward—caught in its hand, to throw it to Viktor’s chin, which missed at the tilt of his head.
I need a helmet, he noted again.
The armored goblin was physically tough, but there was a certain hesitation in him, probably because it thinks that Viktor was Fog-eyes slave.
Viktor recognized its shield and hook sword fighting style, which was Amanila’s standard technique for the frontline defensive.
While originally meant to deal with large beasts: the hook sword, to snag its enemies’ limbs and disrupt movement, its use was further expanded in human wars to trapping their opponent's weapon, trip them off, while the back was for slicing and slashing. The heavy armor and tower shield would mitigate the damage. To Viktor's surprise, even the goblin’s footwork was the same.
The clown-dressed goblin meanwhile was impossible to predict, with its long limbs which it could twist and turn in bone-breaking angles, its nonsensical attack patterns, and its wide contorted smile as if its mouth was being marionetted.
Finally, the padlock-throwing goblin, whose shots were pinpoint accurate and whose strength was far beyond normal.
If Viktor met them in his last life he would have been terrified. Any of them would have qualified for his personal army, and the idea that all of the goblins are this strong…
“You know I could help you, but you insist on doing it alone so I guess there’s not much I can do about it,” Fog-eyes shouted support from a distance. “I mean, I am an orc you know, I’m pretty strong, honestly,” Fog-eyes kept on. The orc was sitting on a huge boulder by the cliffside, turning the pages of a book.
Viktor started racking his brain. He needed to break their formation. He needed to find the weakest, or hope that one of them would slip. And when the padlocks started flying again he moved and treated his cloak as a shield, softening the projectile’s landing. The clown and the armored charged towards him, the armored goblin hooking his ankles, Viktor dancing on his feet.
The clown goblin, from a great distance, had managed to imitate a spear stab—its long legs and long arms stretching into an extensive magnificent reach.
Sweat ran across Viktor’s head. His own movements were too slow, his body too tired too quickly. He fended all of their attacks with simple dodges and side-steps, but he was nowhere making progress in making them submit.
And so Viktor feigned swinging his hammer into the armored one, who was slow and could barely dodge, but the real attack connected downwards into the clown goblin’s left leg, bending it.
Within half a second Viktor was already blocking another set of padlocks, and with that was the clown’s flute connecting to the back of Viktor’s head, dizzying him. To which, Viktor’s body automatically responded by burying a leg into his opponent’s gut.
His vision was dazed, and he was sure he suffered a mild concussion, yet he gained his step just as quickly.
He knew that the goblins heal fast, but still forget that it also applied to him.
The armored one tended to its companion, who still had a huge smile on its face as if getting hurt was too funny. “I hit him!” the clown goblin said. “Me! Scaramouche!”
Something sharp hit Viktor on his cheek.
He pulled it out.
It was a key. A key.
“I hit him!” the padlock goblin yelled back. “Me! Mimic!”
Already Viktor’s hammer tried to bury itself inside the other goblin’s chest plate. The blunt force doesn’t seem to faze it if not for the not knockback, but he knew from his opponent’s slowly contorting face with each hit that he was doing damage.
Viktor knew how to dodge better, how to counter better. He was wary of Mimic’s projectiles, so wherever she was positioned, he made sure that the armored goblin was between them.
And Scaramouche split its legs and started swinging its flute like a dwarven version of itself, arms backward, forwards, forward, backward, then down low again. Viktor could barely parry them. There was no rhyme nor reason to it, no pattern nor grace, it fights like a wild beast with eight limbs that was suffering a seizure.
“You are too good for someone born five days ago,” the armored goblin said.
Shivers ran up Viktor’s spine.
How, he thought. How did he know?
Viktor sent another swing into the goblin’s chest plate. It was so easy for him. His opponent was using a technique he was very familiar with. An overhead strike next, then a short stride backward, followed by a wide left swing. He was mesmerized at how exactly by-the-book the armored goblin could replicate it. One of the fighting styles he created himself: now in front of him thousands of miles beyond his empire.
How?
The armored goblin’s hook sword clashed against Viktor's war hammer. It slid through the handle—hooked—then dragged his weapon off his hands. And with great confidence, the armored goblin stepped forward for his next stance—now—just at the exact moment it raised its right leg, Viktor kicked its left knee, making it lose all of its balance and footwork, its armor dragging it down face-first into the soil.
It still held on to its shield, and just as quickly Viktor unbridled it from its hand, and finally dropped it towards the goblin’s head.
Enough to knock it off, Viktor hoped.
When Scaramouche lunged himself single-legged into an attack that resembled a gorilla’s, Viktor jumped to match his opponent’s height, then held the clown goblin’s head, breaking its momentum, and as gravity pulls them back to the earth, Viktor made sure Scaramouche face landed on his knee.
“Wow, that must’ve hurt,” Fog-eyes commented.
The sun shines as a giant spotlight on pig-dogs cockfighting. The trees danced to the tune of the morning breeze. And the crossbow bolt coming from a goblin called Dos went through Viktor’s heart.
But of course, he dodged. Of course he could dodge it.
Dos was counting on that.
As the bolt flew past through the edges of Viktor’s cloak, flew past the weight of the wind, flew past a falling leaf, and landed directly into Fog-eye’s throat.
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Gnossienne Tree
[Entry from the Library of Bluemin, Biomancer Aks, courtesy of Sunspine]
It was first thought that Gnossienne Trees are where goblins came from, and there were hundreds of research as regarding the soil where they specifically grew, the flora and fauna around them, and essentially a trial of making an artificial one, but only one thing was found as a commonality: a goblin corpse, and when one found no corpse, they found at least traces of goblin blood.
Gnossienne Trees essentially start normally from the roots, growing into a trunk with normal stems and flowers, sometimes bitter or spicy fruits, and once the trunk reached a height of at least eight to eleven meters, perhaps after five to ten decades, the rest of the top grows into a giant egg of green jelly.
Inside this egg grows the body of its goblin root. This egg takes at least twenty to thirty decades to mature, which will eventually pop and from here the previously dead goblin would once again be alive with its original body, with its original memories.
In Doctor Aks* et al.’s mancerate thesis entitled “Kill It and It Will Only Lay Eggs,” he found out that Gnossienne Trees are not only inevitable but also infallible. It is biologically impossible to prevent a Gnossienne Tree from growing from a goblin corpse. However, most natural predators prevent this process with animals simply eating the jelly** or the occasionally occurring natural disasters such as whirlwinds and Pureza’s lumberjacks.
*now Biomancer Aks, with his thesis earning him a mancerate degree due to his contributions to goblin biology and ecosystem
**It has been noted that the jelly taste like a fresh soup of sewer broth and dead rats with a dash of pepper and rosemary
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