After the brief, lopsided fight at Beaver Bridge, plus his share of the experience from the Rattletail woods, Noah had made level nine.

The other deckbearers had also made a few levels, and after working with them a tiny bit, Noah and team had crossed the river and hiked along the bank of the northernmost of the two new waterways that graced Kansas. It had been a far easier trek than the forest. They had encountered a fragment of road with an abandoned gas station, no sign of the previous owner or occupants except a few blood stains and some spent ammo casing.

A decent amount of the food had been there, much of it still in packaging. The group had replenished their food supplies, which had been almost emptied by that point. They had decided to rest there, taking eight hours to sleep. Noah had taken the time, using his Reclaimer Golem and his Human Scavenger, to turn huge chunks of the gas station into Scrap Tokens, filling up his Scrap Yard card. After everyone had woken and eaten, they had headed to the second bridge, closer to the Zorin goblins, and won the fight there as well.

Filled with trepidation, Noah, Lika, and their team had crossed back into what everyone, even Lika and her two buddies, was calling the Rattletail Forest.

One day, another death, and five cards later, Noah stood on the edge of Zorin Bog, trying not to breathe in through his nose. The place stank powerfully of fish and rotting vegetation.

"This is the people we’ve been trying to save, supposedly to ally with?” Emily asked, her voice filled with skepticism and disappointment.

Noah felt her disappointment as his eyes followed the incredibly rickety, partially lopsided bridge about three hundred feet across fetid-and-driftwood-filled waters to a large collection of wooden huts at the center.

Noah and company were about a third of a mile from the bridge, and one goblin was running from a half-constructed guard post on the lake’s edge across said bridge, while his buddy watched them from the post.

With a frown across her face, Lika turned to face Emily. Her contest card still swirled around her.

“What’s wrong with my home?” Lika asked, hands on her hips. “I saw yours. It was some nice farmland, yeah, but there were just giant buildings to hold everyone.”

Noah gave the brief argument only a fraction of his attention as he tried to estimate numbers. He used the same method his sergeant had taught him to estimate enemy forces if he got to see the encampment. Ten huts approximately in each direction, so probably a hundred huts total… I don’t know what density goblins occupy water huts with, but it’s probably pretty high. Maybe five hundred goblins total? A thousand?

Lika and Emily were still talking about human cities.

Noah cut them off. “What method of feeding yourselves do the Zorin Bog goblins use?”

“Fishing with spears in bog and river, and foraging the forest,” Lika responded.

“Are most goblins fishers and foragers?” Noah asked.

Lika cocked her head to the side. “The men, yeah. Women stay home, learn cooking and alchemy, raise children, and maintain the houses and bridges.”

“Let me guess—almost everyone fishes or forages? The men I mean?”

Lika nodded, her head cocked to the side, her brow furrowed in confusion.

“And all the men do the fighting?” Noah asked.

“Well, except that we give any cards we get to the queens and witch-doctors,” Lika said. “’Cuz the forest is dangerous as a rabid alligator.”

It was Noah’s turn to stare quizzically. “Wouldn’t that mean more reason to give the people in the forest decks?”

Lika shook her head. “If a deckbearer is killed by a monster, their cards are lost forever, and not left to pick up like when you killed that prince. It’s just basic sense to keep them with the safe people.”

“What’s the point of cards if you don’t use them?” Noah asked.

Lika stared out at her village. “We use them sometimes. But when we do, it’s against invaders, or to try and hunt cards specifically, with a whole team of goblin spear carriers guarding our deckbearers.”

“Huh,” Noah said.

“There are always more goblins, Noah,” Lika said, though her voice was hollow as she said it. “There aren’t always more cards. And that’s the real strength of a people. You have to choose what’s best for the whole.”

“Shortstack is giving you good advice, if you can hear it,” RED said. “You need to focus on the power of your deck, not rescuing your fellow meat sacks.”

Noah’s own reading of history convinced him that both Lika and RED were being short-sighted. Treating people like resources could occasionally accomplish great things, like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China. But truly great empires almost always got that way by treating their people as partners, and making sure each one had a chance to grow strong.

But rather than try and explain all that in the moment, Noah just rolled his eyes. “Sure, I’ll just start sacrificing my people for cards. That ends well.”

“You think you’re being sarcastic,” RED said in his synthesized voice.

Noah didn’t feel like arguing it further. “Well, shall we?”

Lika nodded, and the group started their way through the marsh grass, slapping at the mosquitos that rose all around them. It took a good ten minutes to walk the third of the mile through the forest and marsh. By the time they reached their target, about thirty goblins had congregated on the shore. Three were women, two in scale-and-feather outfits and another in a leather skirt-and-vest combo that was a near match for Lika’s, and seemed to be the focus of the group. The remainder were male, dressed in loincloth and carrying spears.

Lika stepped forward slowly. “Hey, Klaka, how’s it going?”

Her voice was trepidatious.

The goblin in the leather vest and skirt stepped forward. “Lika?”

Lika nodded.

The goblin—Klaka, Noah assumed—pointed her finger at Lika. “You were banished, you and yours cast out, a mercy given to failures. Why do you return now, and with these hideous humans?”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“They’re here to help us against—” Lika started.

Klaka cut her off. “Help us? Or help you cheat? You surrendered, you club-footed mistake. It’s over. Found a new tribe or die, but you cannot return here.”

Lika glowered. “Look, Klaka, I only failed because you and my other dear sisters joined up to kick me out first, so—”

Klaka cut her off. “Then perhaps you should have been more popular, and less of a club-footed weirdo.”

Is this high-school bullshit for real?

“What’s happening?” Noah asked, stepping forward.

“This little wretch was kicked from the tribe, and with good reason,” Klaka said, pointing at Lika. “Now she wants to come back with outsiders, like the little bog turd she is.”

Some of the goblins standing near Klaka hissed, and some flapped their loin-covered genitals in her general direction. Noah was pretty sure that was a sign they didn’t like her, but he wouldn’t have bet anything he cared to lose on it.

The two goblins with Lika made the same motion back.

“We’re not here to upset your internal… election,” Noah began.

“Election? I don’t understand,” Klaka replied.

Noah turned to Lika. “Explain to me what’s specifically going on, please.”

Lika sighed. “We—the daughters of my mother, Queen Zaba, all fight. When one of us loses, they can either submit, leave, or be killed, till only one daughter remains. Most of my sisters ganged up on me minutes after the announcement, and wouldn’t even give me the option to stay—”

“Because you’re a crippled freak, unworthy to breed more goblins,” Klaka interjected.

Lika’s lip trembled, but no tears fell. “—so I left. It was only a day or so before you found me, I’d barely gone anywhere when the words announcing the apocalypse appeared, and I got a deck.”

The goblin that was always giving Lika shit muttered something, and Lika nodded, but no one translated.

“You got a deck?” Klaka asked, her eyes widening.

“A really good one,” Lika said, and pointed to the card floating around her.

Noah frowned. He had been expecting something like this because of how evasive Lika was, but not quite such a weird combination of brutality and high-school gym politics. The goblins are crazy.

But Noah thought he could still solve it by appealing to old-fashioned greed. “I came here with cards—extra cards. I wanted to help the Zorin Bog goblins against the elves, and to claim the elves’ realm card. But I’ll happily buy aid to do so as well. I’d like to speak to your queen.”

“How are twenty humans with funny clubs going to help us?” Klaka asked with a sneer.

Lika laughed and started to open her mouth, but Noah held his hand out. “I can help. I’ll demonstrate to the queen. Please take me.”

Klaka stepped back and had a quick conversation with the two witch-doctors while Noah waited, standing in the marshy grass and slapping at bugs, trying his hardest to ignore the hideous smell. Lika briefly tried to talk to him again, but Noah shook his head.

After a moment, Klaka stepped forward again, slapping at a mosquito on her shoulder as she did. “Fine, you can come see my mother.”

Noah nodded. Klaka turned and started across the bridge, motioning for Noah and his people to begin crossing the bridge behind her. It was poorly made, with gaps between boards, but surprisingly sturdy.

As they crossed, Noah looked over the side. He saw that the bog was only one-to-four feet deep at nearly every point, but teemed with fish. It also had a rocky bottom, not something he had expected for a place named ‘Zorin Bog,’ although everything around the lake was quite bog-like.

Noah turned to Lika and opened his mouth.

“We have a building card,” Lika said before Noah could ask. “Without it, we would surely starve, or at least have to move. Look ahead, between the huts, there”—she pointed, and Noah trained his gaze along the line she provided—“that’s it.”

Noah squinted. At first, the building looked barely different than the ones around it. It was about ten feet tall, but quite wide and squat on its platform. Noah could see the wood was tightly fitted and bore numerous arcane markings across it, most of them shaped as waves or fish.

As he stared, a card appeared in his vision.

Fisher’s Hall

Common Tier-1 Nature Building

0 Power

Null Card: May not be used directly in the Great Game

Creates a decent quality 1,000 sq ft shrine to Ebisu.

This building gives a boon to fishing depending on its placement

River: This building attracts twenty percent of all migratory fish that cross the river and twenty percent of all non-migratory fish that hatch within two miles upriver and downriver of this building. Attracted fish won’t attempt to travel more than a thousand feet from the shrine and need only half the food to sustain themselves.

Any Deckbearer with Nature Power gains +1 Nature Power if they are within 1000' of this building.

"Ebisu has provided this building with a weak blessing, and the waters around it are bountiful"

Noah stared at the card. He had seen a couple building cards, but one had been a mortal Arrow Fort card that he hadn’t paid much attention to, and another had been an Infection Node overland card.

But staring at the Fisher’s Hall, the true potential of the cards became apparent.

“Wait,” Noah said, stopping. A goblin bumped into the back of his leg, said something that sounded angry, and briefly tried to push him.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Noah said again. “If that is a common card, why don’t you have a ton of them? I mean, that’s insanely useful.”

“Common tier, but specialty cards drop extremely rarely,” RED said before anyone else could answer. “Less than two percent of cards dropped are specialty cards, and building cards are fairly low even within that subset, normally. So getting even one common building probably represents a ton of cards or packs these miserable green skin suits have acquired.”

“He speaks truth,” Lika said. “We keep hoping for another building. Finding a dungeon or an important, named overland monster would give us a much better chance, but I’m not sure we could handle one of those regardless. We’re not great warriors, and our decks are common and low-tier.”

“Hey, keep moving!” Klaka yelled back at them. “I’ve got things to do!”

Noah frowned but kept walking. He and his remaining team were led across the rickety bridge and through the wooden platform huts of the Zorin Bog goblins. As Noah passed through, he saw numerous fish smoking racks, and was surprised the goblins hadn’t burned their village to the ground, despite the lake all around them. The rotting vegetation smell had faded, but the fish smell had become overwhelming, and there were bugs everywhere. Noah also saw multiple starving goblins, most of whom were sickly to boot.

Emily is right, these aren’t going to be the best allies ever, and they have no food to spare. Damn.

After a moment more of walking, they reached the Fisher’s Hall building.

“Alright, leave your men outside,” Klaka said, and motioned to her people to do the same.

Noah, Lika, and Emily walked inside through the front door.

The interior of the Fisher’s Hall was far nicer than Noah had expected, perhaps because it was a magical building. It was cooler inside, and a breeze seemed to be passing through it—a pleasant one that smelled faintly of flowers, and not at all of fish and rot, or even of packed goblin bodies. There were multiple salt barrels around, as well as curing booths.

But the floor was covered in sleeping furs, and goblins lined most of the area, including numerous children and a few pregnant female goblins. These guys are dirt poor, Noah thought to himself.

Klaka stepped forward, toward a seat at the end of the hall that had space around it, and included a few better-dressed goblins. The seat was occupied by an older goblin. Noah had trouble figuring a goblin’s age, but he would have pegged her at ‘older than forty, younger than sixty’ if she were human.

“Queen Zaba! I must report a violation of all our traditions. Our sister, Lika, has returned!” Klaka yelled.

Way to bury the lede, Noah thought with disgust.

Ugly murmurs swept through the crowd in the guttural goblin tongue, and Noah saw people picking up weapons and tools.

Noah stepped forward before Klaka could continue. “I, Noah Smith of the U.S.A., come before you, not as a part of Lika’s tribe, but as a potential ally! The Ashtae Elves move on the territories surrounding them, including yours. They will seek to enslave you soon. I was told as much by their own Prince Ayrlic before I slew him!”

That threw the hall into chaos, as goblins shouted at one another, most fearfully. A few brandished weapons and called out passionately.

The couple around the figure at the end glanced at one another, and the older woman—Queen Zaba, Noah figured—stood. She wore the same leather outfit as her daughter Lika, but with fur trimming around it, and she carried a wooden staff with fishbones wrapped around it and a bear skull at the top.

“Why would you help us?” Queen Zaba asked, one eye raised. “What motive could you—”

A horn pealed out across the water, reverberating even into the building.

Queen Zaba stopped, her brow furrowed, and Noah glanced around at the confusion and milling around him.

He turned to Lika, whose face was pale. “That’s not a horn your people made, is it?”

With wide eyes, she shook her head no.