The goblin, who Ethan decided to call Bob, was supposed to be leading him to the dog it smelled, but it kept getting side-tracked. When questioned, it told him that it was tracking it, but Leo couldn’t see how it licking its own privates was helpful. It was difficult to tell what was actually useful to the tracking process and what was caused by the Bob’s stupidity- which was, admittedly, mostly his fault. After a few minutes of wandering, the forest went silent again, and Ethan was glad to see that the goblin seemed to understand the danger as it went completely silent and still even before him.
Ethan and Bob waited for whatever had scared the forest to pass, and then restarted their trek. After ten more minutes, Ethan realized that Bob had led him in a giant circle, and it took everything in him not to kick the green bastard.
The forest was loud right now, and so he decided that he was safe enough to call out for Gadget. “If anything attacks, protect me.” He told the goblin, and then screamed his dog’s name as loudly as he could.
Ethan and Bob waited for a minute, and then Ethan shouted Gadget’s name again. This time, the forest went silent, and Ethan assumed that it was because of him.
“Smell dog,” Bob said twenty or so seconds after his second call for Gadget. Ethan smiled, but as the seconds crawled by, he noticed Bob’s fearful mannerisms and realized…
“Bob… is it a bad dog?” He asked, his stomach a pit of uneasiness.
“Bad dog.” Bob confirmed.
‘…Fuck,’ He thought. ‘Do I ditch Bob and have him act as bait? It’d leave me defenseless, though… and what if gadget did hear, and is coming right to where this ‘bad dog’ is coming?’
After a few seconds of thought, he gave his orders. “Bob, make lots of noise and go to where the bad dog is. Climb a tree, and try to lead it away. If you survive, come back- unless the bad dog is still chasing you.” Ethan told him. He was a bit concerned that Bob wouldn’t listen to the dangerous order, but Bob obediently nodded and ran off.
At least he’d done the obedience part of the fourth Form right.
‘Shit. Now my bodyguard’s gone, and he might fail to lead the ‘bad dog’ away. I need to… climb a tree, maybe?’ He’d never climbed a tree before, but how hard could it be? He didn’t want to leave the vicinity on the off-chance that Gadget had heard his call.
Minutes crawled by, and Ethan eventually managed to get up into a tree. It was a small one, and his position on the branch was precarious, but it was better than nothing. He faintly felt Bob reach the limits of how far he could go, and he also distantly felt that the goblin was scared. It was coming back, though, which meant that it should have lost the ‘bad dog’.
He considered climbing down from the tree, but also thought it was more than possible that it was wrong. The goblin was very stupid, after all.
That is, until Ethan heard a bark; Gadget’s bark, he knew. He recognized the bark with ease; it was loud, high-pitched and drawn out; sort of a whiny bark, for lack of a better description. It came from where Bob and the ‘bad dog’ were, and he leaped down from the tree and started moving that direction as quickly as he could. Only when he started moving with urgency did he realize how fucking difficult it was to move through the forest. The bladed oak trees were dangerous enough that he tried to stay away from them, and the many roots in the ground constantly tripped him and made it so that he couldn’t sprint- not to mention that he constantly had to pay attention to where he was stepping.
The last bit wouldn’t have been a big deal if not for the invisible trees. He was so concentrated on looking down that he slammed straight into one; it was invisible, with only the thin blue mist as a warning.
His body aching, he continued. Ethan could feel now that Bob was nearby, and decided to risk giving up his location to call him down.
“Bob! Over here.” He said, whispering loudly. Luckily, the goblin heard, and dropped down from a tree a few feet away and ran up to him eagerly.
“Bob. If the bad dog shows up again, fight it. Try to slow it down, and not kill; stall it, distract it, maim it- whatever you need to do to keep me safe.” He whispered to the goblin, and it barked an affirmation.
“Gadget!” Ethan shouted out, and he heard Gadget’s bark in response. He turned to go that way, but then heard a powerful growl from behind. He whirled around to see a large beast, the likes of which he’d never seen before.
It bore a vague resemblance to a wolf, but with fur so long that it touched the ground, despite standing four or so feet tall despite its nature as a quadruped. Its bared teeth were sharp and jagged, stained red with blood. Its legs looked weird, too.
“Bob! Get it!” He shouted, and Bob did. The hunchback goblin tore forward on all fours, straight at it. Ethan didn’t stop and watch, instead immediately turning away and moving towards where Gadget was as fast as he could.
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‘Dumbass goblin… it led it right to me.’ Ethan complained to himself. Of course, it was his fault that the goblin was as dumb as it was, but… well, but nothing.
As he ran, he monitored Bob’s condition. A few seconds into the run, Bob lost his arm, and Ethan wished he had some way to micromanage the goblin. He just needed it to buy him time, and he’d even told the goblin that, but it didn’t seem to be listening- at least, he assumed. Maybe the wolf-thing was just that much stronger than Ethan’s weak-ass goblin.
A minute passed, and Bob was somehow still alive. Ethan was pretty sure that the goblin had been clawed across the torso, but he couldn’t really tell that precisely- it might’ve been a bite, or it might’ve just been a scrape or something.
Had Ethan underestimated the goblin? From how quickly it’d lost its arm to begin with, he’d assumed that Bob would only be able to buy him ten or so seconds. Maybe he’d only switched to buying time tactics after losing the arm? The goblin had been charging at the wolf-thing head on.
It didn’t matter. Ethan risked lightly calling out for Gadget, and he heard a short yip in return; not much farther away. Twenty yards, maybe? A minute of running passed, and Ethan was about to call out for Gadget again when something slammed into him from the left. He almost attacked on instinct, but… it was Gadget.
“Gadget! Are you alright, buddy?” He whispered to the dog, happy to see that he seemed better than he had before. Ethan realized that the dog must’ve been healed by something when he got a good look at the dog’s eyes, and noticed that the milky blobs- the cataracts- in his eyes were gone.
“So his name’s Gadget, then?” A voice asked from his right, and Ethan almost jumped out of his skin. He whirled around to face the voice.
A few feet away, standing half behind a tree, was a young woman a bit taller than he was. She had shoulder-length brown hair and was pretty; in particular, her eyes were a stunning, impossible to ignore grey.
Ethan simply stared for a few seconds, absent-mindedly petting Gadget until he finally found his voice.
“I guess you were protecting him?” Ethan asked, and the woman nodded.
“He was really friendly, so I let him follow me around. He heard you call his name, and ran off, so I chased him in order to find another person.” She explained, “Oh; I’m Alyssa.”
“I’m Ethan. Say, did you heal Gadget somehow?” He asked, curious.
“No… why do you ask?”
“He’s an old dog; he had cataracts, but he doesn’t anymore. He seems fine, actually.” Ethan told her.
Just then, he felt Bob die. The goblin’s head was bitten off in one go, and he staggered a bit at the shock of it.
He leaned against a tree, grasping at his chest. His mana core burned, for some reason. Alyssa seemed concerned, and he tried to explain between deep breaths.
“A goblin I summoned died, and the shock was… well, shocking.” He got out, trying to calm down Gadget, who was freaking out because of him.
“You… summoned a goblin? Like, the little green guys?” Alyssa asked curiously.
“Yeah; I called him Bob. I can summon another in a moment, but I need time to calm down. It was like… I don’t know how to describe it. I felt… not the pain, but a bit of the death.” He explained.
A few seconds passed, before something dawned on both of them.
“What did it die to, and where?” She asked, her voice tense.
“It died to a giant, hairy wolf-thing over there,” He pointed to the North, where he’d come from, “It’d probably take it… I don’t know how long, actually. It took me a while to get here from there, but it’s bigger, stronger, a quadruped and knows its way around this hellhole. It was stealthy enough to fool my admittedly shitty goblin, too.”
“…Can you summon another before it gets here?” She asked after a few seconds of thought, stepping fully out from behind the tree for the first time. He hadn’t noticed till now, but she carried a large, hefty branch in her hands. A chunk of sharp metal jutted out of the side of it, like a pickaxe; it must’ve come from one of the metal trees.
“I can try,” Ethan said, pushing himself off of the tree and making sure he had enough mana. There was a tiny bit more than half now, so he didn’t need to use everything; hopefully, that meant that he’d avoid some sort of mana sickness like he frequently saw in fiction.
He began drawing the mana out of his body, this time through his chest rather than his hand. After that, Ethan threw out the magical gang signs meant to compress the mana into a clump, and after doing so twice, he started on the first Form.
It was easier this time than it was last time, and when he finished after twenty seconds, he reckoned that its skeletal structure should be quite a bit better. Improving in the early stages was always easy, he knew.
He moved onto the second Form, and breezed through it with ease. Ethan pronounced the foreign words better and faster.
The third Form was harder, as it spread him thin. Both hands had to do complex signs while he intoned more complex words. He made it through, though, and he proudly checked on the knotted, pulsing ball of mana hovering a few inches in front of his chest. It was invisible to the bare eye, but he could perceive it through some sort of sixth sense; a sense that seemed weirdly similar to all five of his others. It was almost like he could taste, smell, feel, hear and see the mana all at once, but, at the same time, not at all.
Refocusing, he began the fourth Form. This one was even harder than the last, and this time he realized that part of the reason he couldn’t perform this one very well was because his hands physically couldn’t move as they needed to. His hands were too physically slow to perform the movements they needed to, and his fingers couldn’t twist in the ways they needed to. At least his vocal chords were up to the task of enunciating the foreign, magical words meant to direct his subconscious.
Finally, after a full minute and a half, the fourth Form was finished. The pulsing, knotted ball of mana strayed a foot or so away from him and began forming his second goblin, this one superior to its predecessor in every way.
Its skeleton formed first, and this time Ethan only noticed a slight hunch in its back. He looked more closely at the limbs this time, checking to see if they were the right length, but it was hard to tell with just the skeleton- at least when it was being actively covered with flesh.
Just then, the sound of Gadget barking pulled him out of his concentration, and he whirled around to see what his trusted companion was alerting them to.
Of course, it was the large, shaggy wolf. Gadget looked terrified, and Alyssa looked like she was ready to run. The wolf knew that it’d been caught now, and lunged forward- right towards Gadget, who was the closest to it.