The goblin formed was a specimen to be beheld compared to Bob and the second goblin. It was almost four feet tall, with a straight back and properly-sized limbs. Its digits ended in inch-long razor-sharp claws, and its muscles bulged beneath its forest-green skin. Its face was ugly, scrunched-up with a too-large nose, beady black eyes and bared, carnivorous teeth, but that was because it was a goblin, not due to a mistake in its summoning.
You have gained a level.
It is recommended that you open your Panel.
Ethan wished the System would drop the second message. He understood that his Panel was where he allocated Attributes and such; he didn’t need to be told again every time.
It was nice to learn that he could gain levels from things outside of killing, though.
The very first thing it did was look around in awe at the world, but Ethan quickly snapped out an order. “Stop!” He whisper-shouted urgently, noticing that the goblin’s… ‘objects’… were dangling in the wind.
“What’s wrong!?” Alyssa asked urgently, startled by the alarming word and sharp tone.
“Ah… the goblin has… things that I doubt you’d want to see, is all. It needs clothes.” Ethan said embarrassedly, and he was glad that he could only barely see Alyssa’s outline in the darkness. He was even more glad that she probably couldn’t see him very well, either.
∑
Ethan had taken his bloody, olive t-shirt off of his wounds and cut out a loincloth for the goblin before reapplying the olive t-shirt. He’d been intending to reapply the makeshift bandage for a while anyway, since the part that was actually on the wound had been soaked through for a while now.
Since this one was meant to live for a while, unlike the second one, he decided to give it a name. Unable to come up with a good one on the spot, he decided to ask Alyssa.
“What do you think we should call this one?” Ethan asked.
“They get names?” She asked, sounding confused. “I didn’t think they were independent.”
Ethan sighed. “They’re only moderately so, but I don’t want to just refer to it as ‘goblin’.” He explained.
“Oh… what about Bob?” Alyssa asked, and Ethan laughed quietly. He could almost feel Alyssa looking at him strangely, and he scrambled to explain.
“I named the first one Bob. It died holding off the Wyrdfur so that I could escape.” He explained, and she nodded. “Fred, then?” Alyssa suggested.
“That works.” Ethan said, turning to the goblin. “You’re Fred, now.” He told it.
“He won’t bite if I get closer to get a better look at him, right?” Alyssa asked, and Ethan shook his head before realizing that it was too dark for her to have seen. “No, he won’t.” Ethan answered.
She approached, standing a foot or so away from the goblin and inspecting it with curious intensity. “How smart do you think this one is?” Ethan eventually asked.
“It looks pretty dumb.” Alyssa answered, standing up from her position on the ground in order to get a closer look at it.
“Fred, what’s one plus one?” He asked.
Fred’s face scrunched together in intense concentration, and a few seconds later, it barked out some gibberish to him- gibberish that he understood, since the goblin was intrinsically connected to him.
“What that mean?” Was roughly what it had responded with. Funnily enough, Alyssa’s following question was almost identical.
“What’s that mean? What’d he say?” She asked. Before answering her, Ethan rephrased the question for Fred.
“If you have one stick, and then I gave you another stick, how many sticks would you have?” Ethan asked. While Fred tried to figure out the answer to his question, he relayed its confused response to Alyssa and then waited.
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After a solid fifteen seconds, Fred finally answered.
“More?” Was his answer, and Ethan found the slight hopefulness in its response a bit endearing. He was technically correct, and he relayed its response to Alyssa.
“So… it’s not very smart, then?” Alyssa said, smiling faintly.
“He’s definitely smarter than Bob was; Bob’s response to the same question was to shout ‘What!?’” Ethan told her.
Alyssa chuckled slightly, but the time for banter was over.
“Go and get yourself a branch like this,” Ethan told Fred, holding out the branch with metal jutting out of it, “When you’ve got one, come back.”
He let out a small sigh as Fred ran off. “When he gets back with one, I’ll just tell him to stand guard all night so that we can sleep.”
Alyssa nodded. “What about food and water?” She asked.
“We’ll have to look for it in the morning.” Ethan said, a bit of annoyance unintentionally slipping into his voice. What else were they meant to do?
Alyssa didn’t seem to notice, or at least didn’t let it show. She just sighed and unfolded the sheet of fur, before seeming to realize the problem that he’d thought of ages ago.
“Uh… we’ll have to share.” Alyssa said nervously, and Ethan nodded slowly.
“…We will.” Ethan responded, and Alyssa looked away. Ethan was glad that she didn’t insist on one of them sleeping outside of the sheet; he’d been dreading that for hours, now. He was pretty sure that, if one of them were made to sleep outside of its warmth, they would wake up missing digits.
After a few seconds of tense silence, Alyssa laid it across the ground and slid underneath. Ethan seriously regretted having not been the one to get under first, as it was going to be awkward.
‘No… no, this is just trying to survive. There’s nothing weird happening.’ He told himself, shaking his head and taking manual control over his body.
Ethan slid underneath the sheet of fur, very relieved to feel that it was very good at keeping the heat in. It was barely large enough for the both of them to be under it at once, and so their sides were pressed together.
‘Nothing weird about this; just trying to avoid frostbite,’ Ethan repeated to himself, ‘If anything, this is good; we’re conserving body heat.’ Ethan thought.
A few minutes later, he slipped into a deep slumber.
∑
Ethan was yanked out of his surprisingly deep sleep by a tremendous rumbling originating from the sky. . He heard Alyssa groan beside him. ‘That’s not a good sign,’ was Ethan’s very first thought, as he gazed up at the sky, blotted out by dark gray clouds. He tried to quickly escape the sheet’s grasp, but he had to be careful in order to not tear it apart; the thing was crude beyond belief, after all.
Fred stood over Gadget a few feet away from them, as still as a statue.
“Gadget, up! Fred, get over here.” Ethan said, and Gadget leapt up off the ground with surprising levels of energy while Fred jumped out of his skin.
‘Was that bastard sleeping standing up?’ Ethan wondered. He couldn’t really prove it, but the drastic difference in mental activity he felt between before and after he shouted at him said a lot.
‘…I never told him to stand guard,’ Ethan realized. He’d gone to sleep before the goblin had returned from finding the branch.
…Nothing bad had happened; Ethan just needed to make sure he never made that mistake again.
Shaking his head, Ethan returned his gaze to the rumbling sky. “I guess our water problems solved,” Ethan commented as Alyssa finally escaped the fur sheet’s grasp and stood.
“We need to look for shelter or something,” Alyssa said seriously, ignoring his comment. “I know. Give me a minute to get ready,” Ethan told her, sighing as he sat down and began removing his shirt from the wound on his right leg. It wasn’t too bad so far, but it still ached intensely.
As he did, Ethan gave Fred something to do.
“Look for somewhere safe from the rain.” Ethan told it- a simple order. He didn’t have the time to come up with a more complex order and just hoped that the goblin could figure out the rest on its own.
He winced when he saw the wound again. It was better than before by a lot, surprisingly, but the gouges in his leg were still deep. They didn’t seem to be bleeding very much anymore, though. Ethan was almost surprised at how much faster he was healing, before realizing a roughly 20% enhancement over the course of many hours was quite significant. At this rate, he might be healed enough to not need to really limp in a few days.
He was bleeding a little bit still, but Ethan wasn’t sure if it was worth reapplying the shirt. He had to move very carefully with it on so that it didn’t fall off, and it hurt like hell to have the rough-ish fabric rubbing against the wound.
Ethan decided pretty quickly to just throw it out, as there was simply too much blood covering it. He didn’t want to attract predators with the stench of blood, after all. Even he could smell it clearly, and humans weren’t particularly renowned for their sense of smell.
‘It’s a waste to throw all of it out, though.’ Ethan decided. Since they were on a time crunch, he only very crudely tore off the bits of his shirt that weren’t drenched in his blood and stuffed them into his many pockets to be used for… whatever they’d be used for, later.
After that, there wasn’t much for him to do. He briefly checked his mana level, finding that it was about halfway full- enough to temporarily summon a second goblin. Unfortunately, even with his increased mana regeneration rate, he couldn’t quite sustain two at once permanently, but he could summon a second one for short periods of time, if need be.
He picked his Shardtree branch up off the ground, made sure that Gadget was alright, and then took the wrapped-up sheet of fur off Alyssa’s hands. She hadn’t divulged her Class yet, but it was clear that she was a more physical fighter than he was, so it was best for her to have her hands free.
”Do we just… wander blindly, and hope we find somewhere to take shelter before the storm hits?” Alyssa asked.
“I’d say we go in Fred’s direction at the very least, so that if he finds something we can get to him quicker.” Ethan said after a few seconds of thought.
And so, off they headed to the South, where Fred had blindly dashed off towards. It was, luckily, away from the storm, which was coming in from the North.