Chapter 18

When I reach the body, I notice the boy’s dead eyes staring at the ceiling before I reach out my trembling hands to check the body over, looking for stab wounds, claw marks, bite marks, strangulation marks, bruises, anything that’ll absolve me from this atrocity. I find some bruises and scratches here and there but none of these wounds could kill him. This doesn’t make any sense. Why was he here? How did he stay alive while surrounded by more than 20 goblins? I try to calm myself down by convincing myself he was already dead before we smoked out the cave yesterday but I know I’m lying to myself. This boy died exactly like how all the other goblins here died and I’m the one who did it. It was my idea and I’m the one who carried it out. I didn’t even conceive the possibility there could be a living person in this cave and that ignorance has now turned me into a murderer.

I don’t know when Wraine caught up to me but he goes through the same motions I just did and checks the body from its head to its feet albeit more calmly than I did while I sit nearby, holding onto my knees, trying to process what I’ve done. When he’s finished with checking the body for wounds, he sighs heavily before standing up and brushing the dirt off his hands. He sits down next to me but doesn’t say anything right away. He’s probably gathering his thoughts and a minute passes before he speaks, “This is as much my fault as it is yours. Don’t forget that.”

“C’mon, you know that’s not true. I’m the one who came up with the plan. You wanted to leave and find another request we could do but I’m the one who pushed us into doing this. My greed for the coins and my stupidity for not even thinking a person could be in here is what killed this kid. His blood is on my hands, not you-” Before I can finish what I’m saying, I’m knocked to the ground and my right cheek aches terribly. Stunned by what just happened, I dumbly look at Wraine who’s now standing above me while I’m still sprawled out on the ground.

“Look at you right now, crawling on the ground like a bug. You think you’re some kind of amazing genius who everyone follows without a second thought? You told me your plan and if I didn’t want to go through with it, we wouldn’t. Don’t you fucking think for a fucking second I’m your mindless goon. We’re partners in this. Ever since that fucking ambush that ruined our lives, we’ve been partners and everything we do, everything we say, no matter how fucked up and no matter how we fuck it up, we’re in it together. This?” Wraine gestures with his hand towards the corpse before he nudges it with his foot. “This is our mistake. Not yours. I could have stopped you any step of the way and I didn’t for two reasons. First, I thought it could work too. I didn’t expect it to work this well and choke the whole fucking cave to death but when you told me your plan, I believed it could work. Second, I wanted to see it happen. This is our first adventure since joining the guild and I don’t want to admit it, but when I was a kid I always dreamed of being an adventurer. I wanted to fight monsters with a sword and cast magic at dragons. As I got older, I sorta accepted my place in life and I thought I was satisfied with it. But even with all the horrible shit we’ve been through these past few weeks, there’s anticipation in my heart that I thought was gone long ago. When you told me you wanted to make a huge fire to smoke out a goblin nest, I was right there with you, excited to see our plan work itself out. This kid was just unlucky yesterday, nothing more, nothing less. He was killed by both of us.”

Hearing what Wraine had to say, the crushing guilt I was feeling moments before lessened considerably and I can think again instead of only blaming myself over and over. The guilt is still there but at least now I’m able to push it into the background for now and focus on dealing with what’s crucial right now. “We need to get rid of this body.” Nodding his head, Wraine grabs my hand and pulls me back onto my feet before he pats down the body again, this time checking for anything valuable we can use. We’re already deserters and murderers, what would adding robbing corpses to our crimes really change? Before long, Wraine pulls a small iron knife from the boy’s pockets and puts it into his own. I doubt the knife can do anything other than whittling down a twig but a knife’s a knife. Instead of dealing with the body right away, both Wraine and I search around the cavern for any other valuables we can bring with us. We’re soon rewarded for our efforts when I find a small leather pouch filled with coins under the pile of bones. Opening the pouch, I count out 3 silver coins and 12 copper coins. Wow, the goblins sure did kill someone rich if they were walking around with this many coins. I keep searching the pile of bones but I don’t find anything else while Wraine ran over to the iron sword we saw earlier and brought it over to the bone pile.

Looking over all the dead goblins’ naked bodies, something is off about the bodies but I can’t figure it out no matter how hard I try. It’ll probably come to me later if it’s important enough. Walking over to each individual body, I cut off as many left ears as my pockets will fit. Including the four from the pathway leading here, I’m able to hold 14 goblin ears in both of my pockets since Wraine is adamant about keeping his pockets clean. I guess I’ve never really had a problem with being dirty since I’ve lived most of my life in a barn sleeping beside pigs. Hells, I even spent a night covered in blood and shit during the blood moon. A few goblin ears aren’t going to phase me at this point. Although I did learn to enjoy the sensation of being clean as we traveled to Mountain’s Toil since there were many rivers and streams I could clean myself in.

Once my pockets are filled, Wraine helps put the boy’s body on my back which proves difficult because of how stiff it is but we’re able to get him on there and we start walking back towards the slope leading out of this cavern with Wraine going in front this time. From our scouting yesterday, we know there’s a pond nearby where we plan to dump the body. It’s unfortunate, it’s gruesome, and the guilt is killing me on the inside but it has to be done this way. As we pass the fire pit in the center of the cavern, Wraine remarks on how the goblins were using Andren twigs for their fires. Andren trees are unique because their wood naturally has less moisture than any other tree in the Nasaar Kingdom and creates the least amount of smoke. Back on the peninsula before it was burned down, Andren logs were some of the most popular types of firewood and there was always a high demand for them in the village. The wood we used yesterday came from Bortor trees and those trees are known for having a high water content, making them terrible to use as firewood. Which is ironic since our whole plan relied on using bad firewood.

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If the goblins were smart enough to specifically use Andren twigs to reduce the smoke from their fire pit, then I suppose it makes sense they’d be smart enough to keep a human boy alive to eat later as well. I guess the boy’s death was due to three reasons instead of two: my greed for the reward, my negligence in assuming only goblins would be in this cave, and me underestimating the goblins’ intelligence. Fuck. Shaking my head to clear the dark thoughts, we’re in the cave pathway again retracing our steps when we run into a fork in the path. Now what is this? We didn’t run into any forks when we first came in, and seeing another path in front of us now is perplexing. The path on the left should be the way we came in from but what is the path on our right then? Wraine goes down the left path and I follow him. He turns around after a few steps and I turn back too. As we’re approaching the fork again, we notice the light from the torch creating shadows on the wall that blend the pathway we didn’t see before into the cave wall, creating an inconspicuous path we didn’t notice. Now that we’re looking for it, it’s pretty obvious there’s another path there now but it was invisible to us the first time through. Wow, if the goblins in this cave were still alive, they could have surrounded us pretty easily.

Curiosity overcomes the both of us and we head down this new pathway even though we’re burdened with carrying a body with us now. Although I’m pretty sure I can drop it quickly if we need to fight. We don’t have to walk for long when we reach another smaller cavern. Before we even reach the new cavern, we’re assaulted by a putrid smell and it overwhelms the lingering scent of smoke from yesterday. I can’t believe I miss the overpowering stench of smoke already. As the light from the torch lights up this cavern, we’re presented with a pretty similar sight from the other cavern. There’s numerous green, naked bodies scattered across the floor here. However, there’s a huge difference in the bodies in this room and the bodies in the other room. All the bodies in the other room were male and from what I could tell with my limited knowledge of goblins, they also seemed to be adults. The bodies in this room are much smaller and nearly half of the bodies are smaller still, barely reaching my knees in height. The other half of the bodies are females going by their breasts and the absence of cocks. I realize that’s what I found strange about the goblins in the other cavern now. All of them were males and there wasn’t a single female in the whole room. I suppose this is meant to be some sort of breeding and birthing cavern looking at the female goblins and their goblin children. In the right corner of the cavern, there’s even a dirty pile of linens spread on the ground with faded bloodstains covering the middle of the pile. Holy shit, that’s where the goblin babies are born. In the left corner, there’s a black pool that still looks wet. That pool is where the terrible smell is coming from. Astonishing. The goblins were intelligent enough to designate different areas where they fed, where they bred, where they gave birth, and even where they shat.

Alright, I’m never underestimating goblins’ intelligence ever again. If they could do all this, I can’t just assume we’re hunting monsters without any intelligence or thoughts next time. These are smart monsters and they need to be treated as such. I had my suspicions when I killed my first goblin during the blood moon and I could see the pain and anguish on its face when it died, but I never expected all this. Although I want to leave this room as quickly as possible due to the smell, I spot a relatively clean linen sack in the pile of linens. Pointing it out to Wraine, he walks over to the pile and fishes the sack out. This sack is much larger than the one we’ve been using to store the food we pick up and it even has a drawstring on top that closes up the sack. But even if I wasn’t as comfortable with uncleanliness as I am, I don’t think I’d be willing to eat anything from this sack knowing where it came from. However, it’s more than good enough to keep all the ears of these goblins and since it’s not my pocket I’ll be using, I wouldn’t mind tossing in some eyeballs as well.

It’s around midday when we finally step out of the goblin nest and Wraine doesn’t look too good right now. He was furious when I told him I wanted to head back into the other cavern to collect all the ears and eyes but he stopped complaining once I started digging out the eyes with his knife. I think he stopped talking to ensure he didn’t vomit. On the way out, he offered to carry my weapons and the iron shortsword we found in the first cavern as long as he didn’t need to touch the sack filled with goblin parts. I don’t blame him for being squeamish I guess. His dad cut wood for a living and he wouldn’t normally need to slaughter any livestock while slaughtering the livestock was my job on the farm. Food is just food to me and money is money, no matter how disgusting. Well, if I don’t need to open up this sack to look into it, I won’t. Wraine lost count of how many goblins died in that cave and he’s not sure how much we’ll get if we turn these parts in. Hopefully it’ll partially make up for Lahrein’s reward we’ll be losing out on. Both of us agreed immediately that taking the reward was a bad idea. We’re not sure if this body will ever be found but taking the reward when we already found some coins in the cave is an unnecessary risk. We’ll head straight to Midriver from here and pretend we ran away because we couldn’t handle the quest. It might even be best for us if we take the time to toss all the goblin bodies into the pond as well aside from maybe one or two but that’ll take us days to do and at this point, we need to get to Midriver, which is… honestly disappointing.

While we were on our way to Lahrein, I started thinking and realized we didn’t have to run away to Midriver necessarily. Midriver was our first choice because of Wraine’s uncle but with all of the horrible things we’ve heard about it since then, I questioned going to Midriver. We were already past Mountain’s Toil’s walls, we could go to any other town or city in the kingdom and all we’d need to do is change our names again. There was always this optimistic thought in the back of my head that Aldore and his men wouldn’t waste their time or resources looking for two kids who ran away after a defeat in battle. I always thought the measures we took to keep ourselves safe were going overboard but at the same time I knew we were just protecting ourselves in the best ways we could think of. But this murder changes everything. We’re not just deserters anymore, if someone finds out about this boy, they’ll hang us. Midriver isn’t just our best option anymore, it’s our only option.