The three goblins crashed through the underbrush, the tatzelwurm hot on their heels. The monster’s sinuous, many-legged gait flowed over the uneven terrain like a liquid. A very toothsome liquid. For Teekas, Enshunna, and Immir-shesh, by contrast, this was a mad scramble to survive. Immir-shesh was almost caught when the beast lunged to sink its fangs into the overstuffed backpack of herbs he was carrying. He was saved only by the fact that one of the backpack’s straps, worn from use, was unable to arrest his forward momentum and snapped, allowing him to pull his other arm free and keep running. They ran without any idea where they were going, branches smacking them in the face and thorns catching their skin.
Teekas’ mind raced, assessing their options. They couldn’t outrun the tatzelwurm — they were barely staying ahead of it as it was. They were on unfamiliar terrain, whereas it was within its hunting grounds, so outmaneuvering it would be a matter of pure luck and therefore wasn’t really a plan at all. She had no idea how far such a beast’s territory would extend, but a predator of this size would likely range over many miles — they’d exhaust themselves well before they outranged it. Could they hide from it? She didn’t know. It could obviously climb trees, and she suspected its sinuous body would allow it to-
“There!” Enshunna cried desperately, pointing ahead of her. Teekas barely had time to process what she was pointing at before the other woman dove forward and began scrambling into what turned out to be a large animal burrow of some kind.
Damn it! Teekas thought frustratedly to herself. Immir-shesh was already following his sister, crawling on elbows and knees down the hole. He tossed another satchel of herbs he’d been carrying to the side in order to fit. The sight of it gave Teekas an idea. She snatched the satchel up and whirled, slinging it directly at the tatzelwurm’s feline face. The beast yowled in surprise and reared back, buying her the precious seconds she needed to unsling her own bulging backpack and hold it in front of her as a shield as she began wriggling backwards down the burrow after the other two.
Her immediate fear when Enshunna had dived for the burrow was almost immediately vindicated. Teekas made it a surprising distance in, almost six feet, before she heard the scrabbling of claws on dirt as the tatzelwurm followed them. The narrow confines of the burrow — as she’d anticipated, and the reason she’d doubted that hiding from the beast was a viable option — proved no obstacle to its elongated, disturbingly flexible body.
And now they were trapped.
Teekas remembered what she’d said to Persephone, not that long ago, when she’d bound herself to the realmheart. I don’t think I could hurt someone. Like, on purpose. It hadn’t been an entirely true statement. She knew she couldn’t hurt someone on purpose. She knew it in her bones — they ached with the knowledge. She’d chosen to die rather than do so, a scant few days ago. It was only luck, only Persephone, that had saved her.
And now here she was again. Cornered by another predator, in another hole. No miracle to save her this time. No way out. In a few seconds the tatzelwurm was going to tear through her backpack, and then it was going to tear through her, and then it was going to tear through Enshunna and Immir-shesh, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Something like a sob wrenched its way up her throat. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to die! She should have died countless times over — in the plague, on the march south, when the adventurers had finally caught up with them. Each time, she hadn’t, and others had. That was why she’d taken Persephone’s offer of power — to stop others from dying while she yet lived. And now, all that power would amount to nothing, and she would die, and the siblings would die, because she couldn’t hurt someone on purpose.
Long, cruel claws punched through her backpack and tore it to shreds. There was now nothing between her and the monster. Time seemed to slow as she met the tatzelwurm’s glowing green gaze. Its mouth, full of needle teeth, was spread in what she could only interpret as a grin. Even now, there was no anger in it, no blood-frenzy. It was amused. It was having fun.
Teekas had an epiphany, then. This was the epiphany: Teekas was going to die down here, because Teekas couldn’t do what was needed. But she wasn’t. She could.
Teekas closed her eyes and killed herself. Then she opened them again.
I wish I’d taken [Chow Down], she thought, and surged forward to bite the tatzelwurm’s face off.
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The humans were gaining on them rapidly as they ran for the crest of the hill, and the river on its far side. Weighed down as they were with the bin of stolen pipeleaf, the goblins could exercise none of the explosive agility that was their greatest advantage. Nar-shesh looked back over his shoulder at their pursuers just in time to watch a new status bar pop into view above theirs: Angry Mob — Lv. 11. Red-orange azoth corpusant danced about the humans’ eyes and improvised weapons, giving the illusion of torchlight.
It wasn’t as simple as an angry mob having a level that was the sum of its members’. If it was, a few dozen peasants could challenge a god. Heaven would never allow a skill to exist that made such a mockery of the Chain. Still, a band of human peasants out for blood was mightier than the sum of its parts. This was immediately obvious as, upon [Angry Mob]’s activation, the humans chasing them surged forward in a visible burst of speed. Burning azoth washed their aching muscles clean of fatigue, imbued their every movement with fevered power. Dogs sprinted ahead of the main body of the mob, their bond with their human masters allowing them to benefit from the skill’s effect as well. Their barks rang loud in the night, and made Nar-shesh’s gut twist in fear.
He’d grown to hate dogs, over the weeks they’d spent scurrying through the shadows of human country.
Nar-shesh gripped his stone knife, sharpened to a whisper-edge by his dungeon, and considered killing them all. It would be so easy — a blur of shadow, an explosion of blood, as [Chain Backstab] turned the mob into so many corpses. They’d never know what had hit them.
No diversions, though, Persephone had said. No killing unless it was necessary. In and out, quick and clean. Plus, all other considerations aside, he could only use [Chain Backstab] once an hour. Better to keep it as an option in case the situation, somehow, got worse.
The first of the dogs reached him, snarling. Switching his knife to a backhand grip, Nar-shesh sidestepped its leaping lunge and opened it from throat to crotch. It spilled to the dirt, guts spilling from it in turn as it gave a horrible wail of distress.
Nar-shesh made a decision.
“Dump it!” he yelled to the others. “Scatter! Meet back at the boat!” In the blink of an eye, they’d done so. The great basket of cured leaf landed with a thump in the frozen mud of the field, and four goblins raced away in different directions. Kizurra didn’t even bother with a sneering complaint.
A second dog had caught up to Nar-shesh. His arm shot out, still bandaged from the dog bite — less than a week old — that he’d come to the dungeon with, and punched it in the snout. Something crunched under his knuckles. While the dog was stunned, he snaked his arm around its throat and, with a shout of effort, snapped its neck. A cleaner end than he’d given the first one, at least.
Even if he hated dogs, he suspected he’d be hearing that wail in his dreams for years.
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Hair. Blood. The jarring impact of tooth on bone. The cold earth slammed against her back as the tatzelwurm thrashed. A wet splurt into her mouth — that must have been its eye, she thought — and an ear-splitting yowl from the beast. Then pain, brutal and overwhelming, enough to punch the wind out of her.
Oh, no, it was the tatzelwurm’s taloned paw that had punched the wind out of her, she saw as she went skidding backwards from the blow. Agony radiated from her chest where its claws had slashed her. She could see them, painted with her blood.
She could also see a great bloody swathe of the tatzelwurm’s naked skull and ruined eye. She realized that she still had its face in her mouth.
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The beast, screaming in pain, began to scramble backwards up the tunnel and away from Teekas. Then, just as it was almost free of the burrow, it froze. Its yowl ended in an abrupt wheeze, and it slumped, limp. The green light of its one remaining eye dimmed.
It was…dead?
“Anyone alive down there?” called a voice that Teekas recognized.
“Abzu!” Immir-shesh cried from behind her. He began to climb over her in his excitement, and Teekas’ vision went pain-white as his weight put pressure on her injury. The desperate energy of the fight still seething in her veins boiled over, and she lashed out. Immir-shesh squawked in surprise as her elbow caught him in the face.
“Fuck!” Teekas screamed. “You fucking- Fuck!!” She elbowed him again, then pushed him entirely off of her with a clumsy kick, sending him tumbling into his sister below them.
“Oh, shit,” Enshunna said. “Shit! That’s a lot of blood. Grand-uncle, Teekas is hurt!”
“Teekas, can you move?” Abzu asked from somewhere behind the tatzelwurm’s corpse.
She screamed again, as much in anger — and grief, for the girl who’d died down in this hole just as surely as if the tatzelwurm had killed her — as in pain. Blood and scraps of flesh sprayed from her mouth. She couldn’t quite seem to catch her breath, afterwards. It was probably the pain. “We’ll find out,” she rasped, in delayed answer to Abzu’s question, and began to drag herself up the burrow towards the dead monster.
It was not pleasant.
Immir-shesh did his best to help her from below, despite the beating she’d just dealt him. After what felt like a year but was probably only a minute or two, the three goblins managed to shove the creature’s body free of the burrow and emerge, muddy and ragged, back into the cold night air.
[Awareness] feeding her information on her surroundings even through the pain, Teekas noticed Abzu wiping blood off a long bone wand. She’d seen it before — he used it to draw formations for lodge rituals, and when examining patients who came to him afflicted with sickness or curses. When she’d taken ill with a particularly bad fever as a child, her mother and father had begged the old man to cure her, offering nearly everything they had to make up the necessary gifts for a cult initiate of his seniority. She remembered him poking and prodding her with the wand as he mumbled to himself. It hadn’t felt sharp, she thought, back then. But she could think of no other explanation for where the blood on it had come from, or what had made the neat hole at the top of the tatzelwurm’s neck where its spine fed into its skull.
Abzu knelt over her, scowling in discomfort as his knees creaked, and pulled Teekas’s mantle open to look at her wound. “Hm,” he said. “No sucking, that’s good. Didn’t hit your lungs.” He folded the mantle back down and snapped his fingers at Immir-shesh. “Keep pressure on that,” he said. “You, girl-”
“I got it!” Enshunna said, appearing with an armful of herbs and mushrooms. “Milkroot, faewort, vitae truffles…” She must have gone to pick through the wreckage of Immir-shesh’s backpack, slashed open by the tatzelwurm only moments ago. They hadn’t only foraged for what was useful in formation-craft, tonight — milkroot sap could prevent infection, and faewort was a styptic. Vitae truffles, as the name suggested, strengthened vitality and helped with anemia. Enshunna stuffed a truffle into Teekas’ mouth and got to work administering the other medicinal herbs. Abzu grunted, in that way that old men do, when he saw that she was already doing what he’d been about to tell her to.
“What are you doing out here?” Teekas asked him.
“Foraging, same as you,” he said brusquely. “Move aside, girl, that’s good enough.” He nudged Enshunna aside and began drawing in the blood staining Teekas’ chest with a finger. “Eyes to yourself,” he said to the siblings as he worked. Enshunna obediently averted her gaze: Immir-shesh was visibly more reluctant to not observe whatever skill he was using, but he turned away as well. Under Abzu’s swift ministrations, a rough-and-ready formation took shape around the four parallel slashes left by the tatzelwurm’s claws. With a muttered incantation, Abzu knotted the fingers of one hand into a skill seal and pressed down on Teekas’ chest with his other. The formation flared with light, boiling away the blood used to write it in an instant. Its work was done, though. Within the glowing, rectangular cartouche, the wounds no longer bled — not healed, but held shut by magic more smoothly than by any surgeon’s stitches.
Teekas craned her neck to look down at herself. “I didn’t know you could do that,” she said, voice still ragged from her ordeal.
“You could pile up a mountain out of what you don’t know, child,” Abzu said, and levered himself back upright. “You all shouldn’t have wandered this far out. Too dangerous.”
“Grand-uncle, what’s going on in these woods?” Immir-shesh asked. “We found so many things growing — rare herbs, valuable ones, and out of season too.” He gestured at the fruits of their expedition, now strewn in disarray across the ground. “And I’ve never seen a monster with a level that high — well, except the realmheart’s minions.”
Abzu snorted. “Some formations expert you are,” he said. “Think for half a moment, Immir-shesh, like you should have done before you all almost died. Or forget thinking, just feel. Can’t you feel it? Can you not taste it in the air, any of you?”
Immir-shesh didn’t immediately respond, eyes wide and staring at nothing as he frantically tried to figure out what Abzu thought he should already know. His realization came the instant that Abzu’s patience ran out. “There’s a demesne nearby,” both men said in unintended chorus.
“That’s right,” Abzu said. “A place of power. A place not to be trespassed upon. That’s why the forest is growing like spring on the cusp of winter, that’s why the beasts are bigger and meaner than you lot are prepared to handle. Now come on. The forest twists to hide its heart — you’ll wander these woods until something else eats you, without me to show you the way out.” He began walking away through the underbrush, not looking back to see if they were following him.
“Grand-uncle,” Teekas called weakly after him. He wasn’t actually her grand-uncle, nor was he the siblings’ — it was a respectful term of address for an unrelated man of his age. Abzu did not stop or acknowledge her. “Abzu!” she said, and that did stop him. It would have been more than a little rude to call her elder by his name directly like that, but Teekas had six levels on him — a massive gap, and one that called into question the normal order of seniority. As Abzu turned to look at her with a flinty, impassive gaze, Teekas got the distinct impression that he still did not think that was sufficient justification for her to speak to him as an equal. Well, he could think what he wanted. She met his gaze without flinching, and spat out a glob of blood and tatzelwurm fur. “Give us a moment to gather everything back up,” she said. “Lady Persephone needs this stuff.”
Abzu just grunted, after a moment. “Don’t take all night,” he said. “Who knows what the smell of blood’ll draw over.”
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Decades of increasing friction with the human settlers had allowed the goblin tribes to learn a thing or two about [Angry Mob]. For example, its area of effect was sharply restricted. The key tactical objective, when engaging a human mob, was to split it. Failure to do so meant almost-certain defeat. If the humans had to split into smaller mobs in order to hunt for you, the bonuses their signature skill granted them could shrink from “insurmountable” to merely “very dangerous,” and there was a chance that at least some of you would escape.
Even better than a split-up mob, though, Kizurra thought, was a mob whose attention was not on you. And he had just the thing for that. The event quest, still hovering in the corner of his vision, had given him the idea.
Event Quest: Goblin Raid
Goblins are attacking! Repel these monstrous thieves and defend your homes.
Conditions (Humans):
* Kill goblins. Goblins slain: 0
* Repel goblin incursion.
Conditions (Goblins):
* Kill or capture humans. Humans slain/captured: 0/0
* Loot valuables. Current loot value: 22.5s
* Damage structures. Current damage value: 0.06s
Damage structures. You know what damaged structures? Fire. You know what reliably got everyone’s attention? That’s right — also fire. As Kizurra darted from shadow to shadow, out of sight of his pursuers for the moment, his thoughts weren’t on escape. No, he was trying to determine which of these outbuildings were most amenable to arson.
“Could’ve sworn it was somewhere around here,” he muttered, looking for one building in particular he remembered searching with the group. He sniffed at the air. There — pine resin. Found it. He scurried over to the building — some sort of workshop, he had no idea for what — and slipped inside. A cask of pitch sat amidst a jumble of other supplies. Kizurra, with a grunt of effort, hauled it free and tipped it over. The viscous liquid inside, predictably, did not stir far from its container. That was fine, he didn’t need it to. Kizurra pulled a pyrite sparkstone and a handful of wood shavings from the fire-pouch on his belt. The shavings he poured into a small pile at the mouth of the toppled barrel. Striking the sparkstone against his flint knife, after a few tries he was able to light the kindling. The pitch caught almost immediately thereafter. Kizurra knew from experience that as the black ooze burned, it would thin, and then foam, overflowing its container to flood the whole building with flame.
He didn’t stick around to watch it. Instead, he stepped back outside, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted at the top of his lungs one of the handful of Ploetz phrases he knew in full. “
With the fire both figuratively and literally lit, he took off running downhill towards the river. He’d done his part. Whether the others made it out now was up to them.