Neraru and Harig arrived back at the boat to find Sarsu and Kizurra already waiting. Sarsu waved them over frantically. “Have you seen Nar-shesh?” he asked. They shook their heads, which induced a groan from Sarsu.
“You’re welcome for the distraction, by the way,” Kizurra said with a smug grin.
“What distraction?” Neraru asked. Kizurra tossed his chin at something behind them. When Neraru turned to look, she saw a fire merrily consuming one of the plantation’s outbuildings. It had already started to spread to others nearby. More and more humans were gathering at the scene by the minute, their pursuit of the goblins forgotten in the face of a more urgent problem. “Oh!” she said. “That wasn’t very nice. Fire is dangerous.”
“We’re here to rob them and you’re turning your nose up at a little arson?” Kizurra said, incredulous and indignant. “Fine, next time I’ll just let the humans kill you all.”
“Auntie, you did just incapacitate two men via their nutsacks,” Harig reminded her, managing a mild tone even through their split lip and swelling bruises from aforesaid men’s beating. “That wasn’t very nice either.”
“Holy shit, you what?” Kizurra demanded, indignation forgotten in favor of wide-eyed glee. He cackled. “Alright, I take it back, I take it back! Nutsack Neraru is the hero of this battle for sure. My humble contributions cannot compare.”
“Please don’t call me that,” Neraru said with the despair of one who knows they are powerless to prevent a teen from giving them a stupid nickname.
“Found Nar-shesh,” Harig said, pointing. As the others turned, they saw Nar-shesh bound across the gap between the roofs of two outbuildings, run across the width of the building’s sloped roof, and leap again, landing in the dust with a roll and springing upright. He then brushed himself off and casually strolled over to them as though nothing at all had just happened.
“Show-off,” Kizurra muttered.
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Nar-shesh said with a smug grin.
“Pride comes before a fall,” Sarsu said chidingly.
“Don’t be a buzzkill, uncle,” Harig said.
“Yeah, lighten up, Sarsu,” Nar-shesh said, clapping the older man on the shoulder. “Everyone okay? Let’s split while we still can.”
Not needing to be told twice, the goblins piled into the canoe and shoved off from the dock. Beneath the weight of the one basket of stolen pipeleaf they had managed to secure, the boat rode low in the water. Atop that, they were now paddling against the current. Atop that, they were tired from their exertions. It was past midnight: they’d been away from the dungeon for several hours at this point. Goblins simply did not have the stamina that humans could take for granted, and rowing was exactly the sort of sustained exertion that they struggled with. As such, progress was agonizingly slow as they crept away from the Presdjees plantation.
Still, they managed to make it around the first bend in the river without any of the humans noticing they’d escaped. They would have breathed a collective sigh of relief, if they hadn’t been straining over their oars. Almost immediately, they each received a system notification.
Quest Complete! Event Quest: Goblin Raid has ended in victory!
Conditions:
* Kill or capture humans. Humans slain/captured: 0/0
* Loot valuables. Final loot value: 22.5s
* Damage structures. Final damage value: 30.7s
Score: Copper +
Reward: 20xp
Raid Leader Bonus: +5xp to Goblin [Child Snatcher] Lv. 10
Performance Bonus: +5xp to Goblin [Arsonist] Lv. 5
2xp (2.5xp) tithed to Planter’s Bend Goblin Warren.
“Oh, sweet!” Kizurra exclaimed. “Guys, look, I’m an [Arsonist] now!”
“That’s great, Zurra,” Nar-shesh said. “I’m sure that title won’t cause any problems for you in the future. Everyone will look at it and think ‘yeah, an arsonist is exactly the sort of person I want to welcome into my community’.”
“Cranky because I single-handedly got us more than half of our total score for the quest, aren’t you?” Kizurra said with a smug little grin.
“Maybe a little bit,” Nar-shesh said, and rowed harder.
They travelled in silence for a while after that. Nar-shesh didn’t know what the others were thinking about, but he was reflecting on the rewards of the quest. 25xp, plus the trickle from killing the dogs, had pushed him a full quarter of the way to level 11. Level 10 had already been a height that none of his people had ever dreamed of. That was for heroes of myth, not anyone you’d ever meet in real life. One of the oldest and most experienced members of their tribe even before the plague, Abzu had only reached level 4 after… Nar-shesh wasn’t sure how old he was. After however many decades he’d been alive. The point was, experience never came this easily.
There were three main sources of experience points, for goblins. The first was achievements. They could provide sudden floods of experience, if you could manage to… well, achieve them. There were a few achievements that were common knowledge — just about every goblin who’d come of age had achieved [Survivalist I], for example — and the cult lodges obviously knew of more, though that knowledge was reserved for their initiates. For most goblins, achievements provided the majority of the experience they’d ever gain. Completing all the achievements it was reasonably practical to do would take you to to level 2 or 3, and that was where most goblins’ growth plateaued — level 2, in their mid-20s. After that, most of their experience would be gained in fractions of a point here and again over the span of years, as they grew and learned and were tempered by the vicissitudes of life.
The third way of gaining experience was through killing. This method was not like the other two. Unlike achievements, it was repeatable and accessible. Unlike life experience, it was fast. Obviously, a goblin would take countless lives over the course of their own — fish gutted, oysters shucked, rabbits snared and butchered, deer and birds slain by arrow or sling-stone — but these little lives, level 0 or 1, offered little enough experience that it just became a part of the slow rhythm of everyday life. No, to climb the Chain through violence you had to kill your equals. You had to kill people — monsters, humans, didn’t matter. As long as they were at all significant in Heaven's eyes, every life taken made you stronger. Each successive link on the Chain was a new mountain of corpses you’d climbed.
One night’s work had earned him as much experience as decades’ worth of honing his skills and chasing enlightenment — had weighed as much on destiny’s scales as a dozen souls. And that was with the bare minimum of satisfying the quest’s conditions. What if they had taken captives? What if they had slit the humans’ throats as they slept? What if they’d burned the whole plantation down, and not just the one or two outbuildings? What would the rewards for that have been like?
Why did Heaven want humans and goblins to fight so badly?
On the one hand, it branded goblins as thieves, vermin, squatters on lands that belonged by heavenly mandate to humanity. It told them that the only redemption for their inherent filth was in submission — in death. On the other hand, it raised them up with rich rewards for fighting back against the humans. For stealing their treasures, their children — for everything that it wrongly condemned them for having already done. Why? Which was the truth? What were they supposed to do?
Not that Nar-shesh minded being rewarded for something he was going to do anyway, of course. Still — it nagged at him, the contradiction.
They stopped twice to rest, pushing the canoe ashore in thickets of reeds to hide it and them from unfriendly eyes. It would be a cruel joke if they’d escaped with the loot only to drop dead of exhaustion on the way back. Nar-shesh had seen it happen, on the march south. He wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. It was, consequently, closer to dawn than midnight when they made it back to the dungeon.
As they neared the hillfort, they met someone unexpected — Abzu, leading Teekas’ bedraggled foraging party. Immir-shesh sported a very visible black eye and bloodied nose: his younger sister, Enshunna, stood close behind him but cast frequent worried glances over her shoulder at the last member of their party.
Stolen story; please report.
“Teekas!” Sarsu said. The other three porters staggered and lost their balance as he abandoned the heavy bin of pipeleaf to rush to his bloodied daughter. “What happened? Are you hurt?” His hands hovered awkwardly, like he was afraid to touch her.
“She’s fine,” Immir-shesh said, annoyed. “Abzu put a-”
“Yeah, whatever, fuck off,” Nar-shesh said as he pushed past Immir-shesh, clearly not interested in whatever the other goblin might have to say about the situation. He reached out to Teekas, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “You good?”
A brief spark of what might have been relief lit Teekas’ hollow-eyed stare as she turned her attention away from her father to talk to her friend. “I’ll live,” she said, voice heavy with fatigue. “Which is good enough for now. Don’t worry about it.” She managed a weak smile. “I’ll explain everything once we’re back inside. Don’t want to have to say it all twice.” She looked over his shoulder at his team, raising an eyebrow at Kizurra’s new title. “I see you had a night of it as well.”
Nar-shesh snorted in amusement at that. “I’ll explain once we’re inside,” he said. “Don’t wanna have to say it all twice.”
No sooner had they crossed into the dungeon’s region than the tingling sensation of Persephone’s attention surrounded them. “Oh, good, you’re back,” she said with audible relief. “I was getting really worried. What happened? Did you get the stuff? Oh, hey, you found Abzu! That’s convenient, I was just looking for him.”
Nar-shesh and Teekas exchanged a look of tired amusement. “Home sweet home,” Nar-shesh said dryly.
----------------------------------------
“Obviously I would have preferred things go without anything being set on fire,” I said. “But I agree that it was a tactically sound play in the moment. The most important thing is that everyone made it home alive. Good work, gang.”
Nar-shesh’s team, gathered in the cave I’d just designated as Conference Room 1 (with a sign to match), had just finished recounting how the burglary at the plantation had gone. I supposed, in retrospect, that it had been naive of me to assume that everything would go smoothly. Arson, damage to chattels and property, and a system-issued quest would definitely make the humans think this had been much more of a direct attack than I’d intended. It undercut the implicit bargain I’d made with them by taking Pacifica hostage — one of mutual noninterference, where they stayed out of my business and I wouldn’t trouble them. Well, wouldn’t trouble them except for the taking-hostages thing.
It got me thinking about where all of this was going to go, eventually. I knew the ultimate objective — storm Heaven, cast down the gods, all power to the workers, etc. — but what was I going to do about Planter’s Bend? Any attempts at diplomacy or a peaceful resolution seemed, in the short term, unlikely to succeed. Between the owl attack and the hostage-taking, and now the burglary and arson, our interactions hadn’t gotten off to a very friendly start. That was at least partially my fault, no getting around it. Did that just leave us as enemies, though? Was the plan to muster my dark army, sack the village, and massacre the settlers? I… didn’t really want to do that. The idea of liberating some of their plundered wealth had an undeniable appeal, but I didn’t bear the people of Planter’s Bend any specific ill will. They were the chewing teeth of a machine of imperial violence so vast as to be all-encompassing: circumstance had made them my enemy, but I was confident that given the opportunity I could pull them free of the machine’s jaws and show them that a better world was possible. They just didn’t seem willing to give me that opportunity: instead, they were busy trying to kill me.
In the end, just like I’d told Nar-shesh before he set out on the raid, it all came down to power. To be able to talk reason with the humans, I had to first be able to force them to the negotiating table. I needed to continue growing stronger, developing my infrastructure and swelling the ranks of my forces.
Tonight had certainly advanced that objective. Even before assessing the materials the goblins had collected for my [Azoth-Gathering Formation], the XP sharing from [Bind Minion] had pushed me notably closer to level 15. I was more than three-quarters of the way there, now! It wasn’t even close to the massive glut of power I’d gained from TPKing those goblin-slayers, but tonight was the fastest growth I’d experienced since then.
“Enshunna, Immir-shesh, let’s hear from you now,” I said. I’d excused Teekas and Harig from the debrief: getting their injuries seen to seemed more important. It wasn’t as though I really needed to have everyone in one meeting anyway — [Walk and Talk] meant I could have gotten a separate report from each of them, if I wanted. The collective debrief was more for them than for me, so that they could explain everything to each other rather than me having to catch everyone up later. My conversational bandwidth might be functionally unlimited now, but my reserves of social energy were not.
“We initially set out to the southwest,” Immir-shesh said. “But soon we veered south, following the forage as we found more and more of it. I wanted to turn back, I thought we were straying too far from the dungeon, but Teekas insisted…”
I’d just started to tune him out in bored annoyance when Enshunna interrupted. “There’s a demesne in the woods!” she said, practically bouncing with excitement. “We saw this gigantic stag, it was level 17!”
“I was getting to that!” Immir-shesh said angrily. “You can’t just rush right to the end of the story, it’s important to develop things in-”
“Shut up,” I said. I’d been willing to sit through a few minutes of Immir-shesh cranking his own conversational hog while he got around to telling me what the hell had happened to Teekas, but this changed things. A demesne. Access to a demesne meant faster azoth respiration, which meant faster dungeon-building and faster minion-raising, which meant stronger defenses when the next threat showed up. I no longer had any patience for him. “Enshunna. Keep talking. Where is the demesne, exactly? How did you find it? What sort of place is it?”
“Dangerous,” she said. “We didn’t make it all the way there, but even just around the outskirts we ran into a beast that was almost as high-level as Teekas.”
“Right, the tatzelwurm, I got the notification. And you killed it?”
She shook her head. “No, Teekas fought it off when it cornered us, but Abzu killed it.”
That was interesting. Abzu, with his stiff old-man knees and a whopping level of 4, had killed a level 9 goblin-eating beast? It wasn’t impossible, of course — I’d killed across a bigger gap — but I was raising my figurative eyebrows at it.
As Enshunna continued to explain, with occasional interjections from her brother whenever he felt like she was leaving something out, my interest deepened. He’d just been wandering around the woods at night, alone, coincidentally on the outskirts of a demesne? I could believe that he’d been out looking for the reagents he needed to continue my initiation into the mysteries, but how had he known where to look? Ergiza had confided in me earlier tonight that he probably had training in locating demesnes, due to his rank in the Nine Coils: had he known the demesne was there, rather than just stumbling across it? If he had, he’d been playing that close to the vest when that knowledge could have helped me keep everyone safe. He’d closed Teekas’ wound with a formation? I hadn’t even known that was possible, and from the looks of it neither had the siblings.
I’d suspected that Abzu had hidden depths, but this was on another level. He hadn’t stuck around for the debrief — I wasn’t actually sure where he was right now. I definitely needed to talk to him, and to get some solid answers this time.
----------------------------------------
Karlus Presdjees sat down, heavily, in the simple wooden chair before his desk. His home, though large, was functional in its construction and spartan in its furnishing. He was the richest man in Planter’s Bend — the sprawling riverside plantation the town was named for had been carved out of monster-infested wilderness by his father — but out here in the colonies, wealth was better spent on expansion than luxury.
Outside his window, the ruins of two outbuildings smoldered in the weak pre-dawn light.
An obstacle to his continued expansion had presented itself. As the mayor of Planter’s Bend, it would have been beneath Karlus’ dignity to personally join the [Angry Mob] that had set off into the woods this afternoon. Instead, he’d sent his son and a handful of men along as a show of support for the grieving mother. He’d expected them to turn up not much, perhaps a band of goblin thieves that the mob would tar and burn alive or some similarly brutal thing, and the girl already long dead. Instead, his son had returned wild-eyed and breathless, telling tales of monsters building a fortress in the woods and a witch whose whispered threats were carried on the night breeze.
A true dungeon. The Great Chain could not be deceived about such matters, nor could any skill he’d ever heard of tamper with an area description in the way that would have been necessary. Ordinary people had dealt with dungeons on their own in the past, especially ones newly-emerged, by acting as one and overwhelming their defenses with numbers. He’d never heard of the monsters taking hostages before. It was a damned clever countermeasure against the [Angry Mob] strategy, he had to admit. By the raw numbers of it, one girl’s life was obviously unimportant against the damage the dungeon could do if left to grow unchecked, but whoever made that call was dooming themselves. They would be a social pariah for the rest of their days: the gods themselves would turn their faces away, that’s how bad the optics would be.
Optics could be managed. The green-skinned rats had taken a step too far. They’d crossed him — they’d trespassed on his home, stolen his things. It would set him back weeks to rebuild the outbuildings they’d burned, and they’d lamed a farmhand with four years still on his indenture contract. The man would be lucky to walk again, let alone work the fields: he was useless to Karlus now.
The goblins of the dungeon obviously thought they’d put the people of Planter’s Bend in checkmate, and could now run amok as they pleased. Temperance Blackwater’s plan was to try and play her way out of the check, setting sentries around the dungeon and waiting for an opportunity to counterattack or seize hostages of her own. This had met with his approval when his son had told him of it, earlier tonight, but that was before the goblins had dared to rob his plantation. No, there would be consequences, one farm-girl’s life be damned.
Karlus had always told his sons that if you couldn’t win a game, overturn the board. Difficulty and adversity were for the short-sighted. Climbing the Chain, in this life, was as much about finding ways around problems as it was cleaving through them. He couldn’t move directly against the Planter’s Bend Goblin Warren, or it would be a black mark on his reputation that would never fade. Well enough. All he had to do was arrange for someone who could move directly against the dungeon to do so.
By the light of a lone candle, he wet his pen and began writing a letter. It was bound for the Free City of Oranjeburg, and an agent he employed there to conduct various business matters on his behalf. The letter was short, for much would be understood by its intended audience without Karlus having to spell it out. A dungeon had emerged in the forest outside of Planter’s Bend. It was still young, its encounter levels in the teens. The townsfolk would surely be grateful to see this open sore of darkness removed from their lands. Karlus’ agent should be sure to mention this news widely and often, in the taverns and teahouses of the city.
He expected it would be a week at most before the first adventurers, starving-hungry for glory and the resources they needed to fuel their climb up the Chain, arrived.