The goblins were calling out a variety of things in a variety of directions, all addressed at me. “Holy elder sister! Sainted realmheart! Lady Persephone!” One of them was even on the ground genuflecting again — same one as before, it looked like. I was a little bit uncomfortable to be the recipient of such a show of submission, but I guess I did save his life. I’d let him get it out of his system.
“What’s up?” I said to them, the air vibrating with my words.
“Holy elder sister-” began the one who’d been genuflecting.
“Just Persephone is fine, seriously.”
His face crumped at that like he’d eaten something sour, clearly struggling to overcome the bindings of propriety. Another goblin, who looked both younger than him and kind of like him - probably his daughter or something - stepped forward while he was hesitating and bluntly announced. “We wanted to know whether we can stay here.”
I would have blinked if I had eyelids. “Uh. Sure, I guess, but why would you want to?”
That response visibly flummoxed them in turn. Some of them had expressions on their faces that suggested this was a trick question, or some sort of mind game on my part. “Uh,” the young goblin woman said, eloquently. “Like…” She took a moment to collect her thoughts, and then drew herself up straighter and continued. “Winter’s been getting harsher every year, and we for sure didn’t have the supplies to survive this one that’s coming. Before the slayers found us, we were headed south, to the Riverlands, which is goblin country. There’s tons of us down there: the tribes are huge, and the river chiefs are powerful. There’s still miles and miles of human country between here and the Serpent River, though, and we’ve got like half the people we started out with. We don’t know what kind of welcome we’re gonna get, either: the upside of the Riverlands is that there’s a ton of goblins there, but the downside is that there’s already a ton of goblins there, y’know?” She scratched her short mop of black hair sheepishly. “We don’t want to presume on your generosity or anything, Lady Persephone, just…all the song-histories say that realmhearts are the protectors of the People. Your realms are paradises, where no humans can hurt us. You might be, like…our only hope of survival, pretty much.”
One part of me was intrigued by the fact that goblin oral histories spoke about dungeons, and their past interactions with monster-kind. A second part was stressing out about the newfound possibility of blowing my “cover,” inasmuch as I had one, by acting in a way that an ordinary dungeon core wouldn’t.
A third part of me was feeling the instinctive annoyance of other people putting expectations on me that I hadn’t asked for and hadn’t been told about in advance. A fourth part, trying to reign in the third part, prompted me to take another look at the goblins. A real look.
Goblin - Lv. 2
A race of crude savages and thieves. Individually weak, they rely on numbers and dirty tricks. When their uncontrolled breeding overcrowds their warrens, they emerge to raid human settlements and prey on travellers.
I looked at that description, then back at the bedraggled group of refugees huddled before me, reduced to begging for the mercy of a stranger. I looked at the painted cradleboard that the goblin infant was strapped to, at the delicate beadwork of another goblin’s moccasins. I looked at carefully-threaded necklaces of paper-thin shells, at the goblin with wrinkles and white hair and at the goblin that was blind in one eye and had a club arm. I looked at the goblins, and at what the system had to say about the goblins, and I thought about what sort of power would have created such a system, and why.
Sanctuary. Shelter. Could I grant them these things? I wanted to, certainly. I’d go so far as to say I had a moral imperative to do so, if remotely possible. But still, there was something…
“What’s your name?” I asked the goblin who’d stepped forward to speak for her group. “I just realized, I never asked.”
“Um, I’m Teekas, Lady Persephone,” she said.
“Teekas. Do you have any system access?”
“Yeah, a little,” she said with a nervous nod. “I can see names and levels, and life bars in a fight. Skills and stuff when I level up, like everyone. Descriptions for some things.”
“Have you seen your description?” I asked.
The look of humiliation on her face told me that she had. “Yes, sainted one,” she said, looking at her feet.
“How do you feel about that description?”
“It’s…” she began, and trailed off. She took a while to gather her thoughts. “I’ve stolen from humans, which I guess makes me a thief.”
I waited, but she didn’t say anything else. Another one of them did, though. The irritable goblin who’d retrieved the two corpses stepped forward, declaring with a swipe of his hand “It’s bullshit. It’s lies. Heaven hates all of us children of the Mother, and their hatred poisons the world.”
“I agree,” I said. From the way they reacted, I think that surprised them. “It is bullshit.” A resolution was beginning to take shape in my mind, as I realized what had made me hesitate to promise sanctuary to the goblins. “This world is poisoned against us. This world, Heaven, the system, whatever — it took my past, my future, everything I ever worked for. It took my body. It took my name, do you understand?”
It took a dead tree toppling over for me to realize that I’d been shouting. In the pillar chamber, the beats of my core rang out like hammer-bows. The goblins were huddled together, trembling in wide-eyed terror.
I imagined making a deep sigh, breathing out all the anger from the lungs I’d been robbed of. It worked. With the anger gone, I just felt sad and drained. “You can all stay with me as long as you want, and I’ll do my best to protect you. I just… need you to understand what the plan is. The risks you’d be taking, and what you’d be getting yourself into. Y’know?”
“You... didn’t actually say what the plan is,” said the goblin with the swaddled infant, hesitantly.
I wished I still had a nose so I could wince and pinch the bridge of it. “You’re right. I did not, in fact, say what the plan is. That’s my bad. Here is the plan: I am going to get revenge. I am going to find whoever is in charge of this world, whoever brought me here, and I am going to kill them. I am going to kick down the doors of Heaven and smash the system. The plan is revolution.”
The goblins looked understandably stunned. “Because of this,” I continued. “Adventurers are inevitably going to start showing up and trying to kill me. They’re not going to stop, and it will only get worse as time goes on. Everyone who stays here I’ll do my best to protect, like I said, but you would be putting yourselves right in the middle of the war I’m about to start.”
No one said anything, for a moment that stretched long enough for me to start to feel guilty. Maybe I shouldn’t have dumped all that on them. Weren’t they dealing with enough already? I should have just said “yeah, of course you can stay with me.” I had a responsibility to help them, it was selfish of me to-
“I’m in,” said the snappish goblin, stepping forward again and striking a clenched fist to his skinny chest. “Let’s fucking do it.”
A burst of surprised, relieved laughter escaped me. “Hell yeah,” I said. “What’s your name, guy?”
“Nar-shesh,” said the goblin, steel in his eyes. “I’m Nar-shesh.”
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Goblin (Minion) - Lv. 2
[Enraged (x2)] [Grief]
A race of crude savages and thieves. Individually weak, they rely on numbers and dirty tricks. When their uncontrolled breeding overcrowds their warrens, they emerge to raid human settlements and prey on travellers.
Health:
████
?/?
Azoth:
██
?/? XP:
██░░░░░░░░
4/?
[Skills]
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[Ambusher]
[Backstab]
[Monster]
[Night Vision]
[Trapper]
“So are you, like…born with those?” I asked, my awareness following Nar-shesh as he descended the spiral staircase down the dungeon’s central shaft.
“[Monster] and [Night Vision] we’re all born with,” he said. “And we get [Backstab] usually when we reach level 1. My father taught me [Trapper]. He was a good teacher and an even better trapper: usually it takes at least ten years to earn the trait on your own. [Ambusher] I have because of him too, really. It’s easier to pick up than [Trapper] but you still have to go out of your way. He thought it would be useful, so a few years back he took all the young people in the village to hunt a level 5 boar.” He didn’t explain further, a bitter look on his face.
Well, no one had ever accused me of being a paragon of social grace, so: “I infer from context clues that your father is dead,” I said.
That got a laugh out of Nar-shesh, if not a very happy one. “Yeah. Sickness hit all the villages not too long after. I’d say [Ambusher] was Dad’s parting gift to me, but really it was getting to watch him shit himself to death.”
“That sucks,” I said, in a continued display of sensitivity and tact.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “So, here?”
“Here should be fine,” I said. We’d reached the cavern layer. I’d sunk the heart-chamber down among the rest of the caverns — pool, pillar, and all — and Nar-shesh now stood before it, lit by the grey-green glow of my heart. “I’ve only done this on an owl before, so I don’t know if it will hurt or not, just warning you. Let me know if you need to take a break.”
Nar-shesh nodded, setting his shoulders and scrunching up his face in anticipation, and I began the process of force-levelling him with [Empower Minion].
Contrasted with the owl, there were hardly any physical changes — maybe a fraction of an inch of height, a slight increase in muscle tone — as Nar-shesh’s XP meter filled, emptied, and refilled. I was going to push him all the way to level 10. Now that I actually had a minion I could have a conversation with, and that could report on their own status screen, I wanted to test a few things. First off, my explosive chain-levelling in the wake of TPKing those goblin-slayers had granted me 9 skill points for 8 levels: I suspected that level 10 had been some kind of a breakpoint, like level 1.
Goblin (Minion) has reached Lv. 10!
My azoth reserves nearly depleted, I withdrew my aura from Nar-shesh. The luminous, goblin-green corona of excited azoth that had surrounded him as we worked faded quickly.
“Ow,” was the first thing he said, clutching his head. “That was a lot of notifications.”
“Yeah, it was kind of a lot for me too,” I said. “Pain in the ass. Or the head, I guess.”
As I watched, he raised his hand to thin air and made several swiping gestures. Oh, was he actually physically interacting with his status window? Wild. I couldn’t see a thing, it looked like he was just batting at the air.
Achievement Unlocked! Promotion I
Condition: Have a minion achieve lv. 10.
+100 xp
Class Quest Progress Update
[????] (1/3)
* Have a lv. 10 minion.
* [????]
* [????]
Hm. That was intriguingly cryptic. I’d ponder it later, but right now I was still in the middle of something. “So,” I said. “What are we looking at? Any surprises? I don’t know anything about what ordinary goblin progression looks like.”
“Me either, really,” Nar-shesh said, staring intently at thin air and occasionally dragging a finger down like he was working a scrollbar — which it seemed safe to assume he was. “Dad was only level 7 when he died, and the elders weren’t much higher. Great warriors and witches can make it into the twenties, they say, but I’ve never met anyone that powerful. You have to be the sort of hero they sing songs about.” He shook his head. “Not someone like me.”
“Buddy, I hate to break it to ya, but this is just the beginning,” I said. “Stick with me and you’re going all the way to the top. We’re gonna grind so hard there’s not gonna be a railing left in this fuckin’ skatepark, you feel me? I’m talking level. Fuckin’. Cap. We’re tryhards now.”
He blinked. “What’s a skatepark? Actually, what’s-”
“Don’t worry about it, I’ll explain later,” I said. “Huh, I figured you being my minion and all would let me see more of your status, but it seems like not. What’s your skill options look like? How many points do you have?”
“Ten,” he said, confirming my hypothesis — he must have gotten two skill points at level 10, plus another from the achievement. “Uh… [Tracking], [Fishing], [Process Hides-], [Identify Plant-],” he continued, reading from his list. “[Tracking] is strong but most of the rest of these are crap. Like, [Fishing] barely offers a bonus, and you can pick it up on your own anyway just by fishing a lot. All the crafting skills are straight-up worse than learning to do it by hand. It’s a waste of skill points, no one picks them.”
“Damn, that sucks,” I said. “Does anyone ever get the regular versions of those, without the [-]?”
Nar-shesh turned his head to the side and spat. A glob of mucus floated in my formerly-pristine pool. Gross. “Yeah, humans,” he said.
I created a tiny wave to splash the loogie back up onto shore. “Okay, first off, please don’t spit in my water features. Ground only,” I said. “Second off, that’s fucked.”
“Tell me about it,” he said, crossing his arms and scowling.
“Anyway, read me the rest of the list,” I said, and he did. He hadn’t been kidding: it seemed like the system was seriously giving goblins the short end of the stick. There were fewer skills worth buying than Nar-shesh had points to spend. We both agreed that he should save his points for the future in case better options opened up.
It wasn’t all bad, though. A few of the skills were intriguing. [Knife Proficiency] was your typical weapon-booster for knives; I figured it couldn’t hurt to pick up, especially given the paucity of alternatives. [Tracking] amplified Nar-shesh’s existing skills in bushcraft by visually highlighting tracks, spoor, and other disturbances. Probably the two most exciting pickups, though, were [Camouflage] and [Goblin Battlecry]. [Camouflage] allowed Nar-shesh to blend into his surroundings by spending azoth,as long as he stayed still. When he experimentally activated it, if I hadn’t known he was there, I would have looked right past him as just another rock outcropping. [Goblin Battlecry] could be activated to provide a minor stat buff to nearby allied goblins in battle, and other goblins who knew the skill could join in to amplify its effects.
One worked with the tools one was given, and so far I was feeling pretty optimistic about my new tools. When facing off against a better-armed and numerically superior force, as we surely would be in the near future, asymmetrical warfare was the name of the game. I suspected that [Ambusher], [Backstab], and [Camouflage] would become the ABCs of my nascent force of goblin guerillas.
----------------------------------------
The nameless owl glided silently between the trees. Her serrated feathers caught sound and devoured it, just as she did with the small creatures of the forest: in her wake, even the mournful whistling of the autumn wind seemed quieter.
She had eaten, and eaten, and still she hungered. Mice and voles failed to satisfy. If she’d understood the concept of humor, she might have laughed at how tiny they looked in her talons after her transformation. She’d moved up to chipmunks, then squirrels. It hadn’t even been an hour before she took a rabbit — an unthinkably implausible choice of prey, the night before. Even that had not been enough. She’d considered trying to take a faun, but then the buck of the herd had looked right at her and snorted, limning his antlers in verdant azoth. She didn’t know what Druidic Deer - Lv. 17 meant yet, but she knew when she was outmatched.
Now, though, an intriguing target had presented itself. Something big — but not too big. Small-big. And clueless! It hadn’t looked up, even once! She’d had to fly far afield from her dungeon, to the fringes of the forest: ahead, the tree cover broke into a vast clearing of thousands of leafy, low-lying shrubs in eerily uniform rows. Her target, some pink and hairless thing she’d never seen before, was wandering towards her from that direction. Maybe it had gotten lost. It didn’t look like it was foraging for food. Something in the ungainliness of its movements suggested to her that it was still but a chick. The owl perched on a branch, taking care to find one thick enough to support her new weight. She was so much bigger now.
The thing picked up a rock and threw it wildly at nothing with a yell. The owl flinched, even though the little creature hadn’t thrown its projectile even remotely in her direction. Ever since she’d woken up today, she’d found it more difficult to slip into the meditative trance of prey-stalking, the thoughtless unity of sense, recognition, and action that culminated with some fresh, juicy morsel in her talons. She shifted a little on the branch. It was harder to get comfortable, too. Her proportions were subtly different, and it felt like all her joints were in the wrong place somehow.
Now the thing was repeatedly kicking a fallen log, sending scraps of mushroom and chips of rotting wood flying, and making more noises of frustration. It was totally distracted. Perfect. She leaned forward, ready to lunge into flight.
A sharp bark of anger rang out. The owl paused, head swivelling towards the source of the interruption. It was another thing, a bigger one. A parent, she realized, here to retrieve its young. The adult was twice her size, easy. She clucked in frustration and settled back onto the branch: she’d really been looking forward to tasting the whatever-it-was.
The two creatures looked to be squabbling now, making more angry noises at each other. Were they parent and child after all? They were acting more like rivals fighting for territory. The little one broke away suddenly, turning to flee. Before it made it more than a few steps, the bigger one had caught it by the arm, dragging it closer.
Crack.
The bigger creature struck the smaller one a brutal blow across the face. The owl trilled in confusion, shifting further down the branch for a better look. Could she have been mistaken? Maybe this wasn’t a parent guarding its offspring, but a bigger predator bullying her off a kill. That changed the math entirely. A parent might fight to the death to defend its offspring, but another predator would be much less invested, and could be driven off with a big enough show of force. She might not be the biggest or the strongest — well, actually, now she might be, at least as far as owls went — but she’d never backed down from a scrap with a peer and she wasn’t about to start now.
As the human woman roughly dragged her weeping child behind her, headed back for the farm, a silent shadow followed them from above.