> [ACHIEVEMENT: MY, WHAT SHARP TEETH]

“Seriously?!” I shout at the air as I tug the creature off me and throw it as hard as I possibly can.

Three things strike me as the goblin flies through the air and thuds against a boulder.

First, these things are a lot lighter than I expected.

Second, they’re slimy (which is gross).

Third, fuck they really have a lot of teeth. And yes, [Achievement] title, they are sharp.

We had left Oosal and steadily made our way west, toward where the notice—and Titus’s directions—suggested. Along the way we’d pause to let me practice a little with my bow, Meg surprisingly willing to help me with my aim and form. While the bow wasn’t her weapon of choice, she said, she’d known more than a few archers in her life and knew her way around it. After a couple of rounds, I was starting to feel more confident in it— and in the idea of using it against creatures. Sort of, anyway.

We found the goblin’s nest quite easily. I discovered I have a knack for tracking (ranger, who knew, right?) and once we found the location where they were originally sighted, it was pretty easy to track them up the hill a little way into the woods and locate their lair amongst big boulders by a stream. We watched them from the tree line, trying to get a sense of how many there were, and, for the first little while, I admit to not even being sure what I was looking at. The creatures we were watching were blue, didn’t have the expected long pointed ears, and rather than being just shy of waist height, they were actually closer to that of a terrifying, talking teddy bear from my childhood.

“That one must be the pack leader,” Flynt had said very softly next to me, gesturing toward a slightly larger little creature with a pot belly wearing a very rudimentary grass skirt. The others were all nude, looking more like large naked mole rats than humanoids. “Keira, you shoot it, I’ll follow up with an arcane bolt. If we take it down from back here, maybe we can create some confusion.”

“We’re really supposed to just kill them?” I asked.

“They’re river goblins,” Jonas replied, rubbing his hands together before taking off his gloves and tucking them into a pouch at his belt. His magic didn’t work if anything interfered with dermal layer to dermal layer contact. “They’re worse than rats.”

“But aren’t they sentient?”

Meg shook her head. “Not these guys. They can appear to be, but it’s all animalistic. Smart animals, but animals.”

I thought back to the ears in Tasha’s assortment. There must be different types of goblins? Or maybe it’s proof my brain is just making this shit up on the fly.

I nodded and pulled an arrow out of my quiver. Meg drew her sword slowly, as silently as possible. Tyrus rested a hand briefly on my elbow and muttered something, then disengaged from us, disappearing back into the foliage drawing his daggers as he went.

“I can do this,” I murmured.

“Take your time.” Meg kept her voice low. “Breathe and hold steady. Don’t think too much about what you’re doing. Just let the muscle memory do its work.”

“Okay.”

I nocked the arrow and drew it back, anchoring it against my jaw, sighting right at the pudgy goblin’s throat. It had an amphibian quality to its skin, which shone with an iridescence. I was about to take the shot when it looked directly at us.

Panicking, I let the arrow fly. Instead of impacting its throat, the arrow jammed right into its gut, hard, knocking the creature off balance as a bright red 5 floated up off it, and it started screaming.

Chaos erupted. We expected the seven or eight we could see, but a dozen more came flooding up from little caves between boulders and others jumped up out of the river.

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“Oh shit,” I gasped.

“All in!” Meg shouted, boosting herself over the rock we were crouched behind and running into the fray. Her sword cut deep into one slimy little blue body, extracting oily bluish-black blood (a red 6 floated up, which it was interesting to see the damage dealt by another member of my party) before swinging at another’s head (8). It was almost comical to watch: a tall powerhouse of a woman with a sword more than half her height and these little knee biting creatures. One launched itself at her, bearing a giant mouth half the size of its face filled with teeth. It reminded me of a cartoon piranha. She shouted in surprise and reacted on sheer instinct, the movement cleaving the creature in half (12).

Flynt cursed beside me and whispered in a language I didn’t understand before his hands lit up and a bolt fizzled through the air with a snap of ozone, impacting a goblin about to leap off a bolder onto Meg (10). Another bolt flew at one hopping out of the water about fifty feet in front of us. The second bolt seemed to just skim it (5).

“Stay back. Keep shooting,” he said. “I’m getting a new position.”

“Right.”

I pegged the one that Flynt had winged for another 5, causing it to skid face-first into the dirt, its forward momentum carrying it a few feet. Tyrus suddenly appeared, almost decapitating one of the creatures from behind (10) before it could descend on Meg, and then whipped around to get a second in the stomach (6), following that up with a secondary slash (2).

The leader was getting up, so I put another arrow in it (6, woohoo) and the creature lay motionless, its screaming silenced. There was a pause before a host of goblins turned toward where the arrow came from, and their gazes fell on me.

They came running, making these horrible shrieking gurgling noises.

“Shit!” I shouted, standing from my crouch, and fumbling with another arrow. “Shit shit shit!”

I fired, which just missed one and ricocheted off a boulder. I forced myself to stop thinking so much and let my instincts take over. I reached blindly, grabbing another arrow, and backed up as I drew and fired again. This time the arrow thudded hard into a tiny little chest about twenty feet in front of me (8), knocking the creature back motionless onto the ground.

A spark of arcane energy whooshed in like a freight train, flickering through the mass of goblins, dealing damage across the group rushing toward me (six tiny red 2s drifted up into the air above the fray). Meg was busy with her own mass, pulling one off her shoulder and throwing it aside before striking at another. Jonas had moved in to help, grabbing to pull one off her leg. As his hands touched its slimy, naked body, they glowed dark, and the creature let out a blood curdling shriek as it began to turn ashen gray, almost as if the color was being leeched out of it (8). There was a pained expression on Jonas’s face as he did it, and then he threw the creature’s body aside, batting another back with it.

I loosed an arrow to drop another from the upcoming pack (6) before they were on me, a mass of slimy bodies and gnashing teeth. One bit into my forearm hard. White-hot pain shot up my arm and I screamed at it, swinging around to bash it as hard as I could into the tree behind me (4), causing its jaws to loosen and it to drop to the forest floor with a heavy thud. Another came at me just as the flipping achievement came up.

That’s the one I just threw toward the river.

“Keira! Duck!” Flynt shouts, and I do— just dodging another goblin jumping for my face. It’s hit in midair by a second of Flynt’s area effect bolts, which deals another barrage of damage across the small pack (another set of red 2s drift up like smoke).

I pull an arrow from my quiver and somehow manage to actually stab one in the throat as it lunges for me, its large, black, alien-like eyes going dim while staring at me in hatred. I grimace and drop it, grabbing for the dagger at my hip instead, but Tyrus is there, catapulting himself over the boulder we’d been hiding behind and stabbing down at two as he lands hard between them, an elated grin behind his still perfectly pristine beard. I nod my thanks and step backward toward the tree, pulling an arrow and nocking it, ready, surveying the area. I watch Flynt take down two. Meg stabs the one I threw as Jonas stands up straight, panting, covered in goblin ooze, with at least half a dozen fallen around the two of them.

I don’t see any of the creatures still moving.

We’re all breathing hard, all of us on edge, looking around, waiting, but as the minutes tick by, nothing happens.

“Wow,” I finally gasp. “That was intense.”

The whole thing might have lasted maybe two minutes, tops. It felt like no time though. As the adrenaline ebbs, I start to feel the massive wound on my arm throbbing. I look down at it to find my entire forearm covered in blood— my blood. It doesn’t look real, frankly. It looks like bad Halloween make-up.

“Ouch,” I say, deadpan, staring at it.

“Uh,” Tyrus says, also staring, then looks up at my face, then back to the wound. “Uh. Jonas?! We need you!”

“Hang on,” he calls back. “Meg’s got a pretty big gash.”

“Meg’s a tank, she can handle it,” Tyrus shouts. I look at him, feeling weird. “I think our archer is about to— yup. There she goes.”