“Well, that was annoying.”

Chef summed up the events of the day while the two of them looked down at the sleeping guild master. The man was much less intimidating now that his sword wasn’t on fire and flying towards his face every few seconds.

“Oh well, let’s continue.”

The awkward guard looked between the goblin walking away and the man he’d just felled with more than a little confusion.

“Just like that? What, you kill one of the most influential, important, and dangerous people in Berics and just walk away like it’s nothing?!“

Confusion quickly gave way to exasperation and anger as he yelled at the goblin. But, as usual, Chef would have to disappoint his traveling companion.

“I didn’t kill him though.”

The poison cloud has dispersed enough to see into it, but not enough for the lower leveled guard to see well. The slight rising and falling of the man’s chest was as obvious a sign of his continued living as Chef’s lack of system notifications. Not that the guard could verify either of those things, which was why it wasn’t surprising that he made his way over towards the cloud to get a better look.

“I wouldn’t do that. It’s only a knockout gas, but it can kill people if they’re too weak.”

The guard stopped a few feet from the edge of the cloud, taking a slow step backwards as the gas continued to slowly disperse through the woods.

“And I’m weak.”

The words were barely a whisper, but the goblin’s stats weren’t for nothing. The guard might as well have spoken directly into his ear for how well he could understand the man’s words.

“Yes, you are.”

But that didn’t mean that he really understood his business partner. For goblins, weakness was a guarantee for their entire lives. Every goblin was born knowing that they’d never be the strongest. Even if they became the pinnacle of goblin kind, there’d be some human or monster out there easily capable of biting their head off. Goblins tend to live fast and die young, so he’d never had much opportunity to worry overly much about his place in the pecking order.

It was hard for Chef, then, to sympathize with humans who, despite the horrors of the world, carved out a place for themselves through sheer dedication and effort. For many of them, a declaration of weakness undermined everything they’d fought to achieve.

For Chef, it was just a statement of fact.

“Come on, then. I already left him alive and really don’t want to fight any more people today. Now, how do I hide my tracks?”

While the last sentence may have been spoken to himself, he didn’t receive a response to any of what he said. Chef looked back towards the downed human and the awkward guard, trying to figure out what precisely was wrong. Obviously, one of them had been knocked out so he was really only wondering about the one specific human in this case.

The human got all quiet and sad when he realized how small and weak he was. It was as endearing as it was annoying. Like a baby goblin.

“Come on, now. Even if you’re weak, you can still eat better than that man or even their weirdly dressed baron.”

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Chef tugged on the guard’s sleeve, though the armor lessened how cute the gesture was. The softly smiling goblin did his best to gently coax his business partner out of the funk he so transparently was in, but it only took a couple of seconds before Chef’s impatience once again reared its ugly head. Grabbing the man’s arm, he just started walking, literally dragging him from his stupor.

“Seriously, Nerick. People want us dead. If you want to be all non-responsive, at least do it while walking.”

His words may not have made much sense, but the dragging finally seemed to snap his companion out of it. The guard simply stared down at Chef as the goblin dragged him along their path. Being pulled by someone half your size didn’t exactly do wonders for the arm being grabbed, nor did it help their problem of leaving tracks behind, but neither of those were on Nerick’s mind.

“You used my name.”

They continued on in relative silence. Relative in this case excluded the obvious noises of birds, insects, and a person being pulled into, through, or over all sorts of bushes, twigs, and other obstacles. It was a deafening silence in a more literal sense than most.

“It would be a bit rude not to after realizing guard isn’t part of your name. Stupid human names—“

“Thank you.”

Chef let go of the man’s arm to turn around and look at him. There was genuine appreciation on Nerick’s face as he stared not quite at the goblin but past him. It seemed, even when moved to sincerity, the man remained quite awkward.

“I confess that I doubted your willingness to spare humans, especially those after your life. Between that and your consideration for me, I feel I may have judged you too harshly. I am underserving of your kindness, Mr. Chef.”

The goblin mechanically turned around and began walking. Blood rushed to his face and caused him to feel uncomfortably warm as he became suddenly aware of a strange sensation on his skin. In addition, an unnatural desire to flee combined lovingly with the stiffening of his entire body, resulting in his walking away resembling a puppet without joints.

Chef didn’t know what this feeling was, but he hated it tremendously. More than anything, he wanted it to stop. He wanted to say something, anything to stop the strange silence permeating between the two of them now, but every word just got caught in his throat. He finally managed to squeeze out a pitiful excuse for a response after they’d walked at least a hundred goblin feet.

“Please, just call me Goblin.”

Nerick looked down at his business partner with a complicated expression on his face.

“That sounds less convenient than calling you Chef.”

Another fifty or so goblin feet worth of silence stretched out between them before Chef grumbled under his breath.

“It sounded better in my head…”

A brief pat on the shoulder let him know, in no uncertain terms, that everything would be ok.

“I know, Chef. I know.”

The silence between them grew more comfortable as they continued on through the woods, aimlessly. There was no clear goal they were headed towards aside from the distance itself. Obviously, that wasn’t good enough though, or he wouldn’t have had to gas up that old man.

That sounded weird.

“So…”

Chef figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. At least, it usually didn’t. There was that one time where he’d apparently made an entire village hate him because he asked them to give him flour, but aside from the couple of murder attempts that caused, the saying was usually true.

It really was like they said; every rule has its exception.

“Any ideas on how to hide our tracks?”

A few more goblin feet of silence save for the cracking of twigs and the shifting of branches filled the air.

“Nope.”

“Yea, me neither.”

“Guess you’ll be knocking out a lot of people then.”

Chef grimaced as he continued to walk through every obstacle in his path smaller than a tree. There were many words that could describe the goblin, but subtle wasn’t one of them.

“I’m not thrilled by that idea.”

“By the way, we just left an older man unconscious and defenseless in the middle of the woods. Is he going to be alright?”

Chef stopped in his tracks as he turned back around. The man may have tried to kill him, but Chef wasn’t a monster. If he was going to spare him, then he wasn’t going to just let some no named animal take all of the kill experience a few short hours later! He had to secure the kill or protect the body, otherwise he’d end up in that Turducken situation again.

His mouth watered slightly as he began trudging his way back to where he fought his most recent victim.

“Huh.”

Chef looked over at his travel companion, business partner, and friend as they continued to plow through the serene beauty of these woods.

“We really are easy to track.”

For once in his life, Chef was confident that he wouldn’t get lost.