My vision lit up light a flash of lightning and waves of furnace heat blasted out across my body. I felt the rags wrapped around my hand catch fire and crumble away to ash as blisters rose on my face. Every inch of my body screamed with pain.

But that pain was nothing, because even as by body burned my soul recovered. The worming snake of hostile magic that dug through my soul broke and I felt my muscles twitching free of their paralysis. I was in command of my own body again, and as my mind adjusted to the sensory overload I became aware of a terrible scream tearing at my ears.

I blinked and squinted, bringing a dim view of the world into sight. The blazing light still stabbed at my eyes, so I did the only thing I could and drove my blade up further into the old Hob’s body. The blazing light faded, blocked by flesh, and finally I could see.

The Hob was howling in pain, probably cause it had a three inch wide hole burned through the center of its chest. My dagger was angled upwards past the heart and towards the neck, with the Hob’s body thankfully blocking off the blinding light.

The Hob grasped at me with skeletal arms, but the vines held it back with thorns pierced into its flesh. “I.. I am better than you!”

Its voice broke on the last word. “I.. can’t die like this. Not today, not to you, nononono….”

The fell light in its eyes faded, leaving nothing but the desperate eyes of a goblin staring death in the face. “This is absurd. For the pinnacle of necromantic achievement to be bound so thoroughly as to lose to the random luck of some stupid goblin...”

My smile faded and died. The creature in front of me was no longer horrifying so much as… pathetic really. The only glow was that of my searing blade, the only sound that of sizzling flesh. “I hear you brother. Life is pretty bullshit.”

I pulled up on the blade and felt it catch briefly on something in the upper chest. I frowned. Were there any organs there?

The blade jerked up as the last resistance broke and the corpse beneath me detonated. The vines shredded in a blast of woody shrapnel and hurled me across the room. I hit the first stone table hips first and tumbled over it, taking my next impact straight in the chin as I hit the edge of the second table. I bounced off and scraped across the top of it before falling to the ground and rolling all the way to the third fucking table, which kindly stopped me with yet another impact on solid fucking stone.

…

Why the fuck did it explode!?

Fucking undead. I forced one hand down to the ground and pushed myself up off the ground, spitting broken teeth. Stars, I had needed those. First the tip of my damn tongue, now half my teeth. Anymore of this and I’d be able to build myself a second digestive system outside my body.

Which, I do believe, is not where those fucking belong.

The ground swam beneath my vision. Which, I do believe, is s’not, is schnot…

...is…. what was I doing again? Oh. Right, not dying.

I angled my arm just far enough that I could collapse and land a bit further forward than I’d been before. Right. I peered from my nice and comfortable and saw two…four….I blinked, one body on the ground by the faint light of smouldering wreckage.

Just a bit further… I moved my arm forward, grasping at the seams in the floor with my claws and dragging my body closer to salvation inch by bloody inch. My head pounded and my cracked bones screamed in protest, but I persevered until Garrett’s body was within my reach.

One trembling hand dipped into a pouch, withdrawing with a precious healing potion in its grasp. I bit down on the cork with what remained of my teeth and worked at it. I had no energy left for tearing it out, so I was reduced to jiggling and wiggling until the damn thing popped free on its own.

And promptly spilled most of itself out on the stone. I locked my lips around the bottle and slurped away at what was left. It wasn’t much, but I was used to getting by on not enough. And fuck it, why not. I lapped up the rest from the filthy stone for good measure.

Heh. I rolled over and looked up at the ceiling, relaxing with Garrett’s corpse as a pillow. Stars know it was the most use anyone had ever got out of him.

I’d cheated death yet again. Then again, it wasn’t like the bastard hadn’t cheated me before, so fair’s fair.

I shook my head. This was no time for the past. This was the time for stealing more of Garrett’s shit. I’d lost the opportunity before when the Hob had popped up the first time, I wasn’t missing out again.

I rolled over to face the corpse propped up on my elbows and looked for a buckle or something on his bandolier. Stars be blessed, I actually found one. It was still a pain to pull it out from under Garrett’s fat ass, but accomplishable.

Once that unpleasant task was done with I secured it around my own chest. I had to wrap the damn thing around me twice to keep it off the ground, and even then it wasn’t exactly cinched down tight.

Stupid humans and their stubborn insistence on not making anything conveniently goblin sized. Well, there was kids’ stuff I guess, but stealing that shit always made me feel like a creep.

I looked out through the doorway I’d come from, ready to run, but there was nothing. Huh. That had not been a quiet explosion. Not that I was any expert, I preferred staying the fuck away from explosions as a general rule, but that really should have attracted something. Back when Garrett was smashing the wall there’d been tons of the bastards…

I snapped my fingers. Ah-ha! That was why! The first time there had been a loud noise a metric shit-ton of ghouls showed up. The second time there’d been like one. The keen-eared ghouls had all charged into Garrett’s blades, while the slow, dumb, deaf-as-humans ones had just kept plodding along, indifferent to all the commotion. The realization let me relax a bit more. It was nice to have an explanation for my good luck, because if there wasn’t one… well, then it probably wasn’t good luck at all.

Even better than that, the lack of ghouls trying to eat me meant I could get started on the eating myself. I rooted through Garrett’s crap and eventually managed to dig out some jerky. Ah, the delicious taste of not-tree-bark. Not that I took the time to savor it, I was so hungry I tossed it swallowed them whole.

My immediate problem solved, I could turn to the long term issue: getting the fuck out of here. I could tell that there was a way up because of the air circulation, but air fit through holes a lot smaller than goblins could squeeze through. Even if there was a passage out there was no telling how long it would take to find it fumbling around in the dark.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Reluctantly, I set about making a torch or three. I didn’t like the idea of lighting myself up like that, but it was the only realistic option. I could very well need to tunnel my way out of here, and I doubted I had enough food to last for as long as that might take. Time was more important than stealth here.

My fingers brushed along the smooth leather grip of one of my many new knives. Besides, I was far from helpless. I knew what dwelled here, and I’d be more than capable of slaying a few ghouls.

I didn’t stop my work until I had half a dozen improvised torches, enough to last for a while. They were nothing more than wood and cloth, scavenged from the vines and Garrett’s surprisingly extensive wardrobe respectively, so they wouldn’t burn nearly as well as they would with proper oil, but I’d be damned if I was start randomly uncorking shit at random from Garrett’s bag of unlabeled alchemical concoctions. A half dozen shitty torches would just have to do.

I bundled up five of the torches and shoved them in one of those delightful extradimensional pouches, laying the last out in front of me. Getting it to catch might be a bit of a struggle, but this was far from the most difficult conditions to do so. Even with my missing flint forcing me to rely on rubbing two particularly woody vines together long enough for the friction to build up enough to create sparks it was still easier to get flames going in a dry cave than a raging thunderstorm.

I held my new torch up high and proud, illuminating the room in flickering orange light. Ah, that was better. I could function in pitch blackness far better than some idiot human, but that didn’t mean I liked it. Even the warrens had more light than this place. Not much more, but the dim glow of refracting candlelight formed the perfect illumination, bright enough to see, but with enough shifting shadows that no one could see you.

I hopped up on the nearest stone table and sat cross legged. There was one more thing I had to do before I could leave. Look at my soul gains. I licked my lips. This was gonna be good.

“[Soul Sense]!”

…

What? Why was there nothing!? I mean, sure, there was all the same soul stuff that had been here before, plus a smidgen, but that damn Hob had to have given me more than that. By the fucking stars, that fucker was definitely more dangerous than Garrett, and he’d given me at least a few levels. The Hob hadn’t even given me one.

I ground my teeth together, only to immediately yelp in pain. Fucking hells. I stuck one finger into my mouth and gingerly felt around in there. Yeah, turns out healing potions don’t regrow teeth. My bleeding gums had scabbed over, but grinding my teeth together wasn’t exactly pleasant when half of them were gone and the other half were broken off into jagged stumps.

I took a deep breath and let it out through my nose. Focus, dammit. I’d used soul sense via the Skill for a reason, I couldn’t afford to be distracted. Deaf or not, lighting up a torch had to attract some attention, and I needed to be ready when it arrived. Giving that attention a while to arrive here, where I had a chokepoint, would give me better odds on taking them.

It helped that the most dangerous undead down here had been imobile. Better to lure in ghouls for some ‘easy’ soul energy rather than risk another thing like that ambushing me while I was distracted.

I mulled over the mystery of the missing soul energy as I waited, but ultimately the gaps in my knowledge were too big to give me a clear picture. I only had a fuzzy idea of how the whole thing worked in the first place, and my only source of information was currently a cooling corpse.

Well, a cooled corpse. Honestly it was kinda surprising that the smell hadn’t drawn more ghouls, but it wasn’t like this place was low on competing odors. Whole damn complex ree-

My left ear twitched. A predatory grin crept across my face. There was movement outside, slow and hesitant, but growing more confident as the scent of blood grew discernable in the still air.

I settled my stabbing dagger into my left hand and hefted Garrett’s heavy recurved blade in my right. The damn thing might technically be a knife, but it was already big for a human one, between my smaller goblin hands and its deliberately unbalanced design it was all but impossible to move with any degree of finesse.

So I didn’t try. Instead I rested the weapon on my shoulder and rotated my body back, waiting for the right moment to spring.

I heard the slight scuff of callused feet pushing off hard stone.

I pivoted my torso around, getting the throw started before I whipped my arm forward and sent the heavy recurved blade whirling through the air. It sunk into the ghoul’s shoulder with a squelching crunch.

I rolled off the side of the table and fell to the ground, leaving the ghoul to slam into the hard stone surface. I rose, turning and putting the force of my spin into my thrust. The ghoul swiped with one claw, but I rammed my dagger up through the bottom of its skull in exchange.

I took its blow in the side, letting my layers of cloth absorb it with the ripping of rent fabric while my own attack drove up into the roof of its mouth and… and…

And then it stopped just short of the brain as the hilt slammed into the lower jaw. The ghoul’s mouth was lolled open, ravenous for living flesh and too damn wide for my dagger to span the distance necessary to strike the final blow.

I heaved upward, but the ghoul’s jaw remained defiantly open as its grip found purchase on my improvised cloth armor and locked tight. The ghouls dragged me closer to its maw, but I planted a foot in its chest and staved off death for another few precious seconds.

Fucking hells this was a disaster. The only reason it wasn’t already noshing on my face was its wounded arm, and even that stay of execution wouldn’t last forever. The bastard was still stronger than me and gravity gave it the leverage to slowly pull itself closer despite my resistance.

So I stopped resisting. I dropped my foot from the ghoul’s chest to the side of the table and pulled the ghoul’s body down across my body faster than it could pull itself down. The ghoul slammed skull first into the edge of the next table over and dropped to the ground stunned. I snapped a kick into its face and the back of its skull crack back against the stone behind it.

Again and again I lashed out, not stopping until the back half of the ghoul’s skull had more in common with a bowl of blood pudding than any kind of living being.

I stepped back, panting. I really needed to get better at this shit, cause if I kept almost dying whenever anything tried to eat me I didn’t fancy my odds of living to see the next week, let alone a ripe old age.

Or, you know, I could just try to be less cocky. Just cause I’d killed a few ghouls didn’t mean I could discount them entirely. If pulling a Garrett was what finally killed me I would never forgive myself. At least I’d been smart enough to get a good hit in before the melee proper started.

From then on I lit a fire on one of the tables and pulled my doorway stunt again, clinging to the wall above the doorway. I couldn’t get at the stone lintel, but the vines blocking me were even easier to climb, so it wasn’t a problem. With my new position I was unlikely to be spotted, with [Beggar’s Disregard] running along side it I was all but unseeable. Any ghouls to prowl through were executed from above without ever getting the chance to harm me in turn.

I noted them sniffing as they came through, which was interesting cause I knew the surviving bastards were all but deaf. A bloodhound’s nose wouldn’t save them now though, caves had no wind to carry scent and I was wrapped up in a cloak so ichor-stained I could build my own ghoul.

Unfortunately a mere handful fell into my trap before the flow trickled off. Were there truly no more, or were they just smart enough not to venture into an area so doused in the ichor of their fallen brothers that my ichor stained cloak practically counted as invisibility?

No way to know, not without going out there, and that I didn’t like. Still, I hadn’t liked crawling beneath a pile of ghoul corpses, and that hadn’t stopped me. I was gonna have to bite the bullet and go out there.

But not before some last minute preparation. If I was holding light in ghoul infested tunnels, I would have to be ready to actually take one in a straight fight, at the least.

“[Soul Sense].” I breathed the words so softly they barely passed my own lips. I still wasn’t sure what made speaking shit aloud so important, but neither could I reliably activate my skills without them.

The ghouls were enough to tip me over the edge and get me another level full and ready to be invested. I also still had the two levels I’d set aside for future Skills and never gotten back to. I invest the new level first, some simple Stat improvements wouldn’t tax me as much as a new Skill.

Speed: 11 (+1)

Agility: 11 (+1)

Dexterity: 11 (+2)

Constitution: 10 (+1)

Toughness: 8 (+1)

Metabolism: 14 (+1)

Senses: 17 (+1)

I could really see the downside of having so many Stats. With this much to split them between it was difficult to get a significant improvement in any one thing. Still, I could feel the hint of extra responsiveness in my limbs if I flexed just right, the limits at the edge of my abilities slowly getting pushed backwards, so I had no regrets.

Next the Skills. I’d avoided them before because they’d make me vulnerable, to starvation and predation alike, while they were completed. The question was whether I could afford not to have them. Even a single Skill could serve as an incredible trump card, perhaps enough to outweigh the risk.

In the end simple indecision made the choice for me. I couldn’t think of any definitive best option for either of my two available levels, so I did nothing. Better not to risk going catatonic anyway.

A single level worth of Stats wasn’t enough to satisfy my resurgent paranoia, so I followed it up with a few mundane preparations. I dropped down from the wall and retreated to the far side of the room to check through Garrett’s shit real quick. Nothing jumped out at me as an instant victory button aside from some glowing scrolls I didn’t know how to use, so I sighed and got about cobbling together something that would get me a mild increase to my odds of survival instead.

I packed on a few more layers of the toughest cloth I could find. People didn’t realize how much of a pain in the ass it was to cut through the stuff, and a pain in the ass for them was a win for me. Hitting at just the right angle with a razor-edged sword would still put my guts on the ground, but even a slight decrease in precision could let simple cloth turn a blade and the jagged natural weapons of ghouls had a more than ‘slight’ gulf between them and perfection. It was no masterpiece but it would be good enough protection to let me survive a fuckup or two, which was all I really needed.

I lit up a second torch from the last embers of the first and stepped out into the hallway. The light cast flickering shadows all around me, doing nothing to make this place less creepy. All the light did was trick the eye, maintaining an illusion of security while still leaving you blind to the shadows beyond.