The boar totem was the largest structure, and the most eye-catching, but it didn’t take me long to realize that it was hardly the only one. The lines of swimming boars drew the eye to the central totem, but equally dominant in its own way was the exit from the otherwise inescapable deathtrap that was the lake.

Yeah, simple lakes could be inescapable deathtraps. Any deep enough pit could. I’d seen it occasionally in rocky cenotes back home, crystal waters letting you easily see the countless bones lining the lakebed, but I’d guess it was possible even in muddier soil like they had here. Easier to fall in, what with the slipper mud and all.  

Either way someone had cleared their own path down, a wide ramp cut through the bluff face and reinforced with scorched wood pillars driven down into the earth. Cutting and moving that much timber was bound to be a pain, there was a reason most goblin constructions were hodgepodged together from countless smaller components.

But there was a more important factor than skill in their architectural style: cutting down trees was loud. Really loud, completely different from, say, collecting spare twigs and leaves as I had, or even from hacking off a branch here and there. Whoever had built that ramp was pretty damn confident in their position, perhaps not the worst the dungeon had to offer, but certainly not bottom tier scavengers like me.

Which wasn’t all that surprising either, I mean if I had a small army of giant fire-breathing boars at my beck and call I’d be feeling pretty damn confident myself.

I shook my head and stood up. Whatever society lived here didn’t matter cause it didn’t change my plans any, except perhaps to make them more urgent. I needed to get up that tree, preferably before a potentially hostile tribe of crazy dungeon dwellers discovered the presence of an interloper in their territory.

A sharp exhale behind me.

I whipped around, throwing off mud and ash as I turned to face the noise just in time to meet the sight of a short figure throwing a spear at me.

I jerked to the side, but not far enough. The spear pierced my chest and I was helpless to do anything but stare dumbly down at it. Goddammit, why had I even moved? It had been a good throw, aimed dead center. If I’d just stood still I’d have taken the hit to the sternum and the spearpoint would have been met with solid bone, but a blow just off to the side like that could easily slide between the ribs and reach the aortic artery, one of the fastest ways to kill nearly any humanoid.

But not, I dimly recognized, something that was killing me. I reached up with a rock steady hand and plucked the spear from my chest, revealing a slender point wet with blood only up to about the centimeter mark.

A smile cracked across my face, and I burst out laughing. The figure who’d just hurled a spear into my chest backed up, eyes wide with fear, and that just made me laugh harder. I hadn’t gotten around to deactivating my [Rag Armor] Skill!

The goblin, and it was a goblin, with proper ears rather than the malformed stubs of humans or the decorative foppery of elves, babbled, speaking rapid-fire gibberish that nonetheless sounded disconcertingly familiar. Where had I heard that before?

I eyed the unknown goblin warrily, picking out any potential threats among their gear. It wasn’t impressive, but it didn’t always have to be to do the job. They primarily wore tanned hides, without a single stitch of cloth on their person. I didn’t see any more proper weapons on them either, thankfully. They had a stone knife at their belt, but by the way they were trying to fumble it free I didn’t really think they were capable of hurting any goblin with it, let alone me.

I lightly rested my free hand on the pouch containing my own weapons. One of these days needed to see if any of them were small enough to hide somewhere, but as it was I was confident in my ability to draw faster than the goblin in front of me.

The tribesgoblin finally got its knife out and waved it about in a way it probably hoped was menacing but was really quite amusing.

Amusing until it began shouting its strangely familiar language instead of babbling it. Unknown language or not, I knew a distress call when I heard one and I was lunging forwards before my conscious mind was done processing the information. I might not have been old enough to go out with the raiders much before my exile, but I’d still been trained. Proper silencing of sentries had been one of Zatturk’s favorite talking points.

I brought the javelin across with my left hand, smashing aside the other goblin’s knife with the shaft. The slender throwing weapon shattered in the process, but its task was already complete, stone knife flying from their hand. I slammed into their body less than a second later, leading with my knee.

The tribesgoblin folded, bringing their nose down into the punch I’d been aiming for their throat. Well, no matter. It shut em up either way, with the air gone from their lungs and blood clogging up their nose they were effectively silenced as we fell backwards.

They landed flat on their back in the dirt with a muffled oof. I landed knee first into their stomach, driving all their air out again. While they desperately struggled to catch their breath I leaned in close and held the razor edge of a drawn dagger up against their throat, feather light.

They grew still beneath me, gaze going cross-eyed as they tried to focus on the knife beneath their chin. I sniffed, taking in the intermingled scents of ash and sweat. I sneezed violently into my improvised face mask, and thanked the stars that my Dexterity was enough to avoid accidentally opening up her throat. Fucking fire was goddamn annoying, I’d just been curious which gender she was. Female obviously, but goblins didn’t have udders on our chests like human women seemed to. They got downright pissed when you pointed it out too, my mother had an incredibly even temper, but even she’d smacked me good when I said that.

“Elspiri ni kazeem?” She muttered.

I blinked. “Elspiri?” I was sure I’d heard that word before. I even knew what it meant, although I still couldn’t quite place where I’d learned it. It was a kind of spirit, albeit one with near universally negative connotatio—

I shuddered. Oh. I’d learned it from Ol’ Gobber. Of course I had, I could only excuse how long it took me to figure that out because I strove to remember that bastard as rarely as possible. I was pretty sure every goblin that had the displeasure of meeting him did.

Ol’ Gobber was what one might charitably call the teacher of my old tribe, the one who ensured that no goblin reached adulthood with an unacceptably high level of stupidity. The rough equivalent of what Serias had been doing at that human village, but Ol’ Gobber’s methods involved a lot less careful explanation and a lot more… practical exercises.

But he’d taught more than just how to properly skin an animal and which organs could be safely eaten raw, he’d had an unwavering devotion to preserving what ancestral knowledge goblins had left. I was pretty sure he was the only reason anyone in the tribe still remembered which glyph meant what, and he put an unreasonable amount of effort into beating the basics of the Old Tongue into young goblin minds.

This goblin’s speech had more than a few commonalities with Old Tongue, so by all rights I should understand it. Not well, but even with all the other tongues I’d been struggling to master at the time I should be able to get something from her speech.

I narrowed my eyes. “What spirit?”

She blinked and immediately shot back a rapid series of words far too fast for me to understand. Goddammit.

“Talk. Slow.”

She frowned and reached up with one hand to point straight at my face. “You. Spirit?”

I cocked my head. Of all the stupid things, why would she think I was a spirit? And why in the stars would s—

She poked me in the side. I glared down at her, but she didn’t stop. In fact she began blatantly feeling me up, pinching to feel the flesh beneath the cloth.

“Stop!”

She did, firing out a phrase as fast as before, but at least it was blessedly short and I managed to parse through it. “Are you a goblin?”

I glared down at her, struggling to find the words. What was obviously in Old Tongue? I had no damn idea, so relied on simpler vocabulary to get my point across. “Duh.”

She smiled guiltily up at me. “Oops?”

I snarled down at her. Oops? Oops!? She tried to kill me and she said oops!? My grasp tightened around the hilt of my dagger, but I took a deep breath and forced myself back, withdrawing my blade from her neck by a few centimeters. I stuttered out half a demand why she’d tried to kill me before I gave up on trying to twist the handful of words I could remember into a coherent sentence.

I stood up and stepped back, letting her go, but maintaining a cautious stance. If she attacked me again I would kill her. I hadn’t expected to find anyone I could communicate with down here, let alone fellow goblins, but that didn’t mean I could forgive attempted murder. Well, not more than one anyway.

But the female tribesgoblin stood slowly and without reaching for any hidden weapons. She no longer seemed violent, even if she did give me the stink-eye as she clutched her damaged nose.

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She mimed pulling something down and after a skeptical second where I went over all the ways that complying would somehow kill me, I could really think of any, I pulled down the cloth over my face that had filtered out at least some proportion of the dust and ash here.

She seemed excited at the confirmation of my goblin-hood and immediately resumed talking, spitting out words faster than I could understand them and pointing at herself and then out into the woods.

“Quiet.” I hissed back at her.

She paused, seeming confused, before a realization dawned on her face and she nodded rapidly. She took a deep breath, clasped her hands together, and bowed slightly. She spoke with deliberate care, not just of communicating with a daft foreigner, but of timeless ritual and reverence that even I understood, mostly. “Wenir gea, kai nai Selyra.”

I relaxed, even if only a little. It wasn’t a guarantee of safety, more a statement of intent, but it was still better than nothing. I repeated the phrase with as close to her original intonation as I could manage. “Wenir gea, kai nai Zhen.”

Apparently I understood less than I’d thought, cause Selyra immediately snickered. Still, she did seem to take the violence between us as officially over, turning her back on me and going through the scrub looking for her missing knife.

I didn’t stop her. A stone bladed knife and a broken javelin were nothing to write home about even if I wasn’t at least seventy percent sure she wouldn’t try to kill me now. I sheathed my own drawn dagger as soon as I saw her expose her back to me and let my hand rest on the bandolier instead. It would still slower than keeping it in hand, but survival was a many-sided beast and sometimes the merits of convincing people you weren’t a paranoid maniac looking to stab someone outweighed the benefits of easy weapon access.

And I did indisputably have to be worried, just a lot less than before. Names were important and so were formal introductions, but they weren’t a promise of safety, just an acknowledgment that the default violence was over. Strangers were a threat to be feared, named individuals were, well, people. You judged them by their actions, and responded appropriately.

In other words the official exchange of names protected me from getting cut up for pig food, but only so long as I refrained from royally pissing off anyone important. I wouldn’t put that past me though, so I’d have to remain aware of whatever this tribe’s taboos were and, more importantly, not get caught breaking them.

Failing anything obvious to do, I went to help Selyra. Being useful was appreciated in every culture. The scrub and mud made it a bit of a pain to find, but eventually I spotted a slightly different shade of brown and plucked it out of the dirt.

I turned to Selyra, who was still bent over running her hands through the dirt, and tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped up and yelped, quickly shooting off a series of words when she realized it was me. In vain of an actual response to her incomprehensible speech, I just handed over the knife. She accepted it, but she still eyed me warily as she took the care to talk as slowly as if I was a dumb baby. “How so quiet?”

I blinked. Why did tha— oohhh. “[Beggar’s Disregard].” I said, simultaneously deactivating the Skill and answering her question. I hadn’t actually been that quiet, but the Skill had reinforced the attention she’d already been focusing on the ground and made her more oblivious than she’d normally be. In the end it accomplished the same thing. It might even explain why she'd attacked me. With [Beggar's Disregard] up assuming I was some kind of ephermeral spirit wasn't actually that unreasonable.

Selyra quirked an eyebrow at the unfamiliar language of my Skill, but didn’t question further. I guess she only had so much patience for talking down to me. Instead, she started walking, waving one hand to beckon me after. I grunted, and she raised her other eyebrow.

I sat cross legged and pointed down at my wounded leg. Her eyes widened and she blurted out some gesture of concern, but I just shrugged and pulled out a few spare shirts from the wardrobe pouch. I didn’t want to reveal my full collection of magic items, but I only needed to patch up the bleeding a bit. I’d put on a mundane bandage and sneak a healing potion later.

Selyra gasped.

I blinked. What had I— of fucking course I had. I groaned and facepalmed. I’d been so busy patting myself on the back for hiding my alchemical collection that I’d revealed my extra dimensional storage without even thinking about it. Was I really so indulgent that I’d taken that kind of magic item for granted?

Yes, yes I was goddammit. I sighed and resolved to be more careful in the future. No time for recriminations, only for improvement.

I smiled innocently up at Selyra as I folded the shirt into a neat cloth square. I set it down on my other thigh and began plucking out splinters. I winced as the blood slowly oozing around the edges quickened, but it was inevitable. I just needed to slap the bandage over this as soon as I could.

My fingers quickened, darting down to snatch up splinter after splinter with unnatural precision. Selyra paused mid-kneel, she’d been moving to help, but she was too late, the handful of shattered wood that had still been embedded in my leg was already thrown over my shoulder. I turned over my folded pad in my other hand and slapped it over the free-flowing blood, pressing hard to force the blood to stay in my veins were it belonged.

Great, now all I had to do was…

I fished out another shirt with my free hand, then glanced between it and the wound. So I’d just have to start wrapping it down one handed…

Selyra snorted and slapped me over the back of the head with an open palm. I glared at her, but she was already snatching up the shirt and slicing it into long strips with smooth strokes of her knife. Kneeling down she shooed my hand back and started winding the freshly made bandages around my pad. I obliged, scowling, inching my fingers backwards as she replaced the hand pressure with tightly bound cloth.

A few minutes later I was standing up again, flexing my leg to see how far I could get it to go without pain. Not that far as it turned out, the medical attention, however necessary, had also reminded my body it was supposed to be injured and returned the pain to the forefront of my mind.

Selyra made to slap me again, but I knocked her blow aside easily this time. Not gonna happen again.

She rolled her eyes and beckoned me forwards.

I frowned. “Where?”

Selyra paused mid step. “Tribe this way.”

I shook my head and pointed at the pillar-tree. “Don’t need tribe. Need up.”

Selyra set her foot back down and turned to look up at the massive tree looming over us. “Climb water-tree?”

I bristled at her incredulous tone. “I can.”

I couldn’t. The pounding waterfall flowing down would sweep away even the strongest of climbers, but that didn’t mean I was giving up just yet. The pillar-tree was more than a single plant, with dozens of vines and branches criss-crossing its surface. The trunk might be smooth, but the branches sticking beyond the rushing water supported their own vertical canopy, as if you took the jungle and turned it on its side. I could climb through it as I scaled the massive distance to the roof above.

Selyra jittered nervously, bouncing up and down on her feet. The pace of her tongue matched the rest of her body, moving too fast for my shitty grasp of Old Tongue to pick out one word from another, let alone decipher what any of them meant.

“Slow.”

Selyra jabbed a finger at my skull. “Slow!”

I scowled, but Selyra ignored me to swing one arm in a broad sweeping gesture at the pillar-tree. “Death!” She stabbed a pointing finger in the direction of her tribe. “Not-death!”

I narrowed my eyes. “Is point of spear not-death?”

Selyra threw her hands up in the air. “Accident! Tribe won’t stab you, tribe will help you!”

That caught my attention. “Tribe know way up?”

Selyra snorted. “Better than idiot!”

That was dubious. It wasn’t at all clear if the tribe actually knew anything about potential paths upwards or if Selyra was just trying to stop my dumb ass from walking into what she saw as an inevitable death. But if they did actually know a path out of the dungeon, it just might be worth the risk, and I wasn’t super into the whole inevitable death thing myself.

“Fine. Tribe.”

Selyra started moving again and I followed without complaint this time. I started to catch glances of other goblins out in my peripheral vision.

They sent a few curious glances our way, but were overall too busy with their own shit to worry about two goblins who looked like they knew where they were going. If my clothes weren’t drastically different from theirs they might not have paid us any mind at all. Not all of them were even bothering with clothes at all, and those who were overwhelmingly preferred the same kind of leather and fur getup that Selyra was wearing. I couldn’t blame them for going without, in this heat fur was hardly a compelling option. A plain belt or a pouch hung from your neck gave you most of clothing’s benefits anyway, at least if you were willing to risk the thorns.

The goblins here seemed more inclined to embrace the thorns than anything else, really, many of them wore braids of thorny vines bound around their arms or chests, especially the Hobs.

Soon enough the goblins weren’t just at the edges of my vision, but all around us. Dozens of goblins were running about, but it wasn’t until we reached a clearing scorched clear of undergrowth that the full scale of the tribe became clear.

I tensed as the burned ground came into view, remembering the heat of the fire threatening me before, but I forced myself to calm down. This wasn’t the same place, the ashes were still and cold here. Looking at it and seeing a bustling camp enclosed within a circle of largely empty space, it quickly became clear what it really was: a firebreak.

Fire couldn’t burn what was already ash and pre-burning this clearing ensured the tribe would be safe even if their fire burned fully out of control and managed to reach this far. This area already had less dense undergrowth than the jungle where the fire had been started, but I wholeheartedly supported the precaution. You could never be too careful with fire.

Why they had evidently decided to strange structures of sharpened wooden poles I was less sure. Each pole driven into the dirt supported another four on top of itself, each sticking its fire-hardened point out at a forty-five degree angle to form a loose forest of speartips. The poles offered far less fuel than the forest would have, but it was still somewhat baffling.

Selyra picked up the pace as we crossed the open ground, power walking with the distinctive gait of someone who desperately wanted to get somewhere fast without looking like they were at all concerned. That’s when it clicked, and I sped up to follow in her footsteps.

The forest of spears was a defense, and I knew against what. Selyra sent a few nervous glances skyward, but I didn’t bother. There was no way I could pick out a circling chameleon-owl from an empty sky, not with no idea where it might be. I could do nothing but keep my wits about me and be ready to leap aside if I felt the telltale air pressure shift of an owl swooping down on silent wings.

Despite the natural fear of crossing open ground beneath the gaze of unknown raptors above we still reached the camp safely. Selyra immediately relaxed, but I wasn’t so sure The camp itself was just as dependent on artificial defenses as the approach. Although I suppose there were a lot more targets here than just us, so it was unlikely we’d get snatched up even if an owl did slip past the spikes.

I looked around as Selyra wove us through the hustle and bustle of the camp, strange and unfamiliar sights greeting me at every corner. The people might be the same, but this place was nothing like the enclosed safety of the warrens, nor did it share all that much with the human hamlets and villages I’d scavenged from after my exile. There were no wattle and daub houses here, nor any hewn timber. Indeed, without the need for a shield from wind and rain the tribesgoblins here didn’t bother with permanent houses of any kind. Instead they had simple tents supported by a single spiked pole to mark out private areas, and the rest was trampled earth.

Unfortunately that wasn’t the only difference from humans I noticed. Unlike the fenced in pens of the average surface village the tribesgoblins seemed content to let their livestock mingle freely among them, and said livestock seemed to consist entirely of pigs. Playing hordes of piglets ran amok between our feet, and the occasional adult could be seen pulling a sled stacked with fresh game.

At least the supernaturally massive boars were nowhere to be seen. Not yet. I could hope they didn’t let the beasts in here with the people, but if they truly venerated them I had little hope there.

It became quickly clear we were headed towards the center of the camp, which was to be expected, but made me nervous anyway. Hobs always made me nervous, even if they were allegedly going to help me. Help was never free.

I sent a few quick glances around, but I knew that trying to slip away and blend into the tribe wasn’t a good escape option. It might work with [Beggar’s Disregard], but it wasn’t my best escape option. Better to avoid close inspection and fall back on passing off the pouch full of Garrett’s clothes as the best I had if they got really demanding with the tribute. With that in mind I circumspectly unclipped the pouches with weapons and alchemical goods from the bandolier and tucked them under my clothes, next to my junk, before shifting the rest around to obscure the empty space on the belt.

Valuables hidden, I was at least somewhat more secure in facing whatever aspect of the tribe’s leadership I was being brought to. Even an empty extradimensional storage pouch was better tribute than a Hob had any right to expect anyway.

I rubbed the sweat off my palms as we neared the center of camp and the tents grew bigger and bigger. I could already see it opening up more, into some sort of ceremonial space bustling with activity. Bloody Hells, I was too damn nervous. Nobody negotiated worth a damn when they were nervous, but no amount of rationalizing was gonna make me calm down. The last time I’d seen a Hob had been my exile, and conscious thought couldn’t overwhelm that kind of memory.

But Selyra turned off before reaching the center, leading me towards a tent instead. She pushed open the flaps and I followed, perfectly happy to get out of sight, but I bumped into Selyra as soon as I stepped in.

Selyra immediately yanked me the rest of the way in. When I wrenched my arm free and opened my mouth to respond she held one finger up to her mouth. The heavy stitched leather of the entrance flap fell closed behind us and I blinked to adjust to the new darkness as I took in the interior.

Bundles of plants and herbs hung from the ceiling amid swirls of aromatic smoke. The smoke rose from bowls of incense that circled a goblin sitting cross-legged on the ground with both eyes closed.

The shaman’s eyes snapped open, revealing bloody orbs. “You. I have foreseen your coming.”