Atticus despised the mini goblins. Which was completely fine with Jeremy. If she clung to his shoulder and hissed up a storm right by his ear, that meant she was about four feet too high for the little green monsters to reach. Her claws dug into the meat of Jeremy’s shoulder as another one popped out from the bushes along the edge of the trail and ran at them.
Jeremy threw his hands up and visualized the barrier spell’s simple runes. They materialized in thin glowing lines before the mini goblin. A moment later, its wild advance stopped short as if it had run into a spotless glass door. It bounced onto its back and remained stunned for a moment, figurative little birds chirping dizzily around its head. The shock only lasted a moment before it climbed back up, chittered, and zeroed in on them with beady little eyes. The delay gave Caleb the chance to step in.
He arranged himself like he was on a pitcher’s mound, making a big show of it, rearing his arm back and lifting his knee. Then he threw the rock. The moment it left Caleb's hand, a spell burst from his fingers. It included the runes for earth magic, manipulate, and what Jeremy had come to label as ‘fast.’
The rock whizzed unimpressively over the mini goblin’s shoulder. It struck a tree, blowing right through the trunk in a burst of bark and wood splinters, leaving behind a hole that went clean to the other side. Then it buried into the tree behind it. Caleb’s arms flopped to his sides, and he hung his head with a sigh.
Jeremy threw up another barrier to stun the mini goblin again before it could crawl too close, then patted Caleb on the shoulder. “Baseball never was your sport.”
“Do you want to try again, or can I take this one?” Zanie asked. She and Caleb had been taking turns killing the mini goblins they came across. And they came across plenty. The creatures were like squirrels out here, a countless number of them rooting around in the underbrush. The state park was as full of them as it was devoid of any recreational visitors.
Getting out here had taken another day of walking because they had not been able to find a car. When they finally reached the end of the traffic on the inbound side of the highway, none of the cars that were free enough to move still had the keys in them. So, they’d kept trudging along, much to the protest of Jeremy’s feet. The mall with the REI was west of their position, on the other side of the state park, so they had decided to check out the mini goblin situation on their way past.
Since there weren’t any visitors, the little camping cabins were empty for them to sleep in. They had not even run into a ranger, which Jeremy thought was a little odd. The mini goblins did not seem like that terrifying of a threat. Only a week ago, that suburban neighborhood guy had been leading a small army of children against them for shits and giggles. Surely, Jeremy had not been the only one who had the idea of practicing magic on easy targets. But here they were, walking down one of the trails, likely the only people for miles and miles of expanded lands.
“There has got to be a way to make my aim better, just like I’m making the rock go faster.” Caleb groused. “Let me try again.”
He reached down to select another piece of gravel from the riprap of the trail and went through all his motions of acting like a baseball pitcher again. He paused to take a deep breath, then trained his eyes on the mini goblin as it once again stumbled to its feet. The look in them was intense. He narrowed them, drew back, and then let the rock fly.
This time, his spell consisted of another effect. Jeremy assumed it aided with his aim since, this time, the rock hit the mini goblin right between the eyes. With a visceral splat, it went straight through the creature's skull and embedded itself into the dirt. Jeremy could see through the hole to the forest floor behind the mini goblin for a moment before its body teetered over.
“Yes!" Caleb pumped his fist. All of their overlays shifted just slightly in color. Caleb and Zanie's through shades of orange and Jeremy’s into a brighter yellow. Caleb smiled large, then winced, “Although that took it out of me. Now I’m tired. Jesus.”
He scrubbed a hand across his face. Jeremy pursed his lips. Apparently, adding the second effect increased the amount of mana required to cast the spell.
“Why don’t we take a break?” Jeremy suggested. He pulled out his notebook and clicked his pen. Caleb plopped to the ground right where he stood, putting both hands on the ground behind his back to prop himself up as he let his head fall back to stare up through the limbs above them. Zanie went over to the mini goblin’s body and tilted her head at it.
“Did they always do that?” She asked. Jeremy glanced up from where he was copying down the rune that helped Caleb aim, along with a note that its addition increased the rank of the spell. At Zanie’s feet, the mini goblin’s body lay distorted. It had lost its structural integrity already, as though it were several stages along in decomposition or as though it had been made of jelly all along.
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Jeremy once watched a documentary about deep sea creatures that were from the depths scientists initially thought could not support life. The pressure would be too great. But there were animals down there with bodies made of jelly that were somehow adapted to the pressure and the darkness. When scientists captured one and brought it to the surface, it died on the journey up, and its body only remained intact for a matter of minutes before it started to fall apart into goop.
That was what this looked like. As though somehow, while it was alive, the mini goblin had structure, but once it died, its body disintegrated into goop. Its edges blurred with the forest floor like it was leaching into the soil, and a horrific smell started to waft from it.
“I don’t remember the last few doing that,” Zanie answered her own question.
“No,” Jeremy clicked his pen and stowed the notepad back into his pocket. “Uh…that doesn’t usually happen.”
Not that he really knew anything about these creatures, but that was why they were here.
“Was there anything different about its overlay?” Zanie asked. “Maybe it was a different kind or level or something?”
Jeremy shook his head, “No, it was the same dark red, level zero. The runes looked the same to me as all the other ones had. But I guess I can’t be too sure.”
In truth, he had not looked too closely at the creature’s overlay beyond noting that its color was nothing unusual.
“Let’s find another one,” Jeremy said.
“I thought we were taking a break,” Caleb whined.
“It’s Zanie’s turn to kill one this time, anyway. Come on.” Jeremy held out a hand and helped haul Caleb to his feet.
It did not even take a full minute for another rustling along the side of the trail to draw their attention. They stopped and listened, watching where the branches of the thick blueberry and viburnum bushes shifted around. Jeremy held his hands at the ready, already visualizing the runes for the barrier in his mind. He’d taken to throwing up the barriers to stun the creatures rather than taking turns with Zanie and Caleb. He wanted to practice them, as well as practice manipulating mana itself.
The rustling drew closer.
Then, a squirrel popped out. It crawled tentatively onto the trail, searching and sniffing at the riprap. It froze when Caleb let out a surprised chuckle, one little paw poised in the air and tail on the fritz. After a startled moment, it darted across the rest of the trail and disappeared into the brush on the other side.
More rustling followed in its wake, larger this time, cracking lower branches as well as disturbing the leaf litter.
“There we go,” Jeremy murmured. Atticus kneaded his shoulder, and he winced. A second later, a mini goblin poured out onto the trail, all stick-figure green limbs and nasty sharp teeth. Its hot pursuit of the blissfully unaware squirrel skidded to a halt when it noticed the three of them standing there.
Jeremy had not deciphered the little creatures' behavior yet. They seemed to go after small prey like squirrels and cats as a food source. Or at least, that was what he assumed. But if they happened across Jeremy and company while on the hunt, their focus immediately changed to the much larger, obviously threatening humans.
He wasn’t sure if they were so low-leveled that they did not have the intelligence to run away from a threat or what, but they charged every time. Even squirrels had the common sense to run away from people. But mini goblins seemed hardwired to throw themselves at them in an aggressive rage like it was instinct to attack for some reason. Jeremy couldn’t figure it out.
He threw up the barrier, this time making sure to analyze the runes in the creature’s overlay. They were the exact same as the ones he’d taken note of when they first started hunting them, save one little extra rune. So, there was some type of difference. It was not in level. The overlay was still a dark red. It was instead different in its attributes somehow.
Zanie darted forward to sink her knife straight into the top of the mini goblin’s head. She retracted the knife and stepped back as it flopped to the ground dead before it could get a counter-strike in with its gleaming claws. Caleb had remained more interested in practicing his projectile spells, hoping to get better at manipulating objects so he could work up to teleporting them or whatever other nonsense his unique personality trait would let him do. Zanie had hung up her skirt in favor of a pair of joggers and one of Jeremy’s razor-sharp makeshift dragon scale knives.
She shook the green blood off the makeshift knife and frowned down at the corpse as it melted into another disgusting ooze and started emitting the same horrible smell as the other one. She used the back of her hand to brush a lock of hair out of her face and glanced over.
“What is that smell?” She choked out.
“It just looks like super-fast decomposition,” Caleb said.
“Yeah, but it smells like…” She made a face, her features all twisted up and disgusted, “Not just rot. I don’t know. It smells sick. I don’t like it.”
She looked down at the blood dripping from the knife like it was acid about to eat away at her skin.
“I don’t know about you, but I can’t smell anything over the campfire stench that’s been in my nose for a while now.” Caleb kept arguing, although he did start moving down the trail away from the mini goblin.
“I don’t know how you can possibly miss this stench.” Zanie gagged and lifted the collar of her tank top over her nose as she passed the gelatinous corpse. It was a strange transformation, from spindly limbs to a smear of goop.
“Wait,” Jeremy shook his head. “Why are you smelling a campfire? We didn’t have a fire last night.”
Every single fire ring at the campsites and cabins had a little sign proclaiming a ban on open fires because of the prolonged drought. Just like Jeremy had been shying away from using fire spells, he decided not to light an open fire when it was obviously high risk.
“Yeah, I don’t know.” Caleb glanced back at the mini goblin’s corpse warily, then moved a few more feet up the trail to turn his nose in the air and sniff. “It’s weird. All I can smell is smoke.”