As the horizon started brightening in the distance, I was exhausted and just wanted to get to sleep, but I still had so much more work ahead of me. I was soaked to the bone and shivering. While the rain had slowed down to a light drizzle, but that just seemed to make the morning worse. When it had been pouring down I could at least delude myself that I was being cleansed by the torrent of water. A drizzle was just miserable, enough water to keep you cold and unhappy, but not enough to do anything useful. I doubted the next hour would even add more than a quart to my supplies.

I had not gotten any sleep in the ensuing hours past the attack, between gathering up all of the bodies and moving them over through the mud to the growing corpse pile after taking the cores from them. I also took the time to go through the goblins that the portal had drained seeing as how I doubted I was going to get any dirtier. They too had cores, but every single one of them was lacking even the slightest bit of glow that the ones I had personally cut down seemed to have. Okay, even in my head I couldn't ignore the bear's contributions, Gaian had saved my life twice, both by taking out the six as they had been trying to come at me from behind while I was dealing with the smaller three. They would no doubt have drowned me in claws and teeth while I was distracted. Not to mention managing to get over in time to save me before I was finished off by the one who had managed to club me into unconsciousness.

I owed him my life and would never forget it, no longer were any parts of my brain clambering for me to leave him behind. No doubt the ruthless practical part of me was at least content to have him along as a bodyguard for our next inevitable encounter. While the normal side had already considered him a brother in circumstance and was ready to use everything at our disposal to get him better.

Speaking of which, with all of the camp finally cleaned up from the aftermath of the attack, it was time to get myself patched up before starting on laundry. With a seemingly never ending list of tasks in front of me, I could only be happy that the threat of concussion from the goblin basher left me too afraid to sleep. I had thought to leave all of the bodies where they lay, but my neurosis wouldn't let me leave everything so untidy, and used the justification that if I moved the bodies after harvesting their cores I could both clean up the campground and be sure that I wasn't wasting any time digging through bodies I had forgotten I had gone through earlier.

Stripping down to my birthday suit, I tossed all of the clothes I was wearing onto some of the stamped down grass where I had placed the rest of my previously dirty laundry earlier. Despite their already filthy state, I didn't want the mud to make them any worse. I had thought to take them off early to stop them from getting covered in more gore from my corpse mutilation habits that I seemed to be forming. But with two open wounds and their rugged stain-free composition, I thought that keeping bits of goblins out of my bloodstream was a better use for them.

Going over to my tent, I unzipped it part way and started carefully going through my pack for what I would need while doing my best to let as little water in as I could. Part of me was desperate to pull out some wood and the coals I had saved, but I held off, determined to keep everything dry as long as I could. Pulling out my med pack, I opened it up and pulled out the rest of the alcohol, iodine, four suture strips, and super glue. Reaching into two other pockets I pulled out my shammy, a bar of soap, and the tiny bottle of concentrated soap I had brought along for my dishes. I thought about grabbing my water filter but held off for now as my pounding headache was keeping me from thinking straight and I wanted to keep from being distracted. I thought about grabbing some of my ibuprofen that I had added to the kit back on earth, but couldn't remember if that helped or hurt in a concussed situation.

Unsure if it would kill me or not, I left them alone for now. I was sure I would use them eventually and as I only had ten pills it wasn't worth wasting them and making the situation worse because I hadn't memorized what was allowed when you are concussed back when I had no idea I would lose access to the internet forever. Leaving the sutures and glue just inside of the tent, closed the flap most of the way to keep the damp away from the food I had spent the previous day drying. Hanging everything else in the pouch that was integral to the vestibule door, I kept the bar of soap and stepped back out into the mud and rain.

Starting from my head I scrubbed myself down as best as I could, going over everything multiple times rather than miss a spot. With limited amounts of soap, I may as well make the best use of what I had and get totally clean rather than do a poor job of it. I knew the basics of soap making, it was a fun science experiment I had done with my kids when they were younger. Afterward, I had continued the hobby on my own, I liked how simple and easy it was to do if you have the know-how. Unfortunately, that know-how also needs the right tools to go with it… If you are just ordering sodium hydroxide and olive oil off the internet all you need is a stainless steel pot, a mold and time and presto soap appears. With aluminum campware, no commercial lye, and goblins for a fat source, I was going to have a much harder time getting clean in the future.

With no immediate plans for making a permanent camp that I could try to jerry-rig a lye barrel up for. I was going to just have to try to make a weak soap in a dedicated pan and just hope for the best that the basic solution wouldn't melt through my cheap campware before saponification set in. Continuing on to my lower body parts I winced as I was scrubbing my right arm. Fortunately, the goblin had only punctured me and hadn't managed to tear any small bits away. After a rinse with the alcohol to hopefully prevent any infection I should be able to just cover the cuts up with superglue and with a little bit of luck I doubted I would even end up with any scars.

Scrubbing down to my leg was another story. I was missing a good six-inch chunk from the lower limb, always looking for any silver lining, my inner optimist tried pointing out to me that with the meat being ripped away and open to the world I was much less likely to develop an infection, so at least I had that going for me. I would have agreed with the voice in my head if he could show me his MD, but as I had skipped out on those eight years of school, and only dealt with small, self inflicted knife wounds. A bigger part of my hopefulness was just going to be praying that the little rats weren't just permanently infected with a species-wide rabies, that was what filled them with the mass insanity that led to charging larger creatures to try and drown them in numbers.

Gritting my teeth as I scrubbed all of the dirt out of the still oozing wound, I made sure to pick out any bits of cloth that were still stuck to the open flesh, not wanting to leave anything in it that might cause an infection when I closed it up. Scrubbing everything thoroughly was incredibly painful and I had to pause several times to wait for my eyes to regain focus. A huge part of me wanted to risk blindness and just chug the couple ounces of rubbing alcohol I had set aside, but self-control won out in the end as I needed the liquid to help ward off gangrene.

Stepping back out into the falling water, I started trying to wipe the soap away as it mixed with the blood that started welling up again from the scrubbing bar. As it slowly cleared up, I bent down one last time in an effort to get it as clean as possible. After I once more washed the soap away gently, I went back to the tent to hopefully get this sealed up. Stepping back under the outer doorway's cover, I laid the soap back into its hard container and sat down on the wet grass, wiping my hands on my chest to get the rest of the residue off before dealing with the bandages. Reaching up to grab my shammy once my hands were merely damp instead of slippery from the soap. I dried them off before slowly patting my leg dry.

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Dumping the iodine into the wound next, I hissed in pain but held still and waited for it to get to work. Wishing I had brought along some hydrogen peroxide as well I told my inner thoughts to shut up, as depression was sure to be a short path away as the days here continued and I constantly thought of things that I owned that would be helpful here in this new world instead of back in my house on Terra. With a sharp gasp, that I couldn't help but let out as I dumped most of the remaining alcohol onto my leg. I quickly dumped the rest of it onto my arm to give myself another source of agony to deal with. I had learned a long time ago while working in kitchens that if you have a burn or cut on one hand, when you eventually cut or knicked yourself again that the pain actually lessened, as you couldn't focus on both injuries at once. After discovering that, I had a habit where when I got a burn or cut, I would stub my toe or punch a wall to give myself something to distract my brain from the more painful injury.

As I waited for the alcohol to cleanse and evaporate, I thought about everything I had cut out from the goblins in the dark of the storm. First I had finally gone through all of the two-day, old goblins. That task had actually been easier than I had thought it would be because I had waited long enough that rigor had left the bodies. I had needed to bring the chem lite over because while I hadn't managed to find anything in the shaman, his own bruisers, or two of the smaller goblins. I had at first assumed that was just because the portal had drained them completely causing the glowing rocks to dissipate. But after going through the rest of his small cannon fodder, I had found the cores where I had expected, only without the glow I had come to associate with the ones I had gathered personally or looted from the pouches.

Heading back to the fresher bodies that had attacked me, I had had to toss the chemlite aside after several false starts where the light actually drowned out the glow coming from the cores. I grew fed up with it and left it back over by my tent so I could try and focus on the soft light coming from the inside of the goblins once I had gotten their chests open enough for the glow to shine through. Once I started doing that, all of the small goblins had gotten remarkably quicker to process, but there had been one where I hadn't managed to find anything beneath his heart.

With the lightning having disappeared into the distance, I covered up the glow stick with some of my wet dirty clothes to kill the light’s glow entirely. Eventually, after I went and covered the light completely, I finally noticed a small glow that seemed to be coming from his eyes. Taking the shaman's old blade and removing the head, I dug around, coming up through the skull's bottom to eventually pull a glowing rock from the fore of his brain. I assumed it was resting between his eyes and against his frontal brain which let me see the slight glow when the camp was in pitch darkness.

So I had went back to the shaman, and after I removed his head as well with the blade he had so generously donated to the cause. I finally found after a bit of digging around the ball that I had just assumed the portal had devoured. When I went to remove the heads of his two larger subordinates whom I had also come up empty upon, after digging around in their brains I still wasn't able to find anything, which seemed to invalidate my research. With only the few advanced goblins of the attacking party left to search I went to the two bruisers first to see if they also had a third possible place for their cores.

With the rain still sheeting down, I had taken the time to remove their hardened leather vests and scrape them clean of the mud and well let's call it mud before tossing them into the grass behind my tent. I had hoped that when the rain stopped they would still be salvageable for something. At the very least they would make a decent bottom for my sleds letting me save my canvas from being torn up.

Taking their belts and pouches off, I had tossed them into my own dirty clothes pile to examine later after I finished my laundry. When I had dug into their hearts again I came up empty, so next I had removed their heads, assuming the placement of the core there might be what separated them from the rabble. When I came up with goose eggs, I was legitimately confused and didn't know what to think. Closing my eyes for a minute, despite how dark it had been, the lightning had still occasionally been flashing out over the plains in the distance, and I had wanted to get my eyes as sensitive as possible for one last look before giving up. When I opened them I immediately noticed a slight glow coming from lower in their abdomens, and when I had dug behind their stomach I finally found what I was looking for. Picking the chem lite up I went back to the two bigger bodyguards that the shaman had and quickly found their dull cores.

Not able to remember which of the small goblins in the pile I hadn't found anything in, I just took the loss rather than digging through all of the bodies again. The spearman and archer I had taken out had pouches of their own which went to the loot pile, while I had ignored the clothes as not even being scrap worthy. The search of their bodies had shown that the spear carrier had a core behind his stomach while the archer's had been under his heart which seemed to be a minor anomaly, but as the archers were closest in size to the smaller rabble, it might just be that they had just slowly grown big enough to use a bow while the other bigger ones were more specialized.

With the alcohol on my arm finally drying up I came back from my musings about the previous after action. Unscrewing the super glue I started brushing it over the teeth punctures. While it was somewhat painful, after the alcohol bath, it seemed like a mild burning which was easy enough to ignore. As I had used most of the alcohol on my leg it was taking longer to dry but after tending to all of the smaller nicks on my right arm I found that it looked to be ready. Resisting the urge to tap it to be sure, I applied a layer of glue over the open wound while gasping at the greater pain. Taking two of the suture bandages I applied them in turn over the larger wound before pulling the straps closed to tighten it, alternating between straps to slowly inch it closed.

Yes, the instructions for the bandages made the glue seem unnecessary, but I quickly shouted the miser in me down. I couldn't risk my leg becoming infected and crippling me, I had left a small part of the bottom of the bite unglued so hopefully that would be good enough for drainage. Pulling the small straps of the bandage closed all of the way I used the small scissors in the med kit to trim them off. Giving the leg a couple of minutes for the glue to dry completely I then wrapped it around several times with gauze to hopefully keep everything dry in the damp weather. Looking out at the sky, with the light shining through the clouds, the last of the water coming down seemed to finally be disappearing. Putting the two unused suture strips that my arm hadn't ended up needing back into the med kit I closed up the glue, emptied bottles of iodine and alcohol, and returned everything back to the tent.

With no more water coming down from the sky to rinse them off, I left off doing my laundry for now. Taking out the mesh bag that had previously held my mess kit, I decided a better use for it now was to hold all of the cores both looted and harvested. I also pulled my long tweezers out that I had used for cooking the night before. Opening the pouch of my pack that held the troll core I carefully used the kitchen tongs to remove it, holding my breath and concentrating, ready to drop it the second I felt any energy coming up to attack me. I guess the steel of the utensils was unconducive to soul energy and I seemed to be safe enough holding it this way for now. The troll core also didn’t seem to be trying to reach out and infect my new harvest either, but to be safe I still didn't add it to the group, being content to hold it away from everything.

Walking naked, but for my belt and the two blades I had sheaths for over to the grass the bear was lying in, I was finally ready to experiment and get some answers.