Chapter 2 - The Long Trek

Establishing a base is not an easy task when you have just nine pairs of hands to rely on.

However, these were not human hands and one thing that was quick for me to realize as a Kobold was that… we were packing an awful amount of strength despite our short height.

I gave it a test before planning something as we were brainstorming on where to set our ‘nest’ and the boulder that was roughly half my size felt easy to carry with a single hand. I studied the muscle in question and noticed how surprisingly good the reaction was to the overall stress.

I would have loved to experiment on this a bit more, but we were on a tight schedule and we were facing the big question that was… how do we set up a settlement?

We had options to rely on. The quickest option and the one that was agreed upon at first was to find a lake, a river, or any body of water that wasn’t salty and set the base there. The issue for this good plan being that none of that was in sight.

Rocky was given the assignment of climbing tall trees to check for any potential clue on where to go, this decision driven by the fact that his scales offered cover from anyone looking around for any easy prey.

It took a while to coax the guy to not be a pussy about it and, at the end of the first climb, he was giddy to go at it again. Stupid moron had said it would have been just that one time and it would have been it, and then he came up begging to climb more trees. It was just… frustrating.

But it wasn’t what really irritated me. It was how this first and possibly the best option we had on the topic was not within reach. Not a single big enough body of water was in sight and it would have been futile to try and waste too many days in this effort.

I wasn’t going to involve my new ‘brethren’ through what felt like a hopeless chase.

The second choice was finding a cave and trying to make it work there. It had to be a cave with a deadend at that or else we would have faced some potential issues of something coming from the rear and killing us. No, that was a too risky option and it was quickly shut down.

Finally, the third option and it was there that I made a few unpleasant discoveries.

Up to this point, I had been ignoring the book I got from this ‘Mistress Calessa’ that, from what I got from the Kobolds, was our ‘creator’. The notion felt odd and yet, when the topic of finding a potential human settlement was approached, I got a few more clues on the situation itself by trying to find anything we could get on a path to the closest bit of civilization.

The book was more of a journal, one of many from the way it was dated and how it started just two years after ‘the last one got destroyed in an accident’. I rushed through a few pages, with a few hopeful but inconclusive findings and mentions of human settlements.

And then I reached the Kobold section, with many questions getting answered in a rather horrifying fashion. Starting with one thing that confirmed my early assumptions due to the females’ oddly mammal-like appearances: we were not natural-born Kobolds.

Calessa provided just a brief summary on why she got interested on the topic, finding out that human kingdoms had rallied to try and suppress the Kobolds’ tribes once it became clear that we were capable of matching up with their ‘insane population growth’ and even produce some of the most fearsome warriors compared to their knights.

The first step on what Calessa described as the ‘death of the First Kobold Civilization’ was the ‘Treaty of Amerti’, an unusual meeting of representatives of various species that happened roughly a century before the page which saw the humans successfully requesting a ‘worldwide crusade on Kobolds’ on the basis that Kobolds were aggressive monsters.

From what I learned through the Journal, that was a truth, but not the truth. While it was correct to say that Kobolds had been thorns to everyone’s sides, it never got to the point where a sustained genocide was acceptable.

The bribery employed by the humans to push a favorable vote, however saw massacres unfold all over the world, with the Treaty falling apart a mere decade after its ratification, with most countries, even some human-dominated ones, backing off the aggressive circumstance but… the damage was done.

Kobolds were seen by human beings as the equivalent of my previous life’s demons. Creatures that could only spread darkness and commit heinous crimes.

Fifty years after the treaty, the Kobold population had been effectively cut short in the tens of thousands compared to the various millions that once the species’ population towered at.

It didn’t help that various factors further crippled the population growth, leading the Kobolds to ultimately join the Demon Lord. Fifty more years go by, a war happens, various adventurers are slain and then the heroes come forth to fight and kill the Demon Lord.

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It was right during the last years of the Demon Lord’s rule that Calessa offered a plan that pleased the Demon Lord himself. Like any normal fantasy world with a Demon Lord in it, Goblins were seen as the expendable backbone of the big bad army.

It was good at first, but the lacking quality of the troops left much to be desired as a war meant to be easy to win was taking too long to be dealt with. Which is why Kobolds were approached with a plan to fix this. Kobolds had peculiar magical affinities that were related to their Dragon-related ancestry.

It was something that time had crippled until it was no longer a feasible option to just unlock for everyone, but Calessa offered a solution: most of their eggs to be modified and mutated in an effort to create the perfect trooper. Not just soldiers, but also magicians, and infiltrators.

The reason behind the mammal-like details was a ‘mutation’ related to experiments the eggs went through to make them not only compatible to reproduce with pretty much all available ‘intelligent species’ on the planet, but also create a degree of attractiveness that would make the process feasible.

And now the biggest bit: the project was a failure. Not for a lack of effort, but because the pages of hopes for new experiments actually being the end of the written journal, confirming that the Demon Lord’s defeat brought an end to any plans to complete the projects.

What was missing for the project’s completion was how to enable all eggs to unlock the full potential they were meant to manifest. Out of the eight eggs that made this last batch we were part of, only ‘mine’ had a propensity to develop all the correct traits. I had a magical affinity, a fighting affinity, and a leadership affinity due to my ‘pheromones’ offering a degree of relaxation.

I sighed in relief when I noticed that nothing there mentioned something that would make any woman in the nearby area jump my bones. I just couldn’t bear with the fact that this world was trying to make me a sex machine other than a death machine.

Because, from what I could summarize in this mess is… we were bombs. Big bombs at that. I literally spent two hours after finishing reading just trying to draw my own conclusions on how Calessa depicted each ‘subject’.

Rocky, Grise and Aqua were the ‘soldiers’ as the three were also those that had taken the opportunity to wield weapons once I was done with the undead. Their nature was seen as one of ‘action and direct intervention’.

Carrie, Limmy and Viola were magicians as I had the group try out some basic wind spells in the book, and they were the only ones showing a grasp on magic. Their nature, as reported by Calessa, was of those that were less keen for confrontations, more diplomatic and, generally-speaking, willing to take part in actions only if acting as supports rather than active fighters.

Finally, there were Cloud and Rosa as ‘infiltrators’. Rosa was an easy guess since she was the most brazen of the group and the one with the more curves. She wasn’t openly pursuing debauchery, but she had been quite keen to touch around, hug people, and be rather pushy towards males and females.

And that’s where I realized why I didn’t see Cloud as a potential infiltrator until I had him singled out. I hadn’t noticed until that moment he was far more slender and feminine compared to the males. Not in a way he would behave in a girly manner, but he was shy, submissive and tagged along the ‘soldiers’ in a way to seek protection.

At the end of that analysis, I was also grimacing over the last thing that really fucked this mess up even more: one thing that had been modified as quickly as possible in the eggs was the way reproduction worked in terms of timing.

Instead of the standard ten months for natural Kobolds, eggs would crack open after six months and the growth from four years to achieve adulthood was halved to just two years.

I was no doctor and I definitely was no geneticist, but I could tell this was some real messed up shit that could really screw us up if anyone found out about it at this very moment.

If the humans wanted ‘us’ dead back when the growth pace was that swift, they were going to hunt us down with passion if they discovered this tidbit. Then again, perhaps as a saving grace, Calessa had taken precautions to curb the aggressive nature Kobolds were keen to show to a degree which would be easier to control.

Now, with that lore mess out of the way and many life choices to regret, I had to make a completely different decision. We wouldn’t go for a human settlement and rather gamble our lives by finding a non-human one. It could go really bad with people like the elves as they have a bit of a grudge on dragons and anything related to them, or it could go really good if we found either Goblins or Orcs.

Yes, I know that this sounds insane, but since we are non-human, these two kinds of monsters were our best bets.

Still, we also had to handle the main concerns, which were food, water, and cleaning.

Food was something easy to handle as we were taking breaks to hunt the local fauna, small boars and hares, cooking their meat, using a special stasis spell that was available in the journal to keep it preserved, and then keep their fur to be traded off as a valuable good.

Water was a bit more complicated, but we were able to find the right amount of puddles to heat up, purify any mud and bacteria, and then sip from the few times we found those along the road.

The last one was a bit complicated as some discussions emerged due to the initial plan I had in mind: guys first, ladies next. The reason why I had picked this order was because males were meant to produce more sweat than female kobolds so… that was an issue.

But not a deadly one, so, despite a few complaints, I managed to keep the group going with these conditions for as long as we needed to ultimately find civilization. Which we kind of ended up doing during the early hours of day six on the road… North? Forward. We all went straight forward and I don’t think that’s North… Right?

Still! While we were walking the same bumpy roads, we ended up finding a trio of people up ahead looking nervous but slowly approaching us.

“Are those… humans?” Aqua asked, perplexed by the very detail that made them ‘not’ human.

“Nope,” I remarked calmly, finding this development quite perplexing. “We are looking at dwarves.”

And while I was nervous that they could have been some troublemakers or scouts, the youngest of the trio stood on her tiptoes, a ‘young’ girl at first glance that waved at us despite the clear panic the two older dwarves were going through.

I have a feeling these three are not soldiers… especially with how loud and the girl was being at the moment to call our attention.