There were sounds all around him, voices to be exact. They were murky, muffled, and near incomprehensible. His vision was just a blurry mess. Blobs of different shapes and colors surrounded him. Green blobs dominated the others. Had the bushes come alive and were now about to hide inside of him just like how he hid inside them?

The blobs were forcing his mouth open. They really were trying to force themselves inside of him! Alwin resisted, clamping his mouth shut as tight as possible. Well, he tried to. He had zero energy left inside his body. All of it diverted to essential functions like breathing and apparently thinking.

They shoved something down his throat. It was tiny and blue, just like a marble. Oh, Cor! They were planting their babies inside of him. No! Not his tummy! He had to spit it out. He fought off the darkness pulling at his eyelids and strained to cough the marble out. The blobs covered his mouth. He was powerless to resist. They made him swallow their babies.

Gradually the blobs began to take shape. His eyes were focusing—that was a relief. He wasn't going to die without understanding what was happening to him. A green hand was covering his mouth, stopping Alwin from spitting out whatever they shoved inside of him. As he looked up and his eyes began to actually work, he realized the person doing this to him was Lin the Goblin. Standing around her weren't green blobs anymore, it was the goblin guards stationed at the camp entrance. He had made it back!

Lin was saying something, her lips were moving but it was all a garbled mess. He stared at her trying his hardest to decipher whatever she was saying. She moved her lips in a repetitive manner. Alwin could see that much. What was she saying? Slowly, the fog in his ears began to clear, and her voice started to filter through. She was saying something about what happened.

That's right! Alwin needed to get help. He moved his lips, struggling to get the words out. It was like his mouth had been taped up and all that came out were muffled versions of whatever he wanted to say. It didn't help that his brain wasn't working at a hundred percent. Coming up with words was easy, coming up with a string of words that had intent behind them was difficult.

"Look at that Al-loser over there. I bet Uchronia found him so useless that she kicked his sorry ass all the way back to camp."

Even with his brain barely working he knew who was the snotface that said that—Bion. His squad—him, Brie, and Concord—was the first squad to arrive back. Were they done already? Never mind that, If he could sock him he would, but right now he needed to focus his everything on articulating his words. Alwin licked his dry lips and opened his mouth, struggling to form the words. "...ped." The beginning of the word stuck in his throat. He tried again, forcing the sound out. "...napped." One more push. "Kidnapped." The word finally came out, leaving him breathless as he tried to communicate the gravity of the situation.

"Kidnapped?" Lin repeated.

He nodded, slowly. Every movement carefully calculated. It was like he had forgotten how to move and now had to actively will his body to perform any action. It was aggravating. He wanted nothing more than to drag Lin—and even Bion and his squad— to the hopefully not resting place of Gus and Uchronia.

"What do you mean kidnapped? What did you do to Uchronia? Tell me everything now, Al-loser!" Bion had activated his Core Skill—Mechanize. Gears began to sprout all over his body, covering his squishy slimy self.

That no good, snot-eating Bion. Do you think he wanted to just abandon Uchronia and Gus like that? It took everything—EVERYTHING—he had to summon the willpower just to leave them to an uncertain fate.

"Stand down, boy." Lin glared at him.

Bion glared back at her and knew that she wasn't messing around. The gears that had sprouted from his body clanged to the floor, disintegrating into a scatter of magical dust seconds later.

Lin whispered something into one of the goblin guards' ears. He nodded before dropping his halberd and rushing off to who knows where. He came back moments later with some water and a porcelain bottle.

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"Drink up," Lin said. "We're going to need you to lead us back to where you last saw them. Is that okay?"

Alwin nodded. It was easier to move his head around now. But there still felt like a disconnect between what he wanted to do and what his body actually did.

She popped off the cork of the porcelain bottle and took out one pill. They were brown in color instead of the usual red and blue he was used to. Stupid information download malfunctioning. It would've been nice to know what Lin was about to make him swallow. Given everything that had happened today—it felt like 19 days—with Lei Mao and the young masters', he just hoped it wasn't a certain byproduct that the body produces.

Opening his mouth, Lin was about to place the pill inside but paused. She furrowed her brows and rolled the pill in her hand. She popped the pill into his mouth and told him to wait. The pill was bitter. It was slowly dissolving in his mouth, the bitter juices coating his tongue. Please hurry up Lin! She dug out another pill from the bottle and only when it was inside of his mouth did she give him permission to swallow. Alwin chugged down the water she had given him, washing out the horrible taste on his tongue.

A rush of energy ran through him. He could feel it flowing throughout his entire body. It wasn't like when the Small Healing Pill fixed up every bruise, scratch, or wound on his body. This was like a prickly electricity that had coursed through his body. He could feel a buzzing, tingling, and pin-pricking sensation all over.

"Are you ready to go?"

"Yes!" Alwin shouted.

Woah! He was so loud. That was unexpected. He was just trying to speak normally. Something's weird. His mind was racing. Going a million miles a second. He had so much energy. Everything was jittery. But, he knew one thing. Gary Stew, you are going down. Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!

"Just hold on for a sec." Lin grabbed him, stopping him from running off on his own.

She reached into her robe and pulled out a small wooden whistle. Alwin watched as she brought it to her lips and blew, expecting a sharp sound to pierce the air. He had to perform a double-take—it became a quadruple-take from all the jitteriness he was experiencing—it wasn't making any sound. Glowing rune-like patterns emerged on the whistle's surface, spreading across the top and sides. Then they waited.

Who knew what they were waiting for? Okay, Lin knew what they were waiting for. It was a stupid thing to say. If only the million thoughts in his head would work together instead of jumping to the next tangent.

Lin was tapping her foot and looking at a pocket watch that she had pulled out from somewhere. Alwin was too busy thinking about funnel cakes, which evolved into thinking about funnels, and then subsequently to fun flannel, aka, funnel, to notice.

Four goblins came leaping out of one of the towering trees that made up the camp. The first, the smallest, landed without a sound. He wore leather armor that was dyed black with a bandana affixed to his head that fluttered in the wind. His waist was cinched with a belt full of pouches, along with twin daggers in their holsters.

The second goblin, also donned in brown leather armor landed, with a soft thud. A bow and quiver were strapped to her back, and two throwing knives were attached to her hip.

The third goblin crashed into the ground. He was the largest one of them all. At first, Alwin thought the goblin was in metal-plated armor, but upon closer inspection—it was really hard to focus—he realized that it was just leather armor but with a metallic finish. The goblin wielded a large club, roughly half the height of Gary Stew. Alwin really wanted to use it to bonk that no good monster-eating human on the head.

The final goblin wore a leather loincloth to cover up his family jewels, the rest of him was exposed to the world, free and natural. His muscles bulged under his forest-green skin. He clutched a wooden staff, its top curled around a glowing green crystal. A pointed gray hat—like a witch's hat—was in his other hand.

"Thirty-one seconds. Good." Lin clicked the pocket watch shut.

"Here's your stuff," said the goblin with the gray hat and the staff. He handed both of them to Lin.

She took the items from him and, to Alwin's surprise, began to disrobe right in front of them. Alwin's eyes widened, and he began to summon his Spirit Hands, ready to cover his face from Lin's lecherous actions. But before he could summon his Spirit Hands, he realized his mistake. Lin wasn't exposing herself—far from it, you perverts inside his brain! Beneath her robe, she wore a fitted layer of leather armor, similar to the gear the lady archer goblin sported. Lin set her witch’s hat atop her head and brandished her staff with a twirl. She stamped it on the ground, her transformation complete.

"We've got a kidnapped student. This Dark Slime here will bring us to their last known location."

"Yes, ma'am!" The other goblins nodded in unison.

"Goblin Force Five, let's move out!" Lin shouted!