I would love to say that my flight from the goblin was a calculated move motivated by logic and reason and that I took my circumstances into account and made the optimal decision. It was not. I was simply terrified.
I am not a coward. I’ve never been one to turn away from hardship or danger. However, in the few hours before this point, I had been kidnapped, insulted, and threatened by an otherworldly being of unimaginable power before being literally killed and sent to another world with nothing but the clothes on my back, and now my blood was literally freezing in my veins and I was being attacked by a literal monster, so I believe my response was justified.
In hindsight, I probably could have handled that goblin. Goblins are almost universally slow, weak, and stupid, and on top of that, this one was alone, and I was carrying a bundle of serviceable weapons in my hands. Although I was only level 1 and slow from the cold, I was still a vampire with high base stats and doubled system stats, and my opponent was a level four goblin scout no stronger than a child. Whether I could have handled the reinforcements following the sound of the horn is another question entirely, but I was not as helpless as my immediate running away made me seem. It all worked out though, and I learned from the experience, so in the end there were no lasting consequences for my thoughtlessness.
I did at least have the presence of mind to run the opposite direction from the goblin encampment. And as I ran, my wits did start to return to me, and when I realized that I was still faster than my pursuer, despite the cold, I was finally able to calm down. It helped that my body was dead and no longer felt fatigue, so I had one less distraction. It was also around this time that I realized that I didn’t need to breathe anymore. I had been doing it until then out of habit, but when I noticed that my breath was still steady while I was running for my life, I soon stopped.
I started looking around for ways to get out of my predicament. I had built up a lead on the goblin, but my body was still getting colder, and they would eventually catch me if I didn’t find a way to build up an insurmountable lead, or fight them off. Unfortunately, the forest was almost exclusively spruce, which doesn’t make the best weapons, and I wasn’t willing to bet against the goblins being able to climb them. Plus, the last thing I wanted was to be frozen solid up a tree. If I fell while frozen, I would probably literally shatter, and I would be dead, regardless of my new undeadness.
After I had run probably close to a mile, the forest suddenly opened up, and I realized that I was now standing on a road. And not just a small footpath through the forest. It was wide and well-traveled, with four lanes of deep wagon ruts, and relatively fresh footprints in the snow nearby. I laughed out loud and changed my course to follow the road, knowing that eventually, I would come across humans. My muscles and tendons were starting to get stiff, and I was worried that they would snap before I found anything.
My concerns, while not unfounded, were fortunately never realized. In the distance ahead of me, I soon spotted the flickering of a fire just to the side of the road, and a human-sized figure was standing in front of it.
“Help!” I shouted as loud as I could. “Goblins!”
It did cross my mind that we might not speak the same language, but I figured that, given my position, my meaning would be obvious, even if whoever was there couldn’t understand my words.
“Come here!” called a male voice as the figure drew a sword.
For a moment, I was worried that he would attack me when I got too close, but when I got close enough to see the man’s face, that worry vanished. The man looked like he could have been younger than me, and he looked just as scared as I was. The hand that held the sword was trembling slightly, and he was looking more over my shoulder than at me. I ran right past him toward the fire and sat down next to it, sighing with relief as the warmth spread through my body.
“Where are they?” he asked, still looked at where I had come from.
“I-I don’t know,” I said, trying to make it sound like my teeth were chattering. “Th-they were ch-chasing me b-but I haven’t s-seen them in a few m-minutes. I’m- I’m cold, I n-need to sit… sit by the fire.”
“D-don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll protect you. I’ve taken swordsmanship lessons before. A few goblins won’t be able to get past me.”
“Th-thank you,” I said.
In all honesty, my performance was atrocious. Acting is one of the few things I’ve never been very good at. Well, maybe it’s not that I was never good at it, it’s more that I never wanted to put in the effort to get good at it. I hate pretending to be something I’m not. In this scenario, keeping my race a secret might have been a matter of life and death, so I had no choice, but I was not happy about it. If the man had been less nervous, or more observant, he probably would have realized that I was being disingenuous much sooner than he actually did.
About a minute later, I heard the slapping of the goblins’ disproportionately long feet on the ground as they ran. There were only six– the five from the fire and the scout– and all of them were still armed with nothing but wooden sticks, so I was starting to feel foolish, and embarrassed that I had needed help with just that. Surely in a world with magic, a few goblins wouldn’t pose much of a threat to anyone. But the man didn’t seem relieved at all, and if anything, seeing them seemed to make him more scared.
He had said that he learned swordsmanship, and his stance made it look like he was telling the truth, but as soon as he started fighting, I knew that he had not learned it very well. His first swing was solid and balanced, and cut through one of the goblin’s necks, killing it, but when he blocked a strike right afterward, his form fell apart. He spent the rest of the fight off-balance and flailing, seemingly only landing strikes by luck. The goblins themselves weren’t much better, and they didn’t seem strong enough to do any real damage, so the whole fight was more painful to watch than anything else.
It was over in less than two minutes, with the last one standing being the young man, panting over the last goblin corpse. He turned around and flashed me a wide smile, and I could barely keep myself from putting my head in my hands in second-hand embarrassment. Even at level one, I probably could have done better than him if I weren’t half-frozen.
“Th-thank you,” I said, trying to keep up my guise of a poor, freezing girl who was attacked by goblins. I didn’t know the region, or if those circumstances were plausible, but he didn’t seem to find it too unbelievable just yet, so I just planned on rolling with it. “M-my name is Lucille. Th-thank you for saving me.”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“No problem,” he said proudly. “My name is V- it’s Rafael! I’m happy I was able to help you. How did you get out here anyway? Oh wait! Hold on!”
Rafael was obviously a fake name, but I didn’t pry. Whatever he was hiding, it didn’t compare to what I was hiding, so I didn’t mind. And his intentions, as far as I could tell, were not impure, so there was no need to be too suspicious.
I had other concerns anyway. When he had killed the goblins, I had gotten my first ever level-up notification, which distracted me as he rummaged through a small pouch on his hip.
You have assisted in the slaying of Goblins x6. You have earned a small amount of exp
User Level 1 -> 2
All stats increased by 1
I could tell immediately that I was feeling better than before, but I didn’t have time to explore any further before “Rafael” spoke again.
“Here, put this on,” he said, holding a thick jacket far too big to have fit inside the tiny bag. “It has heating magic on it. It should warm you up. Do you need any food?” he dug through the pouch again while I put the jacket on.
“I have salmon, lamb, pheasant, capybara, and uhhhhh, bread? Cheese? Cheese bread? Oh, and water. Here.”
“I-I’m alright,” I said, holding up a hand to reject the canteen he was trying to give me. “I ate a little while ago. A-and I’ve been eating snow.”
“Still, you’ve been running a lot,” he said. “You need to replenish your fluids. Even though it’s cold, so you might not have been sweating, you still used a lot of energy, and-”
He cut off and his concerned expression turned fearful as he stumbled backward.
“Your heart- Why can’t I hear your heart? What are you? Are you a ghost?”
My embarrassment from needing help from such an inept man had wiped away all panic from my mind by then, so when his demeanor changed so drastically, I was able to analyze the situation logically, as I normally would have, unlike how I acted with the goblins.
First, this man said that he couldn’t hear my heart, implying that he normally could. Looking back, that made sense; He had already been standing and waiting for me when I first saw him, meaning he had noticed me first, so he probably had excellent hearing.
Second, he was scared. People without heartbeats were not normal in this world, and were not usually friendly. Unless this man was just naive or racist against undead or something. Either way, he was starting to panic.
Third, he was stronger than me. If he got too worked up and decided to attack, I would be mostly helpless. Even if he was a terrible fighter, I was in bad enough shape that it wouldn’t matter.
Fourth and lastly, there was no way I could talk my way out. I didn’t know enough about the world to come up with a believable lie. And even if I did manage to convince him of some falsehood, it would quickly be revealed, and I would be in a worse situation than before.
The conclusion: I needed to tell him the truth, or at least part of it, and and I needed to do it calmly to defuse the situation before it got out of hand.
“I am a vampire,” I said. “A peaceful vampire. I won’t hurt you. I can’t hurt you. I couldn’t even hurt the goblins, remember?”
“Y-you’re a vampire?” he asked looking somewhat calmer. “But… I thought vampires were extinct?”
“Obviously not.” I winced at my harsher-than-intended tone. “I mean, I’ve never met another one, but I’m alive, and I’m definitely a vampire, so that means it’s impossible for us to be extinct.”
“Oh.” he took a few deep breaths. “You’re really a vampire?”
“Yes, I really am a vampire.”
“I’ve never met a vampire before.”
“Yes, I gathered that.”
“Does that mean you need to drink blood to live? Does blood taste good? Do you-” he hesitated. “Do you want to drink my blood?”
“Yes, I need to drink blood to live, yes it does taste good sometimes, and no, I don’t want to drink your blood,” I said, stifling a laugh.
“Woah,” he said.
“I’d appreciate it if you could keep what I am a secret though,” I said.
I had gathered from his responses that being a vampire would definitely stand out, and I didn’t want to stand out too much until I was strong enough to handle the attention. I planned on laying low for a while, and doing some quiet leveling to get stronger before making any serious moves toward winning the stupid game so I could go back home. I was foolish. There was no way I would be able to avoid standing out no matter how hard I tried. But at the time, I thought it was a perfectly reasonable goal.
“I won’t tell anyone,” he said earnestly. “Not even if I’m tortured.”
“You don’t have to go quite that far,” I said. “If there’s really someone willing to torture you just to learn that I’m a vampire, you can just tell them. How did you even notice anyway?”
He glanced around conspicuously as if he were looking for eavesdroppers then leaned in close to me.
“I’m actually half beastman,” he said. “My mom was a cat-woman, so I have really good hearing. And I can see in the dark pretty well too.”
“Ah, I see,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone else.”
I wanted to ask why he needed to hide that, but thought better of revealing the extent of my ignorance.
“So how did you get out here?” asked not-Rafael. “Do you have a secret hideout here or something?”
“No, I got teleported here,” I said. “Against my will,” I added, since he didn’t seem the type to understand implication.
“By who?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was just at home, and then suddenly, I was in the middle of the woods.”
“Where are you from?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
We sat in silence for a short while until I broke it.
“Did I wake you up? Running from the goblins?”
“No, I was actually already awake because I heard a horn,” he said.
“...The horn that the goblins blew when they found me?”
“Oh. Probably. Yeah.”
“You can go back to sleep then,” I said. “You probably need the rest for your travels.”
“It’s ok!” He said. “I’m wide awake! I can stay up until morning, so you should get some rest instead.”
“I’m a vampire. I don’t sleep at night.”
“Oh yeah… Well, I’m still going to stay up. There’s no way I’ll be able to go back to sleep.”
Fifteen minutes later, he was snoring.