Chapter 23 - Remnants

It took about an hour of flight and one additional thermal to the east (off some natural hot springs, I think from the smell of sulfur wafting on the draft) for me to make it to my destination. One of the bluffs I’d seen smoke rising from came up in the distance, and as I drew closer I could definitely see signs of habitation from the air.

I soared wide, banking back and trading altitude for speed. I swooped down toward the thin trickle of smoke rising from the bluff and went low. I swept down over the treetops, head angled down to look for signs of fellow goblins. It only took me about a minute to fly over the village.

It was completely destroyed.

What little mud hovels they had once had were crushed and trampled, and I saw raw materials scattered in a hurry. The source of the smoldering was a pile of spread ashes and a scorched frame that I think had once been a wooden structure—possibly once the pride of their village. Now it was barely a grave marker.

I curled my lip in distaste, feeling a shock of grief. While I’d grown somewhat inured to the loss of any single goblin, the destruction of the collective of another tribe sickened me. It dropped a pit into my stomach that churned. What had done this? Night haunts don’t start fires.

Reluctantly, I banked and headed south. There was another bluff I wanted to check. It was slightly closer to our own. I hadn’t seen smoke, but if there were goblins there was a chance they hadn’t discovered carousels yet.

What?

I banked so that I could look down at the ground. Through an opening in the trees, I could see four small goblins, whose fur was slightly greener than that of my own tribe. They were jumping and pointing at my flying machine, but they locked up and went rigid. I realized it was the trance of technology—everything I’d unlocked was flooding into the survivors of whatever cataclysm befell their village. I leveled out and made a buttonhook turn, hoping to find them again. But the four had moved back into the trees.

So, they weren’t all dead. That was good news. Great news, even. Plus, apparently finding different goblin variants would unlock them for my own tribe, much the same way unlocking technology did. That added an additional imperative to discovering additional tribes. Scrappers were probably useful, too. I wondered if they specialized in breaking down tech into component parts and cobbling it back together. I grinned and leaned into a turn to catch the hot-spring thermal again and then headed south.

The moon had passed overhead, and its pull had a noticeable effect on the performance of the glider. I was holding altitude longer, but once the eclipse passed over the clear areas, I would lose the benefit of those thermals.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The whole time I was flying, I felt the distinct impression of attention on me. At first, it made me paranoid. There are, after all, myriad predators interested in goblins. Some of them fly. And I couldn’t think they’d look kindly on me making a flying contraption with their buddy’s desiccated hide. But the presence wasn’t hostile. It took me a little while to figure out that the extraneous presence I felt was the system itself devoting extra attention to my efforts.

“System, are you watching me?” I teased.

That was honestly more than I expected to get from the recalcitrant entity. I had always imagined it as a chubby CS engineer typing out snarky replies to me from the other side of a keyboard. This was the first time I felt it as a tangible presence in the world.

“Flying?”

I thought for a moment. “Like distilled freedom. Like all the worries of the world just become so small as to not matter. Up here, it’s just you and the air currents.” I squeezed the handles of the control system. “I always preferred gliding over powered flight. The wings are like a part of you. It’s amazing. It’s always been amazing. And it will always be.”

The System didn’t answer me. I did feel the presence lift somewhat, though not disappear entirely. I suppose it had other tasks and couldn’t afford to spend all its processing power on one little goblin glider, no matter how novel to this world. If this was some sort of alien simulation, maybe the bug-eyed gray alien administrating the whole thing dreamed of piloting a UFO one day before he settled for a life of computer nerd-ism. I could relate. For a long time I never thought I’d get my chance to go into space. Fate had conspired to give me that opportunity, then take that opportunity away from me—first in the accident, and later in the explosion. Some other force had intervened to give it back.

It took about an hour to reach the other plateau to the south, near the border of an arid, desert area. I’d ear-marked it for survey, betting that the sun-baked desert would give me enough thermal lift to easily make it back. I was delighted to find that an active goblin village thrived on the bluff, and there was a frenzy of activity. I dipped down for a lower pass over their plateau.

The frenzy of activity turned out to be a war of sorts between the tribe and a large type of pale, frilled lizard. The goblins were holding their own, but they were doing so with sticks and thrown stones. Once the shadow of the eclipse passed, the lizards retreated, scaling down the shaded face of the cliff on the side that blocked the sun.

I banked and followed the lizards from the air. They were quick little devils. They were only level 1 or 2, but there were a lot of them and they moved as a pack back to a dry, dusty area on the plains with lots of cracks and crevices. I lost them there, as they slithered into tight burrows and disappeared. I made a note of the area and rode the thermal coming off the baked ground of the plains until I’d regained enough altitude to return for a low pass over the village in peril. They spotted me instantly, and pointed and shouted. Two of them threw rocks that fell hopelessly short.

That was the biggest single jump I’d seen yet. So, the warring tribe had only 12 members, currently. They lost at least two warring with the lizards that I saw carried off the cliff. Without enough goblins to replenish losses, they would lose the war of attrition. Especially if the lizards came at night as well as during the eclipse.

As much as I wanted to stay and see how the next battle played out, I was losing light, and with it, the thermals. I still had to make it back to Village Apollo. If nothing else, the 12 remaining goblins on this bluff now had fire, spears, and other technology to give them a slight edge. Who knows, if the lizard skin was photosensitive, the fire alone might be enough to deter them.

I angled back toward the hot springs I’d passed over earlier. Even with the sun dropping, they should give me the boost I needed to make it back to Village Apollo. But my mind kept wandering to what I’d just seen.

I was so lost in thought about how I could help the goblins on the bluff that I didn’t see the shadow pass over me.