Chapter 46 - Peaty-prilling

When we got to the water’s edge, the designated collectors swapped their skull masks for ones of reinforced ceramic, in addition to donning their plate carriers. We had spears, slingers, poppers, and even a few of the RPPs left over from the stone sloth alpha battle. This was everything I had to bring to bear against the dangers of the bog.

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s get to work.”

I’d brought enough bricks for the tower, but the tower wasn’t the only thing I intended to build here. Mud and grass was in ample supply, and I wanted anyone not working on the tower or geared for battle to be manufacturing additional bricks on the shore of the bog. We needed a bunker on the waterfront, storage, and room to expand as the expedition grew. Builders started hacking at the reeds with flint cleavers as others turned out mud with spades to be mixed and molded.

Strangely, even though the goblins all used the same size molds (which I’d measured and double-checked), no two bricks came out the same size or shape. This contributed somewhat to the lumpy, uneven construction of the goblin structures that made them always look as though they were tired of staying upright. Everything the goblins produced had this quality, and I had to assume it was some sort of quirk of the Goblin Tech Tree letting them harness technology they didn’t actually fully understand. Still, it was going to be a problem once we started developing mechanical devices with tighter tolerances.

The expedition had no guarantees. There was still a chance that all of this ended in disaster. We crept through the reeds at the bog’s edge. I poked my head up enough to take a look down the shore to see if I could spot any larger predators. Waterfowl and bugs dotted the surface of the bog, and the goblins flushed out the occasional frog which would try to hop for its life only to end up stuffed down a goblin gullet. Perks of being on the work detail, I suppose. Until one of the goblins didn’t bother to chew, and started to ribbit every time his mouth was open—much to the other goblins’ delight.

I spotted two of the crocodilians sunning on an island out in the bog, but there was no telling how many lurked beneath the surface. Surprisingly, I could now see the levels above them. 25 and 26.

System, are these ones smaller than the one that attacked us the first time?

Interesting. Taking out the stone-sloth alpha must have bumped up that threshold high enough for the crock-knockers. They were only a few levels above the alpha—still much stronger than goblins, but stronger than how many goblins? Hopefully, we wouldn’t find out today.

I ducked back behind the reeds and gathered the three scrappers I had with me. All of them had loose-weave net cloaks on, and I had one hold still while I stuffed reeds, grass, and moss through the netting until each hobgoblin resembled little more than a lump of peat themselves.

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“Alright. Keep an eye on those crocs. They start heading this way, you give the signal.”

“Onnit,” whispered one of the scrappers. “Trust.”

The sneaky commando goblins melted back into the reeds, and I actually had a hard time tracking them even further than just a few meters away. They made barely a ripple in the water as they slid into the bog and slowly became one with their environment.

I had a couple wranglers similarly outfitted, except those I had in reserve with their snatchers ready, to hopefully loop around predators and give the other goblins time to flee.

Now it was time to get the rest of the goblins to work. I sent them out in pairs: one armored goblin with a slinger and spear for each harvesting goblin with a basket and peat knife. The book had described a fairly simple process of carving the iron nodules off the bottom of the peat masses. They accumulated over time and could grow anywhere from the size of a pea to the size of a fist.

I sent them out onesie-twosie at 20-meter intervals so that a large congregation wouldn’t draw the crocs out. Non-variant goblins aren’t known for their stealth, but they at least sloshed more carefully than normal, knowing there were predators in the bog. This wasn’t the natural habitat for base goblins the way the forest was. They meandered around, looking uncertain even though I’d explained what to do in advance. It took me a moment to realize, this was something I’d have to demonstrate myself. Well, any good leader should never ask their workers to do something they’re not willing to do themselves, right? Otherwise I’d be no better than the useless middle-managers at NuEarth that bossed the engineers around while not knowing the difference between a servo and a solenoid.

I kept an eye on the crocs as I waded out with two of the goblins closest to me, blade in hand. I ended up in the team with the goblin who had swallowed the live frog, so I got to listen to the distressed ribits from one of my partners. So far, neither of them had stirred from their basking and the surface of the water was disturbed only by fish, frogs, and the large, blue wading birds spearing them that looked like a heron with a row of hedgehog spikes down its back. The birds themselves were only level 2, so they didn’t pose much of a threat, even to non-variant goblins.

We headed toward a concentration of peat on the surface, and I slipped my hands underneath to feel for the presence of iron. Goblin hands are extremely dextrous—maybe even more so than human hands. I ran my fingers through the tight woven plant matter until they lit on something small and hard. Pay dirt—er, pay peat. I slipped the knife underneath and carefully cut the nodule free. The other goblin held out his sticky-wicky basket and I dropped the piece of ore into it.

A shudder ran across the surface of the water as the concept propagated through the present goblins. I still didn’t know the mechanism by which technology transferred between goblins—whether it was an aspect of the System itself bestowing skills to creatures, or some sort of goblin gestalt connection. They did have much bigger heads than their rudimentary intelligence would require. I’d chalked the excessive size up to a protective layer of internal fluid to allow deformation in the event of a fall, but maybe part of it was some sort of subconscious psychic lobe? Who knew? This was a new world (simulation?) where magic has as much meaning as physics, and the whole shebang was being actively administrated.

Either way, the rest of the harvesters snapped out of their stupor and looked at the knives in their hands with new light. Teams began to get to work, fishing underneath for iron. I kept at it, pulling two more small nodules off the mass of peat.

It was working. The iron was in our grasp. So many applications that required metallurgy were going to open up because of this. I went back to work, feeling for iron and pulling off another several nodules off the next three peat masses.

I got so absorbed in the work that I didn’t notice the dark shadow that had crept up behind us until I felt something hard and sharp nudge me in the back of the head.