We were soon on the road, and I learned that Lira was the only other silver ranked in the group, and she was a low silver rank. I was informed that for missions like this, they would mainly use copper rank adventurers, only sending a silver rank or two in case anything bad happened. I was likely assigned to this as an easy starting mission, as I was a complete beginner when it came to hunter work. The four copper rank adventurers were named Kell, Syn, Nera, and Jen, all of them with matching brown hair, though their eyes ranged from plain brown to a striking silver on Jen.

    As the days passed, I learned that Lira absolutely loved raunchy jokes, constantly trying to make anything she could into an innuendo. The others had the decency to look embarrassed or resigned, but a few of them did make all of us laugh, so it wasn’t all bad.

    After a few days of talking to each other, Lira started to make comments about visiting my tent at night, but was obviously doing it in a joking manner, which was a bit disappointing to be honest.

    It took us around a week to arrive at the small town. As we walked through the farmland, everything seemed completely deserted, lending an eerie atmosphere to the trek. I was starting to jump at every noise, the wind through the fields of grain sounding like whispers, and got laughed at when I panicked a bit when a horned rabbit popped out of nowhere.

    I made sure to get my revenge on said bunny, but I had to deal with constant teasing for the rest of the day.  Once we got a bit closer, we faced a few goblin attacks, which wasn’t too surprising, but they were only in groups of five to six, so it wasn’t an issue for us to eliminate them quickly. Once we got to the main part of town, I saw that it had a pretty rudimentary wooden wall, with a surprising amount of people patrolling on top of it. I was wondering what was going on as we arrived at the gate, when we were hailed by a guard standing on the wall above us.

    “It’s not safe out there, hurry in!”

    I shared a bit of a worried look with the others in my group. A relatively small group of goblins shouldn’t be causing this much of an issue. We’d come expecting a group of maybe forty, and while that would still be enough to pause work on the farms, it shouldn’t lead to the amount of worry the guard had shown.

    We got in, and the guard who had hailed us came down to talk to us. As she took off her helmet, I saw she was cute, with a round face one would expect to see on a bookworm, not on a guard.

    “So what are travelers coming here for? We’ve been having quite the goblin problem, so it isn’t exactly safe nearby”

    Lira took the lead, taking out her guild card from beneath her shirt. “We’re from the hunters guild here to fulfill a request to take out those goblins. The group you sent a request for shouldn’t have been this much of an issue though, has the situation changed?”

    The guard winced before replying. “We don’t have a message station in our town, so we couldn’t send a message that the group has grown. We couldn’t even send someone out on their own to get a message to update the request, and we needed as many hands on the wall as we could get, so we couldn’t send a large group.”

    “So how large exactly has this group become?” Lira asked.

    The guard ran her fingers through her hair. “We estimate there’s at least a few hundred of them out there. If you could get a message back to the hunters guild, that would probably be the best thing you could do.”

    “Wait, if there’s that many goblins, there has to be a hobgoblin. Have you seen it? If we could take that out, they would all scatter.”

    The guard shook her head. “He’s always in the middle of the biggest encampment, don’t bother.”

    At this point, I was wondering how often bad information was sent to the hunter’s guild, but we agreed to head to the nearest town with a message station to get the information back to the hunters guild. It was about two days travel, much shorter than it would be to get back to Janna, the city we had set out from.

    We decided to rest the night at Haven, and got free room and board at the tavern. We each got our own room, which were basically mirrors of each other, a bed filled with straw with simple linen blankets, a desk and chair in the corner, and a window with shutters rather than glass. The next morning dawned with Lira opening my door, ogling me as I got dressed, me ignoring her. We finally got all packed up, and set out to the nearby town with a messaging station that I didn’t know the name of.

    The first sign of things going wrong was when the first group of goblins we saw ran from us. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but the others grasped their weapons far more tightly. Deciding that it would be a good time to put my skills to use, I decided that I wouldn’t need a better sword, and spent a good deal of my mana on my mana construct spell, creating a translucent, glowing blue breastplate to cover my vital organs.

    I got some odd looks from the others, and had to explain that it was a skill I had, then they decided to ignore it in favor of constantly looking out for threats. It was a good thing they were, as it wasn’t long before a large group of goblins burst out from the grains around us which they had been hiding in.

    We were thrown into battle with practically no warning, but everyone responded promptly, and we were soon fighting against a group around triple  our size. Kell, Syn, Nera, and Jen grouped up together, leaving Lira and I to scythe through the goblins on our own. It was quite easy compared to what I had gone through on earth, so I rather relaxedly slaughtered the goblins, making sure to move fast enough that none of them could get a good shot on me from behind. Lira on the other hand basically danced around in a small circle, constantly turning to keep them from attacking from behind, and chopping off any limbs that got near her.

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    Our reach advantage over the child sized monsters made it easy for us to beat a few of them at once each, and once we had killed around two thirds of them, the rest ran away as fast as they could. We hunted down a couple, but they had split up too much for us to catch all of them, so we continued to worry about a larger attack.

    This time, we kept our weapons out and at the ready as we continued, and had just exited the farmland when we saw a massive group waiting for us on the road, with more pouring out from the sides and our back. We raised our weapons as the group split, and a much larger, and much uglier goblin went to the front of them. Syn cursed, and said “hobgoblin”, explaining to me what that thing was.

    The hobgoblin screamed in some language I didn’t know, and the goblins rushed us as the hobgoblin sat back to watch. This time, instead of the crappy stone tipped spears and axes they had wielded, they all had weapons such as pitchforks and scythes, likely stolen from the farms nearby.

    I took a deep breath. I’d faced a lot worse than this on earth, but I was probably going to get hurt a bit if we were going to fight all of them, and I was worried about the others. It started out not so bad, Lira and I were chopping through them without an issue, but they just seemed to keep coming as the hobgoblin watched on with a rictus of a grin. I focused as I parried a blow aiming for my thigh, then twisted to avoid a scythe that was coming towards my neck as I chopped through the arms holding it. I weaved through a couple more stabs from a pitchfork and a goblin who only had a stone tipped spear, sending my sword piercing through the neck of the one with a pitchfork.

    I pushed myself forwards through a couple of them, slicing through a leg as I did so as I noticed one of them getting a bit too close to me from behind, and finished off the one to my right as I span and sliced into its chest, idly noting that goblin bones seemed to be terribly soft.

    After a while though, we all started to get tired, and then the Nera took a pitchfork entirely through her arm. One of the others instantly killed the goblin that had stabbed her as she yelled, and the pitchfork was torn out from her arm as it died. Luckily, it wasn’t bleeding too much, so it hadn’t hit an artery, but that was only the beginning, and she was down a hand with her spear.

    My armor started to take more and more hits, as I completely gave up on dodging anything that would only hit it, and after enough of them, it started to crack. I used up some mana I could spare to keep repairing it, but I was beginning to become tired.

    Lira and I stopped fighting on our own as we grouped up with the copper rank adventurers, and we had a shouting discussion.

    “We need to break away from them! Goblins can’t run too fast!”

    “And how the hell are we going to do that!? We’re completely surrounded!”

    “Ten! You think you can cut us a path!?”

    I took a deep breath, and shouted a quick “I can try!”

    I took a deep breath, crouched, and sheathed my sword before conjuring one with my mana construct skill, using the last of my mana. I dashed to the side, away from the hobgoblin, cutting anything between me and the way to escape, my conjured sword slicing through the wooden shafts of their weapons like they were butter. Things blurred together as I would ignore any attacks that wouldn’t wound me enough to slow me down, slicing through the goblins far easier than I could with my metal sword. Eventually, I reached the end, and looked back to see Nera being carried by Lira, but everyone had made it out safely, if a bit worse for wear. It was at this point that my mana for keeping up my illusion making me seem human faded.

    We ran for as long as we could, me getting odd looks from the others, and I ended up carrying Jen, as she had taken a pretty nasty wound to her leg. Once we felt we had gotten far enough away, we did an inventory of all the wounds we had taken. Nera and Jen had it the worst, Nera with the puncture wound in her arm, and a massive cut on her chest, while Jen had a pretty nasty cut on her leg, which had been why she was limping.

    We took a bit of a break, with Lira keeping watch, and I mentioned I was decent at light magic, so once I got some mana back I could heal everyone up, but with how long it takes for mana to regenerate, I wouldn’t be able to until tomorrow.

    After our break, we changed directions to be roughly pointed to the town we had originally been heading to, and ended up making camp at night. We set up a schedule for keeping watch, in which I got the last watch, so I would be waking up early.

    Luckily, nothing happened overnight, and when Lira came to wake me for my watch she decided to interrogate me.

    “So what was with the weapon and armor you were using? If you have something like that you should definitely be rated higher than silver, maybe not gold, but at least high silver.”

    I shook my head. “It’s not quite that convenient, while my sword can chop through wood much easier than a metal sword, it’s not strong enough to chop through metal, and the only real benefit to the armor is that I can control the weight of it. It means I can have plate armor for no weight, which is really nice, but then I’ll have no mana for anything else. You’re not going to ask about the horns and eyes?”

    Lira shook her head. “It’s considered very rude amongst hunters to ask about people’s past.”

    I shook my head. “It’s not even like I have a past, I was raised in one of the spawning pools.”

    She looked at me oddly. “You seem to be quite a bit different from any of the other demons I’ve met who were raised in one of those.”

    I smiled. “Well that’s a secret.”

    She grinned back at me. “Well regardless, thanks for getting us out of there, if you keep it up, I very well may sneak into your tent one of these nights.” This time, I wasn’t quite so sure she was joking.

    My watch went by with no issues, and in the morning my mana had regenerated to heal the worst of the wounds in our group, though I didn’t have enough to fully heal everyone, as we’d all taken some small wounds.

    The rest of the trip to the town went peacefully, only a couple horned rabbits causing issues, which quickly went into our meal pot. We arrived, and headed straight to the message station.

    “We need to send an urgent message to the hunter’s guild in Janna,” Lira said authoritatively, taking out her guild card to show she was a member.

    “What’s the message?” The man manning the counter asked in a bored manner, apparently not interested in anything urgent.

    Lira quickly gave a quick rundown on the situation, and as she dictated the message to be sent, the bored expression on the man manning the station turned worried. The town here was large enough to be fine, with a garrison to prevent things like this from happening nearby, but nobody likes to hear news like that.

    “You think they’ll mobilize some of the troops here to deal with it?” he asked.

    Lira shrugged. “That’ll be up to the hunter’s guild to decide.”

    We waited around for maybe an hour and a half before we got a reply. The hunters guild would be sending a larger group, who would meet up with us here, as the military wasn’t going to be doing anything. We looked at each other, then went to find an inn to rest. When I asked Lira, she mentioned that the guild would subsidize the money to stay there so long as we shared a room, so we weren’t stuck sleeping in the common room.

    We went to bed, wondering if Haven would be okay until the rest of the hunters arrived.