Red. Everything before me was read; polka dotted striped red, but definitely red. I stared at the marvel without being able to utter a single word. After all, there was nothing to say. It was big, was an understatement; roughly half as long as a blue whale. When it fully awoke and stood on its hind legs with something stretching from just behind it, like a tail, pointing sharply at us- it didn’t look like a shrimp, no. It looked like a scorpion.

A deep-sea scorpion.

Under water, under pressure, barely equipped to run let alone fight… we were doomed for.

At least that’s what I thought but more and more spears crashed into the damn thing, and from all sides no less. Hundreds, no, thousands of spears.

At first, I thought fishmen were attacking it. But no, they weren’t fishmen. Something much, much more primitive in nature. Something purple.

Something… goblin.

Sea goblins. And roughly a few thousands too. About the size of a typical teenager, with fins and tails like mermaids. They didn’t wear anything, I suppose there was no need. But they did carry a whole bunch of spears and their target was the damn shrimp.

But since they were fighting the shrimp, we could just run away… right?

Yes but no.

Shing!

Most of the spears just bounced off the Shrimp’s armor. Some did get into crevices between its scales but I doubt anything could come off that.

But just when I was thinking the goblins couldn’t harm the damn thing, three heavily dressed goblins passed me by and went straight for one of the impaled spears. They slammed into the spear, making the shrimp shudder.

It shook violently, almost impaling the three goblins, but I used some currents to move them to their sides. Given the situation, we weren’t safe and we couldn’t get out. So, the only way forward was to help them stay alive long enough to kill the shrimp or wait till they tired each other out and escape.

More and more goblins swarmed the shrimp and crashed into the spears. Making it shudder even more. However… it was no longer moving violently. It was merely… observing?

This was bad. A wounded beast was a deadly one. I wasn’t sure how intelligent the damn thing was, but it was definitely being patient and waiting…

The goblins had already regrouped, launched new spears and were about to rush in again. Its tail rose ever so slightly and changed the color of the water near it…. It’s a trap…

The goblins still rushed in, but I swept away the odd colored water with a heavy current myself. Took a considerable amount of mana, mana which I’d borrowed from my bracelet.

Yet, I still felt faint.

Thud!

More and more goblins crashed into the thing, eventually knocking all its feet out. The thing still had its tail attached but the goblins were quick enough to deal with it.

I felt like fainting.

“Chance,” Roksha murmured.

The fishman nodded and we quickly made a run for it. Or would have… if we weren’t captured by the goblins a minute later.

Sigh… I proceeded to faint.

***

When I woke up, the pressure was gone and I could have sworn I felt weightless, like I was in space or something. Not that I’d ever been in space….

The water around me was light and felt really airy, as in, I could breathe it in. A hut? Of bamboo. The bed was made with bamboo and leaves. Same for the furniture. Everything was made from bamboo.

Seemed pretty bright for a room without any light source. Actually, this felt very similar to how I felt above.

I came out, and well… even brighter out here.

Tall bamboos; everywhere. I couldn’t really see their tips. Mostly because of the blinding sun. It was too damn bright.

“Stare for too long, and you’ll go blind,” someone said in Western.

I brought my vision back to the ground. Hundreds if not thousands of huts. Intricate small roads, and lots and lots of goblins.

The one speaking to me was also one of the purple things; a goblin. A female one at that too. She was wearing something akin to a tank top and shorts.

I thought goblins didn’t wear clothes; but I guess I was wrong. These ones did. The few that didn’t were the front line warriors who had to be agile, I guess?

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Then again, mermaids and fishmen go commando too.

Maybe not wearing anything was the norm here, underwater? My soggy ass clothes were already starting to fall off….

“Uh-huh… where am I?”

“Timble.”

“Where are the other two?”

“Talking to the elder,” she said. She towered over me. I’d say by two feet. I was like what, almost four feet now? So yeah, tall as fuck goblin.

She’s packing!

Glowing golden hair, somewhat blue eyes and perky lips. Honestly, if she was human, she’d probably have been one of those girls from rich families. No, that’s just your assumption.

“I see. And where is the elder?”

She pointed. She pointed at the distance, to a hut that was somewhat bigger than the rest. “There.”

***

Apparently, these goblins were not the violent bunch. I could tell just by looking at their homes and how they treated each other.

They actually felt more like ancient humans, than goblin. Not only were they wearing clothes, they were also living here like humans. Treating their children, like actual children and not cannon fodder or a snack for a rainy day. At least that’s the sense I got when I saw a father walking down with his child on top of his head, and the mother not too far off, laughing.

They were farming, they were hunting and frankly… this place looked way more peaceful than a typical human village….

In my limited experience, I only saw three goblins. All three times, I was with Alustur. He was teaching me some basic self-defense.

Goblins would almost always attack with whatever they found near them. Could be a rock, a branch, or even a knife. And it had the intelligence to know that a knife worked better than a rock, so it kept the knife. It also kept shiny things like coins and silver and even gold to some extent in its lower groin cover which stretched upto it’s belly button (so they weren’t necessarily showing off their big stuff), so if you could kill one, you were guaranteed a haul, unless the goblin was a loser.

Their groin pouches stank though… Don’t ask me how I knew that….

These things were strong and vastly more agile compared to humans. However, they didn’t have much stamina. One blunt hit and they were done for. I never fought a goblin. I merely watched Alustur cleave them in multiple pieces. And he’d done it so elegantly too: Quick Slash, he’d called it.

Forget the quick part, I couldn’t even manage the slash. Swords were just too heavy for me. Kind of why I was rocking a knife on my waist and a machete. Both were gifts. Gifts I’d hardly used. Gifts… slowing me down because they were so frigging heavy!

Still, even after all that fainting and awakening cycles, I was kind of surprised they were still here.

“You even farm?” I asked.

There were sea horses here, kept in an open field like area with fences. Kind of like cattle. But sea horses could swim, and they could have just floated over the fences so… Seriously this underwater world was really, really throwing me off.

Come to think of it… I couldn’t really float much here. And most people weren’t floating, they were just walking around. Well, not necessarily walking, since they didn’t have legs. But they weren’t floating around Fishmen. They were merely havering a foot off the ground.

“Yes. We treasure fresh food and beverages.”

They kept fish and other things here too. I also saw fruit trees and berries. “Do you mind if I have one?”

“Hey, Ballstruck, do you mind if he has one?” She yelled in sea tongue.

“Not at all!” Came the answer from the distance.

Well, that was… a name.

Gulping, I picked a black round berry. Sweet, with a hint of sour and maybe some spice. I could have sworn I’d had something similar before but… big seed!

“This is pretty nice,” I said. “A little astringent, but pretty nice.”

“It’s not fully ripe yet. Give it a few more days and… well, we don’t really eat it. We just make wine.”

Fair enough.

They did have a few different types of fruits here. But the most vibrant, beautiful of them all was… Honeycrisps. Yes, even this place had Honeycrisps!

“Feel free to try one,” she said, albeit reluctantly.

The tree was as big as me, but was cut like a peach tree and had no main branch. Each sub branch had at least twenty fruits! I picked the best one, the reddest, plumpest… the best~!

Juicy… sweet… a bit tart and… my eyes balled. “This is amazing. The flavor’s even better than-” Words refused to escape my mouth.

I hadn’t even swallowed yet. Yet, I was already overwhelmed. This was a new find. A miracle!

“Stop overreacting,” the goblin lady rolled her eyes. “There’s like hundreds of these in Bolster, save your fawning for that.” Shrugging. “Weren’t you worried about your companions?”

Oh yeah… that too.

Didn’t mean I couldn’t finish my fruit first… which I took my sweet time with while walking; I kept the seed.

So delicious~!

***

I was wrong.

The elder’s house wasn’t just a little big. It was way bigger. The huts were mostly single room huts, with some two- or three-room huts mixed in here and there. The elder’s hut was about ten times bigger. From the outside it looked about three hut big, but from inside… yeah, magical.

“How do you do this?” I asked, not being able to suppress my curiosity.

Goblins in decent clothes were going about talking and hurling paperwork and all that stuff. I never thought this to be possible but here we were.

“What do you mean?”

“Have such a big place within such a small space….”

“Spatial rationing. How else do you think we sustain our population in such a small safe zone?”

Small? I could have sworn their village had at least a kilometer radius. But then again, I saw a few thousand goblins attacking the shrimp. Besides, those goblins had families, farms, and bamboos….

What even happened to that thing? Dead probably.

“What’s Spatial Rationing?”

Everything here was of course made of bamboo but the quality was much higher than the hut I woke up in. Things were just… top quality!

“Shrinking space elsewhere so we can have more space here,” she said in a matter-of-fact manner and stopped. “We’re here.”

A hut within a hut?

It was in the middle of the whole thing with pathways leading past it as well.

The goblin knocked and when an answer came motioned for me to get in. But how? The door was closed?

And there was no handle. So how- my hand went right through. Not just the hand, I went through it though like it didn’t even exist!

It’s a fucking fine cloth, you idiot!

“Woah!” I almost fell over but somehow grabbed myself at the last moment. There were people inside, inside this moderately large room, all sitting on sofas: About five goblins and two people I was already familiar with.

“Welcome,” one of the goblins said. “Please join us.”

Cautiously, I sat next to the mermaid.

“Now, as we said, we can’t let you go,” the goblin continued. “WE still need to figure out what happened back there and without a proper explanation we just can’t let you go.”

“What are they talking about?” I whispered.

“You talking will only complicate things,” Roksha said. “Let me handle this.”

Sure but… what the hell was even going on?