Inns were surprisingly cheap in Great Hope. Kevin decided to stay in the village for a while after getting some supplies. Not only was making the inn he’d found a cost-effective base on operations, he was enjoying the hot baths and he’d also gotten a lead on some mysterious, unique monsters.

Once he had gotten a handful of leads to check out, Kevin was actually able to find the first creature with Branch's help. The moment Kevin had been out of the area of the village, the little fairy had nonchalantly stepped from behind a tree and began traveling with Kevin again.

That first monster, a large purple-striped cat, had reminded him a lot of tigers back on Earth, except it had been huge and could breathe poison gas. The hunt had almost cost Kevin his life. He had been able to kill the monster but had breathed in enough gas that he actually passed out. The next day or two was a blur, and he barely remembered a frantic Branch bringing him water to drink in folded leaves. He could also barely recall the little fairy shoving badly cooked morsels of meat into his mouth. As it turned out, Branch's bad cooking might have been what saved him.

He’d read somewhere on earth before that charcoal had health benefits. Maybe it’d been enough to help his blessed body overcome the poison. Or maybe it’d just been his new skill.

Kevin woke up long enough at one point to check his status window and realize that he had gotten [Poison Resistance, Minor].

The window read:

[Poison Resistance, Minor].

Once acquired, this ability acts as an active resistance, but it can also be activated once a day to forcefully purge toxins from the body.

Before falling back unconscious again, Kevin hit the button on the screen. The next day he woke up feeling like a new goblin. An unreal amount of filth was staining the forest floor next to him, and he spent several hours cleaning himself and his clothing in a nearby river.

Branch found him as he was just finishing up, and the little fairy's relief might have been a little bit comical if Kevin wasn't aware of how close he had just come to death. What was worse, he wasn't sure how he could have protected himself or done any better than he did killing the monster. It’d had a poison breath, and Kevin didn't really have a good way to protect himself from it until now.

He hadn’t even known monsters other than dragons could have breath weapons.

The only way he possibly could have killed the monster without coming so close to death himself would have been if he had perfectly ambushed the huge cat or somehow killed it from a distance. He decided this was a new motivation to learn ways to hunt from a distance. He was not strong enough or skilled enough to use a bow, but maybe he could keep an eye out for a powerful crossbow or something.

He wished he could just learn magic. It was a constant frustration.

"Branch, thank you for everything you did to help me over the last two days," he said sincerely.

After sputtering for a little bit, the fairy rubbed the back of his head and said, "Well, I couldn't just leave you. The goddess wouldn’t like that. And also, if you die, how am I going to have any more adventures or see new things?"

Kevin chuckled a little bit after that and shook his head. It was amazing how in his past lives, even as a knight, he had been surrounded by people whose true loyalty was unknown. Meanwhile, in this life, after only twenty years, he found a truly trustworthy friend in one of the strangest places imaginable.

A coincidental meeting after he had been sleeping in a tree, polymorphed as a chipmunk, had probably just saved his life.

"Branch, that was scary," he said out loud. The fairy nodded solemnly where he hovered in the air. Then Kevin slowly said with true conviction, "I'm not running into any monster fights without a plan or some recon or backup ever again." As he said it, Branch nodded again, and Kevin also realized why he had been fighting in such a stupid way. Why did he rush in like that? Maybe part of him was still used to having such a strong human body with a long reach and covered in armor, not to mention the supernatural abilities he had received from the Eternal Struggle Reward System.

That hypothesis rang with truth. Unfortunately, he was stuck as he was for now. He didn't have any more points left for the Eternal Struggle Reward System.

When he had been in his late twenties as a knight on the run without many other options, he had taken a gamble on the Reward System he’d received upon becoming a Champion of the Morrigan. Kevin had been looking for power, and he had gotten lucky with the randomized rewards he had been able to choose from. The “Seed of Supernatural Physicality” had essentially given him the strength, speed, and durability of a superhero from comics back on Earth. Even though he still hadn't had magic of his own at the time, the Seed had allowed him to fight and even prevail against others that used magic or aura.

But in this life, he didn't have that power anymore. The Seed had been a physical thing that had died with his old body. On top of that, now he wasn't even a big, strong human man anymore, or a wiry, quick human man, like in his first life. As a goblin, he wasn't exactly helpless, but he had some inherent weaknesses of the goblin race. One of the biggest was his short legs and short arms. Especially while challenging such large monsters, the beasts couldmove so quickly that Kevin was at a huge disadvantage with his mobility and reach.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I'm a goblin in this life; I need to think more like one. And how do goblins kill? Either with numbers or by being sneaky, Kevin mused. "Branch, would you be disappointed in me if I started killing monsters in a very sly and underhanded way?"

"No, I would be proud of you," said Branch. "The way you've been doing everything has been pretty stupid."

Kevin slowly turned to eye the tiny flying man. "If you thought that way, why didn't you say something before?"

Branch shrugged. "I thought you were doing it on purpose. Maybe it was a joke. I was waiting for it to get funny."

Kevin sighed. He let the subject drop and returned to his old campsite before getting dressed again. In the distance, he saw the spoiling body of the monster he had killed and shook his head. Branch had somehow cut flesh from the creature and cooked it on the charcoals of the campfire, obviously in the hopes that it would make Kevin stronger, whether just because it was food, or also maybe from a power he would get.

With this new example, he could confidently say that the powers he had received from the monsters had been thematic with the beast itself. It was a possibility the fairy had thought it was possible, but Branch wasn't much of a deep thinker. Kevin figured it was much more likely the little fairy was just trying to keep him alive with food. And to do that, to cut meat from the dead monster, Branch would have had to use one of Kevin's knives. Iron and steel were poison to fairies, so Branch had literally risked his life to save Kevin's.

Before this series of events, Kevin had found Branch somewhat annoying at times and hadn't truly thought of the fairy as a companion. That had truly changed. Out loud he asked, “Did you feed me the monster meat because you thought I might get a power?”

“It just seemed like the only thing I could really do. Food and water. Mortals need that, right?”

Kevin shook his head and grinned. "Branch, you are really my friend, you know that?"

"Of course, you've always been my friend."

Kevin felt a pang of conscience in his heart as he spoke to the guileless Fae, but his new resolution made it sting less."That's right, Branch, we've always been friends, and we'll always be friends, especially now."

"Good, yes, good," said Branch. "Are we heading back to the village now? You should get me some honey to repay for the last two days; you smelled like poop and vomit."

"Branch, we'll get you some honey. I'll even throw in some crackers."

"Yippee!"

***

Kevin did two more monster hunts over the course of about ten days. Each time he was far more careful than he had been when the poisonous beast had almost killed him. He’d learned caution and prudence. As before, with named unique or boss monsters, he did receive a new ability once he ate some of them, but neither were directly attack-related. He knew it was illogical, since every ability made him more powerful, but he just hadn't gotten too excited about either skill; each felt relatively mundane and nothing he was too excited about: [Uncanny Balance], and [Beastly Stamina].

In fact, the most exciting development for Kevin over the last week had been getting to know some of the townspeople and learning more about their strange village.

Now he really wondered why the guards and Frida had let him into the village to begin with since they were trying to keep such a big secret. It turned out, or at least the village merchants told him, that the village leaders didn't want to unnecessarily kill anybody, and they'd also realized that just turning everyone away would probably make the place more suspicious-looking than any alternative. Rumors had already begun to spread, and one merchant in particular, Degi, told him that he’d heard the guards had been extremely wary of him. Apparently, one of the guards had used some sort of divination spell on Kevin to discern how powerful he was, or what his origins were, and his spell had bounced back. That was the real reason why Frida had asked him to verify he wasn't a dragon.

The whole situation seemed a little strange to Kevin, and he had to remind himself that people in the rest of this world of all races were terrified of dragons. Although dragons didn't indiscriminately destroy cities or anything like that, they weren't exactly benevolent all of the time either. Kevin's parents had a reputation for being wise and kind, but all of dragonkind didn't exactly follow those tenets.

The asshole dragons were just smart enough not to piss off the Paxdraconis.

Time flew. Before Kevin knew it, he had run out of unique monsters in the area that anyone knew about left to kill, except one. He really didn’t want to go after the last one, though. The hunt would be extremely dangerous, so he was saving it for last.. That didn’t mean he’d given up, though. If there eventually wasn’t anything else left to do in the village, he was ready to move on, but this had been a fantastic place for him to get his “adventuring legs” so far, and pick up a number of helpful new powers.

Even though he wasn’t excited about [Beastly Stamina] as his venom ability, he’d have to be an idiot not to realize what a huge benefit it was.

Kevin was actually making his rounds one morning, checking out the merchant's wares to see if he could spot anything else he needed, and striking up idle conversation in the hopes he’d find some lead on new monsters when he was interrupted. Branch came zooming out from behind a hanging rug at a merchant stall on the street and zipped directly to Kevin's chest.

Where he was at, nobody could really see him.

"We've got a problem," whispered the fairy, "or at least I think you might. Lots of eyes here, though. Maybe meet me at your room?"

Kevin nodded, and Branch flew away again. Nobody noticed. From there, Kevin went directly to the inn, where he could keep his cover as a human man in the village. Whenever he was getting tired of his disguise or needed a break, he could just lock the doors and be a goblin for a while.

This time when he made it back to his room, Branch was already there. The window was open. The fairy had an unusually serious expression and said, "I saw a dragon in the woods. In fact, I heard a dragon in the woods yelling."

"A dragon was yelling!? Yelling what?”.

“Your name.”

Kevin's heart sank. "What did the dragon look like?" he asked sharply.

"I didn’t see her in dragon form for long, and I don't usually pay too much attention to two legs, but I guess she was wearing a green dress and had dark hair," Branch replied.

"How old was she?" Kevin asked.

"I don't know!" said the fairy indignantly. "Branch knows many things, but the ages of human girl forms that dragons are transformed into is not one of them."

"Fair enough, but can you at least make a guess?" Kevin asked, with only a hint of frustration. "What about her voice? Was she angry or demanding?"

"Hmm, now that you mention it," said the fairy slowly, "probably more impatient, maybe a little curious? She didn't seem to go in one direction all the time. Sometimes when I watched her, she was heading towards you, but then she'd see something and head that way to look at it, or sometimes even randomly go a different direction."

Kevin facepalmed. He couldn’t possibly know for sure, but his heart was telling him that his suspicion was right. "Lydia."

"What's a Lydia?" asked Branch.

"A Lydia is a pain in the ass. I'll talk to you about it later, I suppose. How far away was she?” One thing Kevin had learned about his friend was when Branch was by himself, he could move incredibly fast.

“As fast as she is moving, she might be here or close in a week.”

“Damn. That means I don't have much time left. I want to get this last monster hunt done and then say my goodbyes to people in Great Hope."

"Why?" asked Branch. "Why say goodbyes? Why not just leave?"

Kevin made a complicated expression. "Because if Lydia goes looking for me here, either she or the townspeople could get hurt. Lydia is not an enemy, Branch. Well, not exactly. She's my cousin. Let's go get that last monster. We need to hurry before Lydia finds this village.”

“You are leaving now!?”

“In about ten minutes. Based on what you said, that gives me enough time to knock this last hunt out, get back, and leave. Let’s go.”