Chapter 14.

The SafeZone was vaguely circular, with two hallways going off in opposite directions. After some discussion, they labeled one of these directions North and the other South. They weren’t actually north or south, as the compasses they brought weren’t working inside the dungeon. But they had to start somewhere.

Sophie volunteered to scout one direction and Elaine the other. They both promised to return the moment they saw any signs of hostile forces. They returned twenty minutes later, as agreed, and shrugged. Each of them gave effectively the same report; a long twisting corridor with no offshoots. After some consideration, Eli simply flipped a coin and announced that they were heading south.

The corridor twisted around to the right, and then the left, and finally split off again. This time the right passageway led to a smaller version of the safe zone, where eight goblins were sleeping out in the open.

The party retreated until they were out of earshot, and then had a brief discussion. By mutual agreement, they decided to engage. If things went badly, then they’d run to the safezone and withdraw. Either way, it would give them a better idea of what their chances were to face these early goblins than to be forced into combat on unfavorable terms and find that they were massively outmatched and cornered.

The melee members of the group, Peter, Maia and Mattie, sneaked forward. Peter felt his heart beating so hard in his chest that he was worried that it would wake the goblins. Maia and Mattie, however, found that they felt a surprising calm now that they were about to engage in combat. Maia’s calm was that of icy sureness, while Mattie’s was more like the serenity that she’d been chasing after with her Tai Chi all along.

Abruptly one of the Goblins sat up, looked blearily at the party, and made a screaming sound. The crack of a gunshot filled the enclosed space as Elaine shot it in its center mass, causing the green little monster to practically explode as the bullet did an abnormal amount of damage to it.

The combat started, and the disoriented goblins all began jumping to their feet and racing for where they’d stashed their weapons. Sophie killed one of them with an arrow in its back, and Junior took down another with his crossbow.

Before the remainder finished arming themselves, Peter raced up behind one of them and, just like he was swinging for the outfield, smashed it in the head with his baseball bat. The result was the goblin’s head turning into a pulp and a messy spray squishing onto the wall.

Mattie jumped and pinned another of the goblins to the ground, stabbing with the long end of her crowbar and piercing it through its heart. The goblin went still within moments. Maia tripped another one with her hockey stick and began beating it until her stick broke, then resumed beating it with her own fists. The goblin went limp as her Stamina enhanced blows broke its bones.

The two remaining goblins managed to arm themselves with a club and a dagger, respectively, and turned to charge the group. Erik Stepped forward and slashed his machete at one, and even though it didn’t look like his weapon connected, the goblin’s head suddenly fell from its shoulders. It took two more steps and fell.

The final goblin looked around at the party, then charged at Eli. It was wielding a dagger, and he stepped forward to test out how his enchanted bat would do against it, but before it reached him the goblin suddenly jerked to the side with the bright orange fletching of a modern arrow piercing the side of its chest. It continued forward, but stumbled and fell after two steps.

It fell to the floor, wheezed twice, and went still.

The group looked about the aftermath, their ears ringing from Elaine’s pistol. Sophie ran out to the intersection to see if anyone was coming to investigate that, but ten minutes passed and it seemed that their slaughter went unnoticed.

The party regrouped. Maia took one of the clubs from the goblin’s stockpile to replace her broken hockey stick, noting that the primitive weapon was heavier and stockier but would hopefully survive more than a single blow with her enhanced strength.

“Okay. So, what did we learn?” Eli asked.

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“That goblins are easy to kill?” Peter asked.

“Maybe,” Erik said, frowning. “We got the drop on them. We outnumbered them. Between those two factors, there’s no reason we should have been in danger from that fight, but things still went wrong. Elaine, I don’t know if you noticed, but—”

“Yeah, I noticed,” she said, looking at a bullet in her hand. “That wasn’t a hollowpoint bullet. It did way more damage than I was expecting it to.”

“It did 1d4 sonic damage to the rest of our ears too,” Luke pointed out. “Honestly, I kind of wish you hadn’t done that.”

“Yes, well, it happened,” she said. She put her bullet back into her vest and shook her head. “Either goblins are especially vulnerable to bullets, or it’s something to do with my class. But either way, my service pistol is more dangerous than I thought it would be.”

“Maybe this won’t be so bad after all,” Sophie said. “I noticed that my arrows have an extra punch. Maybe bullets are the same way.”

“I don’t think so,” Eli said. He glanced at Gabri, who was searching through the loot they’d taken from the goblins. “I think that it’s the system enhancing the weapons because of who is using them.”

“Well, regardless, we proved that we can take on goblins if we catch them sleeping and unprepared,” Junior said. “But let’s not get complacent, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eli agreed. Then they began moving forward again.

Having returned to the fork in the passage, the group took the other option this time and found that the path lasted longer this time. When it did branch off, they took the left exit, with Sophie leading the way as their scout.

While she had promised that she would only stay a few hundred yards in front of everyone, the truth is that she continued to jog even after she’d reached that point until, suddenly, she came across another large, open room. She gasped at what she found, then returned to the group.

From Eli’s perspective, she abruptly reappeared and motioned for everyone to retreat.

“Goblins,” she said. “Fifty of them. All in one place. And they’re not sleeping. They’re cooking something, and it kind of looks like it’s something that used to walk on two legs.”

“Right. Back to the fork,” Eli said, and nobody argued as they returned down the passageway and took the other way this time.

They continued to navigate the maze. They came across another small encounter with five goblins and swiftly executed them with a brutal ambush, although Elaine refrained from firing her pistol on them this time. Even so they were concerned about the screaming, and so they continued to push forward.

Fortunately it didn’t seem that the large room they had skipped had heard them, and although there was a goblin who came to investigate from in front of them, Sophie dispatched him with an arrow to the chest and didn’t even bother to report it to everyone behind her until they stumbled upon the body.

The path split again, and Sophie wrote on the wall with a marker that she was scouting the left path. Everyone else paused at the intersection to wait, except Elaine, who volunteered to explore the right path. They both returned a few minutes later.

“Dead end with twenty Goblins defending it,” Sophie said.

“Another split,” Elaine reported. So they took the path that Elaine had scouted rather than the dead end.

Once they reached the next fork, Elaine and Sophie again scouted. While the group was waiting, the rest of the party was nervously chatting about how the first floor was proceeding.

“It’s a lot easier than I was expecting,” Luke was saying.

“We haven’t had a real battle yet, so shut up and don’t jinx us,” Junior scolded his younger brother.

“I just mean that—”

Abruptly, an arrow took the mage in the shoulder, and he cried out in pain. The group turned about just in time to see ten goblins coming around the bend behind them.

The goblin with the bow hollered in victory as he strung another arrow.

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