This area was pretty much crawling with goblins. Since it was where so many of their blocky, flaming troop transports had landed, and the massive teleport formation to download them from the Rock that housed most of them had been set up, that wasn’t a big surprise.

However, now that it had been identified, there were a lot of explosions going off. Casual orbital bombardments, if only dropping big rocks on them, were a thing. ICBM’s, and artillery shooting off from over the horizon, were also a thing. There were explosions, as well as lots of poison gas working off green blood. Monstrous mech crawlers the size of buildings were trundling here and there, like battleships going over the land, shooting off massive cannons that spewed plumes of fire a hundred yards long when they fired, to the cheers of the watching goblins.

Endless hordes of green, one-tenth of endless hordes of black, and one-fiftieth of endless hordes of furry yellow were streaming off the teleport point as Flamejumping goblins waving knives and slugthrowers whooped and ran off them, eager to get into the fray and maybe light some fires of their own.

Goblins, goblins everywhere you could see...

Now, logically, even I shouldn’t be moving through this area. I mean, we’re talking a hundred thousand goblins to a square mile density here. I was only killing forty-some a second, after all. There were big things with cannons all over the place, and if they killed a few hundred or thousand of their own getting rid of something important, well, said goblins died in big fiery explosions, which is all they could wish for, right?

That’s one reason Chalice was Mindfeasting, and popping me all over the place.

It was just Linejumps, line of sight, moving from location to location where there were tons of stuff to shoot at and rip apart, and making it deuced hard for those bigger guns to draw a bead on me, and definitely impossible for them to catch up to me.

I plunged into a throng of goblins and started the Cleave Train, shredding a swathe over twenty feet wide through the horde in a flying explosion of green blood and body parts. I was definitely harvesting enough short-term PP to power the Linejumps as I made way towards their teleporter formations.

And yes, they could ALL hear me coming, and they were even singing ‘akkK!’ along with me, despite knowing what was coming.

Yeah, in Goblin, it was VERY well written, it made their flesh crawl and their knees shake. Those who had heard it live were instant fans, and there was a huge competition in the goblin infosphere to get all the verses. According to their chatrooms, there were goblins already crooning it halfway across the galaxy.

What? The Ranthas and Goldilock crews had to learn Goblin and some very weird logic processes, but what the gobs called an infosphere wasn’t anything complex... although I challenged any Mekker to comprehend that base 13 number system without blowing a gasket...

The hobgoblin women were desperately trying to imitate my success with it, as they were the primary musicians among the goblins. However, the pure cheerful malevolence seemed to defeat them.

Seeing a vid of thousands of runts going ‘akkK!’ fluently in perfect tune to the song was oddly gratifying, however...

Whatever, goblins were running forward to see their star, and dying in whooping glee, many suiciding with bombs and grenades to help write the final and proper epithet to the song, the one where I went ‘aargh!’ or ‘aiiee!’

They weren’t sure which one was appropriate yet, so they were trying to find out, see.

Of course, I could sit in a fusion bath, so they weren’t going to hurt me with those... or the particle guns ripping up the atmosphere and concussing everything around me. Slugthrowers and shrapnel, fellas... but I wasn’t going to tell them that, and only a cannon was actually going to hurt me.

Which was fine. Watching me running right through explosions, my shooting never stopping, accented the vids for them nicely.

Then one of the enterprising Goldilocks kids took an hour of my visuals, edited it, added lots of things, including goblin ID’s as I popped them going out, ‘akkK’s’ going off over their heads, and uploaded it into the goblin infosphere.

Damn thing had four hundred million views within an hour, and was being viewed halfway across the galaxy within six. With all new lyrics based on those killed, of course.

All my Perform-Talented girls mocked me endlessly. Apparently the only serious pageviews I could accumulate were among goblins... until I pointed out all the Dark Angel vids out there, and how those seemed to be accumulating...

G&G had quietly bought up the publishing rights to my image early and was making good money off it, too. I understood the playing cards were pretty popular in the Marines... and catfights were already erupting over which of the girls got to play me in the videos sure to be coming, since they were happily setting up the studios to do so...

Stolen story; please report.

Ahem!

Path eight paces wide through throngs of goblins, surrounded in blurs of gold Swords, violet lasers widening the pathway, Spikes poking anything that happened to survive the lasers, feeding Chalice before she whisked me away to another position to keep running. Singing goblins dying loudly were everywhere...

Okay it was hilarious, but the goblins seemed to love it. They had just the mindset to appreciate it. The hobgoblins and urgobs, not so much, except when swathes of hard violet lines limned in green and white were sweeping towards them... “akkK!”

There were the Pylons, cooking with nebula green and parablack lightning, space-tearing fire erupting as atoms were smashed to crush two distant points together, and more goblins, vehicles, and goblins, and mecha, and goblins, were dumped into the fray.

Only a couple of miles to go...

Plumes of dirt and fire were rising all over the place, sometimes scattered, sometimes in walls. Dark walls of lethal gas swept over goblin positions, and left corpses behind if they didn’t have vac suits. Starburst shells exploded and covered acres in falling naptha, and goblins squealed in excitement and pain as they died by fire. The number of rockets and missiles flying back and forth was immense, and the piloted craft made the prettiest explosions, be it in the air or spiraling out of control into the ground.

Bonus ‘ooohs’ from the crowd if they took out a mecha or a hapless bunch of gobs when they hit.

----------

Yeah, that’s the runeform, yep, there, there, matched on the far side, yep, sever there, cut there...

A dozen Ranthas were helping with the calculations as I closed in, looking through the soup of the atmosphere as a constant hundred-decibel roaring was spiking to up to a hundred and fifty every so often (and Chalice’s song was perfectly audible through it all, thank you). We had 3D views of the Pylons, the psitech structures leaking so much pan-dimensional energy (parablack lightning... riiiiight... antiphotons or something?) that I dreaded to think how much power those gobs could harness if they could only scale up the efficiency properly...

Still, time to shut down the incoming teleports.

I jumped onto the pylons with Dragon Walk, Sun Strikes ripping into the structures with Construct-bashing glee, chewing through the odd materials and odder energies, here, there, and there, and there as I ran up and around the things.

Power conduits snapped, vented in odd directions. Black and green lightnings blew out and around me. Feedbacks started inside this pylon, and Paten and Host played around the lines of managing technicians, who all shouted ‘akkK!’ loudly as they died, desperate to get on film.

One of my thoughtstreams started editing it for them in admiration.

“Gorb turned to Flark

Or, see dat up on dere?

Yah, she gonna fritz boom it.

De shooties helpin’ out

Oh, de cannon sprotzed numfour!

Fixit fixit afore dey come

Oh, Zog she saw uz -akkK!”

They were immortalized, as the goblins’ own cannons energetically blew off chunks of the Pylon, and I got on the far side and set up a personal Interdiction on a certain point as power surged through the whole system.

I was sure the techies could have stopped it, but they were transfixed by the idea of how glorious a boom it was going to make, and didn’t bother with any emergency stops.

Snaking power flowed between the pylons, and got really twisted coming to and from the one I was standing on. Space wobbled, began to stretch, and reached out to the pylon I was on... and the key Rune I was standing on, where space was harder than adamant, and not going to be doing the flex thing at all, thank you.

Power exploded, trying to tear open space, except the anchor wasn’t there. Space folded at alarmingly wrong angles, lost coherency, and fed back into the Pylons.

Yeah, it was a very pretty explosion, had to admit. You just don’t see space blowing apart at right angles to itself every day.

-------

The Pylons blew out as the energy they’d used to fold space vented back into them. They weren’t capacitors, this was supposed to be flow-through power. Runes went off in all sorts of colors, reality invented a few new ones, the Warp tried to come in and was sent off at left angles (that was VERY interesting to see, and started a whole new train of dimensional physics thought), and as some random atoms lost cohesion and decided to convert to pure energy, I made a jump and inertial-dumped via Featherweight off my Ring.

There were a lot of rads and light and heat, but I wasn’t afraid of any of that. The shockwave could have been bad, but Featherweight meant I had no inertia, and all it did was shove me away really fast, the air streaming past my Vajra as I was flattened on the bow of the shockwave, racing a line of matter-distorting energy and random space-time sitting up and doing calisthenics for a second or three, before going back on the couch while Reality gargled a mouthful of broken space-time and spat it back out.

There were howls of awed glee for miles around as cracks in space, mushroom clouds in multiple layers and angles, and lots of fire in some crazy colors and configurations lit everything up.

Goblin fireworks ftw! Losing their fast way out and in? Minor, trivial detail. Waddasho!

------

I came down out of the sky, crashing down on a plaza cooked flat by fusion flame, a lot of very heavily armored urgobs there, who were all staring raptly at the horizon being on so much fire. They kind of blinked when I slammed down in front of them, and the massive lander they’d walked out of behind them.

I straightened up, dusted myself off, and looked at them.

“Tremble, oh oooo oh, Tremble, she comes...

Or, guyz! Itz her! Dat skinny

Da one wut killed dem gits

In da black plaz ain’t goin’ back to

Gold sword anz killin all

Shown ‘em whatz a git

E’en da trees and bugs

Or me name’s not Gogrum-“

Paten aimed. The shocked hobgoblin crossed his yellow eyes at the leyser dot on his flat nose, shouted, “akkK!” and his head blew off, right on cue. The stanza ended with a certain set of very familiar notes to a certain gaping urgob, throwing off the normal lead-in...

I wrinkled my eyes at the familiar cybered urgob in much beefier power armor, who stared at me in total shock. “Hey, furball, fancy meeting you here!”