“Hey, Dendrite,” I said.

Denrite walked up to the Goblins arrayed around the metal crate and examined them closely.

“They’re not attacking me, so I assume that means they know what’s up,” Dendrite said. After looking one of the Goblins from head to foot, Dendrite added, “God, they’re disgusting.”

“I know,” I answered quickly. As we spoke, my eyes were focused on the metal crate. I was trying to figure out how I would move it. “Don’t swat them, though. They’re mine.”

“Oh, I see,” Dendrite said, looking at the roman numeral that had been branded on the Goblins’ shoulders. “In fantasy worlds, goblins are either cute little guys or terrifying monsters. I guess we got the monsters. Hey,” Dendrite started speaking to a Goblin, “what happened to you? How were you created?”

After a long moment of thought, the Goblin said, “I don’t know. We were created by GM before the First Deluge. That’s all I know.”

There was a tension in the Goblin’s voice that caused me to look up. He spoke as if he was trying to control his emotions. When I looked at the Goblin, I saw that his lower lip was protruding, and his eyes were glassy.

The Goblin was trying not to cry.

What? They were capable of sadness? Dendrite and I must have hurt the Goblin’s feelings when we called him disgusting. Why would GM bother giving his weapons the capacity to feel any emotion beyond loyalty to their superiors and hatred of their enemies? Despite the festering hatred I felt toward all Deluvians at that moment, I couldn’t stop myself from viewing the Goblin as just a bit more human.

I was able to loosen the straps on the crate enough that I was able to remove the cargo parachute from its exterior structure. With the crate now free, I started dragging it.

“Well? Lead us to the 13th Legion,” I said, gesturing for the lead Goblin to start walking.

As we started walking, I briefly considered the behavior of the Deluvians that we had made contact with. Once I had shown them who I was, they were no longer hostile and started following my orders. This was expected. What I didn’t expect, however, was the lack of any expressions of faith.

Just about every individual I had previously interacted with in GM’s hierarchy bowed and scraped when they knew who I was. The sorcerers and loyal Cognoscenti on Merkopia worshiped me like I was a god. The Goblins followed my orders, but they did not look upon me with reverence.

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Usually, I would appreciate this lack of worship, but the Goblins’ behavior toward me suggested that their loyalty wasn’t a matter of faith. They didn’t view me as a god. They viewed me as a commanding officer. I suspected that the Deluvians didn’t have a natural inclination toward religion like humans.

How did they view GM, then? If he was their creator, but they didn’t experience worship in the same way humans did, then they would most likely view him as something akin to a father.

After less than a hundred yards, I started spotting groups of hidden Deluvians. Dendrite lightly gripped the mace at his belt as we passed under a squad of three Goblins sitting on top of a building. None of the Deluvians we passed attacked us. They must have seen the five Goblins we were walking with and the several-hundred-pound metal crate I was dragging with minimal effort as indicators that something special was happening.

We walked for a few minutes with the sound of metal scraping against concrete being the only sound to break the silence. Eventually, we traveled past a side road that contained nothing except for a truck and a few Goblins.

My gaze was drawn to the truck. I stopped dragging the crate and started walking down the side road. The Goblins moved to stop me, but I got them to back off by flashing my tattoo.

My eyes locked on the bed of a pickup truck pulled over to the side road’s curb. I soon reached the pickup truck and looked closely at its cargo.

“Oh, God,” Dendrite said from my left. I heard a choking sound emanate from his throat as he fought the urge to throw up.

The bed of the truck held dozens of human corpses. The bodies were shrunken and damaged. Their faces were still contorted by the pain of their violent deaths. Some of the corpses had lost their limbs as a result of the process that had brought them into the bed of the truck.

The corpses were all stuffed together like sardines in a can. They were all in an advanced state of decay, so their rotted flesh all melded together into one putrid mass. Men, women, and children had all been stuffed into the bed of that truck. Their skin was pallid and grey, and many of their cosmetic features had already begun to fall off.

The sun and exposure to the air must have caused them to decay faster. Their skin was marked with countless blemishes where animals had started to eat them. When I looked more closely, I could see that every one of them had been shot with a gun at least once. It was difficult to tell which wounds were the cause of death, and which were post-mortem.

And the smell…

“Sir?” I heard one of the Deluvians speak from behind my back.

I was finally able to wrench my eyes away from the pile of human corpses. Before me was standing one of those disgusting monsters.

A bullet had destroyed the Goblin’s brain before I fully understood what I was doing. I held in my hand a pistol with a smoking muzzle. It was as if my body, guided completely by hate and disgust, had shot the Goblin on its own.

“You killed these people?” I asked the Goblin standing next to the freshly-made corpse. His answer didn’t really matter.

“Yes,” the Goblin said, terror in his voice, “but…”

I shot the other Goblin in the head. Due to our close proximity, its skull popped, and I was covered in blood.