What followed was half an hour of something very different from what Damon's combative mind had come to imagine. Rather than try and challenge him to fights—or even feats of strength—apparently, they much preferred to simply squeeze him for answers.
Literally.
It was... intrusive.
With zero respect for personal boundaries, the goblins climbed on and put every inch of Damon's body under freakishly intense scrutiny; with the end result of only finding him wholly unimpressive.
"Quit it!" Damon knew he was no bodybuilder, but prowess came from technique, and fight IQ. These little weirdos seemed awfully misguided, if they were really expecting him to be bloated with muscle. Despite the increase in his Strength stat, there'd been no sign of any actual muscular growth so far. I might have gotten slightly more veiny, but that's probably the starvation.
"I can show you how I fight sometime, and put all your doubts to rest," Damon said, confidently enough that he would have usually expected them to buy it.
Rather the claim was met with a cynicism that he was quickly coming to expect. "Hah, " Followed by a glare and being ignored again.
It very nearly made Damon outright wish for some random enemy to show up, right on the spot, then he could show 'em. Luckily it didn't quite go that far—not before a piercing child's wail rang through the orchard—or Damon would've felt just awful.
"Shit," And the goblin leader took off, determined to not be late to the rescue.
Damon's longer stride allowed him to catch up in seconds, and he interrogated her on the run. "Is there some danger here I should maybe know about?"
Rather than answer him she appeared to be talking to herself. "I told 'em not to head in too far, caps damnit."
They ran past tree after tree, until Damon spotted what, at first, looked to be another hill up ahead, except that wasn't quite right. It may well have looked like just another hill, if they'd been approaching it from the other side. That's not what the scooped out mound looked like from this direction; it looked more like a giant, gaping maw leading ignorant children below ground. From over here, the giant mound appeared almost like it had been hollowed out in ages past; but that wasn't the strange part—since the leafy trees just kept going and going, far past where a cavern's rocky floor should have begun; but all Damon saw was a continuation of the same grass and apple trees as they'd found outside. How is any of it even getting any sunlight?
[Welcome Explorer, to Logos' Eye of the World]
The answer was clearly that it wasn't, not for a vast portion of the day anyway.
That strangeness only distracted Damon for a short while, before they spotted the sprinting goblin child—being hunted down by a very oversized pack of hairy, frenzied spiders.
[Cat's Paw Tarantula - Level 25]
Damon raced ahead preparing to crash into the arachnids, while missus Lila started covering the child's retreat with her shortbow.
The spiders were impossibly large, but still reached no further than Damon's hip, which probably meant they still looked as large as horses to the child being chased. And they were fast. If it wasn't for how skillfully the kid was dodging them—opting to even go in full circles around three trees in a row, rather than be forced into a straight line for more than two seconds—then they would have already caught him and dragged the kid off.
Damon leapt into a move he used to find difficult, now easily executing the technique to perfection—taking three fast steps and launching into a hurricane kick, using the car-like speed of his sprint to start spinning like a thresher and successfully mangling the two spiders in the front with their precarious limbs.
"To me!" Missus called, leading the child to finally break out of his hyper-focused state and use the opening to run straight for the other goblin's position with a desperate cry, while Lila kept firing to keep the rest of the cluster back.
Damon was attracting all the attention now though, bringing the creatures to try and surround him as he fended off fangs and cracked more limbs.
While the creatures did indeed resemble old world tarantulas, there were some key differences. The two front legs had spear-like protrusions on the ends, making it feel more like he was battling a hip-height pike formation than a pack of hungry predators.
Stab, skitter, stab.
Damon was making minute adjustments to avoid being pierced, but the creatures coming at him from every angle were still drawing blood. Another arrow cracked into a raised leg, but then Damon was all out of space, with two more spiders coming up from behind.
Plan C.
So he reached up high instead, hauling himself upward by a leafy branch and using the spring to launch himself into the next tree over. From there, he saw an opening and started hopping from branch to branch, but it seemed that heading for the tree tops was not a valid option when you were being chased by tarantulas; they were still about to catch up far too swiftly.
More and more arrows kept firing at the pack, striking in whistling volleys now and again as more and more goblins started catching up, while Damon kept punishing the ones racing ahead of the pack with violent kicks, but in the end it was the glaring sunlight which really made the hostile creatures rear back, hiss with displeasure and call off the pursuit, leaving a confused Damon panting on the grass.
"Okay, that was some bull, why are spiders that large just hanging around, protecting fruit from kids, of all the goddamn things? Man, I hate hairy spiders. Like, being hairy, that's our thing, you know?"
Despite how the crowd from the orchard had managed to catch up, nobody was listening, except for Billy who pawed the ground twice in agreement.
The goblins were all busy celebrating a young life saved.
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Those events resulted in the second round of explanations to mess with Damon's world that evening, once they returned to the village. But he insisted on first things first.
"Name's Damon," This time he matched her glare for glare when the goblin Redcap turned to him.
She sighed. "You can call me Lila. Thank you for helping…”
Her acknowledging his efforts was certainly welcome, except for how he still caught her muttering under her breath.
“Still a suspicious prick.”
No big deal, he'd been in hostile gyms and had to win groups fighters over to his side before. Sometimes it took time, but it always worked out as long as you proved yourself.
After that he learned another three disturbing truths, in what was quickly becoming a trend.
First Lila explained that their tribe was in fact migratory, having set up their village of huts in this spot less than a year ago. Previously Jacob's Well had been just another watering hole amongst many to be found among the black hills, and it was only from discovering the newly popped up orchard that they had decided to stay. There hadn't been a single tree bearing fruit the last time they were visiting these parts.
Apparently they been known to settle like this for longer periods on occasion, whenever they found a bountiful spot which hadn't yet been discovered by dangerous predators.
"Uh. But what about the spiders?"
Lila had given him a determined mug. "We can handle the spiders. I'm talking about real predators," before she looked away, like the mugging was meant for someone else.
Apparently they usually only came out as night fell, except for when a particularly cold wind blew to wake them up early. Even then they avoided the sun beams like they had deep secrets to conceal.
The little kids who tagged along were generally meant to warn the adults if the winds turned, since the adults were all too high level to really feel it unless they focused on it. On top of that, the kid in question had been challenged by his older sister—a known prankster who was in huge trouble—to go and get the [Explorer] achievement. Only the kid had kept going and going, intent on not only beating his sister's record at a younger age, but surpassing it.
… In the end the darn kid had actually pulled it off, not just earning the achievement, but getting a level out of it by technically being in combat with the creatures when Damon came along and splattered them. So, he was not in any trouble at all; such foolhardiness was expected of goblin children around that age. His sister had still messed up tremendously though, and was going to face severe repercussions.
Damon learned all this sitting around the late night campfire, partaking of some orchard fruits and the white, grilled mushrooms that were still on offer, since the soft bastards actually tasted alright once you put some effort in.
The second truth he learned was how Lila was indeed the true leader of the tribe, the one and only Redcap. But she was far from the oldest in the tribe. In fact she was the youngest leader ever elected to the position, and despite looking around, Damon failed to spot anybody older looking.
Lila looked incredibly reluctant, but eventually dragged the words out to explain. "They're gone, out huntin', or so they claim,” She spat to the side, so Damon barely caught the last muttered words. "Didn't even bring any sponges… who're they kidding."
Oh, guess there's a story there. The goblin named Pipan leaned over and whispered to fill Damon in. "They only share what they know, and what they don't know they don't share."
Apparently Lila actually believed all the seniors had been spooked, and gone looking for answers to some mystery they refused to acknowledge to anybody outside their circle. This was despite Lila having been elected to Redcap fair and square, albeit by the power of the youngsters. It wasn't Lila's fault if she was popular, or if the seniors were better at multiplying than they were surviving… but withholding information from your leader was plain wrong.
Yet, she still only had her suspicions.
A few hours later—once the embers were dying down, and a mere glow from the cinders remained—nearly all the goblins had gone to bed when Lila lit a torch and bid Damon to follow.
She took him to the largest hut at the back of the village and showed him inside.
As it turned out, she'd purposely left Billy out of this last one, not due to a lack of trust for the beast's motivations, but rather in case he ever grew more loyal to someone else with goals of their own in the future. This secret was simply too valuable, to certain rivals of theirs in particular. There was no point in putting their friend through that choice; luckily Damon was naturally disqualified.
What she showed him inside was what appeared to be an ornate vase at first, until he saw how it was see-through and the strong blue color actually belonged to the liquid inside. The bottle had a silver cap on and looked to still be about a third full. Despite this revelation, Damon's attention was instantly pulled to the leftmost corner—where he saw a large, prone crystal form revealed, gleaming in the torch's light.
Lila's speech was all about how this potion was tremendously special, a reward only earned through the valor of many lives lost. The very substance that had earned generations of her tribe their unusually high baseline Perception since ages long past, turning them from mere animals into the proud, traditional folk that stood before Damon today. Even now it guarded the future of their young, granting its blessing to distill the potential of their least fortunate. However, should the wrong animal ever get a hold of this substance, then just a few generions on, the goblins could very well find themselves facing another threat on the level of the Dorsin; a notorious shark tribe who was the bane of many of the landtribes in the area, known to act vindictively against any who dared to stand up against the tremendous power of their blow darts.
Damon barely heard a word of it—instead his full attention was fixated on the crystal form lying still in the corner, staring back at him accusatorially.
"That's fucking Ken!"