CHESHIRE GETS A CRUSH

I spend a good portion of our walk to the walls staring at Goose’s face. She has dull grey-green eyes, jet black hair pulled into a very tight ponytail secured by what looked like an iron shackle, her skin was pale, save for rather red cheeks, her lips thin, her nose small and a little hawk-like, her jaw sharp and she had a contrastingly cute smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose as well as on her forehead and cheeks. I held perfect eye contact, while planning my method of attack. “So… come here often?” I asked before immediately seeing my life flash before my eyes. This is all over. I’d better crawl into a little hole with my fellow worms. Although, she didn’t seem to care about the awkwardness that seemingly emanated from me like slime emanated from a hagfish. She just answered me with a casual shake of her head. “First time going to the wall?” I asked. She shook her head again. “So, you’ve been, just not a lot?” She looked to consider, before giving me a so-so gesture. Erianna interrupted my thought-provoking conversation with her slightly biting voice. “Goose has been to the wall more times than all the rest of us combined. I think she means she hasn’t been here often with the rest of us.” Goose nodded in the affirmative to what Erianna said. “I see, why do you go to the wall so much?” I asked. Goose just stared at me. Before she shrugged. Damn… I thought I finally backed her into a corner. “Don’t bother,” Erianna said, “If I can’t get her to talk, you definitely can’t. I’ve been trying for so long and all I’ve gotten was, You’re too weak.” That last bit she’d said in a deep, softer tone. Was she mimicking Goose’s voice? Was that what she sounded like? Why did I feel like I had just gotten a glimpse at bigfoot?

My nonsense was interrupted as we approached the wall. I’d seen it before, of course. I’d lived in Hope’s Grave my entire life, but it never ceased to amaze me. “Praise Lumina,” I muttered absentmindedly as the wall loomed overhead. It was absolutely massive. Nearly 200 feet tall and made of seamless smooth stone. Not just tall, it was thick. Looking through the tall archway we were approaching, proved it to be nearly 50 ft thick. As amazing as it was, it caused a chill to run down my spine. I, of all people, knew why the wall was this imposing. It was a simple reason: it had to be. And I was about to leave the protection of the wall that was so tall and thick by necessity. I took a deep breath. Okay… okay… calm down. Let’s go back to bothering Goose… or… or… thinking about how I might be able to get her to speak to me… or even. I raised my hands and slapped them to my cheeks. Okay… you got this… there’s nothing out there that you don’t know about… probably. Well, it’s the things that I’m not ready for that’ll get me. Nope! Don’t think about it. You have a team, they’re probably good, what was it James said? Monster equivalent of a paper shredder? I looked at Goose… she didn’t look that strong. She was clearly athletic, but not like… I don’t know… super athletic. Hell, she was only a little taller than I was, and I was practically a bacterium. Sorry, Lumina. We reached the gates, showed at least a dozen permits, and signed several waivers. Well, James had to sign them, he was the team leader, and therefore authorized to sign of the behalf of team members if only for expediency. And all to soon. I stepped past the far side of the long tunnel and beheld the carnage. I didn’t know what to expect. But the bare, scorched ground was certainly not it. It looked like a battlefield out here. And sure, I’d seen pictures, but pictures didn’t have the smell. It smelled like war. Like countless things had dies here en masse. The air smelled of mana smoke. Smoke a the tingling acrid scent similar to ozone.

The bare ground was long, but not too long. We trod across the ground as my panic addled brain finally realized James was speaking. “-we get in there, Emeline, I want you out ahead, checking for anything dangerous, Nathanial, I want you in front of me, Cheshire I want you in the back. Got it?” We all replied in the affirmative, save for Goose, who said nothing, so I spoke up for her. “What’s Goose gonna do?” “Kill anything that moves,” Emeline said before her colorful clothes twisted and shifter into a camo suit, before she dashed off, entering the tree line. It was at that point I realized I didn’t actually know why we were here… I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to seem like an idiot. So, I just followed along. The heavy bag on my back barely impeded my movement as I stepped into the thick forest.

I half expected monsters to jump out at us the moment we set foot in here, I half expected there to be dangerous flora growing in between every third root, but the closest thing to a monster I saw was some songbirds chirping away high above, and the closest thing to carnivorous flora I saw was a bush of nettles. It… was just a forest. And apparently, it just being a normal forest… was worse. I was as tense as a bar of steel. I almost jumped at almost everything even remotely resembling a noise, I couldn’t stop glancing around, and every time the radio beeped from Erianna reporting in, I literally jumped; ready to be descended upon by any sort of silver rank hell beast. I almost suspected we were under the influence of a dream drinker, a monster that looked sort of like a toad, that would place their victims under a sort of delirium and lure them into the claws of something that would shred them to pieces so they both could partake of our hubristic flesh. The only problem was, I was extensively familiar with the signs of a dream drinker’s influence, and I hadn’t even caught a whiff of one. Although to be fair, they lived further in where the forest became a swamp. And that area was strictly forbidden seeing as there were slimes there and slimes were practically unkillable. Although for us, they were literally unkillable.

Slimes were a perfect amalgamation of the worst traits something you wanted to kill could have all balled up into one gooey mass. They were mostly goo-like which ruled out any form of physical attack, they conducted electricity well, which meant they would immediately ground themselves on… well… the ground, they had a very high heat capacity, meaning that they could absorb massive amounts of heat before changing temperature, either to heat them up and boil them or to freeze them. They didn’t even conduct heat well, meaning that while their surface temperature would increase even so much as an inch into their gooey depths, their temperature would remain unaffected, They would instinctually cool, or heat themselves to maintain a desirable temperature by bubbling the surrounding air though themselves, and worst of all, they had no “Core” so to speak. To kill a slime, you had to destroy it on a material level, every single drop of goo is apparently individually sentient. Meaning, that if you let a single droplet get away, then it would just regrow itself, add in their propensity for forming 50-foot tall giga slimes, and devouring everything in their path and you could see why they are gold rank. The only good way to kill them is through dilution, specifically in salt water, as they will merely absorb fresh water into themselves gaining more mass. Effectively, the best way to kill a slime, is to drop it in the ocean. Since you need oodles of salt water to so much as scratch a slime. The only other methods involved basically saturating the entirety of the slime in highly potent magic, which was basically unfeasible. Sort of like trying to vaporize a glass of water, it would take a truly staggering amount of energy to accomplish the task, seeing as you need to far exceed the boiling point of water to get it all to burst into a cloud of steam, and you needed to use this method, since if you didn’t the water would begin to cool itself.

There, I went on a nonsensical mind tangent, am I out of this now? No? I sighed. Which also didn’t help my nerves, and now all I could think about was getting killed by a slime… oh joy. Hey, I made a joke! Does that work? To both my chagrin and gratitude, we continued through the forest without a hitch, Erianna checking in every few minutes, mostly so that we knew she was there, and didn’t get killed by something dangerous. This continued until something different came through the radio. “We’ve reached the target location,” Erianna said. “Good,” James responded, halting our progress. “Take a count and report back,” he said. “On it.” And that was that. I stood there clutching the straps of my backpack, while James examined his wand, Nathaniel removed a large shield from his back and Goose absently tossed one of her blades into the air, spinning it end over end before catching it. Seeing it now, I could tell that it wasn’t really a scimitar. It was a little short, curved and had a wide blade like a scimitar, but it only had a single point, and upon closer examination, it was double edged. After a few minutes, we heard the radio once again. “My count is 16. No shamans, one hob, unknown number in a small burrow, though I doubt there are more than five in there.” She said. Finally telling me what we were doing out here. We were hunting goblins.

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Goblins were iron rank, and therefore, within our strike zone. As far as monsters go, goblins are about as good an introduction as you can get. They are small, a little fast, approximately clever, and had the biggest trait monsters had that made them difficult to deal with. What has been coined, the health bar effect. This is something to do with monster biology, but the short version, is that to kill a monster, you usually have to deal more damage to it than would be needed to kill just about anything else. Stabbing a monster through the chest, will almost never kill it, neither will putting an arrow in its skull. This has been termed the health bar effect because you have to deal a certain amount of damage to the monster as a whole before it goes unresponsive. Similarly, monsters have no internal weak spots, I.E., if you stab a human or an animal through the chest, you’ll probably kill them by puncturing a lung, or a heart, or a major artery. With a monster it’s not that that doesn’t work, it’s just much less effective. You can shoot a monster with a gun, and it won’t do anything no matter where you put that bullet, since relatively it doesn’t deal that much damage compared to a sword in the digestive tract. This is one of the major reasons behind guns, not being viable weapons for monster hunting.

My distraction only vanished when I realized we were moving in. I hastily, but quietly, sped up, returning to my position in the formation. We were here to cull the goblin population, mostly because if we didn’t their numbers would quickly rise into the thousands. The fight started before I even realized. Goose, having wandered off into the goblin encampment, without my notice, began to make them release horrendous screams. I shuddered. Then James spoke. “Now!” he said. We ran forwards into the clearing. Apparently, Goose was our distraction. We ran into the clearing to see… utter carnage. I remembered when I first met the Toad Eaters, James had described her as the monster equivalent to a paper shredder. I never truly knew what that meant until I saw her. She was a dark blur of speed and blades, every movement, as efficient as it was deadly. From the general area in which she stood, I saw limbs, heads, and even entire torsos removed from their bodies with brutal speed and sent flying. The shrieking drew even more goblins from the small burrow roughly in the middle of the clearing. But a ball of fire slammed into them right as they emerged. James’s wand slightly glowing from the spell. The fresh horde of goblins all charged towards us causing a pang of fear to run through me. But Nathaniel readied his shield and slammed it hard into the first goblin to arrive. I winced at the wet popping of cracking bones, as Nathaniel slammed the massive piece of metal into the creature the size of a child.

Nathaniel fired another spell, expertly aiming it past Nathaniel, igniting another goblin in the crowd causing it to scream and flail. I heard a bloody impact ring out behind me and spun to see a goblin. I barely held back a scream as it stumbled back, a blade lodged in its eye. Another one joined it. Right as with a pang of fear I slammed a boot into its stomach, sending it sprawling. I felt more than heard its ribs breaking beneath my foot. I shuddered at the feeling. Had I just… I could still feel it. The impact, followed by something inside of it just… giving way. James, having heard the commotion, sent a ball of flame to finish off the goblin. The fire igniting it and burning it up. I looked back to see where the daggers had came from and saw Erianna sitting in the branch of a tree keeping an eye on us from above. Coincidentally, it was because of that, I saw the small green figure up in a higher branch. It held a bow, arrow knocked and drawn. I screamed out a warning, but I was too late. The projectile, already in flight. Erianna screamed as the arrow plunged into her back. I went pale and froze watching numbly as Erianna fell, hit a branch, and slammed into the ground on her back, the arrow slammed right through her and emerged from the other side. Her scream made something in my bones tingle, the sheer agony in her throat ringing out into the forest. I almost didn’t notice as the goblin dropped down behind her, A wicked dagger in one hand, bow discarded. I watched as it charged her. Arm raised… then… the blade fell… so did the arm, both hitting the ground, causing the goblin to look at its severed stump in confusion. Not having noticed the dark blur that took its arm off. Goose had thrown one of her swords. It screamed, clutching at the severed stump, as the other bloody sword was thrown, this time plunging deep into the goblin’s stomach, spilling red all over the forest floor. But that wouldn’t save Erianna, she was bleeding out, quite rapidly, had it hit a kidney? Suddenly, Goose appeared in front of me, eyes locked on mine with a disapproving glare for just a moment, practically half a heartbeat, before she reached for my waist and grabbed something. Potions. Oh… I was supposed to heal her… that was my job. I… I had frozen. Goose whipped one of the two potions she’d grabbed sidearm at Erianna. The glass shattering on a rock, spraying the red liquid of the healing potion over Erianna. At the same time Goose dashed across the clearing, covering a distance it would take me a good ten seconds to cover in little more than two. When she arrived, she immediately slammed a hand down on the arrowhead, the sharp point going through her palm, spraying blood. Nonplused, Goose twisted her hand, taking advantage of the hooked arrowhead and pulled it through the hole in Erianna’s abdomen. She let out another shriek. But Goose wasn’t done, Using the same arrow and in one motion, she slammed the arrowhead in the second potion, breaking the top off the bottle and pouring the potion into the wound. Then she pulled something out from under her cloak. It was… a gun. Not a handgun, something big and heavy. It was long, black, and had the wide muzzle of a shotgun. She leveled it at the goblin that was staggering to its feet. Its body cut open and showing its insides to the forest air. It held Goose’s sword in its hands. Goose leveled the weapon to its body and with a fwump, followed by a vicious bang, it exploded. Actually exploded. I could feel the shockwave from here. It sent bloody chunks of meat flying everywhere. Goose, calm as ever snatched her sword out of the air. With the arrow hand. The hilt of the blade, pushing the arrow out of the way, before snapping it off at the shaft.

There she stood, dressed in the dark of the reaper’s cloak, broken only by spatters of blood, wounded damsel at her feet, bloody sword in one hand, smoking grenade launcher in the other. Chunks of bloody meat coming down like rain. The clearing around her filled with at least a dozen small green bodies split into at least three dozen pieces. She leaned her head to one side, and in the silence, I heard her neck pop. “Goddess, be damned,” I muttered, she wasn’t even breathing heavily. “I think I’m in love,” I said. Nathaniel let out a cackle. “Damn right you are,” he said. I’m sorry Lumina, but I had to say it. But damn, if she isn’t the coolest person I had ever met in my entire life, bar none. And now she’s mad at me, because my dumbass froze up and almost got a teammate killed. Way to go Chesh, way to go.