by S. R. Witt
Hell, I hadn’t even been able to trust my brother when push came to shove.
The Key rustled in the back of my brain. “You do a lot of crying, don’t you?”
The rough voice bugged the shit out of me. “It’s easy to be a smartass when you don’t have to do any of the work.”
There was no response from the Key, and I kept on walking. It wouldn’t take me long to catch the goblin army at this rate, but I didn’t think catching up to them was in my best interest. I hung back, followed the marching goblins, and tried to think of a plan.
It took most of the afternoon to circle around the sinkhole that held the Crumbling Temple. It was hard to believe just a few hours ago I’d been planning how to infiltrate the place, and now I was carting around its most precious treasure.
A lot can change in a few hours.
A lot can change in a few minutes.
Standing on a hill behind the army, I saw the problem brewing before their scouts did.
A string of shadows staggered away from the rim of the crater surrounding the Crumbling Temple. It was impossible to see details at this distance, but I knew the identities of the trio. Cringer, Indira, and Mercy had escaped the temple after all. But they’d stumbled right into the jaws of our enemies.
My heart sank as a detachment of goblin soldiers peeled away from the main body of the troops and surrounded my friends. In moments, the whole group was captured, and the goblins dragged them back toward army’s main body.
My fists clenched in aggravation. Seeing my allies in the goblins’ hands drove me nuts. My blood boiled and the urge to rush down there and start stabbing my way through the goblins was overwhelming.
“That’d be smart,” the Key snapped. “Go to all this trouble to find me and then hand me over to the same assholes you stole me from. Genius.”
The Key was infuriating, but it was also right. Charging down the hill and starting a fight would only end in my death and the Key’s capture. My friends and I would all get to die together in a stupid, pointless execution that would undo all of our accomplishments.
“You have a better idea?”
The Key chuckled again, and somehow the sound was worse than its smartass comments. “You’re a thief. Steal your friends from the goblins.”
INFILTRATE THE GOBLIN ARMY
The forces of darkness have captured your allies. While a frontal assault is a suicide mission, there is another way.
Objective 1: Reach the captive tent without being detected.
Objective 2: Free the captives without alerting the guards.
Objective 3: Escort the captives out of the camp without being caught.
Difficulty: Hard
Primary Reward: Your friends will not die.
Secondary Reward: Objective 1. You will gain +1 Hide in Shadows skill
Secondary Reward: Objective 2. +1 Dexterity and 1500 experience points
Secondary Reward: Objective 3. 1500 experience points
Penalty for Failure: Death for you, death for your friends, death for everyone! Also, the key will be lost to the nightspawn and Frosthold will become the property of the Noctivagant Legion.
Do you accept this quest?]
“Well, when you put it like that,” I reached out and tapped the “Accept” button on the interface, and the system added the tasks to my quest log.
On the plus side, the goblins were preparing to camp for the evening. The sun was already low on the horizon, and even the goblins couldn’t march at night without risking injuries that would offset any progress they’d make.
The night winds also kicked up the snow into a useful cloak of whipping white that would hide me from prying eyes and cover my tracks. Hopefully, that would give me the concealment I needed to get into the camp and back out again without getting butchered.
As the goblins pitched their tents and lit their fires, I slithered down the hill on my belly. Muck and mud coated my armor and plastered my hair to the sides of my head, but I didn’t care. The dark earth smeared across my cheeks and forehead would obscure my face and make it harder to find me hidden in the shadows.
I needed every edge I could get.
The thing about Goblins is that they’re disorganized and fractious. While individual sergeants did their best to keep their squads in line, there wasn’t a lot of coordination above or below the immediate command level. Scouts filtered out of camp in random directions and poked around looking. There were a lot of them, but they weren’t very good at their job, and they didn’t take pains to be sure they covered every angle.
The scouts we’d encountered earlier must have been an advanced group. They were definitely more professional and capable than these louts. They’d also had their own commanding officer, which went a long way toward keeping the unruly monsters in line.
With the uncertain light of the setting sun throwing long shadows over the earth, hiding from these scouts was a piece of cake.
Even the pickets surrounding the camp were next to useless. The guards were bored and tired from a day of marching and just wanted to get away from their posts to huddle around the campfires their friends were roasting meats over. The assignments they’d been given irritated them and made them unruly and argumentative. All I had to do was wait for a pair of the guards to start squabbling and scuffling, then I slipped right past their post without even needing to make a skill check.
Goblin were cheap and effective soldiers, but they weren’t the cream of the crop.
The goblins had laid out their patchwork tents in a seemingly random, maze-like pattern. The lack of long sight lines and open spaces made it a cinch for me to slip through their camp like a deadly shadow.
Most of the goblins were gathered around campfires, roasting rabbits or rats or whatever other wildlife had fallen into their hands. The tents were empty, for the most part, so I slipped inside one and waited for the goblins to settle in for the night. Trying to rescue my friends while the monsters were all up and about would be a lot harder than it would be after our enemies were fast asleep with full bellies
Alone in the dark, sheltered from the cold, exhaustion started taking its toll. I blinked away the first few urges to sleep, then resorted to pinching myself to stay awake. My stamina didn’t look bad, but I was just plain old tired. If I didn’t get some sleep in the next few hours, I’d end up falling right into a coma on my feet.
It must’ve caught up with me faster than I’d expected, because one moment I was pinching my wrist to stay awake, and the next I was waking up to an angry goblin brandishing a crooked knife in my face.
He opened his mouth and barked a string of broken syllables at me, none of which I recognized as anything friendly. I lifted my hands high, showing him I was no threat.
So far, none of the goblins outside had taken any notice of us. They were busy fighting over poorly cooked scraps of food and who had to stand guard next. But it wouldn’t take much more of a disturbance before this guy’s friends came looking for trouble.
He sidled up to me, pointing at the pouches hanging on my hip with the tip of his dagger. I nodded and reached down to loosen the purse strings. His eyes were glued to my hand, greed overpowering survival instinct.
I wasn’t sure how much of this was just bad AI programming, and how much of it was baked into the general stupidity of the goblin personality, and I didn’t care.
I pulled a fistful of nothing from my pouch and stretched it out toward him. He pushed his hand under mine to catch whatever baubles I was going to drop for him and never saw the attack coming.
I closed my fingers around his wrist and yanked him forward. Off balance, he flailed with his knife hand, but his attack went wide. My free hand looped around his clenched fist and redirected the knife. Just like that, the fight was over.
He fell back, his own weapon shoved up through the bottom of his jaw and into his brain. Blood leaked from his nose and ran out over his lips. His eyes bulged from their sockets from the sudden shock and displacement of t
he knife entering the vault of his skull through his soft palate. Poor guy didn’t even get a chance to gargle or let out a death scream before his legs collapsed.
I eased him to the floor and went to work stripping him of his filthy clothes.
The goblin was shorter than me and walked with a hunched, bowlegged gate. His armor was leather, like my own, so I didn’t need to take that. He wore a canvas cloak waterproofed with layer after layer of rancid oil that stank like a dead fish left outside on a hot summer day. My goblin also carried a ridiculous, oversized knife. It was inscribed with all kinds of crude signals and had bone charms hanging from its hilt like status symbols. It was pretty nice for a goblin knife, but it was still a junk weapon good for little more than killing rabbits or skinning rats.
My stilettos were so much nicer than this garbage. But they were also missing.
I pulled the goblin’s cloak over my own, shuddering at the stink, and yanked his knife out of his brain. More blood oozed from the fatal wound, and his eyes sank back into their sockets. I wiped the blade on his greasy hair and got most of the blood off it.
Good enough.
With the cloak’s hood pulled down low over my face, and my shoulders sloped forward, I could pass for one of the goblins. I stank like them, I looked like them, and I wiggled my knife around in front of me like I wanted to stab someone just like them.
The disguise wasn’t anything fabulous, but it must’ve done the trick.
SUCCESS! You have fashioned a crude, but serviceable disguise.
Only your mother, your neighbor, that kid down the street, and the occasional wandering monster can see through your disguise attempts.
You have learned the rudiments of the Disguise skill. (Rank 1)
There seemed to be a definite shift in the tone of the game’s messages since I’d picked up the Key. There was a lot more sarcasm floating through the prompts now, and the sullen, straightforward descriptions I’d been getting had given way to this more conversational, and much more confrontational, tone.
Don’t flatter yourself, the Key snarled. It isn’t always about you.
The last thing I needed just then was the Key giving me lip. I shoved it out of my thoughts and focused on finding my friends.
To that end, the game was proving most helpful. As I’d picked up a quest to rescue them, their location showed up as an objective on my in-Game minimap. A dull golden light blinked in the upper right-hand corner of my screen.
Of course, they couldn’t be close. They were being held all the way across the camp from the tent where I’d hidden. I kept my head low, my posture aggressive, and just kept walking in the right direction. There were a few detours to move around clusters of tents, and I did my best to avoid going anywhere near the sergeants, and it took almost an hour for me to get close to my friends.
And the closer I got to the tent where they were being held captive, the more confident I became. The goblins I passed avoiding making eye contact with me and steered well clear of my knife’s tip.
Trying to imagine how these poor creatures lived gave me a moment of empathy I didn’t enjoy. Somewhere, someone much more powerful than them cracked the whip over their head and pushed them into this life. They didn’t have a choice in the matter, and no one asked them what they wanted to do for a career.
Lost in my musings over the hidden lives of the average monster, I almost missed the change that ruined everything.
The dot representing my friends was no longer stationary.
Oh. Shit.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
If the goblins were moving Mercy and the others, they weren’t doing it for fun. Someone important must’ve wanted to see the captives. With our luck, the army’s general wanted to eat them.
Screw that noise. If I was going to free my friends, I needed to do it before they got wherever they were being taken.
Picking up the pace drew attention to me. One of the goblins barked something as we passed, and I responded with a shove I hoped convinced him I wasn’t to be fucked with. I waved my knife around with a little more gusto, hoping the violent gestures would convince other soldiers to give me a wider berth. It worked, at least for the few minutes I needed.
According to the radar flickering in the corner of my vision, I was close. Rounding another set of tents brought me within sight of my friends.
It didn’t do me any good because they were surrounded by a group of very unpleasant looking goblins. These were bigger than the others I’d passed and wore armor you could almost consider useful. It was fashioned from thick iron plates fastened to rows of black chain. It didn’t look comfortable, and it certainly made it harder for them to move around, but it would absorb a hell of a lot of damage. Anything short of a ballista would have a hard time punching through armor that heavy.
This was going to me get me killed. It was pretty obvious I couldn’t win this fight, but maybe I didn’t need to. Maybe I just needed to give my friends the edge they needed to fight their way out. It was the only shot we had.
A goblin bumped into me while I was eyeballing the captives. Our faces were only inches apart, and his widening eyes told me he wasn’t fooled by my shitty disguise.
Crrraaaaap.
He opened his mouth to sound the alarm, and I responded the only way I knew how. The stolen goblin’s knife flashed between us and vanished up under his rib cage. A trickle of blood dribbled over his lower lip; I shoved the knife up into his lungs and gave it a twist for good measure.
A quick shove sent the goblin stumbling on his way, his hands clutching his wounded side. He took a few steps, then collapsed in a heap between a pair of tents.
There was no time to gloat over my brief victory. The back of the first guard was within reach, and I knew it was time to kick my plan into gear. I blinked, and my Thief’s Eyes scanned the enemy targets. Their armor was solid, but it wasn’t without flaws. Where the plates met the chains, there were small gaps. Highlighted in red, these chinks were the key to my victory.
Once I made my move, I was committed. Whether my friends were able to fight back or not, I’d be exposed. This shot had to count.
I took careful aim, clutched my stolen goblin knife, and lunged. The crude weapon vanished between the links of chain below the plate protecting the closest guard’s left shoulder. The hilt banged into the chains, and I was ripping the dagger free before the status message stopped scrolling past.
SNEAK ATTACK X5 DAMAGE!
Critical Strike!
Damage: 100 health
Goblin Elite Guard’s lung is punctured! Stamina reduced to zero with zero recovery until healed.
Goblin Elite Guard is bleeding severely! (20/second)
Goblin Elite Guard is stunned for 30 seconds.
BRACERS OF THE STRIKING SERPENT ACTIVATED!
SUCCESS!
Damage: 30 health
You have increased your mastery of the Weapon (Piercing, 1H) skill. (Rank 5)]
The big guy wasn’t dead, but he was as good as gone. Judging by the length of his remaining health bar, he’d lost three-quarters of his total health, and the rest would bleed out over the next 30 seconds while he was stunned.
The guard standing next to the one I’d just punctured noticed what was going on a second too late.
There was no time to aim for the gap in his armor, so I went for my favorite target: the throat.
He was taller than me but not by much. A little jump brought me within striking distance, and my dagger found its mark.
Its tip entered the soft flesh just below his jaw, striking through his skull and into the lump of fat and stupid between his ears.
CRITICAL STRIKE!
Damage: 30 Health
Goblin Elite Guard suffers serious brain damage. Intelligence reduced to 0 with no recovery possible.
Goblin Elite Guard is bleeding moderately! (10/second)
Goblin Elite Guard is enraged!
BRACERS OF THE STRIKING SERPENT ACTIVATED!
SUCCESS!
Damage: 40 Health
Well, that was unexpected.
Though the goblin’s brain was reduced to a slurry sloshing around the base of his skull, he was far from out of the fight. I’d triggered some primal survival instinct built on the need to kill.
Faster than I’d imagined possible, his oversized scimitar slammed into my left shoulder. The berserk rage filling him with extra strength and speed saved my life.
He was so lost in his bloodlust, he’d hit me with the flat of his sword. The shot still landed with enough force to knock 20 hit points off my total and send me sprawling into the mud.
But it didn’t kill me.
The rest of the goblins realized they had a problem that needed their attention. Three elite guards remained, and they all turned their attention to me.
My allies, on the other hand, were standing around gaping. My disguise had worked too well. Indira and the others thought they were watching a goblin revolt, not a rescue attempt.
