by Kumo Kagyu
“The neck… Throat?” Goblin Slayer nodded and thought about this. Destroy the throat. It had worked before. The effect was obvious. But he also remembered how the knife he’d thrown at the guard had missed. It was clear what he had to do.
“I will need to practice.”
“Heh-heh. Speaking of being similar to people, and practicing…”
Arc Mage gave him a pointed glance, then walked into the gloom of the ruins. Her come-hither look led him to a pile of junk. Perhaps they were funerary offerings of some kind; among them were many rust-eaten weapons that looked like they would shatter if they were used to stab anything. Among them, though, was something of patchy, unsightly leather, something discovered deep within the nest.
“A saddle,” Arc Mage breathed. “Who would have expected?”
Goblin Slayer received these words expressionlessly.
Goblin riders.
The goblins had been keeping those wolves as mounts.
“…Does this, too, go back to that battle five years ago?”
“Nobody knows whether they saw other races doing it, or if someone taught them. But somehow, goblins learned the art of riding.” Arc Mage pulled the cloth away from her mouth, carefully wiping her hands and cleaning them with alcohol. Then she rested her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands and narrowed her eyes as she looked at Goblin Slayer. “All living things respond to the environment in which they live.”
Her gaze was profoundly strange, as if she were watching a bug. She seemed both intrigued and not the least interested in what would become of the subject of her observation…
“Did you know? Humans who live in cold places come to have bigger bodies. Like the barbarian of the north.”
“…I’ve heard stories.” Goblin Slayer thought back to the bedtime tales his older sister used to tell him.
The barbarian of the north. A man of bravery. A warrior and a pirate. All the many adventures he had, all the treasures he pillaged and thrones he overthrew. How with nothing but his sword in his hand, he rose from slave to mercenary to general, and finally to king, a great man in a great tale.
To Goblin Slayer, this story was history, and myth, and legend, and also a bedtime story. It meant nothing to him whether it had happened or not. It meant nothing to him who might mock him for it.
For to him, this heroic tale was the truth.
“They were the ones who offered steel.”
“Exactly.” Arc Mage nodded, removing her apron with a casual motion and letting it fall to the ground. She plopped herself down beside the bonfire, patting the ground beside her, inviting him over.
“You know it?” Goblin Slayer said softly, as if he couldn’t believe what he had heard.
“The desolate darkness and the country of night. The way he cursed the people who mocked him for simple machismo, never knowing his true splendor.”
Yes, that’s right. Goblin Slayer nodded. Then after a moment’s thought, he seated himself next to the still-sleeping captive, across from Arc Mage.
She watched him. “That’s all well and good,” she said with a thin smile, and then she looked into the flames. “But there’s something my master told me… Something the lizardmen say. That long, long ago, there was an age of tremendous cold.”
That’s the legend. She didn’t really speak the words, just formed them with her lips.
“And they claim goblins have existed from at least that time—so these hobgoblins, as you call them, might just be creatures who went back to their roots.”
Goblin Slayer looked over at the corpse lying at a distance from the fire. It was the massive goblin he had slain after such struggle—the hobgoblin. It hardly even looked like a goblin, and he had given it little further thought, but…
“You’re suggesting the muscles are so large simply due to a change in body shape…?”
“It’s possible. It might mean the goblins’ ancestors roamed freely across the plains, rather than living in caves.” Arc Mage brought the bottle of cider to her lips and suckled at it, then took a loud swig. “Goblins do come out into the field to attack villages when they’re strong enough…don’t they?”
“…” Goblin Slayer grunted softly, then nodded. “Sometimes.”
“That might imply the state of their nutrition has an impact. Who knows what might happen if they got regular, decent food?”
Goblin Slayer was silent. He couldn’t imagine.
Filthy goblins eating like humans, leading lives like humans. It was a terrible thought.
Even in regions controlled by the forces of Chaos, goblins were but the lowliest of foot soldiers. That fact wouldn’t change until the day goblins overthrew every one of those who had words in the four corners of the world.
Goblins made nothing for themselves—they pilfered and stole everything.
“Oh, say, do you know about that research into fish bodies and schools?” Arc Mage never stopped talking. Goblin Slayer was forced to think about the next thing.
“I don’t.” He replied to the unexpected question with detachment. There was no reason to be flustered. It was better than having rocks thrown at you while you tried to answer a riddle. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“I don’t blame you.” Arc Mage nodded and continued, “I heard about it from my master. They say if you compare fish who travel in schools with fish who live alone, the ones on their own get bigger.”
“…That sounds like common sense to me.”
“Scholarship is all about investigating ‘common sense.’ Otherwise, you’ll never get past the common.” Arc Mage sounded rather pleased with herself. She puffed out her ample chest and smiled. “In overcrowded schools, growth is retarded, and the water becomes polluted with excrement. The fish become incensed and readily resort to cannibalism…”
“…”
“Basically, they become goblins. See what I’m saying?”
Goblin Slayer, still not speaking, watched the wood as it cracked on the fire. He could feel Arc Mage’s smile on him, as if she could see straight through his helmet.
But so what? Goblin Slayer said, “…The way you speak sounds strange to me.”
“I told you, my master was a lizardman. And I was his student. A top-flight heretic of a pupil, in other words.” Arc Mage peered at the fire through her bottle, then licked a few drops off the lip. “Lizardmen hate to leave any written records, though. So I’ve had to remember everything.
“Rheas write however they like, dwarves don’t fancy talk, and elves stop short at ‘It’s only natural.’
“Immortal wizards merely write themselves some notes—their brains are rotting away.”
So she went on, smiling and talking what seemed to be nonsense, but he only interjected the occasional “I see.”
“Dragons, you know, they can remember everything without writing it down. And they never die, so they never forget.”
Goblin Slayer stirred the fire with a nearby stick and replied, “I see.”
“I’ll bet you do,” Arc Mage said, chuckling deep in her throat. “Dragons love to hoard. Knowledge is a lot like treasure for them. They don’t share it with anyone without a price.” Arc Mage began humming to herself. Some sparks flew, adding their crackles to the music.
Knowledge is a treasure.
Look, behold the sage here in this cave. Look how much knowledge is demanded of this wizard-sage to inscribe just one page of a book.
“But at the same time, if you kill them, the knowledge vanishes. The sneakiest burglar in all of existence can’t possibly get inside a dragon’s head.”
Goblin Slayer suddenly found himself thinking about his own master, the old rhea.
“Why should I go out of my way to teach some cast-off piece of filth who’s only going to be killed by goblins?!”
Thus, his master had exclaimed, and then beaten him harshly about his worthless head.
He had no treasure to offer a fool with no learning, an idiot whose only possession was a simple confidence that
he would be victorious.
Perhaps, he thought, Arc Mage’s master, the lizardman, had himself been a dragon, a naga. But his interest went no further than that; it didn’t even occur to him to ask her about it.
“But if you could get a dragon to share his knowledge with you…” Her cheeks looked slightly red, but he couldn’t tell whether it was from the cider or just the glow of the flames. Her gaze seemed soft, though, as it rested on his helmet. “…If you had that chance, and you told him you wanted to know about goblins? That would make you a weird guy, indeed.”
“I see,” Goblin Slayer said. The conversation lapsed again.
The fire sparked as another log broke. Goblin Slayer strained his ears, but he didn’t hear any goblin footsteps. All he heard was his own muffled breathing and the quiet inhale-exhale of his companion. The even breaths of the sleeping woman.
The only thing he sensed was the sweet smell of apples mixed in among the stench of filth and blood and viscera.
Eventually, Arc Mage broke the silence. “Anyway, I guess the things to study are biology, behavior, origins, subspecies, habitat, knowledge, intelligence, and culture, and that about covers it.” She sounded impossibly cheerful. “Not that I’m eager to study any more than that on my own. Like…language, say. Goblinese…
“Think there’s such a thing?” It was a teasing question, one she’d voiced several times over the past several days.
“There is,” Goblin Slayer said flatly. There was no room for argument in his mind.
“You sure about that? They might just be animalistic cries. I know the gob-gob stuff sounds like they’re talking, but you never know.”
But he didn’t have to hear them to know. He had known it for five years now.
“I saw them pointing at captives, laughing and mocking them.”
“So goblin culture includes humor, is what you’re saying.” Arc Mage nodded happily, once again adopting the tone of a professor praising a distinguished student.
Goblin Slayer, unable to parse exactly what she meant, fell into a sullen silence.
Through his visor, he could see that Arc Mage seemed unconcerned; she just kept talking. “Aw, what’s the matter? That’s a new discovery! One of those hard-earned nuggets of goblin knowledge you’re so eager for.”
“…Is that so?”
“Uh-huh. Research—about anything, not just monsters—is really the slow accumulation of experimental results.”
The Draconomicon, the Demonicon, or, from an alternative angle, A Guide to Skaven.
“I’m not interested,” Goblin Slayer said, again without hesitation.
Why? Arc Mage barely voiced the word. “Finding out where goblins came from might give you a better idea about how to fight them.”
He calmly gave her the reply he had settled on many years ago. “Because while I was doing that, goblins would be destroying villages.”
“—”
It was Arc Mage’s turn to be silent. To Goblin Slayer, it looked as if she had been struck dumb. But his responses were already set. They had been for five years—no, indeed, for much longer than that.
“Also,” he went on, “I already know where goblins come from. The green moon.”
He offered nothing further. His older sister had told him this. And his older sister was never wrong about anything.
“It was her. She taught me.”
“…” Arc Mage didn’t have an immediate answer. She drank her cider, wiped her lips, and then looked down, away from the bonfire. “Planeswalking, is that it?”
It was a mysterious word. Wizards’ words always were.
And she looked so tense—the smile that made its way onto her face seemed somehow forced.
“That’s just a made-up story, a fairy tale to frighten children. And for adults to chuckle at… Isn’t it?”
“I have never found it amusing.”
“…”
That was the last of the conversation until dawn broke. Arc Mage didn’t breathe another word, nor did Goblin Slayer speak to her.
At last, the first light of the morning sun cast itself among the stones. When the pale beam had slithered up to his feet like a snake, Goblin Slayer stood up.
There were no more goblins here. He had killed them all. The only thing left to do was to go back to the village, return the girl to them, and then go home.
He started walking, the girl supported on his back, and Arc Mage followed silently behind him. They left the ruins to find the sunlight piercing through gaps in the forest canopy, stinging their eyes like needles. Goblin Slayer squinted behind the visor of his helmet and began walking slowly through the woods.
“Darkness everlasting.” Two short words came unexpectedly from behind him, from Arc Mage. “Past the edge of this table, beyond the void, on the far side of eternity, the unending search.”
None of the things she was saying made any sense to Goblin Slayer. She sounded oddly sad, lonely almost, but he felt no special interest in this, either.
“Well, to travel is to have traveling companions… But I guess we aren’t all going to the same place anyway.”
He wasn’t interested, and so he made no special effort to remember this conversation any more than any of the others.
“…Erghh.”
She was well aware she couldn’t outright say this was boring, but she couldn’t stop herself from letting out a sigh.
The Adventurers Guild, just after noon. It was full of the flaccid indolence of the hour when lunch break had just ended.
Guild Girl’s sharp-eared colleague was quick to interrogate the receptionist where she lay stretched out on the front desk.
“What is it? What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on.”
The other woman’s eyes seemed awfully eager, for a follower of the Supreme God.
Guild Girl didn’t want to be part of these games. She turned pointedly away.
“Ah-ha.” Her colleague laughed. “This is about your favorite novice!”
“Ergh…”
Bingo.
She was so on target that Guild Girl seriously wondered whether she might have used the Inspiration miracle. She was fairly sure that gift came from the God of Knowledge, but still…
“Hasn’t he been in touch recently?”
“…What’s that supposed to mean?” Guild Girl grimaced at her colleague, who was smirking like a cat toying with a mouse. What was she implying—that Guild Girl was waiting with bated breath for him to come back?
“Well, it’s all good, right? Adventurers have their own lives.” Her colleague laughed. Where they fought, where they died. They were the ones who got to choose.
“I know that,” Guild Girl replied, her expression growing more sour by the word. “He’s completed all his assignments flawlessly, as usual. I guess he’s been busy helping that wizard lately.”
“Ahh, so that’s what this is about.”
Oops. Fumble.
Her friend’s grin got a little wider, and Guild Girl mentally jumped to take back what she had said.
Surely this shouldn’t have been so worrisome. Adventurers took all kinds of jobs and had their preferred quest givers. That was something to celebrate, wasn’t it?
But it was just, you know… How could she put it?
It makes me…depressed.
Arc Mage—she was the spell caster who lived in the wheelhouse on the edge of town. A mad wizard, or perhaps a sage.
Guild Girl was aware Arc Mage had taken him on as a research assistant, and that he frequently went to her house.
In fact, it was Guild Girl who had given him the quest in the first place. She herself. Yes, but…
Hey, they look like a good match.
When she started hearing things like that around, she felt herself growing depressed for some reason.
These were adventurers, people who didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. Idle chatter—romantic gossip, or simple dirty stories—was one of their pleasures. Of course they wo
uld talk thoughtlessly about such things, and it would do her no good to prickle at every one of them. Especially considering she had introduced the two of them.
She hated the feeling of selfishness it produced in her. After all, she was in no special relationship with him.
That’s right: he was an adventurer, and she was a receptionist at the Adventurers Guild, and that was all. How self-absorbed of her to see it as anything to fret and worry and get envious over.
I mean…
Goblin Slayer. The adventurer who had come to be called by that name was obsessed, talking of nothing but goblins.
There had to be something wrong with him. The nickname came about all too naturally, Guild Girl reflected. She was probably in the minority, having talked to this character a bit, having come to have some acquaintance with him.
So who was this Arc Mage—this person who seemed to have gotten so close to him in such a short time?
Guild Girl had heard Arc Mage had been requested to help with the revision of the Monster Manual. She’d heard she was the disciple of a fairly famous mage.
She was certainly researching something, pursuing something. Most wizards were. But the rumors that she was fixated on the Scales of the Twelve Knights that had ended the Summer of the Dead… Those couldn’t be true.
Scales as such were perfectly ordinary items. It was only the knights who found those scales who were truly distinguished. Even the story that she was searching for the Ancestral Bird of Paradise had more credence.
Whatever the truth, Guild Girl knew little about him and less about her. That was probably the simplest way to explain the gloom in her heart…
“Eh, feel better,” her colleague said when she saw her, chuckling and giving her a gentle pat on the back. “You and I are good for more than just saying, ‘Welcome to the Adventurers Guild! How can I help you?’”
“But isn’t that our job?”
“We work to live, right?”
“Well, sure, I guess.”
“Then enjoy yourself! Worry, love, live!”
“Love…”
Guild Girl found herself smiling bitterly. This colleague of hers—this friend—was a bit too eager.