by Simon Archer
We turned to see who had addressed us from across this newest room of coffins, different from the other chambers by its extended length, only to find five little men, if just by a generic humanoid definition. The little men were as green as toxic waste with a tropical flavoring and twice as rotten in smell.
At full stance, they might have come up to my hip, but they were shortened by their own slouches. Their pointy ears were at equal length to their hooked noses, as well as the circumference of their own heads, which were about half the size of their pot-bellied torsos. To say they had sticks for arms would have made sticks seem spindly, and they had long, thin palms and fingers to match. If someone just imagined ugly fusions of old men with a foot in the grave and magical forest children that were also hideous to look at, they were in the mental area of thought as to their appearance.
A semblance of sentience graced them in the form of functional hides for armor, if not crudely stitched together, and metal spears to arm them. The spears, despite the sprinkling of rust and wear, were finely crafted in their prime and obviously stolen from a more civilized military unfortunate enough to lose to them. Whoever made their armor had at least some idea about how to craft with their hands, but just about as much as an elementary school might have also taught.
Above them, their screens showed their labels:
Takatak Spearman, goblinoid Lv 12
Health: 1440 Magic: 30
Armor: 43 Aegis: 15
Abilities: Tiny Hider, Pack Fighter
Tiny Hider: Due to their size, they can utilize more things for cover and escape than their often larger foes.
+12 Covert
+12 Dodge
Pack Fighter: One is annoying, but many are overwhelming. When they’re grouped together, they’ll swarm their opponents until they’re picked clean.
+12 Strike and Armor when within 5 meters of another goblinoid, +6 for every subsequent goblinoid
“Oh, these punkass goblins are nothing,” I said, taking into account all of their special bonuses for being grouped together. “This is a perfect time to test out Bodo’s combat prowess. It’ll be his inaugural battle as my familiar. Are you excited, Bodo? Are you?”
“I know I said yetis were powerful creatures, especially the Zedmakian ones,” she eyed Bodo with an anxious, maternal intention for protection, “but those were the full-grown adults. No matter the animal anyway, you can’t just throw a baby at a pack of ravenous--”
“Bodo, I choose you!” I extended my arm and stood to the side, letting the yeti crawl onto the catapult mechanism I’d set up with my stance.
“THROWING WAS FIGURATIVE!” Delilah, poor, sweet Delilah was far too late to stop me from chucking my familiar at the goblin spearmen like a basketball hook shot, giving the fluffy white ball a lot of spin as the yeti tucked its arms and legs. “YOU’RE A MONSTER, JEREMIAH! A MONSTER!”
Bodo crashed into the spearman in the front, latching onto his face with a violent hug that ripped the green goblin’s flesh. As the yeti was freely ripping off skin and pieces of nose, the spearman to the sides took stabs at him, only to meet nothing as the familiar evaporated in a puff of pink smoke. The spears clashed with the poor first victim’s skull as well as the opposite spear, throwing both spearmen off and killing the first, all the while Bodo had moved on to the next on the left end, ripping into the face yet again. In a slapstick fit worthy of Charlie Chaplin, the second victim tried to thwack the parasite that had dug into its cranium with a sharp strike towards his own head, only for pink smoke to remove the yeti right at the moment of impact.
The third victim, one of the two who’d taken that first jab and just recovered from the failure, was equally helpless as the first two as Bodo clawed at his face. However, the clever little familiar had changed his tactic. He threw himself over the spearman’s head and pulling both of them down to the ground with a cracking slam. Bent over backward, the goblin had no way to defend himself against the spear attack of the rightmost spearman straight into his gullet, quickly depleting the rest of his health as the life drained from it.
Teleporting again, Bodo had teleported onto the back of the one who’d gotten his spear stuck inside his friend, narrowly avoiding the spear of the other surviving goblin. Thankfully for the green impish puck, he’d narrowly avoided killing his comrade on accident, jabbing to the side of the neck instead of straight on. Unfortunately for the spearman, Bodo locked the spear under its arm as it hugged the head of his current victim between his curled hand and his beastly teeth, gnawing into the flesh as the goblin desperately tried to pull him off. With one being stuck at the wrong end of the spear and the other facing the wrong direction to his attack, both couldn’t stop the next goblin from going down, reducing the count of goblin combatants down to one.
The last didn’t even have time to scream for help before a pink puff of smoke had closed the distance between the yeti and the next face he was going to gnaw on. Like a school of piranhas in a single hairy coat, Bodo had stripped flesh and bone clean, killing the goblin and ending the threat just as quickly as it had come up.
The familiar returned to my shoulder, nuzzling against the side of my face affectionately as if it hadn’t just committed the most bestial act of animal fury I’d ever seen. Something was telling me, maybe my intuition or a strange feeling in my gut, that Bodo knew just how impressed I was with him, and I knew how happy that had made him.
“Good work, Bodo!” I scratched the bridge of his snout. “Your brutality and ferociousness will be the stuff of songs and legends throughout Neo Ceissein… maybe once we get out of here. No promises about how early that’ll happen. How the hell did you do that?”
“Yeah, how did you do that, Bodo?” Delilah found herself asking as well. “That was some of the most skilled close combat fighting that I’ve ever seen, and I’m a close combat specialist. I had to fight through many combatants to get to where I am now, and I’ve fought masters from all over. Those are not the moves of a newborn animal, not an hour old, no matter how magical they are. Where did you learn how to fight? Who taught you?”
Before the yeti could answer, or whatever he was going to do, another group of five had made its way into the doorway. Like the spearman, they were green, with long ears and noses, but the proportions fit their faces a bit better. They were also quite taller than the goblins, even a bit taller than me, and were built less like starving monkeys and more like well-fed grizzly bears. Their armor was just about as well put together as the last, but with more scraps of metal incorporated to give further protection. They had helmets on, scavenged and not quite fitting their heads, but more equipped all the same. Between them were two sets of dual axes, a greatsword, a glaive, and a war maul at the guy at the front.
I didn’t even need to read their display screens to know that Bodo wasn’t going to be able to handle this one. In fact, just their presence had me feeling like Delilah and I might have been in a bit over our heads in this fight.
“Looky here, boys,” the one with the war maul spoke to his followers in what was essentially a cockney accent. “If you’ve wanted to see what elves taste like, now’s your chance! Rush ‘em!”
Time to see what being fifth level was like.
I hadn’t much time to see every part of the display for the big guy in the front, but what I had caught wasn’t pretty:
Gojobo, Takatak Chief’s Firstborn, goblinoid Lv 25
Health: 6250 Magic: 250
Armor: 70 Aegis: 70
Abilities: Pack Fighter, Warchief, Title: Bearhide
No. No. Wrong. Bad Gojobo, Takatak Chief’s Firstborn. Bad! Get that level back down to fifteen, like the first team. Were you raised in a barn? Or a boxing gym full of horse steroids? How the hell was Baron Muscles Von Nose Cartilage over here classified as a goblin? Sure, the face was similar, but this motherfucker was human-sized! Where was the consistency?
And who the hell were these other guys? They were also breaking the rules of goblinness, and I was having none o
f this:
Takatak Hunterguard, goblinoid Lv 16
Health: 256 Magic: 160
Armor: 30 Aegis: 30
Abilities: Pack Fighter, Loyalty, Wild Hunter
Better than Gojobo, but you all still failed, hunterguards. The first guy was tougher than two of me combined, and these other four were close to as tough as half of one of me each. And I only had one of me to go around for this battle. Whatever battle of the gods I’d found myself in, I was glad to garner the favor of whichever ones were on my side, letting me snag Delilah and Bodo just now before I ran into these freaks. Alone, I’d have probably died pretty quickly. Together, we might have had a chance.
Maybe. I didn’t want to die here.
There wasn’t time for strategy, as the big leader, Gojobo, had already brought his hammer over my head, fixing to smash it down upon my simple frame. Bodo and Delilah had made it out just in time, but I could barely step back in time enough to not die. Gojobo wasn’t finished, however, and had come in swinging again with another cleaving swing to the side. That one had made contact with my flesh, and I felt the back of my spine hurt before my front had also been very much hurt by crashing into the wall beside us. Looking up at my health, I was down a solid two hundred points. That was nearly half of the total in one swing.
Yep, this called for drastic action. Screaming at the top of my lungs, I belted out my best battle cry, activating my Fury ability for the very first time.
Ho, man. Oh, dear God in heaven. Was this what cocaine felt like? My blood tingled through every feeling nerve in my skin, like thousands of soft needles surrounded me. My heart beat like a motorcycle engine, fit to explode from my chest, and that filled me with enough energy to power a city or lift a semi-truck over my head. I could feel every muscle fiber bending in my arms and legs, aching to be used to their absolute fullest potential. Every limitation my body naturally held in place to keep me intact fell away, and I could utilize every calorie of energy at my disposal.
I only had twenty seconds of this, and I couldn’t afford to waste any of it. With fire imbued into the bone club, I swung at the goblinoid leader, who must not have expected me to retaliate so quickly, having not blocked the shot to his side in the slightest. Or maybe he thought I was weak. And I technically was, which would be my secret strength.
Both his ribs and my club cracked under the pressure of the strike, knocking the wind out of him while his maul fell to the floor. Using the opening, I’d wasted no time, using the momentum and filling the mace with magical necrosis as well as I slammed it up against his chin with equal strength.
He was reeling back, and I wasn’t letting up in the slightest. Another smashing blow, and another, and another. Again and again. Even with his protection from my strikes and magic, coupled with what must have been ridiculous boosts from fighting with his pack, I was still carving out pieces of his health. Just a few more hits, and he’d have been put in the ground. With another strike, I prepared to throw down some lightning right down on him and his metal armor.
My last strike never connected, as Gojobo had recovered from his previous mistake and eyed an opening in my defenses, sticking his maul head right through it and into my chest, throwing me backward. I’d only lost another forty-four hit points from that, thanks to the protection from Fury, but I could have only taken three more before the fourth one depleted me completely. And they hurt like a son of a bitch, so dodging became crucial to the strategy.
In my foolish beginner knowledge, I’d thought to parry the attacks from the maul with my club, deflecting them to the side and narrowly avoiding getting hit. However, I was doing this with a bone, and an old bone at that, against a hunk of metal that easily could have been a treasure chest if it had the moxie. Ergo, the bone was not holding up well.
A direct hit had taken away all semblance of structural integrity to the bone, along with my shield against the strike, completely away, as I lay flat on the ground from the weight of the steel block alone. With that crushing strike against the ground, the sandwiching of my bones had taken my shots from three down to one. After the next hit, the following would kill me, and that was with the Fury ability’s protection.
Only ten seconds left, and a desperation to get the edge on these giant goblins, I had to separate them. Except my magic weapon was gone, and I didn’t have a moment to think about what weapon I could have used next, let alone the time to practice with it enough to make it an arcane conductor. I needed to cast magic without one.
Delilah didn’t need to use an arcane conductor. She just punched things with magic. There wasn’t a magic focus on her. If I had her school of magic pooled in with the others, I should have been able to do that, too. And there wasn’t a good reason to doubt that I had that power myself. My own body had to act like an arcane conductor. I had to think of it that way if I was going to have any chance of beating a hobgoblin several times stronger than me.
With nearly the rest of my magic on hand, I tried my best to focus the power to one hand, to generate enough concussive impact magic to force Gojobo far away from his minions. I could tell that the energy I was putting in and the amount of skill I had to focus was not nearly as conducive and synergetic as necessary, the invisible kinetic forces escaping the focus and lashing outward into the environment. Stone cracked under the wisps of pure kinetic energy, and I quickly released what I still had leftover into Gojobo’s stomach while I had the time to do so. The magic pulsed, impacting into the goblin chief’s son and his internal organs.
Like a cannonball shot point-blank, the concussive blast threw both Gojobo and me back from the center of the explosion. By the slimmest luck, I’d managed to save a smidgeon of the reserve to root myself in the earth, my legs only avoiding snapping like twigs thanks to my increased endurance. If I were a regular human, I’d have folded over with two broken shins at that moment.
The explosion wasn’t as contained as I was aiming for, destroying coffins and displacing remains all over while bits of stone and bone bounced around like pinballs. A few of the rubble pieces had smacked into the other hunterguard goblins, dealing with Bodo and Delilah as in a two-on-four match that they were barely holding onto. With the advent of chaotic flying rocks in the air, the tide had turned for them, crippling one of their legs and injuring the rest enough for the yeti and revenant to take care of business properly.
Meanwhile, I knew that I had just created an opportunity by removing the commander from play. While I separated him from his pack, the lack of Pack Fighter benefits crippled both groups, especially Gojobo. Now was the time to strike, while the iron was red hot.
16
Five seconds left, enough for one more good shot in before I was back to normal. Thankfully, my magical salvage was enough to compensate for all the magic I was leaking out, trying to pour more and more magic into every swing. That wasn’t to say that I wasn’t pushing myself again, but I didn’t have a choice. Without a weapon, though, this was going to be all the harder to figure out. Thanks to Delilah’s possession teaching me about magic channels in my body, I wasn’t out of options yet.
The magic flowed through my muscles, enhancing my speed and strength as I threw myself forward, sneaking my way into the wide opening I’d made in Gojobo’s defenses. One fist to that long nose, coated in lightning, concave the cartilage into a cup on his face. This time, though, I’d only channeled the lightning to enhance the speed of my fist. That was how Delilah did it, making her faster and stronger than even her immense strength was capable of. That was why warrior mages had magic in the first place. The elements acted more like accents to the magical effects they were using to throw their strikes out. With that second punch, Gojobo had struck against the back wall, cracking out as I’d whittled down his health to critical levels. Barely one moment more of my Fury, and I had another punch in store for him.
The brute wasn’t nearly done yet, picking himself out of the crevice I’d indented into the wall with his body. He met my second punch by catching it with
his palm, and my Fury had officially run out. I focused my magic lightning into my legs to increase my speed. Without the Fury defense, another hit with that giant maul spelled certain death. The big goblin hadn’t lost a step of his swings, hurling that steel block at me with full power each time it almost touched me.
While I was going to have to attack at some point, I had to dodge for the time being and couldn’t mix the two strategies at the moment. Too little, too late, I’d realized that I was running low on magic, even with my magic regenerating, so my options were thinning.
As it so happened, magic salvage and magic regeneration were not the same thing. I didn’t know how it worked exactly, especially with the different measurements of time they must have used in this world, but the salvage score measured more than just how much magic I got back over a short time, but also how long I could use that regenerated magic in intervals. The details must have been complicated, but the short version meant that I was only getting my magic refilled on a timer before it started leaking away faster and faster. I was sure that the more salvage and intelligence I’d gotten, the less of a problem that would have caused me, but that was a future Jeremiah circumstance.
For now, I had a smaller reserve of magic than I realized, and I’d already taken a huge hit. I couldn’t have afforded to just use magic so flippantly as I’d done before on guys like this. The management of my resources was going to have to improve, and that wasn’t something I could have just leveled up along with everything else. These skills and abilities were like employees I had to utilize properly, or I died. There were no middle options in fights like these.
But there were mid-range options for attacks when magic was involved. Things were going to have to get dicey without an arcane conductor to focus the magic where I wanted it to go. Mid-combat was the worst time to experiment with attack ideas, especially on low resources, but all my other options were going to kill me. So, still hopping around like a scared frog while Gojobo destroyed the surrounding stones with his heavy hammer, I got to cooking up a new kind of spell attack.