by Simon Archer
As if on cue, three hobgoblins climbed into the arena, each of them built like they trained to wrestle bears. Standing about a foot taller than me, each of them were like pillars of muscle, looking more like orcs, if it weren’t for the giant noses and ears. For clothing, they only wore a leather equivalent of a sumo wrestler speedo. They had come prepared. Well, not to worry, as long as I kept a cool head, I could have cast a spell or two to--
“Oh, Jeremiah, I forgot to tell you,” Gak’Nak shouted from above, “but I’ve added a few new rules to this fight, since you’re a special case, and I want this to be fun for everyone! I’m sure you can handle it, though, yeah? If you use any of those blasting, exploding, flashy magic tricks, you lose the whole match, no matter how far along you are. That means that you forfeit your right to be a part of this tribe, your marriage to Hikki will be annulled forever on the spot, and we’ll cripple your legs and your pale concubine’s as well where you both stand, throwing you into the deepest part of the tomb for the beasts to feed upon you.”
Oh, shit.
20
What the hell, Gak’Nak! No magic! And he was going to maim and murder me if I did practice magic! I was a goner without my spells. What was I supposed to do, punch them? They were like walls of meat! And each of these goblins was being souped up by the others around us to make them all into superpowered monsters!
That fat son of a bitch was luring me into this trap the whole time, wasn’t he? God, I felt so stupid. Why did I ever agree to come here? I bet that conniving goblin wrecking ball was laughing all the way to this very moment from the second he learned that I killed his son, just waiting for me to step in here and make an ass of myself. He was tricky, I’d give him that, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of an execution like this. I was going to win.
No, no, freaking out and making crazy assumptions wasn’t going to solve anything. He had no more advantage here than he did when I was first presented to him. The goblins could have taken my weapon from me beforehand and then killed me on the spot back then. They had the numbers and the stats to overwhelm me ten times over back then.
This was just the big guy getting his kicks. At the end of the day, he was a ruthless warlord, even if he was my father-in-law for the moment. It was also all political strategy. Without any witnesses to the act, I had to prove to the whole tribe that I actually killed Gojobo with my own two hands, and that I really was the warrior worth succeeding Gak’Nak. As an outsider, too, that meant I had to prove that fact beyond a shadow of a doubt, with ten times the asskicking as the next goblin could ever hope to dish out. With the extra stipulations and handicap, all doubt about me as the new future clan leader would have dissolved when I eventually came out on top of this dogpile. And, if not, I’d be dead, and not his problem anymore.
How did I get myself into this mess? I just wanted to get to the goddamn surface so I could have officially started my quest to save Neo Ceissein. I had a destiny to fulfill. I couldn’t have died in a place like this. At this point, I’d never actually seen any part of the world I was supposed to save. Just the inside of this gloomy-ass crypt.
However, just by cursory glances of their hobgoblin status screens, I discovered that their health suffered at less than a quarter of my own each, with an average level around ten or so. Pitiful. Just pitiful. Goblins, at the end of the day, were just goblins, no matter how much they snarled. They make up for the lack of power on average by just having more people to throw at problems than the average race. It was the same with all the stories and fantasy books back in my world. At my current level of physical strength alone, I had a decent shot at fighting them by my lonesome.
These goblins wanted a bare-knuckle brawl? I was going to give it to them like their bones would have never forgotten.
Besides, the boss goblin said that he didn’t want any ‘flashy’ magic. Very specific, that. Magic he didn’t see wasn’t necessarily against those rules, per the letter of the law. As long as there was nothing flashing, or not even anything to see in the first place, then I wouldn’t have used any blasting, exploding magic, then. Cheating was only illegal if the cheater got caught in the act. In the shadows, my magic had free rein to crush these goblins whenever they came to the ring, so long as no spell ever came into the light.
As an omnimage in training, I had to take every opportunity to train how I could if I was going to fight a god one day. Now was a good time to practice some control and resource management that I’d been meaning to hone a bit better. On their own, my battle skills would have strengthened themselves like muscles, but my own mind and how I handled them was still mine to take care of. If I could boost my strength high enough to fight these hobgoblins without getting noticed for it, then I would have considered this training exercise a success. The main goal here was to keep my expenditures low, while still getting some kick out of my spells. I prepared for my first secretly magical punch, thinking of what magic spells would have been the least conspicuous.
For the sake of training in this fight, I had to think about my magic less in terms of raw numbers and units, and more in percentages and portions. Regardless of how much magic I was going to get in the future in units, all of that magic would be outputting more powerful spells alongside the growth as a result, so the percent of magic used would have always been important to note and consistent throughout the levels. The more I reduced the portions I took out for the same amount of damage, the better I would have become overall, and I could have actually counted my growth in my understanding of magic, instead of just my levels in the system.
While the power was amazing, if I became more efficient with it, that would have shown a real mastery of magic I could have called my own, and not just the power of the magic seed in my chest, or the advantage of the system and its secrets in my head. That would have proven that I was an actual master of omni-magic, and not just a power-leveler. It didn’t take a tactician or a skilled warrior to wipe out an army with a nuke, but it took both to destroy the army with a tenth of the soldiers. I was hitting way above my level, anyway. It wasn’t much of a measure of anything but my growth, rather than my strength relative to others.
With all of that in mind, now I was thinking that this was going to be fun. A real life fighting montage of my very own! It would have been like I was in some kind of martial arts world, focusing my chi energy, or chakras, or ‘insert-magic-martial-arts-energy-name-here’. Was I going to pretend I was in an old sixties kung-fu flick the whole time, fighting ten ninjas inexplicably terrorizing the streets of Chicago to save the jive disco deva who’d fall madly in love with me? Damn straight, I was. It was my God-given right as a free man with a bountiful imagination. No one could have stopped me. Hoo! Hwah! Hiyah! Kapow! Good God, y’all!
The first sumo goblin came straight at me, catching me off guard in the middle of thinking. I stepped underneath his swinging arms, only to find the next sumo goblin waiting to grab me by both arms. Without thinking, I lifted my legs to kick him, accidentally channeling magic through my body to blast him in the gut.
That would have been the most embarrassing thing to happen in my heroic career, to be caught cheating with magic in a fight at my own goblin shotgun wedding not even a few seconds into the first real match. I’d never live it down with the other heroes. Not that I had other hero peers anymore, but still. Anything was possible in a world of magic, and everything I knew could have been turned on its head at a moment’s notice. I could have never been too sure I was truly alone. Or, at least, I hoped I wasn’t.
Thankfully, distracted brain aside, I hadn’t blown my cover quite just yet. The reflexive spell I cast through my feet was impact magic, which was just magical kinetic energy. No light, no sound of its own, just pure push and hurt. That was perfect. No one would have seen anything.
Well, except the dent I made in the poor bastard’s stomach. Yeesh. That must have looked suspicious. I looked through the horde of onlookers, seeing if they had noticed anything. So far, the drun
ken energy of the crowd hadn’t changed, the goblins cheering and booing all at once at the sport I was now winning at. I took that as a good sign.
Too much damage at once was too risky. Even the toughest man could have only done so much without any magical extras to boost him up. And I had used nearly a third of my magic on that one strike. I still had to learn how to dial it back. Only three strikes with that, and I would have been depleted, losing my ability to salvage my magic. No bueno. The less magic salvage I used up at once, the better off my endurance would have been, and the more powerful spells I could have pulled out later on.
Time to experiment.
The second sumo goblin was down, the third was making his move, and the first had managed to turn himself around. With one boulder of a fist, the third swung out into the air only with haymakers, wanting to knock me out with only one clock to the head. Apparently, I was also practicing my defense as well thanks to that. My armor was saving my ass now, taking most of the hit, but the rest of the damage was still leaving me at an uncomfortably large chunk of health missing. They didn’t hit nearly as hard as Gojobo, but my survival rate as a punching bag for them was abysmal. The big red number that popped up from just one swing wasn’t comforting, either.
There had to be a way for me to increase my defenses in battle. Some magic spell that actively boosted my toughness to brace myself for a nasty hit I couldn’t dodge. I remember something about a fortress mage being one of the available schools. That school had to have protective features, or I’d eat my shirt. But how was I supposed to use them? Did I not have the abilities yet? My suite of abilities was rather small for having all of the schools at once. Hopefully, more were going to trickle in after a while.
The third hobgoblin sumo threw another fist, which I had to jump over. That put me right in the way of a fist coming from the first hobgoblin sumo, but now I was airborne. With a tight maneuver, I twisted around them, shoving my palm into the face of the first sumo. I tried to focus more of the magic of the next spell into my hand as a self-type, and less into the impact element, to see if that helped solve the issue of keeping the magic costs lower.
It didn’t help by much, as it turned out. Yeah, I spent less magic on the attack, about ten percent of my total reserve, but I had also gotten less of an impact out of it, in a basic one-to-one. If I’d put the same amount of magic as before, I’d have gotten the same result as before, I could tell. It was more than enough to knock the sumo out cold, but I wasn’t satisfied with the results yet.
The kickback of that last strike was enough to throw me into the third and final sumo goblin, throwing us both to the side of the ring. With his fat weight, the sumo goblin cracked the fence gating us in, falling over the side as I took the time to jump off of him, securing my victory with a perfect landing. The crowd cheered and jeered all at once, becoming more drunk as the time went by. I was getting a lot of food scraps thrown at me for my victory over the sumos. A little uncalled for, but what could I have said about it?
“What else you got?” was what I said about it, cocky asshole that I was. “Who else wants some of this?”
That riled them up like throwing a cat into a room full of cats. The food, as well as the goblin rock-money, came flying in, raining down on me along with their mixed praise and disgust with me. Though, if I listened carefully enough, I would have judged that there was just a voice or two more goblins praising than berating me. I think I was winning them over.
Basking in their adulations would have to wait. My next few challengers crawled onto the stage like ants, a horde of short goblins about ten strong. They were going to be harder than the sumos; not because they intimidated me with their numbers, their rank smell, or their green teeth, but because my impacts were sure to kill any one of them at my current level of control. I wasn’t winning any favors that way. My spells required more tact than ever.
They pounced at me, bearing their fangs and pointed nails with their snarling, foaming mouths. Not having a clear attack strategy yet, I let the first one bite my shoulder. Bad plan. Ow. Piranhas must have been less of a nuisance than this. A second took my stunned reaction to bite me on the thigh, and a third got the shin on my other leg. This was getting worse by the second. Their bites hadn’t done too much damage to me, but they were wearing it down as long as they were clamping down, small flashes of red numbers continually eating away at my health. If all of them clamped down, they’d drain me dry. They were going to have to forgive a few deaths.
Trying to use the smallest amount of magic that I could muster, I went for a backhand of impact magic, only throwing my wrist into the motion of casting it as I knocked the shoulder biter away. He flew away, smacking into the wall of the platform and rolling over it, disqualifying him. At least, I assumed that leaving the ring disqualified them. I didn’t want to have to fight any of the ring out losers again.
With two more flicks of impact backhand, I knocked the other two goblins off, just as another two went to latch on like a couple of leeches. Before these two made contact, however, I tried to shoo them away with some small impact pokes, which worked a little too well, throwing them both out of the ring. Alright, six left.
The finger attack, however, was more fruitful than last time. The hang time for both those goblins was similar to the first one I’d backhanded, but I’d used less magic to make it happen. Progress was being made. Not much, but enough to make me feel like I was getting somewhere. It was only a matter of figuring out if magnifying was actually the trick. Something told me that a simple answer was too much to hope for.
Another attempt, and another two goblins. Now, to increase my surface area of focus, see if I was releasing more energy than was proportional to my magic that way. With two fists pressed together by the bottom of the palms, I threw them both forward in an awkward position, blasting one of the goblins clear away from the ring and into the crowd of onlookers, knocking a few over like bowling pins. The amount of magic I’d used was about a quarter of my total. While the results were fairly big, the magic use was quite a bit for what I got out of it.
Alright, so there was some amount of correlation between how much of a surface I used to throw the magic out and how much magic came out at once, but not as much as I might have expected. All of that to say that keeping the point of casting small did help get the most bang for any amount of magic used. But it wasn’t enough. I was going to get this to be so goddamn efficient that I could have used a teaspoon of magic power to create a tidal wave. Okay, maybe that was a drastic example, but the meaning is still there. Efficient destruction. I couldn’t afford to put my life in critical condition in every fight, for my mental health alone.
I’d sidestepped the second goblin flyer, swatting it away with my foot after it landed. No magic that time, just muscle, and the lights had gone out for him as his head hit the platform edge wall. Two ankle biters snuck up on me, grappling a leg each and sinking every sharp part of their body into my flesh. The leather boots I’d stolen from that grave were not helping in the slightest, offering no protecting between me and little goblin teeth and nails. God, always with the teeth. I would have thrown them a bone, literally, if it meant they would hit me instead of trying to eat me alive. Ow, it was the stinging that was the worst of it. Before I could swat those two away, the last two came for both of my arms, clamping down with the same amount of voracity as the first two and the same amount of body-wrapping technique.
A particularly strange idea waddled its way into my mind right then. Was it possible, even probable, that a living creature could have been used as an arcane conductor? I’d already succeeded with a bone. Who was to say that a living material couldn’t have been just as effective at conducting magic? And who better to find out any of this than me, right? If I couldn’t do it, it truly was impossible. At my skill level, I meant. Well, here went nothing. Focusing on the pain of their teeth, I started to fill both the goblins on my arms with magic power, leaking it into their skulls and filling them with power.
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The sensation was odd, as if I was somehow growing a goblin skull out of my arm, rather than just charging up a goblin with magic. Maybe that was part of the trick? I need to treat the magic as a tool to manipulate or a lackey to command, but as a part of my body to use like my arms and legs. That was going to be tricky. I didn’t have to think about moving my arms and legs, or my fingers. They just did their own thing without me. Controlling body parts wasn’t a conscious effort in the classical sense. I knew how to get the magic flowing out, and even how to direct it between limbs, but this was fairly new.
It reminded me of the time I had gotten into that bad car accident and had some intense care to compensate. Point being, I had to have a catheter, and when they removed it, I struggled to start peeing again on my own. I’d lost touch with the muscles that just made it happen on its own. This was a lot like that, feeling out muscles that were previously out of my control.
Then, something particularly odd happened to the goblins once my magic had taken up most of their bodies. Like a rush of blood, the magic suddenly reversed, flowing back into me rapidly until it had drained completely out of them. The two goblins loosened their grip, groaning to themselves as they began to fall off my arms. Thinking quickly, I conked them together to make it look like I’d knocked them out with some percussive therapy instead of cheating with magic.
Looking back up at my magic reserve score to see what exactly had happened, I found a bigger number there than before for the maximum, by thirty points. I was rocking five hundred seventy-five for the new total. Somehow.
Wait, did I just steal the magic from their bodies? Oh, boy, that was… tempting, I had to admit. Seriously, the possibilities I started imagining were fantastic. And also fairly cruel. It would have been easy to just sweep through a few small villages, find some weak folks who weren’t using the innate magic of their bodies, and suck each of them dry to add to my own powers. The limits to my magic would have been all but obliterated, as if they weren’t even there. I could have become a god--