Goblin Slayer, Vol. 4

by Kumo Kagyu

  “So start by picking your piece, please,” Guild Girl said, her voice and smile softer than they usually were at the front desk.

  “Hmm…” Cow Girl put her hands together in front of her chest, staring intently at the various adventurers lined up on the board.

  Yeah… I think this is the one I want.

  Unsure though she was, she took the knight she had picked up earlier. The steel helmet made it impossible to see its face, but it had its shield and sword raised and looked straight ahead.

  “For me…I think this one.”

  “Oh, um, I’ll take…” Priestess put a pale finger to her lips and thought, a bit lost as she gazed at the pawns. Then, with an “ah!” she glanced around and chose a particular figure.

  “Th-this one, please!”

  The character she had selected was an elf spell caster, her voluptuous body draped in a robe.

  “Good choice,” High Elf Archer said with a knowing laugh, and Priestess squirmed a bit.

  “Okay, for me…” High Elf Archer flicked her ears with an expression like a hunter stalking her prey. “Right! I’ll take this one this time! A dwarf warrior!”

  “Gosh, are you sure?” Guild Girl asked, but High Elf Archer replied, “Of course!” and stuck out her little chest. “I’ll show that dwarf I’m better at…dwarf-ing…than he ever was!”

  “I’ll continue as the scout, then.”

  “Heh-heh-heh! That means you have no monk. Well, I’ll handle that.”

  Guild Girl smilingly set a light warrior with shabby-looking equipment on the board, while Inspector picked an old man holding a holy seal.

  And so their adventurers were assembled. A knight in armor and helm, an elf sorceress, a dwarf warrior, a light scout, and a veteran monk. This was the party that set out to face the humongous dragon and save the world. Guild Girl briefly explained the rules to Cow Girl, who then took the dice firmly in hand.

  Here goes.

  “My adventurer is the hero who’s gonna protect the village, rescue the princess, and defeat the dragon!”

  With this resolute declaration, Cow Girl let the first roll of the dice fall upon the board.

  §

  “Ahh, we lost.”

  The town and the sky were tinged with the ultramarine of twilight. Cow Girl spoke indifferently, looking up at the stars that twinkled in the distance. As she walked along, hands clasped behind her, Priestess scuttled alongside like a small bird.

  “We weren’t able to get the Sword of Dragon Slaying, were we?”

  “Couldn’t get through its scales.”

  In the end, they had had their hands full with goblin slaying. The dragon had destroyed the girls, and they hadn’t been able to save the world, but…

  “But it sure was fun, wasn’t it?” Priestess said.

  “Sure was,” Cow Girl agreed.

  Autumn still seemed some time away, but the breeze that blew cooler and cooler hinted at it.

  The world he saw.

  The world he lived in—

  She had caught the slightest glimpse of it.

  “Hey…” Cow Girl laughed as the breeze caressed her skin, flushed from the game. “Window-shopping at the weapon shop, playing at the tavern… Not very girlish, is it?”

  “Ah-ha-ha-ha…”

  Priestess gave a dry laugh and avoided the question. She was three or four years younger than Cow Girl, and she seemed like a little sister.

  I wonder how he thinks of her.

  “Hm.” Priestess might or might not have noticed the small breath Cow Girl let out. But she gazed up at her with a guileless smile.

  “I’d like to play again sometime.”

  “…Yeah. Me too.”

  “In that case…” Priestess ran several steps ahead, tap-tap-tap, and spun around to face Cow Girl. Her golden hair flowed behind her head, catching the last light of the sinking sun and sparkling. “…Let’s do it!”

  Huh. Cow Girl exhaled without realizing it. I guess I do have some connections here.

  She had thought she had only him, and the farm. But because he was connected to this girl, now she was, too.

  “…Sure.” Cow Girl dusted off her behind and smiled. “Let’s do this again sometime.”

  Riiing. She squinted in happy comfort as she rang her sounding staff. The first wind to signal the end of summer brushed her cheeks. The carriage rattled along. How pleasant it would have been to walk alongside it on the road.

  She came back to herself. She had nearly forgotten that she was in the middle of an escort quest. As a member of the clergy, she sometimes felt she could sense the presence of the gods at moments like these.

  Only a few clouds dotted the sky. In the distance, a dark shadow flew. A hawk? An eagle? A falcon?

  “That bird’s quite a ways up there, isn’t it?”

  “It is indeed…”

  The one who had spoken to her was sitting on the roof of the carriage.

  The ranger with the crossbow was not, of course, up there for the fun of it. Someone needed to keep watch. Ranger had been trusted to keep an eye on the surroundings and showed no sign of letting attention lapse.

  So the suspicion in Ranger’s voice caused her to immediately tighten her grip on her sounding staff. Each of the others readied their equipment as well, preparing against something they could not see. The only one who seemed not to notice anything was the carriage’s owner, a merchant. They ignored him as he asked, “What’s all this, then?”

  Ranger said in a low voice, “Don’t you think that bird’s a bit too large?”

  “Now that you mention it…”

  It happened as she tried to get a closer look.

  It was closing the distance even as she watched: skin and claws, beak and wings the color of dark ash—

  “Demon!”

  They reacted to the voice of their companion, Ranger, but they were too late to take initiative. In her case, critically too late, and the monster—the stone demon—was painfully quick. It was not fate or chance, but a cold difference in abilities that was her undoing.

  Even as she thought Huh?! her feet were already floating above the ground. She flailed her legs, but it meant nothing; she was pulled straight up into the air. The ground, the carriage, her friends, all grew farther away.

  “Ergh…ahh…ow…eeyikes?!”

  She beat at the monster with her sounding staff in her desperate struggle to resist, whereupon it squeezed its claws into her shoulders and shook her.

  She looked down and gave a squeak at the height. She felt her lower body grow moist.

  “Hrrgh— Eeegh!”

  The problems didn’t stop there. Her thigh burned like it had been struck with hot tongs. Ranger must have loosed an arrow in an attempt to do something, and the demon must have used her as a shield.

  She looked down, her vision clouding with tears, to see their spell caster chanting something.

  Stop, stop, stop, stop! She waved her sounding staff desperately, shaking her head No, no!

  We’re wrong! This isn’t a demon! It’s not a—!

  “Aaaaahhh!”

  The creature dodged the flood of lightning, whipping her about. The arrow in her thigh dug deeper into the flesh. She screamed and shook.

  She shouldn’t have done that.

  The claws in her elbows slipped, tearing skin and flesh and drawing blood.

  “Hrk!”

  A sound escaped her. The sensation of floating. Wind. Wind. Wind. Wind.

  Oww, I’m scared, help me, God of Knowledge, O God, oh God…!

  Sadly, all this might have been a fervent wish on her part, but it was not a prayer.

  So it did not reach the gods. Her one piece of good luck was that she felt no pain. She was unlucky until the moment she struck the ground, consciousness never left her.

  Although now that she was a twitching lump of ruined flesh, it didn’t really matter.

  §

  “So what’s the plan?”

  A brusque male voice sounde
d in the wind-whipped wasteland. The spear he carried across his back and the armor he wore made him look handsome and brave.

  In front of Spearman’s eyes rose a white tower, sparkling in the noon light. The walls were made of a shimmering white stone; from the way it reached to the sky without a single seam, it might have been ivory. But the thought that there was no elephant this huge left little doubt that this was the product of magic.

  “I’d guess that thing has at least sixty floors.”

  “Walking in through the front door might be tricky.”

  The answer came from someone no less heroic-looking than Spearman. His muscular body was armored, and across his back he carried a broadsword almost as tall as he was. Heavy Warrior, famous in the frontier town, stretched out his palm and looked upward, squinting at the top of the tower.

  “Eighty or ninety percent odds this tower was built by the kind of jerk who would fill it with monsters and traps.”

  At his feet was a brutally mangled corpse; it appeared to have been dropped from a great height. They had already collected the level tag that had been around its neck, giving its name, gender, rank, and class. Apparently the body had belonged to a young girl, but whether she had died before her fall or because of it, they didn’t know.

  They saw other crimson dots around the tower, presumably more remains.

  “Suppose some weird magical type built it as a hideaway. I’d say he’s gone bad.”

  Heavy Warrior gave the corpse a gentle poke with his boot. The tower’s owner was a Non-Prayer—he had forgotten how. Meaning this adventure would basically be a hack-and-slash, full of monster opponents.

  “I doubt there is a need for us to face them head-on.”

  The final person spoke in a low, dispassionate voice. It was a man in grimy leather armor and a cheap-looking steel helmet, with a round shield on his arm and a sword of a strange length at his hip. He reached into the item pouch on his waist and began digging through his equipment.

  “We can climb the wall.”

  “Hey, you mean with a rope or something? If the anchors come out midway, we’ll come tumbling right down!”

  “Hold a piton in each hand and pull yourself up.”

  Spearman gave an exasperated shrug, gawking at the piton Goblin Slayer had produced.

  “Do you have any climbing experience?”

  “A bit, on mountains. Cliff sides, too.”

  Heavy Warrior folded his arms and grunted. He held out a finger, measuring the tower’s height, and clicked his tongue.

  “The question is how to fight anything that jumps you on the way up. It doesn’t have to be a demon. A gargoyle would be trouble enough.”

  “Gargoyle?”

  “Stone statues,” Heavy Warrior said, indicating their approximate size with his hands. “Wings. They fly around in the sky.”

  “Hrm.” Goblin Slayer let out a grunt. “So there are such enemies as those, too…”

  “Yeah. Personally, I’m all about melee weaponry, but…a magic user would sure make things easier right about now.”

  “Don’t get all fired up here, huh?” Spearman looked at Heavy Warrior, who had begun formulating a strategy with the utmost seriousness, as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “So, what? You want to cut your way in, detect and disarm traps, search around? I sure don’t.” Heavy Warrior heaved a sigh, sliding the massive sword on his back to rest between his shoulder blades. “Because we have no spell caster, no monk, and no thief.”

  At that, Spearman could only fall silent.

  §

  There was an endless array of places to adventure in the world. Ruins from the battles of the Age of Gods were numerous, and all the more so on the frontier. Whether they followed Order or Chaos, nations flourished and then declined, and the cycle continued with another nation arising. As a result, finding one or two new ruins was nothing to write home about. But when ruins appeared one day that were not there the day before—that was something else.

  It was supposedly a passing merchant caravan that had first discovered the ivory tower rising from the waste. The forest that had been there on their outward journey was gone, replaced by the white spire that gazed down on them.

  Naturally, their surprise was tremendous, but they’d had no time to stare—they had been attacked by creatures with human shapes and wings like bats.

  Demons! Those awful servants of Chaos! Those Non-Prayer Characters!

  The merchants scurried away, and via the Adventurers Guild, their report was sent to the king himself. The king could have sent in the military to exterminate the threat, and the matter would have been settled. If only things were so simple.

  To send in the army required men and money. In this case, the men were regular citizens, and the money was taxes. Taxes might go up next year. And relatives, family members, friends, and neighbors might die doing their duty as soldiers. The citizens found this intolerable, and it bred only resentment.

  And then there was the dragon who lived in the volcano to keep an eye on, and other problems like the partisans of the Demon Lord who still threatened the area. To send in the army would mean there were fewer people to attend to these other matters.

  And if the tower was bait, a diversion, what then? True, demons were gathering there, but it was still just a tower in the middle of a wasteland. Maybe some twisted magician had built it. It couldn’t be said yet whether it was a threat to the country or the world. There was no reason for the military to get involved.

  You might ask, then, what the military was for. To stand ready against an invasion by the forces of Chaos, of course. In the recent climactic battle between the new Platinum-ranked hero and the Demon Lord, they had been on the battle lines. Casualties had been high. Many died, many were wounded. They were in no shape to go immediately to their next skirmish or major battle.

  More than anything, simple strategy told that trying to cram an army into a ruin or a cave was a good way to get it destroyed. Army units were meant to fight on the open plain with enemy units, not to go into enclosed spaces that not even horses could enter.

  Ruins and caves had monsters in them that were threatening the pioneer villages. How could the army be dispatched to all of them at once? It was precisely because the king and nobles were a good king and good nobles that they could not use their forces so lightly.

  “But neither will this matter bear to be ignored.”

  The young king, visiting his friend for the first time in a long time, sighed deeply.

  The place was dappled in soft sunlight, full of tranquil, pure silence.

  The plant life was carefully tended, the flowers fragrant. The white pillars in the grove appeared to be massive trees. The burbling of a stream, which seemed to come from no place in particular, was soothing to his frayed nerves.

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “Oh, my.”

  They were in a garden in the deepest part of the Temple. Its priestess gave an elegant smile and cocked her head. Her beautiful golden hair flowed like honey, cascading over her ample chest.

  “Quite an interesting change of heart for someone who turned his back when we were dealing with the goblins.”

  “You must understand, though that may have been a personal tragedy, in the grand scheme of things, it was trivial.”

  The king spoke briefly, then waved a hand as if to clear the words away.

  The way he settled into the seat that had been prepared for him was at once uncouth and yet graceful. Was this what they called kingliness? Or aristocratic bearing? Whatever it was, he moved as one who had known it since birth.

  “And some goblins can easily be handled by a party of adventurers.”

  “…Yes. You’re right.”

  That was simple fact.

  Goblins were dangerous, and if they defeated you, “tragedy” was the right word for what awaited.

  But goblins remained the weakest monsters, and they were not the only ones against whom l
oss meant a cruel fate. You might be eaten by a dragon, dissolved by a slime, or smashed to bits by a golem…

  What ultimately awaited you was the same thing you would find when the goblins had finished having their way with you: death. Whether it was due to lack of physical strength, or skill, or simple bad luck, there was no future for those who could not defeat goblins.

  “As Your Majesty is most kind…”

  A comic song came from the woman’s half-open lips.

  Once a king so kind and fair

  To take his taxes did forebear

  Water he gave to a raging river

  And city councils aided ever

  Tucked the councilmen into bed

  And every starving person fed

  He made his soldiers passing bold

  And heroes sent to goblin holes:

  The Capital soon was a feast for trolls.

  The king frowned to hear a song that made light of the nobility, and she giggled like a girl.

  “Is this not the moment to call in adventurers, Your Majesty?”

  “Indeed, it may be…”

  The king put a hand to his brow, rubbing it as if to loosen a taut muscle, and nodded. He had thought it would come to this.

  The army was not suited to monster hunting. Hence they would give those scoundrels status, give them rewards—they would send in the adventurers. That was what kept the world turning. They would just do it again now. Weren’t adventurers monster-hunting specialists, after all?

  “The merchants said they were attacked by demons, but we don’t know for sure what was responsible.”

  The king shook his head as if to point out that there was no proof, then settled heavily into his chair.

  One could hardly have sat on a throne the same way. He closed his eyes, breathing in the refreshing air of the garden to his heart’s content.

  “I very much doubt merchants could tell the difference between a demon and a gargoyle.”

  “It’s an evil spell caster’s tower then, is it?” The woman who was master of this temple gave a chuckling laugh, and murmured, “My, how scary,” as if it was none of her concern.