The Goblin's Shadow (A LitRPG Series)

by Kyle Vauss

  I sighed. I didn’t want to spend much time in here. “Let’s get this over with,” I said.

  He straightened up. “Did you go to Ikiele?” he said.

  “I haven’t had time yet.”

  He looked sad. “Okay, fine. On with the test. You’ve just hit level 3, I take it?”

  “Yep.”

  There it was again. Mentions of levels. This was an aspect of game play that Bolzar should have been ignorant of. Something felt very wrong about this, and I felt as if I shouldn’t be here. Something was going on. Why had the devs chosen to make an NPC aware of game mechanics?

  “It’s time to choose a skill,” said Bolzar.

  This was strange. Until you hit level 10, the new skills you gained by levelling up were all pre-determined. I’d never been given a choice before.

  “How are you finding the class so far?”

  “Shadow walker?” I said. “It’s okay, I guess.”

  “It’s more than okay, Tom. You’re just not using it properly yet. The same way you never used any of your classes. Why is it that you never stick around? According to your account history, you’ve had thirty different characters in the last year.”

  Although selling characters was perfectly legal, I knew that the devs frowned on it. The problem for them was that they couldn’t do anything about it. As long as you paid a subscription to Infarna, your characters and classes were your property. Still, I had to remember that in here, I was talking to a representation of the devs. There was no point being brazen about the fact that I levelled up characters for profit.

  “I’m just trying to find the right class,” I said.

  He looked at me strangely. “There’s something you’re hiding, Tom,” he said. “But if you don’t want to tell me, then fine. Let’s get on with the test. I don’t want to be here anymore than you do. You smell sweaty.”

  He pointed at the chair in front of him. I walked over and sat down opposite him. Bolzar spread his hands across the table, and four playing cards appeared on the surface.

  One of them showed a door. The other showed a dagger, and another displayed a spell scroll. The last one was a picture of a man laughing.

  “You’re outside the chambers of a rich lord,” said Bolzar.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” I said, looking at the bare white walls around me.

  “Come on, Tom. Play nice. You said you’d cooperate. Remember, there’s something in it for you.”

  “Fine,” I answered.

  He coughed, then carried on. “You’re outside the chambers of a lord. Your job is to get in the room so that you can kill him.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s just say he’s a very bad man. Whatever it takes to soothe your conscience.”

  “Go on…”

  He pointed at the cards. “There are a few ways you can kill him, each one represented by the cards in front of you. We’ve tried to make them as simple as possible so that your tiny mind can work out what they mean.”

  “So, what do you want me to do?”

  “Just look at the cards and tell me which you’d pick. Each one represents a way to kill the lord, and I just want to know which way you’d go.”

  I stared at the playing cards. This must have been some kind of personality test, I guessed. If the devs were gathering information on their players, maybe they wanted to know what kind of people were in the game. I needed to think about this.

  The dagger obviously represented a full-on physical assault. That didn’t seem the way to go; if the lord I was there to kill was rich, trying to fight my way into his room would draw the attention of his guards. So, that was out. Next up was the spell scroll. My shadow walker could use certain spell cantrips, but it still wasn’t a magical class. If I was really in that situation, magic would be a poor choice, since I wouldn’t be effective with it.

  That left the door card, and the man who was laughing. The laughing man must have represented charisma. Some sort of way of talking my way into the lord’s chambers.

  “Tick tock,” said Bolzar.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Then think faster. I want to get back to my book.”

  Again, charisma wasn’t one of my strengths, either in real life, or as a shadow walker. That left the door card.

  This was a trick question, I realized. The three playing cards of magic, attack, and charisma were just complicated ways of doing things. Sometimes, the simplest way to do things would be to just walk through the door.

  I pointed at the door card. “That one,” I said.

  Bolzar looked at me as if he hadn’t expected the answer. “You’re sure?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Positive?”

  “Yeah,” I said, getting irritated. “The door. I’ll just walk into the lord’s chambers. No tricks, no spells. Just walk right in there.”

  Bolzar collected his cards into his hand. He sighed. “Well, it’s your decision, buddy. The other cards would have given you something good, but maybe this will work for you. Okay, then. It’s your choice.”

  With that, he clapped, and the cards disappeared. I expected something to happen. Maybe the room would shimmer and disappear, or I’d get a message telling me I’d learned a new skill. Instead, the room didn’t change, and Bolzar drummed his fingers on the table.

  “Are we done?” I said.

  He ignored me. I looked at him, and I realized that he seemed different today. He was disheveled. His face was covered in stubble, and it looked like he’d worn the same clothes for a week. There was something wrong with Bolzar; a kind of sadness in him, as though something was playing on his mind.

  “What were you talking about the other day?” I asked. “About the woman in the village?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

  “So, are we just going to sit here?”

  He shrugged. “The game is processing your choice. It should be done soon.”

  I had the strongest feeling that I needed to help him. That something was wrong with Bolzar, and that there was a reason the game had matched me with him. I didn’t really want to spare the time, but when I looked at him, I felt pity.

  “Look,” I said. “If you really want, I can go talk to this woman for you. But you need to clue me in a little.”

  Bolzar leaned forward. He smiled, and this time it wasn’t sarcastic. “You’re a good person, Tom. Deep down, behind all this ‘lone ranger’ business, you have a good heart. But no, I don’t want to talk about it. But thanks. Have this for your troubles.”

  [Item gained – Belt of Sneak – 2% increase to sneak chance.]

  He handed me the belt, which I clipped around my waist. For a few minutes, neither of us said anything. I looked around. I wondered if someone was watching me, if there was some Infarna dev out there looking at this on a monitor.

  “What now?” I said.

  Bolzar clapped his hands, then stood up. “We’re done. Your choice has been processed. Until next time, Tom.”

  The room began to shimmer and fade.

  “Hang on a sec,” I said. “What are you-”

  Before I could finish my sentence, the room disappeared, and I was back on the plains.

  Chapter Thirteen

  [Ability unlocked: Phasing]

  - As the shadow warrior learns his craft, he finds that his body changes. When faced with an obstruction, your body can turn to shadow. This allows you to walk through walls, doors and windows.

  - At level 1, you can pass through wooden doors.

  By choosing the door card, I’d obviously unlocked the phasing ability. I wondered what I would have gotten if I’d chosen the dagger or the spell scroll. Had I picked the right one? Was this some kind of new levelling system that the devs were trialing? If that was the case, why pretend it was for customer feedback?

  I didn’t have time to dwell. I brought up my character screen and saw that Phasing was listed as an ability. Now we were getting to the good stuff. Being a
ble to walk through doors would be great for a character who wanted to steal things, or join the thief’s guild. Unless they were made of metal, locked doors were no longer a problem. I imagined that teenager who eventually got this character would have a lot of fun with it.

  I looted the gnomes’ bodies and found 50GD, a rusty axe, and a dagger with an empty gem socket on it. For such small creatures, they gave off decent treasure. Combined with hitting level 3 and earning the Phasing ability, this had been a worthwhile jaunt.

  I decided it was time to stop levelling and to wait for Gabber. The sun was no longer covered by a cloud now but instead, it had set. I knew that the goblin would be here soon. I wondered what he would say when he saw me. Would he have expected me to change my mind?

  A few hours later, I still didn’t have my answer. The time for our meeting came and went, and I started to feel like I’d been stood up. I looked around me. The NPCs had left the plain now, and the grass was bathed in the shadow of the night.

  Where was he?

  I started to feel irritated. I was only here to get back at Crawford. I didn’t actually care about the goblin. The least the little jerk could do was to show up.

  And then he did.

  As I stood up and looked east, toward they direction of the village, I saw a little figure running at me. It was Gabber, alright, and he was sprinting as fast as his little legs could carry him. He had a look of panic on his face, and his sleeves had rolled down over his hands and they flapped in the wind.

  Behind him, with spades, brooms and rolling pins raised, were some angry-looking villagers.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When Gabber reached me, he stopped and panted. When he opened his mouth to breathe I saw two fangs along the upper row of his teeth. They seemed sharp enough, but they were under-developed compared to most goblins. In fact, everything about Gabber made him seem like a kind of goblin-lite, as though his growth had been stunted.

  “Told you we’d need to run,” he said, rolling up his sleeves.

  The villagers ran across the plains toward us. It was a group made up of men and women. Most of them looked to be ranging from thirty to fifty years old, though an old man hobbled at the back of the crowd.

  Gabber ran to a patch of grass to my right. He looked around, before reaching down and picking up his rucksack. “Left it here for safe-keeping,” he said.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  The villagers were closer now. They held their make-shift weapons aloft, and it was clear from their faces that they were ready to use them.

  “There was a book I wanted from the village,” said Gabber. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a book that was smaller than my palm.

  “All this for a book?”

  He shrugged. “I like to read. I’m glad you came back, Tamos.”

  We needed to decide what to do about the villagers. They didn’t sport advanced weaponry, and they hardly looked like warriors. The problem was that village NPCs were given ridiculously high levels and hitpoints. This was programmed by the Infarna devs after a particularly infamous incident. A bunch of warriors went to a town and slaughtered every NPC they could find, leaving a trail of blood and corpses.

  With such high hitpoint meters, it would take days for us to whittle them down. Meanwhile, the villagers’ steady barrage of low-damage attacks would kill us.

  As the villagers got closer, they started shouting.

  “Disgusting creature,” called one man, a spade lifted above his head.

  “Dirty little swamp rat,” shouted another.

  Gabber faced them. “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel about me?” he said.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I said. “We need to do something.”

  “Why don’t you use that spell you used in the forest. You know, the one where you made a copy of yourself?”

  “You saw that?”

  Gabber nodded. “I was watching you for a while. But then I got bored. You’re not very interesting.”

  “No,” I said. “The cooldown means I can only use it once a day, and it won’t work here. I don’t want to waste it. The minute they touch the copy it’ll break, and there’s too many of them for a sneak attack to do much good.”

  “So, what, then? Come on, human. You’re supposed to be the brains here.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Yeah. I guess that I’m the brains of the operation, actually.”

  One of the villagers, a strapping man with the muscled arms of a farmer, was close enough to jab his pitchfork at Gabber. The goblin jumped back out of reach.

  “There’s nothing for it,” I said. “We need to run.”

  I turned and started to sprint away, when Gabber called out behind me. “Not that way,” he said.

  “We need to get to the forest. They’re programmed so that they don’t stray far away from the village.”

  “If you’re here,” said Gabber, “I’m assuming you’ve decided to help me. And we need to go north.”

  North of us, beyond the plains, was a mountain range. It was far enough away that we’d lose the villagers, but I didn’t see where we could go after that.

  “Just trust me,” said Gabber.

  Just as he went to move, the farmer jabbed his backside with his pitchfork. Gabber dropped to the floor and shouted in pain. I ran over, pulled him to his feet, and then dragged him out of harm’s way.

  We sprinted over the plains. My already-low stamina began to drain. As we left the plains behind, I realized that I couldn’t hear the villagers anymore. We reached a stone pathway that seemed to snake toward the mountain range ahead.

  I stopped. “We need to rest,” I said. “If my stamina drains completely, it’ll take me ages to get it back. Besides, it looks like we’re alone now.”

  There were a few trees to our left. Oversized crows perched on the branches and watched us. I held my sword and watched them warily, wondering if they’d attack. The birds made no sign of hostile intentions.

  To our right, there was a rock on the ground. I walked over and sat next to it. Gabber joined me, sitting on the cramped rock so that there wasn’t an inch between us.

  “Scoot over a little,” I said.

  “Scoot where? I’ll fall off.”

  “Fine. Listen, you did the wrong thing back there.”

  Gabber looked at me. “When?”

  “When the farmer stabbed you. You dropped to the ground. Number one rule in fighting – never let your opponent drop you to the floor.”

  Gabber put his rucksack on the mud and stretched his legs on it, resting his feet. “I don’t know if you noticed, Tamos, but I was in quite a lot of pain.”

  “You need to bite through it next time. If you’re in combat and you fall to the ground, you’re done.”

  Gabber nodded. “I guess. I was never much of a fighter.”

  “What’s the deal with you?” I said. “Where are you from?”

  “You’ve gotten pretty chatty all of a sudden,” said Gabber.

  “Since it looks like I’m helping you, I’d like to know who I’m travelling with.”

  The goblin crossed his legs over his bag. “So, you want the full story?”

  “The condensed version. Not the Gabber version. Don’t start by telling me about the day you were born or anything like that.”

  “You’re no fun,” said Gabber. “You gave me a fighting tip, well here’s a storytelling tip. Always provide a little context.”

  I quickly checked my stamina bar and saw that it had reached hallway now. Another five minutes or so, and it’d be full again. After that, we had to decide on a route. And I still needed to know where we were going.

  “Well here it is,” said Gabber. He leapt up off the rock and stood in front of me. I could tell that with my undivided attention, the goblin was in his element.

  “I’m listening.”

  “They call my clan the Redbacks, on account of this,” he began. He turned around so that
his back faced me. With a struggle, he lifted his man-sized shirt, to show his bare skin. His back was lined with ridges where his bones stuck out. In the center was a red circle that looked like a stain on his skin.

  “I’m the son of Gar’lor. You heard of him?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Just as well, I guess. We never wanted humans to know about us. My father was the clan chieftain. Since I was his eldest son, I was next in line to take over.”