Danny stood there and allowed the first goblin to ineffectively hit Danny’s stone armor with his club. Pleased with how his armor stood up to the blow, Danny swung his sword and managed to open the goblin’s throat.
Two more goblins followed right after with swords raised. As Danny blocked one goblin’s sword, he kicked out at the other. While Danny’s leg was struck by the goblin’s sword, it only managed to change Danny’s kick from striking the goblin’s stomach to its groin. The goblin he kicked fell to its knees in pain as the other goblin pulled its blade back for another strike. Danny easily stepped away from the still standing goblin’s next strike as he stabbed his sword down into the chest of the kneeling goblin, piercing its heart. Finding his sword firmly lodged in the goblin’s chest, Danny warded of the remaining goblin’s next sword strike with his stone covered hand. Reflexively, Danny punched the goblin in the face with his other hand and was surprised at the sound of breaking bones.
Seeing the remaining goblin slump to the ground unmoving, Danny turned to see all the goblins that had stayed behind at the collapsed stairway, already on top of him.
*I miss Air Scan in this aspect,* Cranny complained.
Danny raised his hands to protect his head as the blows rained down on him. Striking out with his hands, a few goblins fell to his half-blind strikes. Then, one goblin found the week spot in his leg armor.
Danny’s knee buckled, but he managed to stay on his feet. The blows continued to strike the off-balance ascendant when stone spikes burst forth from the ground to spear the remaining goblins. Danny waived his arms around a few more times before he realized there was no one left to fight.
*Cranny?* Danny asked in confusion.
Cranny’s annoyed voice spoke up, *Danny, we don’t have time, or mana, for you to test your skills like this. You can’t be good at everything…yet. Now, the clock is ticking.*
Danny sighed dejectedly as he stood up and walked gingerly over the blood stained floor and bodies. He had to remove a few of the spikes to give himself enough room to pass in some places.
*This isn’t working, Cranny.*
Ensuring there was no immediate danger, Danny released his Earth Aspect and used Harmony Magic to quickly heal his knee. He felt exposed as his stone armor fell to the ground around him, but he had trouble maintaining it in his natural form.
There was a large main hallway from the stairway up to the goblin tunnel on the other side. Four smaller hallways crossed to either side of the main hallway.
*Alright, bringing up the mini map for you,* Cranny announced. A translucent display of the basement appeared with small red dots denoting living goblins.
Using Air Magic, Danny snuffed out the torches as soon as he checked each hallway. The smoke from the torches was getting thicker so he had to hurry. He noticed that the air-tight basement made his ears want to pop when he used his Air Magic. That added air with fire to the list of elements to avoid excessively using down here.
There were over fifty rooms on this bottom floor, and every one of them so far contained cramped and huddled goblins. Out in the hallways were crude buckets and large bowls filled with goblin excrement. Happening to glance down, he realized one of the buckets held some sort of slop or gruel. There was nothing to tell this bucket from the others and shuddered thinking the goblins might not bother to denote the difference. Danny wouldn’t be surprised if these goblins were all horribly diseased.
*Danny, I can’t really scan all of them since they are all packed so closely in together, but my best guess is that they are all female. I would also suspect by the condition of the few I scanned that they are all in one stage of pregnancy or another.*
Danny grimaced, *What about the ones we killed by the stairs?*
*Those were all males,* Cranny replied.
Moving on, Danny soon reached the other side of the lower basement floor. As he already knew, a pair of goblin males had tried to hide from him. They must have seen the attack by the stairs and hidden.
*They don’t have a connection to the source at all,* Danny pointed out.
Cranny agreed, *Yes, just like all these females.*
Quickly killing them with two ice spikes, Danny confirmed that the whole floor contained female goblins packed in as densely as possible.
Danny complained, *I thought the boss was always at the lowest level of a dungeon?*
*Yeah, so much for outsmarting our way to the end of the level,* Cranny agreed.
Moving to the sealed stairway, Danny activated Earth Aspect only to hesitate. He couldn’t bring himself to just leave these female goblins here to suffocate to death. Even though they were like a plague, he couldn’t bring himself to kill them in a way that would cause them to suffer far worse than they already had. Focusing on the far side of the basement, Danny created dozens of crude stone clubs that quickly piled up as they broke off from the ground. Then, he focused on the cell doors, weakening the hinges. With a cacophony of reverberating echoes, the cell doors fell under their own weight, and the female goblins were free.
*Danny, we really don’t have time for this…but I won’t try and stop you.*
As the first female goblins gathered up enough courage to step outside their cells, Danny sunk down into the ground. The female goblins rushed to pick up the stone weapons Danny had created and any weapons that were on the dead goblins that had attacked Danny. The sealed wall to the tunnel weakened, and a male goblin’s pickaxe easily broke through. The new hole was widened enough to get by, and the male goblins piled up on the other side crowded in close to look in. The waiting males barely managed to take a step backwards as the first of the female goblins jumped through the new opening to stab one of them in the gut.
CHAPTER 29
The goblins of the upper basement level began to work on clearing the sealed stairway to the surface. A hobgoblin looked on as the smaller goblins dug with their crude picks or hauled away the chunks of removed stone. The other goblins not involved with the excavation were putting on armor and weapons. These goblins were visibly larger and moved with confidence.
Not yet wanting to put the goblins on alert, Danny ducked back into the ground and checked a few more locations.
In one of the larger rooms on the floor, a few hobgoblins were seated in what he could only assume was meditation. There was crude bedding along the nearby walls as well as a few female goblins chained by collars around their necks which were attached to the walls.
In all, Danny found that one side was devoted to the hobgoblins, while the other to armor and weapon storage. He had a few other rooms to check when he stumbled upon a room where the goblins were making new weapons and armor.
A couple of goblins were apparently assisting a dwarf as he worked at a forge. One was carrying a crude sword over to a massive pile of weapons while the other was sharpening the swords as best he could with a whetstone. The smoke Danny had seen coming from one of the crumbled towers up top must have been from a vent to the smelter taking up a corner in this room.
Other goblins were walking in and selecting weapons from the pile before leaving. Danny waited for a gap in the visiting goblins and then immediately used Raised Earth to close off the doorway to the room. Before the two assistant goblins could react, spikes of earth rose up to permanently silence them. The room now secure, Danny dropped down to the floor.
The room was like an oven, and Danny wondered how the dwarf and assistant goblins hadn't turned into jerky by now. Realizing that he had just sealed this room off, Danny turned to watch the smelter still burning strong, still consuming oxygen. Coming up with an idea, he quickly rose the earth up, sealing off the smelter from the rest of the room.
Walking over to the dwarf, Danny touched the metal shackles at his feet, and they fell off, “Good day, sir. How are you? My name is Danny.”
The dwarf hadn't moved a muscled when Danny had dropped down from the ceiling. Then, as he removed the shackles, the dwarf had fallen over, a look of fear and confusion on his face. That’s w
hen Danny realized he had spoken in Elvish. Danny was at a loss as how best to communicate with the dwarf.
The dwarf looked closer and began to eye Danny cautiously before speaking in passable Elvish, “A-an elf? Wait, w-what exactly are ya?” Then realizing his manners said, “I mean, the name’s Dain. Thank you for releasing me…I don’t mean to be rude, but are you a stone elf?”
Danny had forgotten he was still in his Earth Aspect and released it, his body changing back to his true form. Danny explained, “I am actually human, but I know Elvish as well. How did you wind up here?”
From his position on the ground, Dain obviously decided Danny was more friend than foe as he started to tenderly inspect his recently freed ankles. Dain sounded tired as he began his story, “I was with a dwarven delegation to the elves, hoping to see if they would let us do a bit of prospecting in their lands. We was hoping to form a sort of business partnership with any minerals we find. Figure with the elves buying all their ores and metals from us, they wouldn't mind us providing the goods a bit closer to home. Blasted goblins took us by surprise and knocked me over the head before I knew what was what.”
Reaching out with Nature Aspect, Danny scanned the man for injuries. There were a few other signs of poor treatment he had received from the goblins, and Danny used Nature Aspect to try and heal the dwarf. To his surprise, his mana was rebuffed.
Being the first dwarf he had seen, Danny scanned the man's body with his mana sight. He was surprised to find that, while the dwarf's mana was unlocked, it all seemed to flow along his mana veins only to be ejected from his body anywhere it got near his skin. The dwarf was producing a large amount of mana as well. Apparently, this gave dwarfs a natural resistance to magic. Unfortunately, Danny didn’t have time to figure out how to circumnavigate this in order heal him.
Danny asked, “Do you know if there is anyone else being kept here, and where is the hobgoblin with the black duster?”
The dwarf frowned and shrugged his shoulders, “When we were attacked and I came to, I only saw me and my clan cousin Mari in the group returning. They brought me here, and all I have done is work, sleep, eat, and shit here. I am a miner, not a blacksmith. I know a little about metalworking but just repairin’ things. Which is good in a way, as all I can make are some shoddy swords and armor for them. I haven’t seen any hobgoblin in a black duster, just black robes.” Dain got quiet, “I haven’t seen Mari since then. I hope she is alright. She and her baby…”
Danny looked confused, “She brought a baby on the trip?”
Dain shook his head, saying, “No, she was pregnant. She didn’t mind having it in the elven lands, as her sisters would help her. She was pretty far along…we need to find her, please.” Dain looked up imploringly at Danny.
“Of course, we will find her if she is still here,” Danny promised. Now, he just had to figure out what to do with the dwarf and decided it would be best take him along.
Dain quickly agreed, “Better safe with you than trying not to get captured again by those little bastards!”
“You know how to fight?”
Dain shook his head, “My clan have been miners for generations. We are not trained to fight.”
Danny started to second guess his decision to take him along, but had already wasted enough time.
***
Having completely scouted the upper basement floor, Danny only found goblins of one variety or another. Danny grew stone again to reseal what the goblins had mined from the stairway to the surface. The goblins had already discovered the sealed forge and had started to dig through it as well.
Cranny informed him, *Your mana is almost out, Danny.*
Danny had already taken Dain through a new tunnel he had created in the earth outside the forge, sealing it behind them. Danny showed the hard-working goblins some kindness, by removing the stone from the forge’s door. Of course the dwindling flames of the smelter had now turned the air of the forge room into a poisonous noxious smoke. Danny didn’t bother to wait around to see how they handled this.
Moving to the large room on the surface, Danny sensed that the stone he had erected to block the doorway from the outside had already been breached. He decided to leave it alone for now.
Having run out of ground, Danny slowly surfaced in a corner, doing his best to hide his exit point by pulling the stone back down and condensing it. The room was obviously meant to be used as an assembly room or a great hall. There was a raised area on the farthest side of the room, and the entrance to the stairway to the basement was through a now sealed door on the same side. The walls were lined with female goblins, all chained to the walls.
The great hall was a flurry of activity. Large goblins in armor and weapons were rushing outside, while unarmored goblins were dragging the wounded back in. All the while, a hobgoblin in a black duster was screaming orders to the soldiers and goblins running all around. Behind the screaming hobgoblin, a large group of hobgoblin shamans was tending to the wounded.
Danny had no clue what was happening outside and did his best not to be distracted about the first few unpleasant possibilities that sprang to mind. Then, he noticed that the hobgoblins were not healing the wounded but were infusing them with entropy magic. The wounded would then rise up and leave to fight again outside.
He knew he had to stop this supply of fresh troops. The problem was he was getting dangerously low on mana and didn’t have time to go back and recharge while he could be helping whomever they were fighting.
Danny growled in frustration, *If only I could…* He realized he was being an idiot. In his rush to locate the one responsible, he had been ignoring a more efficient way to tackle the problem.
Switching to his Nature Affinity in Sacred Tree Form, Danny willed the three trees to grow new roots toward him. They soon reached his position, and he merged his form with theirs. Mana flowed into him, and Danny took the extra seeds he had stored in his robes and quickly grew those as well. Soon, he was merged with five sacred trees. While they were new, the mana regeneration he now had access to was still nothing to balk at.
***
The great hall’s doorway to the outside sealed itself again, as spikes burst forth from the ground. The male goblins that remained in the room were swiftly dispatched, and the group of hobgoblins were all that remained. As they gathered around each other, Danny could now see that there were a little more than twenty shamans.
Not trusting his Earth Affinity to not accidentally kill the hobgoblins, Danny sent the roots of one sacred tree through the floor to wrap around and restrain the shamans. His efforts were thwarted when a hobgoblin in the black duster hit the roots with entropy magic. The dark magic quickly entered the root system and began to spread, feeding on the mana within.
Danny killed off the infected roots before they could spread through the whole tree and then into him and his other trees.
Danny struggled to find an answer, *Crap, I need them alive.*
Able to keep a level head, Cranny came to his rescue, *Their entropy magic is what makes them difficult to handle. Why don’t we just use ‘that’ to remove their ability to cast magic?*
*Of course, but I need to get closer,* Danny agreed.
Danny took a calculated risk and created an opening to the surface and switched to Mana Aspect. Turning to Dain, Danny handed the dwarf his backpack and told him, “Here, take this and stay here.”
Not waiting for a reply, Danny floated into the room, and the hobgoblins spotted him immediately.
The hobgoblin in the center, who had been barking orders earlier, seemed to recognize Danny. Speaking in a strangely fluent Elvish, the goblins wearing black dusters greeted him, “Welcome honored guest, to the future of the goblin race. Please, call me Bozhidar.”
Danny studied the hobgoblin who had spoken. To his normal sight, there was only his black duster to distinguish him from the others in the room. Through his mana sight, Danny could tell the hobgoblins had mana lines and stored mana in their bodies just like the hu
man wizards, who had been unlocked with one of the ancient keys. Their mana lines bulged irregularly, and their mana storage was inconsistent.
Danny remembered back to his theory on the whereabouts of Diadem’s wizards missing ancient key. Danny felt he was certain where it had gone and now who had stolen it.
Bozhidar's smile fell from his lips as he studied where Danny floated, “You really are him, are you not? The one who stole my father's birthright. He said you might come. The one who was born with all the gifts my father had carefully crafted. The one my father curses his every waking hour…the son of Creek.”
Danny frowned, not because of what had just been revealed to him, but because this wasn't the individual responsible for him being here on this world, “Where is your father? He and I have much to discuss.”
Bozhidar looked behind him, “Father was frustrated with our short lifespans and poor position in this world and made plans for his future. His future and those of my two older brothers.” Bozhidar said the last with palpable jealousy.
Turning back to Danny, the hobgoblin seemed to regain some of his confidence, proudly proclaiming, “Before my father left, he handed over his kingdom to me and set for me three tasks. Grow in power, crush Diadem, and if I get the chance, kill the thief stole what was his.
I have to thank you, Creek. I had lost hope when I heard the elves had finally decided to come out of their forest to wipe us out. Father was right when he said that they were cowards, only striking in the shadows, rarely risking their precious long lives. Now, before I die at their hands, I can at least grant one of my father’s wishes.”
With his mana sight, Danny could see all twenty-something shamans preparing spells. Bozhidar led six of his hobgoblins in casting some sort of complicated ritualistic spell, while the others started to rapidly fire fireballs and small bolts of Entropy Aspect at Danny.
Danny didn’t move from where he was floating, as the spells splashed harmlessly against a shield made from pure mana. Danny found his mana quickly depleting, though, and didn’t know how much longer he could maintain his shield. Switching to another aspect would be risky, so he did the only thing he could think of. He moved forward.
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