Goblin Slayer, Vol. 1

by Kumo Kagyu

  “Goblins. Impudent beasts,” the dwarf spat, patting his beard.

  Wordlessly, Goblin Slayer cast the torchlight on the floor, then down each of the passageways left and right, looking closely at the walls. There was nothing there, save for the soot of the lamps once used by the fortress’s long-vanished residents.

  “What’s wrong?” Priestess asked.

  “No totems.”

  “Oh, you’re right…” Only Priestess understood Goblin Slayer’s remark. The other party members listened in puzzlement. But Goblin Slayer said nothing more.

  He’s thinking. Priestess looked at the party and realized it fell to her to explain.

  “Um, in other words, that means there’s no, um, goblin shamans here.”

  “No spell caster?” the elf said with a happy clap. “Lucky us.”

  “No.”

  The lizardman let out a hissing breath. “Are you, then…troubled by the absence of spell casters, milord Goblin Slayer?”

  “Yes.” He nodded, then indicated the alarm with the tip of his sword. “Your average goblin would never come up with something like this.”

  “Long-ears said it was brand-new. That means it’s not part of the fort’s original defenses.”

  “I thought about tripping it to draw them out,” Goblin Slayer muttered. “But I think we had better not.”

  “Milord Goblin Slayer, you spoke before of your experience with such extensive nests,” the lizardman said, taking care that his tail did not drag across the alarm. “How did you deal with them?”

  “I flushed out the inhabitants and annihilated them one at a time. Sometimes I used fire. Sometimes I directed a river into the nest. There are various ways.” Standing next to him, the elf looked aghast. “But we can’t use those here.” He turned to High Elf Archer. “Can you make out any footprints?”

  “I’m sorry. In a cave, maybe, but on stone like this…”

  “Let the dwarf have a look,” Dwarf Shaman said, coming over.

  “Fine, but watch out for the alarm.”

  “I’m stout, not stupid. I’ll be careful.”

  The elf politely made way. He stooped in front of the party. He walked back and forth across the bar of the T-shaped intersection. He kicked the stone floor, looking at it intently. A moment later, he gave his beard a confident stroke. “I see it. Their little roost is to the left.”

  Priestess was confused. “How can you tell?”

  “By the wear on the floor. They’re coming from the left and returning from the right, or coming from the left and turning to go outside.”

  “Are you sure?” Goblin Slayer said.

  “Of course I’m sure. I’m a dwarf,” Dwarf Shaman replied, pounding his belly.

  “I see,” Goblin Slayer murmured, falling silent.

  “Is something wrong, milord Goblin Slayer?” the lizardman said.

  “We’ll go this way,” Goblin Slayer said, and with his sword, he pointed…to the right.

  “Didn’t Stumpy just say the goblins are to the left?” the elf said.

  “Yes. But if we go that way, we’ll be too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “You’ll see,” he said with a calm nod.

  Not long after starting down the rightward path, they were assaulted by a choking stench. The air was thick and cloying. An acrid taste lingered in their mouths with every breath.

  “Hrk…” The dwarf pinched his nose.

  “Urgh…” The lizardman’s eyes rolled grimly in his head.

  The elf, too, unconsciously took a hand from her bow and covered her mouth.

  “Wha…what is that? Is it safe to breathe?” she groaned.

  Priestess’s teeth were chattering. She knew this smell.

  “Don’t fight it. Breathe through your nose. You’ll get used to it soon.” Goblin Slayer didn’t look back but only walked resolutely farther down the passage.

  The party hurried to keep up. Even Priestess somehow managed to continue.

  The source of the stench was close. They came up against a rotting wooden door that seemed placed to section off part of the ruins.

  “Hmph.” Goblin Slayer gave it a solid kick. With an agonized creak, the door abandoned its duty and collapsed. The foul liquid that covered the floor splashed up as the door fell into it.

  This was where the goblins put every manner of refuse. Scraps of food, including bones with bits of flesh clinging to them. Excrement. Corpses. Everything. The formerly white walls had turned a grimy crimson with the piles of trash.

  Amid it all, they could make out a strand of flaxen hair and a leg attached to a chain. Four wasted limbs bore hideous scars. The tendons had been cut.

  It was an elf.

  Emaciated, buried in filth, the left half of her body nonetheless still showed the beauty her people were renowned for.

  The right half was a different story.

  Priestess thought the elf looked like she had been covered in bunches of grapes. Her delicate, pale skin was invisible under bluish swelling. Her eye and her breast were wrecked.

  The goal was unmistakable: torture for torture’s sake.

  Oh, not again… The thought rose in Priestess’s mind and stuck there.

  “Huegh… Eurghhh…”

  Right next to Priestess—seemingly so far away—High Elf Archer was adding the contents of her stomach to the waste that covered the floor.

  “What is this?” The dwarf stroked his beard, but couldn’t conceal the horror on his face.

  “Milord Goblin Slayer?” Even the normally inscrutable Lizard Priest wore an expression of transparent disgust.

  “You’ve never seen this before?”

  At his quiet question, High Elf Archer nodded, not bothering to wipe her mouth. Tears dribbled down her cheeks, and her ears hung almost flat against her head.

  “I see.” He nodded.

  “…illl… …ki… killll…” Priestess looked up suddenly at the plaintive groan. The imprisoned elf. She was still alive! Priestess rushed over to her and held her up, ignoring the filth that immediately covered her hands.

  “Give me a potion!”

  “No, she is too much weakened. It will only catch in her throat.” The lizardman had followed Priestess over to the prisoner and was inspecting her wounds with his scaled claws. “She is not wounded fatally, but she is in peril of dying from exhaustion. She needs a miracle.”

  “Right!” Priestess drew her staff close to her chest with one hand and placed the other on the chest of the wounded elf. “O Earth Mother, abounding in mercy, lay your revered hand upon your child’s wounds.”

  Watching their healer bestow the goddess’s miracle out of the corner of his eye, Goblin Slayer approached High Elf Archer.

  “Do you know her?”

  Still crouched and shaking helplessly, the elf shook her head. “Most…most likely she was like me…a ‘rootless’ elf who…became an adventurer.”

  “I see.” Goblin Slayer nodded and then with his bold stride walked toward the prisoner. His sword was in his hand. The lizardman gave him a wary look.

  “Oh…!”

  We’re out of time.

  Priestess blanched and rose. “H-hold it right there!” She stood with her arms spread in front of the prostrate elf. Goblin Slayer did not stop.

  “Move.”

  “No! I…I won’t!”

  “I don’t know what illusion you’re harboring now,” Goblin Slayer said in exasperation. His tone didn’t change. It was merciless, calm. “But I came here for one purpose: to slay goblins.”

  His sword fell.

  There was a geyser of blood and a scream.

  “Three.”

  The thud of a body. It was a goblin, the sword through his brain. He dropped the poisoned dagger he had been holding as he died. No one had noticed him hiding in the pile of trash behind the imprisoned elf.

  No, Priestess thought, shaking her head. That wasn’t true. He had noticed. And the prisoner, too.

  “Ki…
kill them…all…” The elf adventurer brought up a mouthful of blood along with her words.

  Goblin Slayer set his foot against the corpse and pulled out his sword. He used the goblin’s tunic to wipe glittering fat off the blade.

  “That’s my intention,” he answered calmly. No one else said anything.

  What had this man seen in his life? What was he? The people standing in that filth-riddled room finally felt a glimmer of understanding.

  Priestess recalled Witch’s appraisal of Goblin Slayer. And her words: “Let it be, your own decision.”

  Now she understood clearly what that meant. Every adventurer, even those who didn’t survive their first quest, would experience killing and death. They would encounter awful and terrible things. Villages and cities ravaged by monsters would not be an unusual sight for them.

  But there was a logic behind it all. From bandits and hoodlums, to dark elves and dragons, even slimes—all had a reason for how they acted.

  Goblins alone were different. They had no reason. Only evil. Evil toward humans, toward every other living thing. To hunt goblins was to be confronted with that evil over and over again.

  That was no adventure. And someone who chose to go down that path—they were no adventurer. They were him.

  A man in grimy leather armor and a dirty helmet, carrying a sword that seemed almost too long to wield.

  “Goblin Slayer…”

  Amid the dark and the stench, someone whispered his name.

  The responsibility to provide an escort for the elf prisoner back to the forest fell to Lizard Priest.

  He took several small fangs out of his pouch and spread them on the floor.

  “O horns and claws of our father, Iguanodon,” he intoned, “thy four limbs, become two legs to walk upon the earth.”

  When he had spoken, the fangs on the ground clattered and began to swell in size. A moment later, they had formed the skeleton of a lizardman, who bowed its head to Lizard Priest and kneeled.

  “This is the Dragontooth Warrior, a miracle I received from my father,” he explained.

  “How well does it fight?” Goblin Slayer asked.

  “As I myself am fairly capable, it could deal with one or two goblins if the need arose.”

  The lizardman wrote a letter explaining the situation and gave it to the Dragontooth Warrior, after which the creature hoisted the elf over its shoulder and set off.

  Between this and Minor Heal, the party had now used two of its miracles. No one objected.

  “What the hell…? What is going on here?” High Elf Archer whimpered, crouched in the muck. Priestess patted her back.

  Strangely, although they were still in the filth-riddled room, they no longer noticed the smell.

  I guess we must have gotten used to it.

  Priestess gave a rueful smile. Her arms and legs trembled just a little.

  Dwarf Shaman was tugging roughly at his beard and scowling. Claiming he felt unwell, he had gone to stand in the doorway of the room. The Dragontooth Warrior, with its elf load, passed by him.

  Goblin Slayer had his back turned to it all. He rummaged through the mess, pushing things around, tossing them aside, until at last he pulled something out of the garbage.

  It was a canvas knapsack, clearly meant for an adventurer. Goblins had clawed at the inside but had thrown it away. Perhaps they had tired of it. It was awfully dirty. Goblin Slayer, too, began to paw through it.

  “Ah, I knew it had to be here.” He took out a balled-up scrap of paper, yellow with age.

  “What’s that?” Priestess asked softly, as she patted the elf on the back.

  “It must have belonged to that prisoner,” Goblin Slayer said, calmly unballing the paper—no, it was a dried leaf. With his finger he traced the flowing lines that had been drawn on it, then nodded as if he had found what he wanted.

  “It’s a map of these ruins.”

  “That elf must have been using it to navigate…” There was a good chance that, unhappily, she had not known the ruins had become a goblin nest. Insofar as heading into some abandoned ruins was an adventure, the fate she’d suffered was certainly one possible outcome.

  That they had been in time to save her was sheer dumb luck. As much as Priestess hated to admit it.

  “The left path leads to a gallery,” Goblin Slayer said, studying the map intently, “which borders an atrium. I can almost guarantee most of the horde is there. It’s the only place large enough for them all to sleep.” He folded the map and put it into his own bag. “It seems left was the correct choice.”

  “Hmph.” The dwarf gave an affronted snort.

  Goblin Slayer also took a few bottles of ointment and other small items from the knapsack.

  And then, without preamble, he flung the bag at High Elf Archer.

  She was bewildered.

  “You take it.”

  As High Elf Archer put on the knapsack, she looked up. The corners of her eyes were red and puffy from her rubbing them; she looked very uncomfortable.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Now hold on, you can’t talk like that to—”

  “It’s all right.” The elf cut off Priestess’s indignant tirade.

  “We…we have to hurry.”

  “That’s right,” Goblin Slayer said calmly. “We have to kill those goblins.” He walked with his usual bold, somehow violent stride. Over the collapsed door he went, leaving the room full of trash behind.

  He didn’t look back.

  “H-hey, wait up—!”

  The elf called out and rushed to follow him while Priestess went along in silence.

  The remaining two adventurers looked at each other.

  “…Gods above,” the dwarf sighed, twisting his beard. “He’s a real piece of work, that one. I wonder if he’s even human.”

  “I have heard Eotyrannus, the Dawn Tyrant, was also thus. It seems the stories are not altogether untrue.” The lizardman gave a wide roll of his eyes.

  “Maybe you have to be a little crazy to be good at this job.”

  “Be that as it may, we must go. I, for my part, cannot forgive those creatures.”

  “Nor I, Scaly. Goblins are the age-old enemies of the dwarves, when you get right down to it.”

  Dwarf Shaman and Lizard Priest looked at each other, then went after Goblin Slayer.

  The leftward path twisted like a maze. It was only natural for a fortress. If you didn’t know the lay of the land, you would never figure it out.

  But they had the map left by the elf and two people watching carefully for traps. They did encounter several goblin patrols on their way through the fortress, but it was nothing unexpected. High Elf Archer fired her arrows into them from her short bow, and if this failed to stop them, Goblin Slayer would leap into the fray and finish them off.

  In the end, not a single goblin survived its encounter with the party.

  Priestess looked discreetly at the elf’s face, taut like a drawn bowstring.

  She had seen the elf’s almost miraculous shooting at the entrance to the ruins. The idea that her arrows could ever fail to stop their targets seemed almost unfathomable…

  Goblin Slayer, though, did not seem bothered. He forged ahead with the same calm stride as always.

  Finally, they reached the last place to take a rest before the gallery.

  “How much magic do we have left?” Goblin Slayer asked quietly. He stayed close to the wall, changing out his own weapon.

  High Elf Archer was crouched in the corner, and Priestess moved to stand near her, offering a pat on the shoulder. “Um, I used Minor Heal once already, so…I have two miracles left,” she said.

  “I have called upon a Dragontooth Warrior only once,” the lizardman said. “I, too, can use up to three miracles, but…” His tail swishing back and forth, he reached into his bag and brought out a handful of teeth. “The miracle of the Dragontooth Warrior requires a material component. I can perform it perhaps one more time only.”

  “I understand.�
� Goblin Slayer nodded. His gaze fell on the dwarf. “What about you?”

  “Well, let’s see…” The dwarf began to count on his small fingers, muttering “one, two…” under his breath. “It depends on the spell,” he concluded, “but say four times, maybe five. Well, four for certain. Don’t worry.”

  “I see.”

  The number of times a spell caster could use their magics increased with their rank—but not dramatically. Spell casters’ real power lay in the variety and difficulty of the spells they could cast. If they were not a Platinum-ranked adventurer—and even then, one with a remarkable gift—the number of times they could cast per day was limited.

  It meant every spell was precious. Waste them and die.

  “Um, would you like a drink? Can you drink?”

  “Thanks.” High Elf Archer took the canteen Priestess offered her and put it to her lips.

  She had been all but silent until this point. The elf had always received Priestess’s concerns with the faintest smile and a shake of the head.

  Who could blame her? Priestess thought. After seeing what became of another elf like that…

  Priestess herself sometimes dreamed of what had happened to her former companions.

  At the time, she and Goblin Slayer had taken one quest after another almost without pause. Looking back on it, she was glad she had not had time to stop and think.

  “Don’t put too much in your stomach. It will slow your blood flow,” Goblin Slayer said calmly. “You won’t react as quickly.”

  He wasn’t saying it for the elf’s benefit. It was just a practicality. He was making sure they were all aware.

  Priestess stood, as if unconsciously covering the elf. “Goblin Slayer, sir!” she said. “Can’t you be…a little more…?”

  “I don’t want to mislead anyone,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “If you are able to join me, then join me. If you aren’t, then go back. It’s that simple.”

  “…Don’t be ridiculous,” the elf said, wiping drops of water from her mouth. “I’m a ranger. Orcbolg…you, even you, couldn’t handle scouting and looking for traps and fighting all by yourself.”

  “Those who can should do what they are able.”