The Hobgoblin Riot: Dominion of Blades Book 2: A LitRPG Adventure

by Matt Dinniman

  I sat down at the table, folding my hands.

  “This really is a beautiful place,” I said out loud. “My name is Gretchen, by the way. I have friends outside, but they can’t get in. It’s just me.”

  I didn’t see the wark-ee right away, but I saw the white dot appear on my minimap. An odd cooing noise followed.

  Hop, hop, hop-hop-hop. My keen ears heard the bird creature hesitantly approaching.

  And then it was standing beside me, head cocked to the side. It cooed questioningly.

  I pushed my clay sheep toward him. “I know it’s not as shiny as you usually like it, but I’m just getting started. You can have it if you want.”

  The bird creature cooed, sniffing at the sheep uncertainly.

  “I’m not here to trade my art for an artificer. I want to talk to her. I know she’s here, and I know she’s listening. I saw her handiwork outside with the animated suits of armor. I can see her footprints in the dust.”

  Quick as a wink, the bird snatched my clay sheep off the table and swallowed it whole. It gurgled a few times then disappeared. I could hear it rustling as it entered the hearth.

  “I can feel you watching me,” I said. “I mean you no harm.”

  “Do you know what it’s like watching all your children die?” a voice said. Soft, feminine, but also old. The voice did not come from the hearth, but the doorway to the next room.

  My heart started to thump. Remember, this is a dark cleric. They can be tricky. Nale and I suspected she was a psionicist. If she was who I thought she was, then she was for sure.

  “I can’t imagine what that would be like,” I said. “But I do know what it’s like to lose one child.”

  The ancient wark-ee hopped into the room. She was completely gray, and her crooked beak was chipped and crazed like old pottery. She wore tattered, purple rags that had once likely been glorious.

  “I was in the room during their conversation,” she continued. “I listened to your king speak with the grandson of the butcher of my people. He is a good man, your king. But he is naïve. He hasn’t yet been crushed by the weight of his responsibility.”

  “Your majesty,” I said, bowing. I’d suspected it was the queen. She wasn’t the master of the guild, but she was still powerful enough to animate an entire hallway of constructs. She was powerful enough to create artificers like the one Jonah had received. Only a master psionicist could do that. The stories told that the queen of the wark-ee had been a dark cleric. I was surprised nobody had put this together earlier.

  “Why have you come here today?” the queen asked.

  “The hobgoblins are all but gone from this city,” I said. “If we can defeat this last group of demons trying to invade, then we can return the city to you.”

  She laughed. She indicated the hearth. I turned to see a second wark-ee looking at me from the ashes, the one who’d eaten my sheep sculpture. “There is my kingdom,” she said. “That is all that is left. I do not want this shattered land.” She hobbled forward, plopping down next to me at the table. “Tell me, child. Tell me what you really want.”

  I told her about Sandra the Learnt. About how we didn’t know where she was and how we needed her tracked down.

  The ancient bird nodded. “I can do this for you,” she said. “But first you must do something for me.”

  Crap. “Of course,” I said.

  As she told me what she wanted, my dread was replaced with a rising excitement.

  Quest Update. Missing Maps. This is an alternate quest path!

  Having discovered the lost Queen of the Wark-ee, the ancient liege of Castellane has offered to help locate the hiding location of Sandra the Learnt. However, she requests a boon in exchange. She has knowledge of the location of her old enemy, Chief Musa of the Hobgoblin Riot. Bring him to her so she may exact justice upon the slaughterer of her people. Once this is complete, she will aid you in locating the traitorous polecat.

  Warning: Chief Musa must be captured alive.

  Poppy: Holy fucking shit, Gretchen. How the hell did you figure that out?

  “So, where is he?” I asked.

  “He’s not far,” the queen said. “He has been under your thumb this entire time.”

  * * *

  “The problem is,” Oliver the beastmaster said. “I can open the cages. I know how to do that. It’s right easy.” He pointed to a lever on the wall of the Menagerie. “But only the obstacle master can open them individually, and only the obstacle master has the magic needed to get them critters all back in their cages without any fuss. I can set up traps outside of each cage and try to get them all bundled up again, but it’ll take some time. Some might get away. We got some nasty beasties in here. So if you want to get into that cage.” He indicated the cage with the giant oblivion walrus. “We gotta let them all out, and it’s going to be a messy business. The good news is the Rage trigger only gets turned on during an active wave, so they won’t be extra aggressive.”

  Nearby, a pazuzu slammed against the barrier, screaming and hissing. It slammed its scorpion tail against the wall. I couldn’t imagine how much more enraged those things could get.

  I wondered for the hundredth time if the late Chauncey knew that Chief Musa was hidden in his “Safe Room” as the queen wark-ee had called it. The prince hadn’t seemed to know about it, nor had the oracle Jonah had killed. However, the coypu had to have known about it, despite his insistence otherwise.

  That little bastard, I thought. If he regenerates while I’m still around, I’m going to flay him alive.

  “It makes sense now,” Colonel Holder said, eyeing the massive walrus. “That little rat had the ability to put us all to sleep. He only did it when he was extracting one of us for food or when he was feeding the walrus.”

  I examined the walrus now, who was currently throwing itself against the magical barrier in an attempt to get to us, just like the pazuzu. The thing had to be fifteen feet tall, and the glimmering white tusks were at least six feet long each. It gibbered something in a language I couldn’t understand. Its gray abdomen crushed against the barrier.

  Chief Musa was hidden inside the belly of that monster. He probably wasn’t alone. Prince Kankan had said his father was accompanied by fifty guards. It was very likely that we’d slice this walrus open, and fifty elite hobgoblin warriors would pour out.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s set it up. So we’re clear, if you capture the monsters back into your traps, we can reset the Menagerie?”

  Oliver nodded. “I can. It won’t be easy, but I can do it.”

  We now had forty hours until the final wave. “Do it,” I said. “Do it as quickly as you can, but I want to lose as few of these beasts as possible. We don’t have time to go get any more.”

  Like with the traps and the towers, it was possible to reset and fiddle with the obstacles, but it required significantly more time and effort than it would otherwise with a specialist.

  I sighed. This would be a perfect job for Bingo. I looked at Colonel Holder. “I don’t want any mistakes on this,” I said. “We need maximum coverage of the entrance and exits when we open it up. Let’s try to get all of them into traps before we do anything with the walrus, so we’re not having to fight a bunch of hobgoblins while we deal with these tormented and ogres and peluda.”

  Holder nodded and started barking orders.

  “How long,” I asked Oliver.

  “Give me about ten hours to get set up, then we’ll be ready.”

  I nodded. At the end of the row, one of the two ogres pointed at me through the barrier. He made a motion like he was breaking something in half.

  Popper note 24

  “If this works, and then Jonah’s plan works, we might actually have a shot at this thing,” Gretchen said.

  We were taking a break, something that had become a tradition on non-wave nights. Oliver said everything was ready and in place, but we’d decided to wait until it was light outside. Gretchen’s plan was dangerous as fuck, and I’d talked he
r out of doing it when the monsters could scramble away in the dark. I didn’t know if they’d be bound by the spiral wall or not. It was a rare thing for me to be chastising Gretchen, but she’d readily agreed.

  I took a long drag of a cigarette. “If we find her, Sandra the Learnt I mean. And we kill her, does that mean the obelisks will turn right back on? And the quest will be done?”

  “I think so,” Gretchen said. “The quest originally made it look like we needed her to run the fast travel nodes, but I think this twist was in the works the whole time. Once we kill her, the Sandra the Learnt quest will be done and fast travel will turn back on. So will full-screen maps.”

  I nodded. “I want you to go to Jonah as soon as it’s done. There’s no reason for you to stay for the final wave. I’ll be stuck here, but I can discharge you. You know we’re fucked. Saving Harmony is more important than saving this shitty city. The only reason it was important was because of Sandra.”

  She seemed to chew on it for a while.

  “No,” she said finally. “If we lose, we lose. We’ll die, but the compulsory quest will be done either way. We’ll regenerate outside the city, and we’ll get to a fast-travel portal and get back to Harmony. If Jonah’s thing works out tonight, he’ll still need our help, but he’ll have a whole lot of backup.”

  I nodded. Gretchen put her arm around me and pulled me in tighter. It was an odd feeling, something I hadn’t experienced since I was a little kid. I let her do it.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I was planning with Jonah,” I said.

  “I know,” she said after a moment. “I understand why you did it. It doesn’t make you less of a jerk, but I understand it.”

  I sighed. “Did I ever tell you why I was in prison? Either the first or the second time?”

  Gretchen stiffened ever-so-slightly. We both knew I’d never told her about it. I’d never told anybody about it except Alice, who lay snoring behind us.

  “No,” she said finally. “Tell me.”

  “I had two friends,” I said. “Monobrow Sam and Ricky.”

  “Monobrow Sam?” she said, sounding amused.

  “Yeah,” I said, laughing. “He looked like he had a dead caterpillar up there. This one time he tried to shave it himself, and he ended up breaking the razor. Anyway, so I had these two friends. Ricky had met some dudes selling these Chinese-made controller chips for the new rationing power meters.”

  “Oh wow,” Gretchen said. “I’d heard about those. I remember it was a big problem. I’m glad I never had to deal with the power rationing.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I keep forgetting you’re a Canadian. So we started selling these chips, Ricky, Sam, and I. And it was good for a while. Work was scarce, and Juliette had just had Molly. So I really needed the money. And everybody wanted those chips. We thought we’d sell them for a couple hundred bucks, but people were fighting for them, offering even more. For a while there, we were selling them for a thousand a pop.”

  “And you got caught?” Gretchen asked.

  “Sort of,” I said. “Ricky got caught. He rolled on me. He didn’t rat out Sam, just me. I had a bunch of chips and a log book with all the sales hidden in my house, and they had a search warrant. They found it and arrested me.”

  “How long did you get?”

  “My sentence was five years in a federal pen, and I ended up doing four and a half years.”

  “Wow. Four years in prison?” Gretchen shuddered. “I think I’d kill myself before I went to prison.”

  “Bah,” I said. “Prison would be a cakewalk for someone like you.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Someone like me? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re like six foot three! And a badass. You’d run that place in a week.”

  “Popper. Or should I say Charlie? I don’t look like this in real life. Remember?”

  Shit. Of course she didn’t look like that in real life. What was I thinking?

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I forgot. So while I was in jail, Ricky came and visited me. He told me the guys he’d gotten the chips from wanted their money. He’d said originally they were only charging him like $25 a chip, but now they wanted $200 a chip. We’d lost over 200 of them. So they wanted all this money.”

  “Forty thousand dollars,” Gretchen said.

  “Yeah. And Ricky was bouncing town.” I took a deep breath, remembering that moment. “That only left one person they could collect the money from.”

  “Your friend, Monobrow Sam,” Gretchen said.

  “That’s right. Sam. He’d been one of my best friends since we were kids. Sam wasn’t too smart, and he’d gotten his ass beat a bunch of times over the years. I was the one who protected him, who kept him safe. I was the one who introduced him to Ricky. I should’ve known that fucker was no good right away but… but…”

  Gretchen put her hand on my shoulder, and I felt myself start to tremble. “What happened?” she asked.

  “I had the money, but I couldn’t get to it while I was still in prison. My old man died and left me his car. An '06 Pontiac GTO, all original. No selfie electrics. Nothing. Last I’d checked, they were going for about 75K, and none of them were in that condition. My lawyer said I couldn’t touch it while I was still locked up. I didn’t want to get Juliette involved. I told Sam to tell the guys to cool their jets, and I’d have the money for them when I got out. This was four years later, see, and I knew I’d be free in a couple months.”

  “What happened?” Gretchen asked again, her voice softer this time.

  I suppressed a sob. “They killed him. They killed Sam. And I wasn’t there to help him. I had the fucking money. They shot him in the stomach and stole his grandma’s ring. It was my fault. He’d been so scared. He didn’t want to talk to them at all. He’d wanted to run away. I’d told him it would be okay. It wasn’t like these guys were drug dealers, right? They were selling damn computer chips.”

  “Oh my god, Popper,” Gretchen said. “I’m so sorry. But, you must know that wasn’t your fault. You didn’t shoot him. How could you have known that would happen?”

  I’d never talked about this before, not to anyone, not even Juliette. Tears streamed down my face.

  “After I got out, those guys disappeared. I wasn’t about to give them any of that money now anyway. I looked for them, though. I wanted to find them so bad. They were fucking ghosts.”

  “But you ended up back in prison?”

  “Yeah, so there’s more to the whole Ricky story.” I let out a long stream of breath. “He’s Molly’s biological dad. He’d been dating Juliette before I even met her. That’s how I met her, actually. After they broke up, I started seeing her. She’d told me she was pregnant on our third or fourth date, and by then, I already knew that she was the one. She’d wanted to try to work things out with Ricky, but I knew by then Ricky was a sack of shit when it came to women, and I asked her to marry me.”

  “You asked her to marry you on the third date?” Gretchen asked.

  I grunted. “Yeah, she didn’t take that so well. She laughed at me. But Ricky did what I expected Ricky to do. He told her it wasn’t his, it had to be mine. Though Juliette and I hadn’t even gotten together yet. Anyway, he made it clear that he was going to be an ass about the whole thing and that he wouldn’t step up. Juliette made me wait until Molly was born before she’d marry me, but she did. Molly is my kid. I don’t care what anybody says. She’s mine.”

  “That was noble of you,” Gretchen said.

  “You know, I never saw it that way. I felt damn lucky that Juliette let me into her life, and I was damn lucky I ever got to meet Molly. She’s so great, the happiest kid ever. She has this thing. It’s called cerebral palsy. But it doesn’t slow her down. Still, you know we wanted the best for her, so it was hard getting good treatment for her symptoms.”

  “That must’ve been tough,” Gretchen said.

  I shrugged. “You do what you must, you know? I’m not proud of what I did, selling t
he chips, but I did it for her. And you know what, in some sort of fucked-up way, I think Ricky—at least originally—I think he brought me in on it as his own way of, you know, supporting the kid he made.”

  “Yet he turned you in and not Sam,” Gretchen said.

  A deep anger boiled there, something I didn’t want to confront. I felt it rising, deep within me. In prison that second time they’d forced me to see a shrink. That dark, bottomless rage I’d worked so hard to hide… The shrink had suggested I give it a name. It’s easier to confront something when you have a name for it.

  I remembered now what I’d called it.

  The Hobgoblin Riot.

  I’d called that thing living inside of me the Hobgoblin Riot. How could I have forgotten?

  I’d called it that because that was how I imagined it. A trapped, angry horde, fighting against the world. And every once in awhile, it would burst free. Terrible, violent, insatiable. Something I’d never be able to defeat. I looked up at Gretchen.

  “So, yeah,” I said. “The thing is, Ricky. He was a pretty boy. He could talk his way into anyone’s pants. Especially a lonely woman whose new husband had just been sentenced to prison for five years. Especially when you’re already the father of her kid.”

  Gretchen didn’t say anything. She silently waited for me to continue.

  “So while I was in prison the first time, Ricky started having an affair with Juliette. I think he saw me with her, saw how good I had it with Molly. I think he started to feel jealous. So when he got caught, he turned me in knowing I’d get arrested and he wouldn’t. When I was put away, he made his move, and Juliette obliged. He even played daddy for a while. I had no idea. Sam suspected, I think. Though at the time, Juliette had moved to a different apartment, and they didn’t see each other so much. But Ricky being Ricky, he abandoned her once again as soon as those guys showed back up, wanting their money. He abandoned Juliette and Molly once again, and he left Sam and me with the debt. And that was when Sam was murdered.”