Nothing like a good crisis to come at you out of nowhere, huh?
They were small in size, their equipment plain and crude. Their faces were dirty and devoid of intelligence, but with their swords, their shields, their stone axes, and their bows, they weren’t entirely bestial. It took a mere instant for my gray matter to figure out who they were—goblins, those infamous marauders of many a would-be adventuring party.
Talk about sticking to the script. No doubt they were here to attack the weakest of would-be heroes—which meant me, I guess. But, really, thirty of them against a single slime? Kind of a lot at once, wasn’t it?
And yet, I didn’t feel so much as a whiff of terror. My instincts told me I had absolutely nothing to fear. Their swords had rust on them, and their armor was thin and torn at the edges. Some of them were dressed in nothing but stained rags. Compared to the hard-scaled lizards and the spiders with massive serrated blades on their feet I had dealt with before, I couldn’t imagine their gear inflicting any damage at all on me. Besides, if things got hairy, I could just go into black-snake mode and Poisonous Breath them all into puddles of goo…
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As I sized them up, the goblins’ apparent leader opened his mouth.
“Grah! Strong one… Have you business here?”
Huh. Goblins talk. Or maybe Magic Sense is helping me decipher their grunting.
And—come on, “strong one”? First they’re surrounding me with their weapons; then they’re rolling out the red carpet for me… What do they want?
It got me curious. They didn’t look ready to descend upon me immediately. It might be a good chance to test out my speaking abilities. No better time to start than now.
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I gave the goblins a quick look-over.
To them, this must have been one of the most frantic moments in their lives. Their eyes, as well as their weapons, were trained on me, although at least a few of them were ready to flee at the least provocation. The leader, meanwhile, was every bit up to the post, his steely eyes practically drilling holes in my gelatinous form.
Hmm. They seem intelligent enough. Maybe this conversation thing could work out after all. But will they understand me?
I focused my thoughts on my still-newborn voice and gingerly tried a few words.
“Good to meet you, I guess? My name is Rimuru. I’m a slime.”
The goblins murmured among themselves. Does a talking slime surprise them, maybe? I thought…only to find a few of them already prostrating themselves before me, weapons tossed away. Weird.
“G-garrh! Strong one! We, we see mighty power of you. Please! Quiet the voice of you!”
Mm? Did I put too much force into it? Maybe making myself understood wasn’t such a big deal after all. Plainly, I was freaking them out.
I figured an apology was in order. “Sorry, I don’t have this fine-tuned too well yet…”
“We, we need no apology from such great form of you!”
Guess that worked. This is turning into some decent practice. I was impressed that plain old Japanese worked on these guys. With all the politeness they gave me, I figured I should return the favor—but given how terrified some of them were, I might as well show off the confidence they thought I had.
“So what did you need from me? I don’t have any business around here.”
“I see. Village of us is ahead. We felt strong monster nearby, so we came to patrol.”
“A strong monster? I didn’t spot anything like that…?”
“G-gaah! Grah-gah-gah! Such joking! You cannot trick us, even with form of you!”
These guys totally have the wrong idea. Apparently they thought their powerful intruder had disguised himself as a slime. These were goblins, the world-famous lower caste of the monster totem pole. I shouldn’t have expected much.
The goblins and I spoke for a while longer, and before long, I wound up receiving an invitation to their village. They were willing to put me up for a bit, even. Pretty nice guys, given how scraggly they all looked. So I accepted. I had no need to sleep, but a little rest never hurt a guy.
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Along the way, I got to hear a bit of the local gossip. It turned out the god they worshiped had recently disappeared. Without it, the local monsters had started acting up a lot more than before. At the same time, more human adventurers—“powerful ones,” as they put it—were starting to invade the forest. And so on.
And funnily enough, the more we spoke to each other, the more clearly I began to understand them. It must have been my Magic Sense skills getting more accustomed to however the goblin language was wending its way through the particles in the air. Maybe getting in some practice with goblins before my big human debut was a good idea after all, I thought as I followed along.