High Elf Archer didn’t bother thinking too hard as she poured arrows on the mass of encroaching goblins. She’d already learned long ago (she chuckled at herself for thinking of it that way): This was no adventure.
That didn’t stop her acute elven senses from picking up on even the slightest change, her ears twitching. “Does the air seem different somehow…?” she asked.
“Perhaps.”
She shot the nearest goblin in the head, pulled the arrow out, and put it right back in her bow before shooting another one with it, farther away. Goblin Slayer pressed forward, paying no attention to what a luxury it was to be able to effectively ignore the astonishing archery of a high elf.
The goblins moved up to try stopping him.
“GBRG!”
“GRG! GOOGBGR!!”
They’ve started to become more orderly.
Still, there couldn’t be even a hundred of them. He plunged a sword through the throat of his twenty-fifth goblin, then kicked the corpse away.
“GOBBG?!”
If there’s one way in which humans are quantifiably superior to goblins, it’s reach. Simply having longer arms and legs means being able to maintain a greater distance. Ahead of the goblins, farther away from the goblins. As long as you kept that in mind…
…then we can deal with this number somehow.
He remembered the times he had explored with the boy—in the tower, in a dungeon. This was not as bad as those times.
When goblins were piling in from all sides, there was only one thing to do. Cut a path ahead.
The threat of goblins did not lie in their nastiness but only in their numbers. As long as the party could avoid getting surrounded and maintain their vitality—not their HP, mind you—there would be no problem.
Although he would be loath to have to do the same thing on open ground.
“Arrows!”
“Right.”
As such, the only real issue was which weapons to throw and what to replace them with. Goblin Slayer pulled out a dagger tucked amid his armor and flung it at a goblin hiding by a pillar, killing him. He used the momentum to leap forward, vaulting toward the goblin and grabbing its quiver, which he tossed through the air. Neither did he forget the goblin’s specialty—a rusty sword, which he kicked up into his hand.
“Thanks!” High Elf Archer’s lithe arm stretched out, catching the arcing quiver, and that was a relief. There’s nothing more unnerving than an empty quiver. Even goblin arrows are better than no arrows at all.
“You’re very high maintenance, Long-Ears!”
“I prefer the term civilized!” High Elf Archer shot back, sending a snorting laugh in the direction of Dwarf Shaman, who was busy cracking a goblin’s skull open with his ax. “Unlike certain hole dwellers!”
“Hoh! At least we’re smart enough to stay out of the rain, unlike the elves!”
Goblin Slayer moved ahead, flinging the rusty sword at another goblin and killing him while High Elf Archer and Dwarf Shaman argued nearby. Arrows rained down in every direction, while Dwarf Shaman’s ax did its own talking on his behalf.
With them helping to hold the goblins at bay, Lizard Priest had some breathing room. “A swamp can be quite a nice place as well, you know!” he said as he used his superlative tail to slam a goblin to its death against a wall—a literal rear guard.
Naturally, he hesitated to defile the holy staff with goblin blood. The statue, however, was another matter.
The goblins were never going to stop Lizard Priest with nothing but a little horde. Which meant rather than having him up front, it was better to use him to broaden their vision. After all, they were one cleric short this evening.
“What do you think?” Goblin Slayer asked.
“I think they’ve started to become more orderly,” Lizard Priest replied, echoing the judgment of the man who at that moment was relieving a throatless goblin of its club. “I believe we can presume that whoever is commanding them is cognizant of the situation and has begun taking measures to respond.”
“With this scale, I doubt it’s a goblin lord,” Goblin Slayer said, swinging his club to the right and muttering “Twenty-eight” under his breath. “However, I don’t think goblins would follow a shaman so obediently.”
“GBBG?!”
“Some servant of Chaos, then. A dark elf? A cultist? Perhaps some worshipper of evil spirits? Or…”
“GORG! GGORB?!”
“GBOBGR?!”
Their conversation was punctuated by the screams of dying goblins. Not that they noticed.
High Elf Archer frowned at the spraying blood, but a second later, her ears were twitching. “Up ahead! Something’s coming!”
“Hrm…!”
At that moment, a red light pierced the darkness. No sooner had they registered the beam than it was already passing by, impossible to evade. Without the high elf’s senses to alert him, it would have sliced Goblin Slayer clean in half. Then again, he had never been under the impression that his armor would stop anything but a goblin attack.
Let alone a lord of darkness such as advanced now from the shadows.
“The hell is that thing?!” Dwarf Shaman cried.
“At the very least, it’s not a goblin,” his leader replied, stating the obvious.
No, it was no goblin—it was sheer menace, as if the darkness itself had taken on form. It wasn’t just Goblin Slayer who didn’t recognize it—hardly anyone would. But anyone would know to be afraid.
If Priestess had been there—or perhaps Harefolk Hunter or even Club Fighter or the cleric of the Supreme God. If one of them had been there, they might have recognized it. There was a freezing chill like terror. It was not hatred nor greed but rather the pride and murderous disinterest of a being that viewed living things as nothing more than cattle.
There stood a man with pallid skin. His slick red lips opened, and a bizarre voice issued forth:
“You would speak of me in the same breath as goblins? There are insults one cannot bear…”
It was almost like he was talking to himself, like they shouldn’t have been able to hear him, and yet the voice reached the adventurers.
The man’s skin might have been pale, but his eyes burned in the darkness. At first glance, he appeared young. He wasn’t dressed in anything so silly as evening wear. He was a warrior, and his armor seemed patterned on a skinned animal, a gruesome dark red, as if some creature had been turned inside out to put the innards on display.
A great many words existed for this creature, this being: the clan of darkness. Nosferatu. The walking undead. All words invented to describe these monsters.
As the old poet Byron said: