Chapter 24

As far as Luke could tell, goblins were nocturnal. They could operate in the day, but they preferred the dark and the weaker ones had trouble seeing in bright light. He supposed if they pumped up their perception stat high enough, they’d overcome that issue, but as a general trend, most goblins didn’t seem to do that.

That was why Luke waited for the sun to be at its peak before he went hunting. There was a dedicated tracking skill that probably would have served him better, but [Survivalist] had enough general knowledge of the outdoors packed into it for him to figure out which way tracks were heading. Since they were the only bipeds he’d seen in the whole valley, he felt it was safe to assume that any tracks he found that weren’t his own distinctive waffle-boot prints were theirs.

Unless they decided to make another concentrated push today, he doubted he’d find many in the forest. No, what he was looking for was some indication about which caves would make the best hunting grounds, where to set up his own ambushes. He lacked the tools to make anything as intricate as the goblins used on him, but that was fine. He could kill them himself once he found them.

He scoured the forest, even found a few goblins out and about, killed them, of course, and followed tracks back to various caves. It seemed like most of the goblins were on the west and southwest sides of the valley, with a few scattered ones hailing from the north caves. It was no wonder Curt had chosen one to the east for his workshop.

Luke had a problem with trying to hunt them: his level was too high. It didn’t stop him from killing them when he caught up with them, but the little shits started rabbiting as soon as he got close, and the more that happened, the more they got away. Worse, some sort of huge hunting party was roaming the woods, at least thirty goblins strong. There were a few of those warriors in there too, not quite as strong as him, but more numerous.

That wasn’t the fight Luke was looking for. He knew he needed to find smaller groups to pick off and whittle down numbers, but the goblins knew it too and were denying him that tactic. The tradeoff was that they weren’t likely to run him down as one big group rumbling through the forest while going slow and making lots of noise. They didn’t have any more dogs to track him either, so he felt safe circling wide around them and watching for goblins that strayed too far away.

Getting to them before they could raise an alarm was a different matter. The first time, he got a clean kill in, practically smacking its head off its shoulders before it even realized he was there. The second time, the goblin was about a hundred feet away from the main host and realized Luke was nearby instantly. It immediately ran back and started making noise, which caused all the goblins to start looking in his general direction.

“Damn it, this isn’t working. System! Is there any way to hide my XP count so they won’t feel me coming?”

“There are several stealth-related skills that do this to some degree. Most suppress XP sensing as a side effect of their attempts to hide the user, but do so only imperfectly. The only skill that completely blocks other creatures from sensing your XP will also stop you from sensing theirs. It is known as [XP Mask] and costs 20 AP to acquire.”

Luke didn’t like the sound of that. He still wanted to get a rough sense of when other creatures were near him, especially if they were stronger than him. [Stealth] was not on his brother’s build, but he was already diverging anyway with the way he was buffing his stats. “How much does [Stealth]cost?”

“3 AP for the first rank. This would reduce your effective XP amount by approximately ten percent as long as the other lifeform is unaware of your presence. It will do nothing to hide it once you have been discovered. The amount of XP you can hide goes up with each rank, among other benefits.”

“I guess that’s going on the list then,” Luke said. He didn’t see any other way to do what he needed to do. There was no way he was going to sneak up on any of those low level goblins as things currently stood. For the time being, he wasn’t going to make any progress in the forest.

But then, if all these goblins were up above ground, that must have meant there were less in the tunnels. He wasn’t going to make any progress up in the forest. It was time to put all the work he’d spent the morning doing to good use.

* * *

The tunnels went deeper than he’d thought they would, but Luke no longer needed light to see. The route was straight forward, which wasn’t to say there weren’t side tunnels or forks, but that the goblins had taken pains to mark the way. At first, he was suspicious of traps. He was, after all, the enemy.

But no, they apparently had uncontested control of their tunnels and had taken the time and effort to smooth out the paths and mark them with odd little symbols carved into the stone. Luke had no idea what they said, but it was easy enough to find the next one in the chain.

The first defensive outpost was about a quarter of a mile away from the surface. It consisted of a wooden barricade spanning the width of the tunnel with slots in it at four and eight feet. The goblins manning it obviously felt him coming, because as soon as they had a clear line of sight, they started shooting at him.

[Twitch Reflexes] had no trouble countering projectiles coming from so far away, and the goblins themselves weren’t that accurate. Those crossbows they’d mass-produced really were garbage that way, and after watching them shoot so many bolts in his direction, Luke no longer felt bad about having trouble firing them accurately himself.

He charged the barricade through a hundred feet of straight tunnel so fast that the goblins didn’t have time to get off a second volley before he impacted the wood. It shuddered against his body blow, but held. Behind it, panicked goblin screams echoed down the tunnel and the sounds of at least two pairs of feet pattered away from him.

Luke took his mace in both hands and swung at the barricade. Wood splinters went flying and the head of his weapon punched clean through. He ripped it back out and swung again, and again. On the fifth swing, he’d ripped open a hole wide enough to see through. A screeching goblin jumped in front of the hole and fired off a crossbow from point-blank range.

“Holy shit!” Luke yelped as he fell flat on his ass. The bolt skimmed by and bounced off the ceiling behind him, thankfully missing him completely. He scrambled to his feet and jabbed the mace straight forward to smack into the goblin’s chest, then resumed battering the barricade until it collapsed.

The goblins had all fled, all but the one he’d struck. Luke casually finished it by smacking his mace into its face as he walked by and received the confirmation ding to let him know it was dead. Then he sprinted down the tunnel after the runners. Normally, he’d have no problems catching up to them, but the tunnel’s ceiling kept getting lower and lower, forcing him to hunch as he moved.

He still thought he was outrunning them, but then he found a new barricade blocking the tunnel. This time, there were four goblins standing in front of it, all of them frantically pounding at the wood and babbling in their own language.

They turned at Luke’s approach, but were too slow to react to him. He killed them, one after another, without any interference from the goblins behind the barricade. It wasn’t until he smashed it down that he realized they’d all fled before he’d even arrived.

The tunnels got far more confusing after that. They crossed over each other, forming intersections at seemingly random locations and if he wasn’t mistaken, sometimes looping over top of and under each other in a giant rats’ warren. Every now and then he’d find little chambers off the tunnels, the entrances usually covered with a piece of cloth. Inside would be furniture.

He’d finally found their village, but he didn’t find many goblins. They’d all known he was coming and fled from him, which was beyond frustrating. He was trapped in this damn valley, a bunch of goblins wanted to kill him, and when he took the fight to their homes, they all ran in every direction. There was no winning!

Then he turned a corner and found eight goblins in front of him. Half were kneeling and half were standing behind them. All of them had crossbows pointed his way. A ninth goblin behind them snapped out something that Luke took to be, “Fire!” and they all shot at him.

He didn’t try to dodge through that storm of bolts. Instead, he just took a single step backwards and let them all bounce off the tunnel wall. Then he was back around the corner and charging as fast as he could with such limited overhead clearance.

Rather than panicking, the goblins all held their ground and reloaded. There was no way they were going to get off a second round before he reached them, but the lead goblin was smirking as he watched Luke run.

They knew something, something that they thought he didn’t, something that would turn this around. He could feel their levels; none were above 10 or 11. If he reached them, it was all over. So then, they thought they had something that would stop him from getting that far, and knowing goblins, it was probably a trap of some sort.

Luke didn’t see any trip lines or false floors. There were no holes in the walls to fire poison-tipped darts at him. Whatever the trap was, he wasn’t going to spot it in the next one and a half seconds before he made contact. So he did the only thing he could think of.

Luke leaped forward, stretching his body just about horizontal and with his mace held in front of him with both hands. His leap carried him into the front rank of goblins and over whatever triggers that would set off their traps. He bowled the whole group over, and even though it was eight against one, all he had to do was thrash around with his superior strength and they started dying.

The leader took one look at the chaotic melee and ran, but Luke scooped up one of the few crossbows that had been reloaded, sighted it as best he could, and fired. It didn’t hit the goblin center mass, no surprise there. What it did do was sink into the goblin’s calf muscle, an arguably even better shot considering his goal was to keep it from running away.

Luke crushed the remaining goblins, got bit once on the arm by a particularly ferocious one, and extracted himself from the pile. He only counted seven dings, so one of them was playing possum on him, but he’d sort that out after he killed the runner.

Luke advanced down the tunnel, caught up with the goblin frantically hobbling away, and crushed its skull with a single horizontal swipe that splattered it against the stone wall. Then he went back to the pile and calmly started crushing heads on the bodies too. It only took two before the living goblin bolted.

Unfortunately for it, it ran directly into the trap that Luke had avoided, and a set of wide pendulum-style blades dropped down from the ceiling. It was most definitely dead, but Luke didn’t get a notification for it. “Huh,” he said. “Interesting. You’d think it would at least give me half credit.”

Shaking his head, he moved deeper into the goblin village.