Chapter 21

“How in the French fried fuck did they do this so quickly?” Luke demanded as he bounced up and down on an ankle snare. A swipe of his knife was all it took to split the rope holding him upside down to the tree, and he managed to flip around to land upright. He winced in pain as his weight came down on his injured foot.

He supposed he was lucky that he’d come at this trap from the wrong direction and already killed both goblins watching the snare before he’d stepped into it. That wasn’t the only trap he’d stumbled into though. Twice he’d triggered blade-throwing wires hidden in tall grass and once an entire log came swinging down on ropes to blast through at high speed.

He’d barely managed to avoid the log by diving face first to the ground, and hadn’t avoided the knife throwers, though one had missed and the other one had just left one more hole in a growing collection. Luke was starting to get dizzy from the blood loss, but not so much that he couldn’t still swat a goblin down if one was stupid enough to try to get in his face.

The [Curse of Obliviousness] had just under an hour left before it wore off. Luke wanted to hole up and wait it out, but every time he tried, more goblins would find him. Those damn hounds were sniffing him out, which probably wasn’t hard with all the blood he’d left behind. So much blood, more than he would have thought possible. Stamina had to be replenishing it somehow.

If he was going to get away, he needed to kill the dogs. It was that simple. He was in rough shape, but as long as he didn’t run into one of those badass warrior goblins again, he could handle it. From what he remembered the last time he’d run into a goblin handling a dog, they were only around level 5.

Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to find them. They were constantly howling and braying at each other. Luke only needed to keep ahead of them for an hour until the curse wore off, then he would turn the tables and start hunting them the other way around. In the meantime, he would avoid leading them to anywhere strategically important to him: namely his brother’s workshop.

Hopefully they hadn’t already found it like they had his forest camp. It was his last hidden refuge, but he suspected it was safe. If the goblins knew about it, they would have already attacked him there. There was no way they’d managed to boobytrap so much of the forest in just the hour or so he’d been awake.

Luke moved through the underbrush as quietly as he could, eyes peeled and actually focusing instead of just letting perception draw his attention to things. With the debuff on him, he didn’t want to risk setting off another trap if he could avoid it. The problem was that the goblins were remarkably good at hiding them, or maybe it was just that hiding trip lines or snares in tall grass and tension wires that threw knives in bushes was really easy to do.

Either way, he moved as fast as he felt safe doing while trying to keep ahead of the goblins. That was an impossibility considering how thickly they were swarming the forest, but the real problem was more that when he encountered another group, he’d kill most of them and then one or two would run off to go get enforcements.

Sometimes they came back, sometimes they didn’t. It was when they didn’t show up that Luke got worried. He had some concerns that goblins were massing somewhere and fifty of them were just stalking him, waiting for him to walk into a field so they could surround him. It hadn’t happened yet, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t.

He watched the timer tick down on the curse debuff, noting as it switched to minutes and seconds once it was under an hour. Finally, it fell off and the world expanded into focus. A thousand details Luke hadn’t noticed flooded his mind, and it took him a second to reorient himself. Once he did though, he grinned to himself.

It was time to hunt. And with his perception fully restored, he was able to figure out where the closest dog was. Luke limped along, following his own trail back and easily avoiding a trap while marveling to himself that it was so obvious to see now when mere minutes earlier he’d only bypassed it by sheer luck, never even realizing he’d stepped over it.

As the goblin hunting party closed in on him, and more importantly, as he closed in on them, he took to the trees and pulled a few branches close together to help break up his form. It was trivially easy to hold them in place with one hand, even with his injuries, and his other gripped his mace in eager anticipation.

The goblins pushed through a bush, following a huge mastiff that probably came up to his chest. One thing Luke had found was that in addition to being sensitive to creatures that had far more XP than him, he was also starting to notice when creatures had much less. It was harder to pick out, something just in the background that he had to make a conscious effort to pay attention to, and he couldn’t really feel much difference between a level 6 and a level 7.

But one thing he knew was that nothing in this hunting party was strong enough to be a threat. The only thing he needed to make sure of was that he killed the dog first. If the rest of them escaped, well, it wasn’t ideal, but it wouldn’t bother him too much. He wasn’t going to kill all five of them regardless, so he’d just do his best to get as many as possible and not worry if one or two ran.

Luke let go of the branches and dropped, careful to make sure he landed on his uninjured foot first, and brought his mace down on the dog’s back. It gave an abbreviated yelp, cut off by its own death. Luke pivoted in place to strike the goblin that had been handling it in the shoulder. He’d been aiming for the head, but it had turned while stumbling backwards and was just about out of reach.

The crack spun it to the ground, and he didn’t worry about following up. Instead he hopped forward and attacked another goblin, then spun in place to parry one stabbing at his back with a spear. [Peripheral Awareness] was his biggest asset now that they were spreading out around him to attack from every side.

The one he’d hit in the shoulder was down and not getting back up any time soon, though it wasn’t quite dead. Luke would need to finish it off when he had a moment. The other three were still alive, and for the moment he was on the defensive. [Twitch Reflexes] was causing him problems, trying to force his body to move in optimal ways to dodge attacks and set him up for a devastating [Counter]. Normally he’d welcome that, but right now he was injured and not nearly as nimble as his skill wanted him to be.

Luke compensated for that, but it was frustrating to have the skill fighting against him. If he could have toggled it off, he would have. Now that he thought about it, he wondered if that was an option and made a mental note to ask System later. For now, he was fighting defensively, his range of motions limited by the numerous holes the goblins had poked in him.

Two of the goblins screwed up and ended up crossing their spears trying to stab him at the same time. Luke used the tangle to break free of them and focus on the third goblin in the triangle. With the two behind him unable to attack while they freed their weapons, he was easily able to swat the remaining goblin’s defense aside and crush it with a single heavy blow.

Luke darted forward to break out of the remaining two goblins’ range and pivoted on his good foot to face them. They looked far less sure now, but apparently weren’t willing to abandon their still-living companion on the ground. That goblin was weeping softly and clutching at its ruined shoulder. It tried to regain its feet more than once, only to stagger and collapse again.

If the goblins wanted to stay and fight, that was fine by him. He bulled forward, grabbing the haft of one of the spears while he twisted out of the way of the other. A single jerk ripped it free of the goblin and sent it stumbling forward into the range of Luke’s attack. And then there was one.

The last goblin threw its spear at Luke with a scream and bolted. Luke didn’t even have to move to avoid it; it flew by harmlessly. Instead, he threw the spear he’d taken from the other goblin back. His aim was, unfortunately, not much better, and the goblin disappeared into the brush. Three seconds later, he heard the twang of one of the trip wires going off and saw the goblin flop upwards into the air, hanging upside down by its ankle.

Casually, Luke brought his mace down on the head of the wounded goblin as he strode by and retrieved the spear he’d missed with. He came to a stop under the snared goblin, lined the spear up, and thrust its tip into the monster. It took the goblin in the mouth, erupting through the back of its skull and killing it instantly.

Luke checked his notifications individually, curious as to how accurate his guesses about their levels were.

[You have slain Bluerock Mastiff (lvl 5). 25 XP awarded.]
[You have slain Bluerock Goblin (lvl 7). 50 XP awarded.]
[You have slain Bluerock Goblin (lvl 8). 65 XP awarded.]
[You have slain Bluerock Goblin (lvl 7). 50 XP awarded.]
[You have slain Bluerock Goblin (lvl 9). 82 XP awarded.]

“Huh, higher than I thought. I’ll get a feel for it though. Might be important to be able to judge someday. Hey, System. Got a question for you.”

“What can I help with, Luke?” System asked. It appeared right below the corpse still hanging from a rope snare in the tree, heedless of the blood dripping through its ghostly form to pool in the dirt below.

“I’m having an issue fighting with all these injuries. [Twitch Reflexes] keeps trying to force me into movements I can’t do. Can I toggle it on and off?”

“Unfortunately, that is not possible. As it increases in rank though, and as you learn the limits of the skill and how best to use it, you should find these issues disappearing.”

“Well that’s great for future Luke, but I’m in trouble now. There’s nothing I can do?”

“I’m sorry. A SysAdmin of your level would not be able to make a change like that.”

“Are you saying that a… ugh… ‘purer’ bloodline could?”

“Anything is theoretically possible, even the total erasure of the system itself. Whether that is feasible for you personally is something you’ll have to discover for yourself as you advance.”

“Helpful as always,” Luke said.

“Of course,” System replied, completely missing the sarcasm. “Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

Luke’s head snapped around to focus on the sound of a new dog baying not far away. It was close enough that he wouldn’t have much time to set a new ambush and he wanted a clear battlefield without corpses he had to worry about tripping over.

“No,” he said absently to System. “I’ve got some work to do right now. We can talk later.”