Chapter 17

Luke was an equal opportunity genocidal monster. He didn’t discriminate between goblin tribes, and was more than willing to kill anything that attacked him. The fact that goblins always attacked him, without hesitation or provocation, went a long way towards making him feel alright that he was single-handedly decimating their population.

With his next level up to 12, he spent 3 AP to increase [Survivalist]to rank 2. The expanded knowledge made him look back at his old preparations and feel like a putz. He was almost afraid to put the points into [Leatherworking], but he was clearly going to be there awhile and his clothes were starting to fall apart, so he bit the bullet and dropped another 3 AP on that too.

“I can’t believe I was ever proud of this thing,” he said to himself as he looked down at his bag. The threads were starting to snap, and he knew exactly why. He’d built the entire thing wrong. He needed to redo it immediately. He’d planned ahead for that though, and already had new hides drying in his forest camp.

The last 6 AP were used to reinforce his stats. He put 2 each in strength and perception, and 1 in agility and stamina. He could see well enough in the dark that he no longer had any issues fighting the goblins. The biggest problem he was having now was that he was having to go deeper and deeper in to find their underground homes, and more than once he’d gotten a little bit lost trying to get back out.

He took a break for a day to work on some other stuff, namely making himself a better backpack, a new coat, and some sort of shirt. His jeans and work boots had held up better than anything else, though he had to give his leather jacket credit for still being in one piece despite the beatings it had gone through.

At night, he went back to his brother’s workshop and slept there, though it seemed like the amount of sleep he needed kept going down as his stamina went up. He was only getting five or six now, and he felt fine in the mornings. That, combined with his enhanced perception letting him see what was going on even in the dark, led to more hours of the day to hunt monsters.

The problem was one of mental fatigue. Luke just didn’t want to live his life for nothing but work, and monster hunting was a job like anything else. It was actually kind of stressful, knowing that if he screwed something up bad enough, it could result in his death. His set of combat skills was very, very good at keeping him out of harm’s way, but all it would take was one goblin he didn’t see putting a spear through his ribs to finish him off.

Probably. He might even survive that if his stamina got high enough.

Luke limited himself to eight hours of slaughtering, spent a few hours on [Woodcarving] and [Leatherworking] in an attempt to keep himself clothed and to build a treehouse. The knowledge was there, kind of, but the tools were lacking. Carving joints that held together without things like nails or glue was time consuming, and that assumed access to raw lumber that he just didn’t have.

That was why he was standing less than five hundred feet from the goblin camp. They’d built with lumber. They had to have the tools he needed, saws and hammers and nails. He was practically salivating at the idea of having a full toolbelt. Maybe he’d get a general-purpose [Carpentry]skill out of it if he was able to pull the raid off.

The goal wasn’t to kill every goblin there, though that wouldn’t bother him. He just wanted access to their toolboxes. If he could do that without slaughtering the whole camp, that was just fine. Of course, he didn’t have any sort of sneaking skills, so the chances of that happening were effectively zero. That was why his plan involved going after the crossbow-wielding goblins on the watchtowers first.

To that end, he had confiscated a few crossbows from various goblins and spent the afternoon practicing with them. He… was not good at it. They were easy enough to reload thanks to his high strength, and agility probably helped more than he was giving it credit for, but he could tell that the weapons were not good quality, not well-maintained, and were too small for him besides.

He doubted he’d be accurate past thirty or forty feet even if his agility was 100. Since it was really only 14, he wasn’t even accurate that far. Twenty feet was about his limit. The towers weren’t that high though, so he slid his mace into its back sheathe, grabbed a crossbow in either hand, and got ready to make the run across open ground.

The goblins, he’d learned, had shit vision in the day. They weren’t blind, but the towers were more for appearance than practicality. He was spotted immediately, of course, but they couldn’t hit him from range even if he ran a straight line. With his high perception feeding [Twitch Reflexes], there was no chance they were going to tag him.

Luke reached the point where he was maybe fifteen feet from the tower and jumped as high as he could. If there was ever a point where one of them would shoot him, it was at that very moment. Both were too surprised by his actions to do it, though he did notice that one of them was actually reloading and wouldn’t have been able to shoot anyway.

He fired both crossbows with perhaps twenty-five feet between him and his targets. One missed completely, but the other clipped a shoulder and caused the goblin to fumble its weapon. That was probably a better outcome than such a bat-shit crazy plan deserved, if he was being honest with himself. Luke threw both crossbows following the successful firing of them, and there he had better luck.

One goblin was struck head on, stumbled back a few steps, and shrieked in surprise and fear when it fell out of the tower. The other dodged out of the way, but in the process dropped the bolt it was trying to load.

Luke caught hold of the edge of the tower just as he started to fall back down and hauled himself up. The goblin, perhaps inspired by his own attack, hurled its crossbow at his face. [Twitch Reflexes] clocked the attack, but as both of his hands were busy pushing his full bodyweight up to get him onto the tower, there was nothing he could do but duck his head to take it on his skull instead of his face.

“Ow! Fuck,” he swore. Then he was up, mace in hand, and hauling back to knock the goblin clear to the caves. It went sailing through the air, skimmed over the roof of one hut, skipped off the roof next to that, and landed right next to the long house near the back.

A notification ding sounded to let him know that particular goblin was dead. It was the only one though, so he looked down over the edge to see the one that had fallen off limping its way towards the back of the camp. Luke calmly picked up the dropped crossbow, loaded it, and shot the goblin in the back of the head.

Well, he tried to, anyway. In reality, he shot it in the ass, which just made it squeal and speed up. “Goddamn it, these things suck,” he said, but he was a little bit impressed he’d managed to hit a moving target at all.

Phase One of the Plan That Totally Wasn’t Going To Get Him Killed was complete. He’d taken out one of the watchtowers, which would help prevent him from being pincushioned by goblin snipers, if they could be called that. More importantly, it gave him his first up close and uninterrupted view of the camp. He hadn’t been able to make out fine details from the tree line, but now he could clearly see what part was dedicated to woodworking.

As he suspected, it was the north side. That was why he’d chosen the tower he was on to attack. It had been a gamble, but a small one. The lumber was piled up there and based on where the goblins had been cutting down trees, it made the most sense to him. Before, it had been supposition. Who knew how goblins thought? Now, it was fact. He’d confirmed it himself.

His eyes flitted back and forth, counting goblin numbers and divvying them up between workers and warriors. It was surprisingly heavy in the workers’ favor, but then he supposed the purpose of the camp was to gather raw material and process it. The guards would be there to handle problems like Luke, and there wouldn’t be a pressing need for a ton of them.

Except that Luke was a higher level than anything else living in the valley besides Red, who didn’t really like goblin meat and thus didn’t count anyway, and he liked to think he was smarter than the average rodent, reptile, or giant bug. Or at least he was crazier than one.

He dropped off the watchtower, flexing his legs and crouching down as he landed. Then he went for the lumber yard, careful to keep a hut between himself and the south sentry tower. It was only a hundred feet to his goal, but he needed time to locate the tools he was after, load them into his backpack, and get back out.

As far as a smash and grab was concerned, he thought things were going pretty good. The workers weren’t even trying to fight him. They all went running for the back of the camp and the caves, which did annoy him a bit because he saw one fleeing holding a hammer in its hand. There were other hammers though, so he let it flee without pursuit.

Luke swung the backpack off his shoulders and scooped up two hammers and a small leather pouch of nails. A nearby saw went into it, followed by a dozen chisels of varying sizes, a file, a wooden mallet, a whetstone, and a drill. His eyes lit up when he found a wooden box with a set of carving knives in it.

“Jackpot,” he hissed. His tool raid was going better than he could have hoped. If he could just find a small hand-held plane, probably the only kind goblins would be likely to have anyway, that would round out the set nicely.

Then the door to the longhouse flew open, kicked by a goblin foot so hard that it was blasted off the hinges. The largest goblin Luke had ever seen strode out into the light, wearing actual hardened leather armor and armed with a sword so big that Luke was surprised it could wield it one-handed.

Luke was confident he could win that fight. The goblin was impressive, for a goblin. But he was a couple levels past that now. Then a second goblin followed the first one out. And a third. When the fourth one appeared, he felt a twist in his guts that told him something with more XP than him was around.

The four of them fanned out and another ten goblins holding crossbows poured out of the longhouse. There was about a hundred feet between him and the goblin war party. Fourteen of them against one of him.

Phase Two was complete anyway, sort of. He’d gotten almost everything he wanted. It was time to switch to Phase Three.

“Run like hell,” Luke whispered to himself.