Dancing with the Goblins (11)
Clang— clang— clang—
The sharp shriek of metal on metal raked through my ears.
"Bisaaang— bisaaaaang—!!!"
Raccoon's drawn-out wail came thrown in for free.
Grumbling, thick with complaint, rose from every direction.
"For fuck's sake. They really will try every damn thing."
"Shit. Have a little humanity and let us sleep at night."
"They're not human, so."
"No shit, who doesn't know that? Shut up."
Raccoon had the third watch tonight, which meant the subjugation force had been dragged awake in the dead of night, when we should still have been asleep. We were so worn down from fight after fight that a full day of sleep wouldn't have been enough, and now a night raid on top of it. One disaster piled on another. This Goblin Lord bastard was, without a doubt, a master of strategy and tactics. I almost wanted to stand up and applaud the piece of shit.
We kept our distance on the march, but camp was always made in one place, so the whole force being gathered together was the single small mercy. If we'd been spread out and hit one camp at a time, nothing could have been worse.
I was up first, and I went straight to kicking the squad awake.
"JK, get the soldiers up, quick. Patrasche, you bastard. Quit looking for milk and get up."
"Raccoon, you fuck. Don't go crawling into somebody's bedroll. You getting up or not?"
When the chaos refused to die down, Alex, the Silver Plate adventurer, let out a roar.
"Numbers!!!!"
He kept rubbing at his cheek. A shallow scratch from a goblin must have been itching him.
Raccoon whipped his head this way and that, but with the night this dark there was no way he was seeing anything properly. At this point it was a miracle he'd even noticed the goblins had arrived.
We, however, had Eline. A fairy who boasted vision of the swift, precise, premium grade.
"It's five."
Fairies had sharp night eyes too, apparently. The tension went out of me all at once.
Hearing her, Alex deflated and grumbled.
"Bullshit. I thought twenty of them had come charging in. It's just five?"
Sylvia, still half asleep, cracked a huge yawn and offered a suggestion.
"Squad leaders knock them out quick, and we get back to sleep."
"I think that's the better idea too."
Five goblins were nothing to the five squad leaders who weren't me. After tonight, these things would go down in history as the goblins who had faced the most luxurious adventuring roster in the world.
Or so I told myself, while I was barely managing to block in the dark. Alex, a tank the same as me, answered them so simply that I was stunned. I'd thought I was plenty seasoned at fighting goblins, but next to him I still had a long way to go.
This is a Silver Plate adventurer?
Alex, though, looked just as surprised by me.
"You sure you're really Bronze Plate? That shield-work doesn't look like something a man does in pitch dark."
"Feels like I'm about to drop dead, for what it's worth."
The moment I managed the answer, Alex barked a laugh and thumped me on the back.
"You little shit. You've got talent. You're not the kind who stays Bronze Plate."
I am not exaggerating. It hurt worse than taking a goblin's club.
He had the leisure to hit me while he was blocking. The unmistakable musk of a true master hung off him. If what someone does looks too easy, it means that person is ancient water, a lifer who's been in the deep end forever. That saying is completely, fucking correct.
I don't think Alex and I had even turned aside more than a few swings between us.
And already the goblins were coming apart, pieces of them tumbling across the ground.
The squad leaders' raw power. Terrifying.
"Yaaawn— I'll be heading back to sleep."
So beauties really were sleep fiends. Eline was back at her spot and down like lightning.
The rest of the force, who had been staring blankly at the leaders while they fought, lay down again as well. If it was going to end like this, I should have just let Raccoon go back to sleep. I'd run my mouth for nothing. I wasn't particularly sorry.
The next day.
"Kyak!! Kyak kyak!!!"
Widening the patrols had been worth absolute jack shit.
We ranged farther. We walked with a policy of dodging every goblin we spotted, and we still had to fight them. It didn't feel like we were fighting any less. About the same as before, or one or two fewer scraps at the very most. If we saw them first, we could slip past. If they saw us first, fighting was the only answer. Goblins hitting us in scattered bursts were shaving down stamina and sanity in a way you could watch happen.
"The hell did you just say? The girl at the watermill's got herself a man?"
"I saw it with my own eyes. Your ears broken? Want me to dig them out with a longsword?"
On a normal day we would have laughed and let it go. Strung this tight, people were snapping and swinging on each other one after another. Goblin noise up front. Squadmates squabbling at my back. I was about ready to lose my mind.
Still, I was the squad leader. I coaxed and I soothed and I kept them moving somehow, but even my patience was starting to scrape bottom. Anyone who actually knew my real personality would have been fucking stunned.
A patience GOAT, tougher than a babysitter!
"Goblins incoming!!"
One shout from Raccoon, out with the patrol, and a sigh just fell out of me.
"Haa. This is so fucked."
Six of them this time. We put every one down, of course, but the damage was stacking, and that was becoming the problem. Something like thirty-five percent of the force was no longer fit to fight. I'd heard that once thirty percent of an army can't take the field, you call it annihilation. By that measure alone, the subjugation force was already wiped out.
Our own squad's wounded had crept up to five. Even setting aside the injuries too bad to fight through, everybody was carrying cuts and bruises of one size or another.
The one fortunate thing was that goblins were diurnal, and once the sun went down they were hard to see. The night raids were rough, but we could endure them, somehow.
A short meeting settled it. From the next day on, we would push the scouting range even wider. Sink or swim, feed us or kill us, we had to know where these bastards were squatting if we were ever going to end this fight.
The patrols ranged farther, straining to find the goblin stronghold. With the net drawn that much tighter, the fighting eased off as well, and that alone was enough to bleed away some of the fatigue.
Five days out of Baikal, and we were in deep. Even in daylight the light barely reached, and the woods stayed dim. Nobody said it out loud, but every one of us could feel that their base was close.
"Ten copper says we find it inside thirty minutes."
"Five copper on the opposite."
"Five copper? What are you, a cheapskate?"
People bet, and people traded dumb jokes, working hard to shake the tension loose.
How long did we walk like that, shaking off goblins that kept charging us while we hunted for their sweet little home?
The patrol came back and reported that they had found the goblin base.
"A clearing?"
Alex asked it back at them.
According to the patrol, about twenty minutes out there was an absurdly wide clearing. And in that clearing stood a wooden palisade that looked to have been raised by goblins.
The moment Sylvia heard it, she spat a curse.
"Fuck. They really will try every kind of bullshit. A palisade? A palisade?"
I felt the same. What, were they planning to found some shitty little kingdom? They'd gone and built themselves a house, and it was infuriating. Bastards who throw up unlicensed construction like that ought to have a demolition crew called in, the whole thing flattened, and every last one of them tossed in a cell. Lock them all up and maybe then they'd come to their senses.
This time Eline was the one who asked.
"Anything else out of the ordinary?"
"Uh... an enormous number of goblins are formed up in front of the palisade..."
Had they decided they'd done enough of a war of attrition? Or was it the arrogance of believing they could win a straight contest of strength against strength? No wonder the goblins had seemed so scarce. They'd stopped feeding themselves in piecemeal and gathered at the main camp.
"Fuck it. We've got adventurer pride. Let's wipe these shitty goblins out."
We couldn't turn and run, not like this. All that was left was a full-on battle. We were already dancing on the flat of their hand. If we were going to die, it'd be a raw deal to go down without leaving at least one blade in them.
"Then let's go."
And so the force pushed on for some thirty minutes and came to a stop at the mouth of the clearing.
"Kyaruk, kyak kyak!! Kyak kyak kyak!!"
"Kek kek kek, keeeek—!!!!"
Raccoon was so shocked he couldn't get his mouth shut.
"Lord almighty. Lived all my life, and I ain't never seen that many goblins."
Thud— thud— thud—
They stamped in time, and the ground itself shook. Among the fainthearted, there were soldiers whose legs gave out completely, dropping them where they stood.
And at the very back of the goblin mass, dead center. A goblin seated in an enormous chair upon a high platform raised one hand. Every goblin that had been making noise went still and stood in place.
"...The fuck. Is that a goblin?"
Someone muttered it. They weren't wrong. You could not call that thing a goblin.
"The Goblin Lord..."
Goblins deployed in a wide formation, and the subjugation force drawn up against them. It looked like a scene from a war movie. It would have been wonderful, if only I weren't standing inside it.
The Lord slowly lowered the hand he had raised and pointed it at the force.
And then—
"KYAAAAAAAK—!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
He screamed as if he meant to tear our eardrums apart, and every goblin gathered in the clearing began to come for us.
Thud— thud— thud—
Maybe he refused to be cowed by the sound. Alex bellowed like he had no intention of losing either.
"FUUUUUCK, EVERYBODY GRAB YOUR WEAPONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"