Dances with Goblins (7)
Circumstances left me no choice. I handed the sack of goblin ears off to another party member and headed up to the second floor.
Rakun turned to Babar, looking thoroughly lost.
"What's going on?"
"Hell if I know, brat."
Babar drifted through life without a thought in his head. What was he supposed to know? You ask someone worth asking. And anyway, that kid's raw intelligence was clearly sitting right about level with Babar's.
"My thinking is, it must be something to do with the goblins."
"Hmm. That tracks."
A few days had passed, and the whole thing had slipped my mind, but the blood-soaked melee with the goblin army hadn't been all that long ago. They'd probably figured out exactly what was going on. Whether they really needed to call us in for it was another question. Still, how's a sparrow supposed to know what a roc is thinking? Around here, when they say jump, you jump. That's the iron rule of the trade.
Knock, knock.
"Come in."
The branch chief was there to receive us. Sonya wasn't with him this time. In her place, four glasses of water sat on the table, and beside them a single book.
Babar muttered under his breath.
"Oh, boy."
Well, the man was illiterate. Of course he and books got along poorly.
Rakun picked the thing up and flicked through the pages like he owned them. Mannerless little bastard.
"What is this? Just from the contents, it looks like a fairy tale."
The branch chief nodded.
"A sharp eye. It's a fairy tale belonging to the lord's daughter."
"And why is it you are showing that to us?"
Eline's question was fair. This was no ancient manuscript. A fairy tale? Fairy tales were fantasy to begin with. You could hardly take everything in one as fact.
"Myself, the officers of the Baikal branch, the bishop, even the lord — we turned over every record any of us possessed."
For a backwater, the place owned a strangely enormous library, so the search had taken quite some time. The lord collected books as a hobby, and the bishop, from what I heard, snatched up any scrap of old paper that crossed his eye.
A man with the same hobby as my grandfather, who'd gathered waste paper purely for the fun of it. I found myself oddly fond of him.
And even among all those accumulated documents, the same account was nowhere to be found. Not even anything similar.
"A thoroughly hopeless business, wouldn't you say."
The branch chief had it right. If it couldn't be found in records gathered over a hundred years and more, where were we supposed to get the information?
"That, they tell me, is when this fairy tale caught the lord's eye. Read it, if you would."
It was an ordinary fairy tale. A hero meets his companions, sets off on an adventure, and strikes down the Demon King.
"This is...?"
Babar grumbled, plainly unhappy at being the only one left out.
"What. Let me in on it too."
"There's a scene where the hero fights goblins."
"Oh, yeah? That ain't exactly unusual, though."
As Babar said, a hero fighting goblins was no great surprise. Goblins were monsters. A grunt's natural enemy was the officers; a hero's natural enemy was the monsters. But what if those goblins weren't ordinary goblins?
"An organized army. Same as the ones we fought."
Smarter than the common specimen, and they understood the concept of a formation. Very much like the ones we'd seen. They were blocking the hero's path with something like a system of their own, and the hero's party was having a fairly hard time of it. And at the far end of that goblin army, the one leading the horde was—
A Goblin Lord.
Rakun asked, face blank.
"What's that?"
"What, basically the king of the goblins, isn't it?"
The Goblin Lord you got in your average fantasy novel was dangerous, sure, but you couldn't really call it a strong monster. It led the goblins, yet its own martial strength was usually painted as nothing worth mentioning. Plenty of them were written as threats dire enough to wipe out a region, or a whole nation — but that was all down to the fuck-goblins' obscene numbers, not because the thing itself was strong.
But a goblin from this place, one that could slap the orc out of an ordinary fantasy novel and still have a hand free? A thing like that might even toy with an ogre. Figure it that way, and it meant you needed at least ten Silver Plate adventurers, or one Gold Plate.
The branch chief clapped once, clearing the air.
"I asked the bishop, and the hero himself, he says, was a real man. From a thousand years ago."
Whether he'd actually slain the Demon King was unknown, but he'd left legendary deeds behind either way. That was why they called him a hero.
"And this fairy tale, they say, is that thousand-year-old story set down in writing."
Quite the ancient plot, by the look of it.
"I know full well it sounds absurd... but this fairy tale was the only thing from which we might draw even a clue."
The branch chief's wrinkles deepened. It wasn't as if he wanted to put his whole faith in a fairy tale either. He was grasping at straws. A man can't simply sink and drown, so he'd brought the tale along to cling to even a thread of hope.
"What's more, we judge that the goblins have already gathered in considerable number."
They say that if you spot one cockroach in the house, a hundred more are hiding where you can't see them. These gobroaches were no different. Rest easy because there's only the one, and the next day five of them link arms and come crashing in. The day after that, twenty come charging. That was these bastards.
"Quite apart from the mere suspicion of a Goblin Lord, we need to thin the goblins' numbers."
Eline nodded and added her piece.
"It is a Goblin Lord. That is why monsters of about orc level were driven down this way."
Babar chimed in at once.
"Then we'd better come up with a plan, and soon."
Well, any plan was unlikely to be anything terribly new. It would amount to putting out another large-scale commission, same as before.
Here, the branch chief offered us a different choice.
"I consider that the lot of you have already rendered more than enough service."
As it happened, we were the ones who had witnessed every anomaly and reported it.
"So, should you wish it, I will assign you the role of couriers, to be sent to the other guild branches."
He meant to request support from the other territories as well, against whatever might come. Baikal had no Gold Plate adventurers, so they had to ask the adventurer guilds elsewhere to dispatch some. But transportation in this other world was garbage, and there was no telling how many days a dispatch would actually take. A courier from Baikal arriving in another territory didn't mean the decision was made on the spot, either. Selecting the personnel, negotiating the pay, and all the rest of it...
The guild couldn't simply bark at a Gold Plate to go. From the guild's side, they had no wish to ruffle a Gold Plate's temper. And while all of that dragged on, the goblins would multiply like idiots, and the number of hands required would swell right along with them. A vicious cycle, plain and simple. Still, better than doing nothing. If the subjugation happened to fail, somebody would need to clean up afterward.
"I am going to hunt it myself."
As expected, Eline meant to take the Goblin Lord down in person. At this point I was starting to suspect she had some kind of grudge against them.
Rakun hesitated, then spoke with care.
"Would it be all right if I thought about it a little?"
The branch chief nodded readily.
"Of course. Tell me by tomorrow."
"Babar. Babar, what are you going to do?"
When I asked, Babar scratched his chin.
"Hmm. Beats me. I'll just do whatever you do."
As expected, Babar had no thoughts whatsoever.
"Then let's follow Eline and go bag the Lord."
"Yeah. Let's."
The branch chief, who had been listening to the two of us, rose and bowed his head. I'd noticed it before, but I liked that the man carried no sense of his own authority.
"You have my gratitude for your decision."
We finished with the branch chief and left the reception room. I turned to Rakun, who was still turning it over and over.
"Hey. What are you gonna do?"
"Hmm... going as the courier does appeal more, I'll admit."
We had no idea how strong the Lord was, so maybe that was only natural. He was the type who balked at taking on anything burdensome to begin with. I understood well enough. Rakun went on.
"And this way I can legally dodge the dangerous post, you know?"
Normally, you couldn't just run because monsters had put the territory in danger. The adventurer guild would slap a penalty on you for it. Why else would the territory's big men permit sword-carrying thugs to wander the streets? Because there was an unspoken agreement that those thugs could be mobilized when the time came. Try to put them to use in a crisis and they bolt? You get marked on the spot, and you're finished.
"Yeah, yeah, you little shit. Anyway, think it over."
I said it, but I didn't actually believe Rakun would stay. Parting from the others, I figured tomorrow might be the last day I ever laid eyes on him.
The next day, I was at the adventurer guild again.
Get up early enough and you might scavenge one more bug to eat. Of course, I was a reasonably comfortable man these days, so you could call me an adventurer who'd graduated from earthworms to mealworms.
"Goat. Hello."
I finished greeting Eline.
"You eat?"
And traded greetings with Babar. Rakun was in the corner with his head planted on the table, so the dilemma still ran deep.
"Babar, how about we party up today?"
"Sounds good."
We idled through the chatter, and before I knew it the hour had crept up on lunch. Babar and I were just about to go take a commission when a roar tore through the hall.
KWA-AAAAANG—!!!!
"Fuck! Emergency! Emergency!!!!!!!"
"You again, Goat?"
Rakun's one line left me speechless.
"You little bastard. You think kicking a door in and yelling emergency makes it one?"
"Oh. You were right there."
"Get it together, pal. So are you staying, or are you going?"
But the conversation between Rakun and me turned out to mean nothing at all.
"Those goblin bastards are invading this place!!!!"
Kind of them, really. The goblins were coming to find us. At this rate they'd need every hand they could borrow, even a cat's, so the courier run would probably go to some retired adventurer.
Adventurers who didn't know the circumstances were busy sneering at him.
"Heh heh heh. I knew ages ago the adventurers around here had gone straight to shit, but now even a moron like that is throwing his weight around."
"Goblins attacking, my ass... it'd be more believable if the gambling-hall owner finally snapped and came after me."
The man coming down from the second floor, though, seemed to see it differently.
It was the branch chief of the Baikal Adventurer Guild.