Dark Mage Clichés 3
The suicide goblins — the ones viewers called things like Hug-Me's and Farm Goblins — stretched out their elongated arms and latched onto my waist.
They'd grown bulkier and their arms had gotten longer, and in exchange their faces had only gotten uglier. This one bared its crooked teeth in a disgusting grin. The other knights were shoving them off and deflecting them before they could close in, but I'd been grabbed right away, so I must have looked pretty ridiculous.
That crude goblin intelligence, which couldn't even imagine that I was the one doing the grabbing rather than the other way around, felt both familiar and oddly endearing. Reliving an old memory, I clamped my hand down hard on the ugly head stuck to my waist.
Back then, when Han Se-ah asked me to show her something, I threw a goblin, didn't I…?
On the early grassland floors — the first floor side, not the fifty-first — I'd once grabbed a goblin and given it a tour of Seoul.
With a gokkyaaaak, it had gone sailing so high into the sky that the camera couldn't even track it. If I remembered right, that clip had been the first meme that really put Han Se-ah's stream on the map. Before that she'd just been a streamer with lucky gacha pulls; after the goblin toss, viewers had locked her in as the broadcaster filming an isekai overpowered-protagonist story.
Drawing on that memory, I whipped the goblin head stuck to my hand forward—!
This time it didn't go soaring into the sky. It flew straight toward its own comrades back by the tents, the ones still hungrily looking for a chance to blow themselves up. It had wrapped its arms perfectly around my waist and even laced its fingers together, and the ugly grin on its face twisted into something bizarre, as if it had never imagined it could be peeled off so effortlessly.
"Goblin's about to blow — dodge on your own!"
"Uwah! Don't throw it this way!"
Kiiiiiiing——!!!
With that distinctive sound, the stupid goblin's face vanished into a flashing purple burst. It hadn't managed to die still clinging to my waist, but it had taken about five of its buddies with it, so at least the road to the afterlife wouldn't be lonely.
Even an orc that had abandoned a wrecked catapult and a few freshly carved-up comrades, scrambling to grab close-combat gear, got swept up and disappeared into the purple flash along with them.
The fighting after that was a lot more convenient than before. The goblins that sensed something was wrong and tried to steer clear of me got grabbed anyway; I'd click the button on their waist belts and hurl them every which way, and the surroundings would level themselves.
"Roland's starting to get a taste for bombs too!"
After swinging a mace around every day cleaning them up one by one, watching four or five get swept up in each exploding goblin felt weirdly satisfying.
Then again, back in modern society before I'd reincarnated into this world, I'd always been more romantic about AoE skills than single-target burst when I gamed. I didn't really want to say it out loud, but I was starting to understand why Han Se-ah was more obsessed with bombs than magic.
Up through intermediate magic, spells felt less like AoE and more like mez or CC tools. Take Earth Control — she barely used it for offense, which was how it earned the nickname "road paver."
"Don't let them grab you — kick them away! When they blow, they'll clean themselves up!"
"Can we just rip the belts off? If we cut cleanly it should work, right?"
Watching that, the Ice Cross Knights started pulling their own tricks.
Whether they'd trained in wrestling for when they lost their swords, they grabbed the goblin arms stretching toward them and flung the creatures away, or used cleverly curved swordplay to snip just the suicide belts free and boot them off. Little stunts like that.
Even if their stats fell short, their technique was clearly well-honed — and once the Ice Cross Knights got the hang of the suicide gimmick, they started cleaning up the stragglers with crisp efficiency.
"Ah! If you freeze them, they don't explode!"
"Good intel, Katie!"
"I wanna throw some too!"
In the middle of all that, there was the minor incident of Katie looking sulky because the power of her Special Enhancement Stone — Winter Fragment was so overwhelming it froze the bombs solid — but either way, the cleanup was done.
"Alright, let's sort the situation out a bit, chat. First up, the Special Enhancement Stones that keep coming up. But for fuck's sake, not a single ogre has dropped. Freezing a whole suicide bomb solid — the performance is confirmed. But there are no ogres. It's not that we saw them and didn't kill them. They just haven't shown up at all so far."
The ballistae had been punched through, the catapults carved apart, and the stragglers inside had been swallowed by goblin suicide blasts, leaving an empty stronghold. Han Se-ah smoothed the explosion-pocked ground flat with Earth Control, then started chatting with her viewers under the pretense of meditating.
The topic was Special Enhancement Stones. The conversation had started around my combat method of turning suicide goblins against the enemy, then naturally drifted to Katie freezing goblins solid.
Viewers who'd just watched a top-tier CC effect that went past slow all the way to freeze — and even shut down a suicide gimmick — had started hyping that her basic attacks were stronger than intermediate magic. Of course, those "basic attacks" were aura blades from a 5-star upper-tier fighter dumping mana like crazy.
"I want to slap wind or lightning on my staff too and taste that high-tier magic high! Honestly, if that hit harder than bombs I'd use it in a heartbeat. But there are no ogres. No ogres! These things are nine meters tall and I can't see a single one, what the hell!"
While Han Se-ah and her viewers made a racket about enhancement stones, the rest of the party was talking about the suicide goblins.
"These guys seem to have bombs packed into their belts — think we could shoot them with a bow and set them off?"
"Whatever it is, if you just press it hard it blows after a second, so probably?"
Apparently they were jealous of me throwing goblins to clear enemies, and were thinking about detonating them from range or flinging them somewhere else.
But as was always the case with Tower monsters, when a goblin died, everything related to that goblin vanished. Unless it was a named or a boss, even the gear it carried dissolved into mana and disappeared.
The armor and shields of goblin infantry, the stick grenades of orc grenadiers, the spears and blades of centaur cavalry — all of it vanished on death, leaving nothing but a single mana stone. So killing a goblin suicide trooper would only leave a purple mana stone behind; you couldn't recover the suicide bomb belt.
"Roland? Roland!"
"Yeah, what is it, Katie."
Thinking that over, I was dual-monitor-watching the Ice Cross Knights' schemes to push Oleg and Alissa together and Han Se-ah's furious wailing when Katie sidled up.
Just from her expression it was crystal clear she was thinking I want to throw bombs too, and Grace and Irene, who'd come along with her, wore faintly wry smiles. Wanting to handle enemies more easily and efficiently was a fair point, but listening to her, it somehow still came off like a child's demand.
"Next time we fight, could we maybe capture a goblin alive?"
"Because of the bombs on their waists?"
"Right. The land mines, the orcs — these guys' main weapons all seem to be explosives. So if we send samples to the Magic Tower, wouldn't that help when we hunt the boss monster?"
Hearing Katie out, she actually had a point.
The orc grenadiers who traveled with goblin infantry lobbing all kinds of grenades, the magitech land mines planted under the earthen walls, the suicide belts the goblins used in a pinch —
Maybe because they were dressed up as an army, their core gimmick seemed to be tilting more and more toward explosives. Honestly, if they were already using stick grenades, land mines, and suicide bomb belts, was there any reason they couldn't load explosives into catapults and ballistae?
Everyone's attention had been locked on the subtle monster enhancements from black magic and the purple mana stones that came with them, but the bombs the monsters used were probably well worth researching too.
"That's true. If we study their bombs, we might be able to use them ourse—lves…?"
And that was more than enough to snag the interest of our resident bomb-obsessed hero.
She'd clearly been over there running donation collection time with her viewers, and somehow she'd already drifted over and barged into the conversation. On top of that, she grabbed my shoulder — then startled at the fact that she'd touched me herself and took a step back.
For someone called a hero, it was a thoroughly uninspiring look.