A Perfect Massacre
How many goblin settlements were there in this forest?
I had no way of knowing the true number, but my estimate put it comfortably over a hundred.
A single settlement held at least several dozen goblins, and a hundred was typical — that was for the smaller villages. Push farther inward, and settlements of two or three hundred became commonplace.
The largest of them all, the Grand Goblin Settlement, was the size of five enormous villages fused together, each home to more than five hundred goblins. At a conservative count, two or three thousand of the creatures lived there.
Not all of them were combatants, of course. I had seen as much on the first floor — ordinary goblins were not particularly strong. A grown man could handle one without much trouble, and a capable fighter could take two or three. A Warrior, though, was another matter. An untrained civilian would not stand a chance.
But how many Warriors did a single settlement even have? Three or four in a small village. Ten at the absolute most.
In those early raids, I wanted as few goblins as possible to slip away. I needed my party's levels to climb, and I needed the potential those levels unlocked to translate into real stat growth through combat. We could not keep a perfect kill count forever, of course. That was only possible against the smaller tribes.
Even so, of the ten tribes we hit on the first day, not a single goblin survived.
A perfect massacre.
We had swept up every goblin in the surrounding area as well, so word of our raids was unlikely to spread from day one.
When the first day's fighting was done, we did not head for the rest site I had mentioned. We pulled all the way back to the outer fringe and made a separate camp. One night out there was fine. We were still on the outskirts, after all.
"It's easier than I expected, at the start."
Compared to our specs, the goblins on the fringe were pathetically weak. And that was fair enough. It was the same reasoning that had made us grow complacent in the first place, too busy answering the pressure from the outer territories. How much damage could a few of these things really do if we left them alone? That was how we had thought. And that was how we had ended up like this.
Higher-ranked goblins had begun appearing in droves, and their numbers had exploded. The castle's food stores dwindled, raids on the surrounding countryside grew more frequent, and the supply lines seized up entirely. The damage rolled forward like a snowball, and that was how things had reached their present state.
The first day was about finding our rhythm on the outskirts and practicing the slaughter of entire settlements. Killing as many as possible without letting any slip away was what mattered. Fortunately, the knights had plenty of past subjugation experience and offered us solid advice. We got the hang of it quickly enough. It was not difficult — block the entrance, then tear through the inside.
Revo and the other knights argued that we needed to push inward rather than linger on the fringe. I agreed with him. The experience out here was not worth it. Today's fighting had mostly been about getting our basic coordination down anyway, and the rest site I had arranged with Cory lay deeper in the forest to begin with.
The next day, we followed the knights' advice and drove straight into the interior.
From the second day on, wiping out every last goblin became difficult. The deeper we went, the more goblins each settlement held. One by one, they started slipping through.
"Today we push a little harder, even if it means overreaching, and hit more settlements. From tomorrow on, raids this easy will be a thing of the past."
The knights nodded in silence.
I checked on my party members at once. I had been circling the perimeter as much as I could, cutting down the ones that fled and supporting the others. Fortunately, none of them looked particularly worn out yet. The fighting had been constant, but they still had stamina left, and they had not burned through much mana. With the knights handling the bulk of the killing and the party vacuuming up the leftover experience, their levels would climb fast.
At my word, we picked up the pace. Even if a few got away, we would slaughter more goblins overall. I made especially sure we never let the higher ranks escape — Warriors, Archers, and the occasional Sniper that turned up.
Kiee, kieeee!
The goblins fought back against our lightning raids, but we had three knights, myself — whose skill was a match for theirs — and four trainees who had already awakened their mana. There was only so much the goblins could do. Hot blood soaked the village.
The party was fighting well as a unit. They kept Na-yeon in the center while Joo Ha-yeon and Nam Eun-ju cycled from front to back, drawing as much aggro as they could and holding the line. Na Seoyun then reinforced whichever side was drawing heavier fire, cutting down anything that leaked through toward Na-yeon, her feet never still.
Kreeeeeh!
The goblins fleeing the knights' slaughter were not about to ignore the wall of women blocking their escape. Even with the knights taking the majority, an interior village held two to three hundred goblins. Standing at the entrance and holding as best they could, Na-yeon's group was facing more than forty of them.
"Seoyun! Over here! I need help over here!"
"Yes! I'll be right there!"
"Ha-yeon! Get back! Fire Ball!"
The blast crashed through the press of bodies. Goblins shrieked as fire tore them apart.
They're fighting better than I expected.
The experience of fighting as a four-person team in the Underground Waterway was clearly paying off. When I checked their levels, they had already hit 7. I was still level 8. They were closing in on me. The higher your level climbed, the worse the experience efficiency against weak monsters, so by the time we finished the 7th floor, we would probably all be even.
Still, I hoped I would be even one level ahead. Ideally 10 or higher. Eleven, if I could manage it. Levels mattered quite a bit on the 8th and 9th floors.
Hitting level 11 against goblins, though, was an extremely tall order. Still, there were a lot of them, so I could hope.
The fighting did not last long. By the time the four women had dropped about forty goblins, the three knights had already slaughtered close to two hundred.
"How many got away?"
"Fewer than ten. Everything Warrior-class and above is dead."
"Good work. We let quite a few through, and you still managed to put them down."
Once the entrance was blocked, the goblins went over the walls in a mad scramble to escape. No matter how skilled we were, eight people could not stop every last one. That was the limit of our current physical abilities.
"Then we rest for about ten minutes and hit the next tribe immediately."
A silent nod.
Day two. We brought down twelve goblin tribes. The price of pushing ourselves hard. We were wiping out a settlement in an hour at most — sometimes we swept one in thirty minutes. We ran as if tomorrow did not exist, pouring everything we had into today.
As the hours passed and more villages fell, I could see the goblins growing more agitated, their responses getting faster. Word was already spreading. From tomorrow on, we would be lucky to bring down even half of today's total. They would start spending most of their time running. Their defenses would tighten, and troops would be dispatched. Goblins were not complete idiots. The moment the sun began to set, I called off the raids.
"That's enough. We need to make the place we agreed on this morning."
"…I see. Has it grown so late already? How many tribes did we bring down today?"
Revo was painted head to toe in red blood. He was not the only one. Every last one of us was soaked. None of it was ours, of course.
"Twelve tribes, Revo."
"Twelve, is it… Tch. Tomorrow will not come easy."
He seemed to have reached the same conclusion I had.
"If things go as I expect, tomorrow we will be lucky to manage half of today's results. On top of that, the central tribes will start dispatching troops. If the chance presents itself, turning on those smaller detachments instead of the settlements themselves would be a sound approach. Cory will be joining us as well."
"Aye. That would serve as well."
Wiping out the settlements themselves was better for spreading terror and chaos, but cutting down their actual fighting strength reduced the threat we would feel in practical terms. And if we kept winning, the goblins would start to believe that even banding together would not save them. If that idea spread far enough, it would work heavily in our favor.
I headed down the slope of the hill from which, in my previous life, I had looked out over the Grand Goblin Settlement. Checking the area, I found a familiar cave. It was the same one I had hidden in during my first run — a decent place to stay for a day or so. The darkest place is under the lamp, as they say. This spot did not get found easily. I had only stumbled across it by chance back then. It was not somewhere we could use for long, of course.
The entrance was narrow, but the interior opened up considerably. "Considerably" still meant it would be packed with about ten people inside. Even that was more than we could have asked for, and the party marveled at it.
"Oppa, how did you even find a place like this while you were running for your life?"
"It was luck. I wanted to rest so badly I started checking every inch of the surroundings like a madman, and that was when it caught my eye. I was in no condition to actually use it even after I found it, but look at it now. Wider than I remembered, too."
"That's incredible. In a situation like that…"
The others seemed to recall what I had told them of that time. Their faces tightened, just slightly.
We could not risk a fire inside the cave. I spoke quietly to the group.
"Eat, then get to sleep as quickly as you can. Tomorrow is when it gets hard. We ran wild yesterday and today, and the villages we destroyed will have sharpened their guard. This is only the beginning."
"…I suppose so. This is only the beginning. I cannot say how far we shall go, but we will give it our all. I trust you to lead us well."
"We're coming back alive. Don't worry. We'll do everything we can."
Once the words were out, I distributed the food and water at once. The party finished the meal without small talk, set the watch, and took turns falling asleep.
A faint rustle of movement.
Around dawn. I had only just finished my watch, switched off, and fallen asleep when a strange sound snapped me awake.
Footsteps.
I knew that sound from experience. Footsteps, muffled as much as possible.
The current watch was Tula and Nam Eun-ju. Tula heard it too — I saw him seize his weapon at once. He signaled Nam Eun-ju, and she quickly woke the others. The whole sequence was quiet and natural. I could feel how much the party had grown.
Then I realized at once that it had all been unnecessary.
"Ah. I've gone and woken everyone."
In the small hours of the morning, Cory came back wearing a face drawn with exhaustion.
"Cory? You're here already?"
"I am. I ran as hard as I could. I met with the Lord as well."
"The castle… how is it?"
"Chaos, as you'd expect. It was bad enough when you first brought the information, but once His Lordship learned the true scale, he declared a state of emergency at once. He means to pull in the outer villages and prepare as thoroughly as possible."
As he should. The odds of annihilation were still higher.
"And… I received this from His Lordship."
I looked at the item he produced, and felt the need to revise the plan, if only a little.
The third day. For the sake of Cory's exhausted stamina, we did not leave the cave until around afternoon. As expected, the goblins had tightened their watch, increased their patrols, and even organized tracking parties. A more immediate response than I had anticipated.
Several tracking parties had already been formed around the regions we had destroyed, combing for traces. Goblins were poor trackers, of course, and we had erased a fair amount of sign, so we were unlikely to be found easily.
"That's faster than I expected. Their response is quick. Tracking parties already."
"This will not be easy."
"…Just how hard did you run yesterday?"
"Not so very hard. We only killed some two thousand goblins or so."
"…Two thousand? You're telling me you killed two thousand?"
Cory's face went slack with shock.
"We pushed ourselves a little. Most of them were ordinary goblins, though — a large number and not much else. The Warrior-class and above did not even reach five hundred."
That was the truth. Every goblin that would come pouring in was Warrior-class or higher. That force numbered ten thousand. In practical terms, the damage we had done barely registered. Even so, measured against that ten thousand, it was five percent of their total strength. However much we had exploited a slackened watch, it was an insane result. And even if they were only ordinary goblins, a death toll in the thousands would leave a mark.
"Those numbers look thin, Tula."
"…So it would seem. After the havoc we wreaked yesterday, that's all they sent? The goblins may have misjudged our strength."
The pursuit party was clearly made up of higher-grade troops. The lowest among them were Warrior-class. A handful of ordinary goblins were running errands, but only a handful. Their numbers were not truly small, either — a hundred and fifty, at least. But it was not a force that could stand against us. The three knights alone, even without Cory, could handle that many.
The problem was that they would not come through it clean. Small wounds would accumulate, and their stamina would drain away. The kind of madness we had pulled yesterday — twelve goblin settlements in a single day — was no longer possible.
"Na-yeon. How's the area?"
"No one but them."
"…We should hit them."
"You think so too?"
Taking them out would punch a hole in the search net. It would also raise the odds of our position being discovered — but the net was going to tighten on us regardless. Thinning it out in advance struck me as the better play. In terms of actual fighting strength, cutting down a force like this was more effective than raiding another settlement.
"Joo Ha-yeon. Hold on defense. This is different from the settlements. You are not holding a position — you prioritize staying alive. Survival. Don't forget that."
"Understood."
"Then we go."
On my signal, we hit the search party.
Day three of the guerrilla campaign. Instead of the settlements, we started devouring the search parties.