Behemoth's Nest
The guerrilla campaign continued. On the fourth day, just as on the third, we chose to hunt the search parties.
The villages we'd gotten close enough to inspect were already braced for a raid, scouts posted around the perimeter, support arriving fast. They were operating as a coordinated whole now.
A satisfying result. The longer this dragged on, the later the goblin forces would assemble — which meant less time to assault the castle. From the knights' perspective, it was the best possible outcome. I was fairly pleased myself. Cutting down search parties was far more efficient for experience than risking an attack on a village already prepared for us.
Before I knew it, I had reached level 9. The rest of the party sat at 8.
I was already hitting the wall. Getting from 9 to 10 was brutal, and 10 to 11 would be worse. If the quality of the monsters improved, maybe. But what we were fighting here were mostly goblin warriors and archers. If it weren't for the handful of snipers, I might still have been sitting at 8 myself.
Once your level rose, you were supposed to fight stronger monsters. This felt like grinding slimes just to force a level-up. And even this had a ceiling at 11. The moment I hit 11, goblin warriors and archers would stop giving experience entirely. Only the rare snipers, the shamans we hadn't managed to kill yet, and the Goblin Lord who was presumably out there would still yield anything.
We'd finished the fourth day's hunt, shaken off the pursuit, and were now heading toward the last place I'd hidden — a location that would never be discovered.
"Just how far are we going? Where is this place?"
"Upstream. We need to go farther up. It's quite deep in."
"...How did you even find it?"
"During the last reconnaissance, I stayed behind as bait until the end. The direction I lured them was upstream — the rest of the party was heading downstream along the river. The goblins chasing me stopped at a certain boundary. They were afraid to go any farther. I went in a little deeper just in case... luck was on my side."
"Hrm. A place you have such confidence in. I am most curious."
"You won't be disappointed."
The party nodded at my confident reply and followed in silence. Given what yesterday's rest stop had been, they seemed particularly uneasy this time.
Yesterday's shelter had, of all places, been an external goblin food cache.
As the goblin tribes had grown and unified around the Grand Goblin Settlement, a few of them had apparently built these stores out in the wild. Whether they were for tribute or the tribes' own use, I didn't know and didn't need to. Goblins were selfish by nature, so these caches were almost always hidden from other tribes. If the others knew, they'd steal from them the moment they needed to, danger be damned. As a result, almost no one except a handful of tribal chiefs knew where the external food stores were.
In my first cycle, the allied tribes of the Lower Floors that had a Goblin Lord definitely kept these, so I knew the pattern. I'd put that knowledge to good use.
The problem was that the cache was filthy beyond description. Human and animal corpses had been piled up haphazardly, barely processed at all. The cruelty of the sight was one thing, but the stench and the insects were worse. Stay a few days and you'd catch diseases you didn't even have.
Na Seoyun had retched at the horrific conditions. Nam Eun-ju had asked, genuinely, if we really had to sleep there. Even the knights, whose mental fortitude was ironclad, had their pupils flicker, however slightly. That told you everything you needed to know about how awful the place was.
Still, we'd gotten through the night thanks to it.
The moment we crossed the boundary the goblins had feared, the knights seemed to sense it. A halt signal came immediately.
"This is... demonic energy, is it not?"
"You recognized it. That's right."
I spoke as if I'd known all along. I had felt it, after all. In my first cycle I'd only registered it as an unsettling presence. With experience, I knew what it was now. If anything, I found it surprising that knights in the Tutorial even knew what demonic energy was.
"...This is dangerous. With our current strength, we could never win. Beings that wield demonic energy are demons or magical beasts. And if the energy can be felt from this distance... we absolutely cannot win. One does not flee an ogre only to walk into a dragon's maw."
I gave a wry smile.
"Don't worry. It's already dead."
"...What?"
"You'll see when we get there."
I led the skeptical group toward the source of the demonic energy.
A vast cave. At its mouth lay the corpse of a magical beast of staggering size.
"...Impossible..."
A bone-grave of a colossal beast. The demonic energy poured from it in waves. It had been dead so long that hide and flesh had all decayed away, leaving only bone — and still the energy reached this far down. A measure of how terrifying the creature must have been in life.
Even the knights didn't seem to know its name.
Behemoth.
In the past, I'd put some of these bones in my inventory and taken them upstairs. That was how I'd learned the name. Behemoth bones, they'd been called. But too much time had passed. The bones were decayed beyond any value — they'd crumble at a touch. Even the demonic energy leaking from them was at its last gasp. It had to have been dead for thousands of years.
"Goblins will never come here."
"...Aye. Goblins are cowards by nature. They would never crawl into a place that reeks of demonic energy."
The knights' expressions said they understood.
"You really are something, lad. You came this far even sensing the demonic energy?"
"I took a look and got out immediately. Seeing this is what convinced me the goblins wouldn't pursue any farther."
Every one of the knights shook their head at me.
"Safety is secured, at least. If we operate from here, we can hold the goblins off a while longer. And we have the scroll His Lordship gave us..."
A scroll. A single-use scrap of paper with magic sealed inside. Tear it, and the stored spell activated and fired. One of the few treasures the lord had kept somewhere other than his secret vault.
It was strange enough that a rural noble like this had a Curse Contract. Having a scroll with intermediate-grade magic on top of that... this was no ordinary country house. Or perhaps the difficulty had been tuned slightly, given how overwhelming the goblin numbers were. I'd originally thought this was an unwinnable event by design. Now I wondered if there might be an ending where the castle survived after all.
"The search parties we've taken down through today number around seven hundred. Truly, a result beyond all expectation."
Without the spatial inventory and the rest spots I already knew about, our position would have been discovered on day three, supplies would have run out, and we'd have been wiped out today. Even accounting for that, the knights' combat power was no joke. There was a reason humanity had held dominion over this region before the goblin forces grew.
"It's getting harder now, though. Their numbers keep growing. We're at the point where even we can't take them head-on."
"Aye."
"From here on, we need to keep hitting and running instead of trying to wipe them out."
A nod.
It was time to switch to ambushes — striking only the elite units and archers, then falling back. Over and over.
From the fifth day onward, the party members other than me secured our escape routes, while I and the knights focused on killing archers and snipers before falling back. Bit by bit, we started degrading the quality of the enemy's forces.
But the crises kept coming. Killing only a few and running meant the survivors could chase us that much more easily, and this was goblin territory — reinforcements arrived fast.
A hunt with our lives on the line. We faced dozens of close calls every single day. Escape routes prepared in advance, trees felled to carve paths of retreat. Sometimes we fled downstream by river. Once we even ran for the boundary, knowing it might expose the location of our shelter.
By the eighth day, every one of us was covered in wounds, our stamina near its limit.
The results, though, were more than enough. I'd reached level 10. The party sat at 9. That alone would put us ahead of every other party we'd meet on the next floor. In my first cycle, the highest level on the 8th Floor had been 8, with the average sitting at 5 or 6.
Cutting it close.
We couldn't keep hunting like this. We needed a day of rest. We'd already agreed to take the ninth day off. There were still more than ten days of hunting left. Whether I'd hit 11 in that window was anyone's guess. The experience was coming in miserably slow now.
I hauled myself out of the water, breathing hard. This particular escape had happened to be near the river, so we'd used it the same way we had on the 4th Floor. We couldn't go all the way downstream, of course. We still had to get back.
Should we just find another external cache and rest there today?
Getting all the way back to Behemoth's Nest would take forever. I pushed the thought aside — anyone who could read my mind would have been horrified — and looked at the party crawling onto the bank.
"Anyone with a serious wound?"
"...Fortunate. None, it seems. Still, that was truly dangerous this time."
"Ugh, those goblin bastards. When the archers started shooting along the river, I thought we were done for."
"...If their bows had been even slightly better, half of us would be dead. We used the river because we expected it, but still. Today the pursuit felt strangely light. Just enough that we couldn't easily counterattack..."
Na Seoyun cut off Cory's puzzled musing, her voice urgent.
"Oppa! Ha-yeon's hurt!"
"What?"
I sprinted toward Joo Ha-yeon.
"Ah, no — it just grazed me. I'm fine, Shin-hoo."
"Don't be ridiculous. Let me see."
An arrow had scraped across Joo Ha-yeon's shoulder, leaving a torn gash. Not bad enough to need stitches, but infection would be a problem. I cleaned the wound with coagulant and disinfectant, then wrapped it in bandages.
"...Still as devoted as ever."
"I still don't understand why those two betrayed a leader like that to side with the likes of Johann."
He meant Kim Insil and Park Nam-young.
"I don't understand it either, sir."
The truth was, no one was uninjured — not the party, not even the knights. Nam Eun-ju, who'd hurt her leg earlier, had sat out today's fighting entirely. She was resting at Behemoth's Nest. There'd be an experience loss, but we couldn't bring someone with a leg injury along. Level 9 was plenty anyway. She'd probably need two or three days of rest.
That was when we heard it. The sound of a large group moving, somewhere nearby.
We froze, then hid at once. I gave Na-yeon the order immediately, and she sent her spirit out to scout.
What she reported a moment later was a shock. The goblin forces were moving — not toward the Grand Goblin Settlement, but in a different direction.
The rally point should be the Grand Goblin Settlement... so why?
Even while we'd been disrupting them, tribal forces had been steadily joining the Grand Goblin Settlement. From what we'd confirmed along the way, over five thousand had already gathered there. More than half the total.
And they were moving somewhere else?
Don't tell me...
Exhausted as I was, I needed to see for myself. I felt bad for the injured Joo Ha-yeon, but I led the party immediately to a hill overlooking the Grand Goblin Settlement.
And there it was. The vast forces that had been there were already gone, departed from the Grand Goblin Settlement.
Had the goblins realized we were stalling for time? They'd chosen to attack sooner, even with their forces incomplete.
I slipped through the search net — riddled with holes now that the bulk of their forces had left — and returned to Behemoth's Nest.
The knights all wanted to head back immediately. I opposed it at once. We still had work to do.
"We have to warn them! If they assault like this—"
"His Lordship is no fool. He'll have sent out scouts. A force that large on the move — he'll notice immediately."
It wasn't wrong. The knights seemed to realize as much. Their opinion didn't change.
"We must go regardless. We are knights of Mellid Castle. We cannot be outside the walls in a moment of crisis."
"There are still a great many goblins out there."
"Our mission is to buy time, not to reduce the goblins' numbers. Our recent efforts have been outstanding — we've slain well over a thousand goblin warriors. But this is the limit. We can do no more."
It was true. That was why we'd planned to rest tomorrow. But the situation had changed. Going back in our current state, stamina would be an issue. Even so, a day of rest at the castle and they'd be able to fight again somehow. And these were knights. Not only was each of them individually formidable — they could serve as commanders in their own right. If they returned, they would absolutely be of help.
But I stood in their way.
"Why are you stopping us? We have already accomplished more than anyone could reasonably believe. It is time to return to our posts. What on earth is it that you—"
"There's still something we need to do. Something we can do."
"...Just what are you planning?"
"...Why? Their forces have already—"
"About half went on the assault. We've cut down a lot of them, but there are still two to three thousand left. They'll likely send a follow-up force. We have to stop that."
"...If we assault the Grand Goblin Settlement with just us, it would be suicide. Even at full strength it would be the same. What are you even—"
Revo stopped mid-sentence. Something had registered. He turned to follow my gaze.
Where I was looking, Cory stood. More precisely, I was looking at Cory's chest — at the scroll hidden there.