Goblin Slayer - Volume 13 - Chapter 1

First day of the week, be a magic user;

the next, a martial artist;

the third, a dragoon.

On the fourth day, take up your arrows;

on the fifth, ride a horse.

Come the sixth day, slip through the darkness as a scout,

and at week’s end, be a knight errant.

In your spare time, build a dungeon;

fill it with traps and pack it with monsters,

then rub your hands together and wait.

Keep this up for the next millennia

and you’ll begin to understand adventuring.

Chapter 1 - I Wanna Be An Adventurer

“GOOOROGGB?!”

A dagger, silent in the dark, provoked a scream from the goblin as he toppled to the ground. His death throes echoed through the cave, sending other goblins scrambling.

Downright used to this sort of commotion by now. The cheeky thought crossed Dwarf Shaman’s mind as he watched the darkness vigilantly.

“One…!” Another adventurer, wearing grimy leather armor and a cheap-looking metal helmet, was already off like an arrow.

“Ha! Slow work!” An actual arrow—indeed, no fewer than three of them—went flying past him.

“GBOOBB?!”

“GOBBG?! GORBG?!”

“GRBBGORG?!”

They disappeared so deeply into the cave that even the dwarf couldn’t follow, but moments later three different goblins cried out. When a high elf brought her bow to bear, there was no escape.

“Heh…!” High Elf Archer said, puffing her chest out triumphantly as she stole a glance backward at Dwarf Shaman. He gave a cluck of his tongue; she was acting like a gloating child.

It’s that fat head that keeps me from wanting to give her a real compliment, he thought. Goblin Slayer, meanwhile, had already grabbed the weapon from the hands of the first fallen goblin and was heading for his next target. He could be heard muttering “Two” and “Three,” meaning six of what appeared to be about ten goblins had been eliminated. However…

“Nest this size, doesn’t look like we’ll have a chance to shine, eh, Scaly?”

“Most distressing, I must say,” agreed the massive adventurer beside him. Though their tone was lighthearted, it by no means implied that they had stopped paying careful attention. Lizard Priest trembled visibly, shook his head, and added, “With winter so near, I must move my body as much as I need, lest I grow lethargic.”

Even Dwarf Shaman, who had known this priest for quite some time, wasn’t sure whether he was joking. After all, lizardmen were indeed renowned for their prowess in battle and also for their aversion to cold.

Then again, I thought he joked about being warm-blooded once… No, wait. Weren’t even rats said to hibernate in the winter?

“Maybe so, but at least we can conserve our miracles…” The young girl who served the Earth Mother seemed no surer than Dwarf Shaman about how serious Lizard Priest was being; she smiled ambiguously. She clearly had some nerve being down in a dark cave like this, but she wasn’t terrified. She held her sounding staff firmly and kept her eyes moving. She looked like quite the professional adventurer. He had known her, he reflected, ever since she was a Porcelain, and she had grown and matured quite a bit.

It’s why sometimes they’re called strider—means humans take long steps, thought Dwarf Shaman. Dwarves lived a long time—if not so long as elves—but sometimes humans impressed even him.

Priestess noticed him staring at her and looked back questioningly. “Is anything the matter?”

“Nothin’ at all,” Dwarf Shaman said with a belly laugh. “Just enjoying a bit of a break!” He took a long swig from the jar of fire wine hanging from his hip. It felt good to infiltrate a goblin hideout.

Can’t be letting myself get carried away, though. He wedged a hand between a couple of rocks resting nearby and said, “Hey, Beard-cutter. There’s a tunnel here!”

“Hrm!” The response from the front row was immediate. “Hold the line.” Goblin Slayer calmly smashed in the head of a goblin (Dwarf Shaman had lost count of how many this was) with a crude ax, then came running.

“Wait, what?! Oh, for…!” High Elf Archer, left to handle the front row on her own, predictably objected, but it didn’t seem to actually bother her. Did this represent trust on his part or simply disinterest? Well, let’s assume it was the former.

Dwarf Shaman stroked his beard. This young man with his helmet could be quite the strange one. “He said hold it, and I’m sure you will.”

“A tunnel. Are there goblins?”

“That’s the question, innit?”

Goblin Slayer jammed his torch into the rift. They discovered less a proper hole than a cleft in the rock, a jagged tear too tight for a person to crawl through, but goblins could manage it easily.

“Oh, look…!” Priestess noticed it before Goblin Slayer did: a cloth wedged among the rocks, torn and stained with something gruesome and dark. She took it delicately and studied it.

“The quest didn’t say there had been any captives,” Goblin Slayer muttered darkly.

It was a stereotypical adventure. Goblins had appeared near a village. They hadn’t done any real harm, but the villagers wanted something done about them, preferably soon. Sending in a bunch of hotheaded youngsters would only stir the goblins up and make things more dangerous; that was what the party had been told. It made good sense, and there weren’t actually that many goblins. This would have been suited for novice adventurers; they had known that going in. Not the sort of thing one would ordinarily send a party of four Silvers and a Sapphire to take care of.

But then, that’s Beard-cutter for you. He and his companions were good-hearted enough to take on the quest anyway. Dwarf Shaman nodded. “Lots of people travel alone, by choice or by need. Pilgrims, bards, merchants.”

“What about over there…?” Priestess was asking whether Goblin Slayer had found anyone farther into the cave, but he shook his head. “There was nothing.”

“They used to be just goblins, and now they’re just corpses! Gah, I get so sick of this!” High Elf Archer exclaimed, firing off one more burst from her bow before bounding up to the group in agitation. It couldn’t have been clearer that she was displeased, but it went in one helmeted ear and out the other for Goblin Slayer.

“How many were there?”

“You’re the only one who bothers to count, Orcbolg!”

“I see.” He nodded with no further reaction, earning an elegant snort from the high elf.

“So we going in?” She nodded in the direction of the rent in the rock. Rocks and earth were supposed to be the dwarves’ specialty, but the high elf looked as comfortable with the idea as any dwarven miner. Such was a descendent of beings from the Age of the Gods—goodness gracious.

Maybe if we had great, ancient Hylar dwarves here, it’d be one thing, Dwarf Shaman thought, taking a pull from his wine bottle and then peering into the rift alongside High Elf Archer. “Think this calls for a little caution.” Taking his own advice, he patted the rock face delicately, feeling the loosened pebbles in his hands. “The stone’s grown thin here. One good whack and it could come tumbling down.”

“So you’re saying it would be best for me to stay here and guard the entrance,” Lizard Priest commented, nodding somberly.

“I think it just means you need to exercise more,” High Elf Archer said, nudging him with an elbow and giggling. Her eyes glinted with mischief, then she turned to Dwarf Shaman and said, “Guess you’d better stay here, too—pretty sure you’d get stuck if you tried to go in there.”

“Bah. Sounds to me like you’re volunteering. You shouldn’t have any trouble fitting, Anvil.” Behind Dwarf Shaman, Priestess shifted uncomfortably, but he took no notice. Dwarves and elves had been at each other’s throats for generations untold. Anyway, he wouldn’t want to be friends with someone he hadn’t argued with like this.

“I would like to avoid having one hand pinned.” Goblin Slayer’s assessment was as calm as ever, oblivious to the banter. He tossed his torch down at his feet, then waved a signal to Priestess.

“Holy Light, right?” she responded promptly, nodding. They were so used to this by now. She clasped her sounding staff with both hands, then intoned a holy prayer to the Earth Mother. “O Earth Mother, abounding in mercy, grant your sacred light to we who are lost in darkness!”

Quite suddenly, there was a scream.

Deep in the crack, now illuminated by a bright light, hideous monsters writhed and squirmed. Greenskins, goblins, dressed in rags. They raised their arms, trying to shield their yellow eyes, and recoiled from the piercing light.

“GOORGB?!”

“GOBORG?! GOOROG?!”

“Eight. No bows, no casters. Let’s do it!”

“Argh, slow down…!”

Almost the instant he had spoken, Goblin Slayer jumped into the crevice, High Elf Archer following and then overtaking him. A second later, Dwarf Shaman pulled the hand ax from his belt and flung himself after them. “I’m s’posed to be usin’ magic…,” he grumbled. But considering that he had left Lizard Priest standing there, he was more than willing to take on front-row duties.

With Priestess’s Holy Light at his back, Dwarf Shaman lashed out with his ax in every direction. It was unlikely that the two in front would let any goblins escape, but if any did, they would find they weren’t getting out of that hole.

Dwarf Shaman saw Goblin Slayer leap forward, flinging a hatchet. The weapon spun through the air, so fast it would have been impossible to count the number of rotations, and then split a goblin’s skull as cleanly as a piece of firewood.

“GBBGBO?!”

“That’s one…!”

“Add two—that makes three!” High Elf Archer pulled back her bow dexterously despite the tight confines, launching three arrows at once. The bud-tipped bolts swept around the stalagmites of the cave, spearing one goblin after another.

“GOBGR?!”

“GGO?! GOBOGR?!”

Looks like I won’t even get a chance to join the fun, Dwarf Shaman thought, squinting to get a good look at Goblin Slayer, who had entered hand-to-hand combat with a clash of weaponry.

Dealing with fewer than ten goblins in a confined space should be the work of a moment. It was all well and good for him to stand back and spectate on the assumption that they would be victorious, but he had his responsibilities as an adventurer to think of. Risk, after all, was part and parcel of the job. Goblins were considered to be among the easiest monsters in the world to hunt, yet even so…

Hrm? Something felt off. Dwarf Shaman squinted into the distance. There was something humanoid back there, something the goblins seemed to have been using as their plaything.

So it went. It was disgusting, even nauseating, but it was a fact of life with goblins. What attracted his attention were the goblins’ bodies, which had begun to glow faintly—that hadn’t been happening a moment before. It appeared their arms were a little thicker, their bones a little heavier. They weren’t large creatures to begin with, but…

Have they put on weight?

There it was.

They looked like they’d had a good meal, a good sleep, and a good time; that’s how it seemed to him. It was something like what he’d seen in that desert stronghold…

Maybe they haven’t quite made it to hobgoblin yet?

No one in the Four-Cornered World devoted themselves to studying goblins. Beard-cutter, busy murdering the monsters in front of him, might be the closest thing. Dwarf Shaman had no idea how a goblin became a hobgoblin. And what if he did? It was still his job to kill them. The details weren’t important.

Now, how a dragon pup becomes a full-grown wyrm, that might be worth knowing.

It so happened that a goblin who’d made a lucky escape came Dwarf Shaman’s way at just that moment. He cracked the monster’s head open with a single stroke of his ax.

“GROGB?!”

To reiterate: No single goblin demanded a very complicated response.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got things covered here,” he said.

“That helps,” came the predictably brief response. High Elf Archer called something, too; he couldn’t quite tell what, but she sounded okay. Dwarf Shaman shrugged—this was old hat to him—and caught Priestess’s eye, then gave a great belly laugh. A few more goblin death rattles and the battle was over.

“I see I was not needed after all,” Lizard Priest said in disappointment, poking his head into the hole. Priestess climbed past him. “Eep!” she whimpered; she was used to this, but she still had to be careful not to catch a foot on some rocky outcropping. Maybe she was quick-witted, or maybe simply sharp-sighted, because in just a moment there was a torch in her small hand. The flickering orange light revealed a scene of devastation.

“How awful…”

The woman had clearly expired after being subjected to the most terrible “games” imaginable. It was almost equally clear that the goblins had continued to have their way with her after she was gone. Arms, legs, a couple or three holes, and a lute: That was more than enough for many cruel diversions.

Priestess knelt beside the unfortunate woman, closing what was left of her eyelids. She clasped her hands and prayed for the Earth Mother’s guidance in the next life, not only for this woman but for the dead goblins as well. This was partly out of compassion and mercy—but also because if any of them were to come back as lost spirits, it would only mean trouble. Maybe the woman, at least, wouldn’t feel the need to return, but still…

“This is why I hate goblin hunting. There’s always something like this involved,” High Elf Archer said from where she leaned against the wall with her arms folded. When she received only the answer “I see,” she glowered and snorted. “Next time, we’re taking on a different kind of adventure. Something fun and exciting and swashbuckling!”

“I see.”

“You’d better!”

Goblin Slayer simply nodded. No doubt he would go on such an adventure if High Elf Archer invited him. In the time since this party had formed, he had in fact been on substantially more non-goblin-related adventures than he had before.

“Then again, every time we have Beard-cutter along, the little devils seem to end up involved somehow.”

“You’re telling me. It’s outrageous,” High Elf Archer said, but her voice wasn’t as sharp as her words, and laughter formed in her throat. “So what’s the story? Do we head deeper in?”

“Well, hold on.” Dwarf Shaman squinted into the darkness. “I’m takin’ a look right now.”

That was when a bit of dirt scattered onto his bald head. His reaction was immediate. He spared a glance right, then left, then shouted back, “Everybody out! It’s collapsing!!”

“Hrm…!”

“Wha—?!”

“Yeep!”

Goblin Slayer was the next quickest to grasp what was going on. He threw down his hatchet and picked up Priestess and High Elf Archer instead, dashing out as fast as he could. “Take care of her!” he called.

“Got it!” Dwarf Shaman wasn’t going to refuse this direct request: He swept up the corpse of the unfortunate woman. She might be dead, but she would never rest peacefully in the same grave as her tormentors. He pounded along toward the exit; ahead of him, Goblin Slayer was already leaping out of the rent in the stone.

“What seems to be the matter?” Lizard Priest asked.

“The cave’s collapsing.”

“Indeed it is!”

At just about that moment, the puffs of dust and pebbles from the ceiling became a veritable rain. This was no ordinary storm, though; unlike raindrops, being pelted by this precipitation could really leave a mark. Dwarf Shaman, reduced to crawling along, grabbed Lizard Priest’s tail and pulled himself out, after which everyone made a beeline for the mouth of the cave.

“I’m just… I don’t know what to say about this exactly…” The way Priestess sighed, clearly rather tired of being carted around, was charming in its own way.

“Put me down, darnit!” High Elf Archer protested. “I can run on my own two feet!”

“Quit yer yammerin’! We need to get out of here before the whole place comes down on our heads!” Dwarf Shaman snapped, apparently not exerting himself so much that he couldn’t spare a quick quip in the elf’s direction. As Lizard Priest carried him along wrapped in his tail, Dwarf Shaman raised his hands and intoned: “Come out, you gnomes, and let it go! Here it comes, but take it slow! Turn those buckets upside-down—set us gently on the ground!”

His invocation gained them the help of creatures so small as to be invisible. They could tell, though, that the ceiling was being pushed upward. Dwarf Shaman nodded. “All right, let’s hurry! They won’t be able to hold out for long!” He had a keen eye.

“There’s the exit!” Priestess called. Beyond was the darkness of a forest at night. Dusk came early in winter; the party was greeted by chill night air, along with the shining of the stars and the two moons.

“There’s nothing better than bursting out into the bright sunlight in times like this,” High Elf Archer said, finally working her way free of Goblin Slayer’s grasp and landing on the ground as delicately as a cat. She gave herself a shake. “Whoa?!” she yelped, covering her long ears when a tremendous, earsplitting roar signaled the goblins’ nest caving in behind them.

A copious cloud of dust blinded the party; Priestess started coughing violently. Dwarf Shaman had reached into the bag at his hip, just in case, and Goblin Slayer was likewise ready. He had drawn the dagger from the scabbard fixed near his armor and was eyeing the cave entrance watchfully. The dust cleared: The cave was no more.

Goblin Slayer sighed heavily. “Buried.”

“Looks like,” Dwarf Shaman said, carefully setting down the woman’s corpse he had carried out.

Making a spell caster do physical labor, yeesh… The quip crossed his mind, but, well, this was part of helping people. It was what it was. All mortals were doomed to die, but surely they wouldn’t have wanted to think they would still be a nuisance to others after they were gone. One had to be respectful toward the dead.

“…I’m very sorry,” Priestess said after a moment.

“Aw, it’s nothing to worry about,” Dwarf Shaman replied after taking a quick swig of his fire wine. Ah, a nighttime drink was the best drink of all.

Priestess knelt down and set the ruined remains of the musical instrument in the woman’s hands. Was the whisper that fell from her lips born of anxiety, or sadness, or something else entirely? There was no way of knowing whether it would be of comfort to the woman, but in any case, Lizard Priest stood beside Priestess, making his strange palms-together gesture.

“Two different clerics seein’ her off. Don’t think she’ll be coming back as a ghost.”

“No, but she will indeed return, following the cycle of all heaven and earth. Perhaps one day she will even be of naga blood.”

“…You’re right,” Priestess said, comforted by their words. Then she nodded. “Does this mean the quest is complete…?”

“Mm,” Goblin Slayer grunted. “I wonder.” He shook his head slowly from side to side. Even he didn’t quite seem to believe it.

“We took out the goblins. We destroyed their nest. We saved the soul of a dead person. I’d call that a success,” High Elf Archer said with pursed lips, sounding surer than either of them. “I admit, it kind of stinks not to make any profit out of it…”

“Ah, that might not be entirely true…” Priestess clapped her hands, suddenly reminded to dig something out of the bag slung across her shoulder.

“Ooh, you find something?”

“We were so busy running that I’m not really sure, but I found this pouch…” She produced an old, rotting but unmistakably high-quality leather pouch.

“Lemme have a look,” High Elf Archer said, peering at it. Something glinted inside.

Gems. Small ones, but there were sapphires, emeralds, and even…

“Oh-ho, this is a diamond!” Lizard Priest’s eyes spun in his head, perhaps because he was a lizardman or maybe he was getting close to nagahood. The stone he plucked out of the pouch made its way from party member to party member before finally arriving at Dwarf Shaman. He grasped it in his plump fingers, holding it up to the moonlight, revealing a glittering specimen carved by a fine craftsman. “Bit on the small side, unfortunately. Even all together, I doubt we’ll get that much for ’em.”

“Plus, the goblins didn’t notice them. They really don’t care about anything that doesn’t grab their attention, huh?” High Elf Archer’s ears flicked in amusement.

Beside her, Priestess giddily pulled an old sheepskin out of the bag. “Look, there’s some kind of scroll in here, too!”

“Hoh.” That got Goblin Slayer’s attention. He took the tied roll of parchment from her and studied it intently. He didn’t have the ability to identify items, of course, nor the wisdom to have any idea what spell might be closed up in there. But he was still well satisfied with this outcome.

“All right,” Goblin Slayer said, placing the scroll carefully in his item pouch and giving it a gentle tap to make sure it was secure. Even that slight gesture was a window into how this strange adventurer was feeling. Dwarf Shaman, noticing the little smiles on the two women’s faces, stroked his beard.

Well, can’t say I don’t understand. To specifically go on a goblin hunt and still end in failure would be too much. Dwarf Shaman gulped down some more fire wine to refresh himself, then quipped, “It’s true what they say.” The sumptuous underground castles built by the dwarves, or even the subterranean cities of the dark elves, were one thing, but… “The dark depths of a goblin nest darken your heart, too, and the strangest ideas can enter your head.”

He gave Goblin Slayer a hearty slap on the back. After a moment’s silence, Goblin Slayer responded simply, “That’s true,” and nodded.

The other adventurers took that as their cue to check themselves over, and then they set out slowly on the road home. They returned to the village and delivered the body to the village chief, and then Goblin Slayer pressed some gold coins into the chief’s hand, requesting that they bury the woman. Thus, the next morning a funeral was held with Priestess officiating, and then the party repaired back to town.

A completely standard goblin hunt. A completely ordinary adventure, and nothing more.