Goblin Slayer - Volume 16 - Chapter 3.1

Chapter 3 - Cool Runing

There was a staff there. A divine instrument sent to this land long, long ago, when the gods had occupied themselves with war games. Any who took it in hand could wield it as a “hero unit,” protecting Order against evil.

But all that was now far in the past.

Long had the staff slept that bore the Earth Mother’s name. Ten years ago and more, it had been wielded to drive back the evil and death encroaching upon the capital, but even that had been only for an instant.

The Earth Mother’s staff had been sealed away in the deepest reaches of an ancient shrine—ancient ruins—to safeguard the Four-Cornered World.

This burgeoning power was enough to destroy anybody. The fate of the world of people was not decided by the gods: This was one of the golden rules the gods had set upon watching over the Four-Cornered World.

And so the Earth Mother’s staff went to sleep.

Nothing, however, impinged upon its holiness, not even when the forces of Chaos came to establish themselves in the shrine.

“GOROGB…”

“GOBB! GRBB.”

Nothing so lowly as a goblin would even be allowed to touch the staff. Goblins, however, did not wonder why they couldn’t touch the staff but only grew angry about it.

Which was, in its own way, a stroke of good fortune. If they could have touched it, the ensuing calamity would have been terrible indeed.

“GBBR?”

So what happened was no doubt because a goblin, flush with impatience, had jumped onto the altar.

It started with a pebble.

The goblin would never have spotted it clicking as it fell from the wall. Goblins, on the whole, are not blind—but they pay very little attention to what they see. A goblin, with his minimal passive perception, would have struggled to notice such a thing at all.

Although perhaps he would have noticed the wall shivering after the pebble fell…

“GRGB?!”

So what if he did? What could something as lowly as a goblin do about it?

The first one died when the wall came crashing outward. Even the other goblins noticed this, and for a second, they hesitated between guffawing at their idiotic comrade and running away.

“Four goblins! I mean, three! Weapons, uh… Argh! Look for yourself!!”

“GOROGBB?!?!!!?”

The delay was critical.

No sooner had the words been spoken than one goblin found an arrow going clean through the roof of his mouth and out the back of his head.

The other goblins were enraged, though they didn’t spare a glance at the tumbling corpse.

An elf!

An elf woman!

Let’s drag her down and make her weep!!

Their brains filled with the sweet fragrance of that feminine flesh—a most convenient distraction. The goblins charged forward. What was one female? They could beat her into submission with their clubs. Even if it cost a few of their lives.

“GROG! GOOROGB!!”

“GOBBGR!!”

This was why goblins never rose to be any more than what they were.

“That’s one…!”

“GOOB?!”

A scruffy-looking man emerged from behind the elf and flung the sword he held in his right hand. His aim was true, piercing the throat of one goblin; the creature fell back, clawing at his neck.

Goblin Slayer jumped forward, kicking the corpse out of the way and pulling his sword out of it almost in a single movement.

Two left. No problems. One of them came at him from the side; he rebuffed the creature with his shield.

“GROGB?!”

“Hrm…!” Without hesitating a moment, he rolled forward. Another goblin had used his companion’s attack as a distraction, a chance to leap at Goblin Slayer.

A rusty sword scraped along the stone, and the two goblins tumbled headlong into each other.

Goblin Slayer was not going to give them time to start squabbling about it. This was a decisive opportunity.

“Eeeeyyaaahhhh!”

With a screech, a massive figure slammed its tail into one of the goblins’ heads, meanwhile smashing the other’s spine with the heel of its foot. When you come right down to it, there’s no better weapon than sufficient mass combined with sufficient speed.

The battle didn’t even last a full turn. All the goblins that had taken up residence in the chamber were annihilated.

The adventurers landed with puffs of dust. They were followed by a small figure scrambling out of the wall. “Gods! Tunnel won’t break through the wall, I says! So combine it with Weathering, he says! Who does that?!”

“I thought it would be the fastest way.” Goblin Slayer’s reply to the griping dwarf was concise.

Dwarf Shaman replied that Ruta would be very happy—which wasn’t quite a compliment and wasn’t quite a complaint.

It had been very much the sort of solution one might have expected from a follower of the god who always sought a faster, better result. It would also have been impossible if they hadn’t already known about the layout of these particular ruins. There is, after all, a reason that most adventurers in most places start at the entrance to a dungeon.

“And?” asked Lizard Priest, who was busy finishing off the goblin he had stepped on. “Where is the famous staff?”

“I doubt the goblins have taken it. It must be nearby.” Goblin Slayer’s helmet turned this way and that until his gaze found the altar.

There upon it was a staff carved with the image of a familiar winged woman. At first glance, it could almost have appeared to be a dilapidated stick of metal—except it was anything but. To still exist after all these countless ages proved that it was no ordinary staff. One did not have to know about its magical properties or miraculous capabilities to see that much; one needed only to observe the materials.

Time had not conquered the metal nor cracked its surface. This must be adamantite.

“There it is,” was all Goblin Slayer said and immediately reached for it.

“Hold it,” someone said, pressing back his filthy gauntlet. A delicate arm reached out and took the staff. It was High Elf Archer. “If you touched this thing with those hands, I’ll bet the Earth Mother wouldn’t have been happy!”

“I see.” Goblin Slayer grunted.

Lizard Priest’s eyes rolled merrily in his head. “I daresay none of us are worthy of this instrument.”

“Because this is a weapon that can only be used by the Earth Mother’s believers, ain’t it?” Dwarf Shaman was tossing some candies to the swiftly closing hole to show his gratitude.

It was hardly unusual for adventurers to be left tearing their hair out when they discovered at the end of a lengthy quest that the magic item they’d obtained was, say, an ax that only dwarves could use.

“Doesn’t really matter. We’re not actually going to use it,” High Elf Archer said. It wasn’t a weapon anyway. As far as she was concerned, those were the salient points.

Her delicate fingers wrapped around the staff, and she lifted it from the altar in a single quick motion.

There was a tense instant—but nothing happened.

“I really wish we could have brought the kid along,” High Elf Archer said, her flat chest rising and falling with her breathing. She was trying to lighten the mood. She placed the staff across her shoulder. “Don’t you think she would have been better off with us?”

“If she were here, I doubt we could have completed the king’s quest,” said Goblin Slayer, who was still looking in every direction, never letting his guard falter. He didn’t sense goblins. Had anyone or anything noticed the fight just now? He wasn’t sure. But he knew they should hurry. He was still running calculations in a corner of his mind as he spoke, deliberately forcing himself to keep a flat, restrained tone. “Breaking and entering I can do, but I’m not suited to urban adventuring.”

“I’m not saying you should be the one to do it.”

“Maybe so, but y’know who else ain’t suited to it? An anvil!” Dwarf Shaman snickered, rejoining the conversation. “It’d never work—you just scream princess!”

“Come over here and say that to my face!” High Elf Archer snapped, and they were off and running. Just another of the arguments that had perdured between high elves and dwarves since the Age of the Gods.

However, the girl who would normally have watched them with a concerned—but accustomed—expression was nowhere to be seen. Could it be that the pair’s boisterous exchanges were in part a way of supporting her very existence?

Lizard Priest was not so barbaric as to point this out. He slithered his long neck, his tongue slipping out from between his jaws with all his love for battle, and said to their leader, “Well then, milord Goblin Slayer. Shall we do just as we planned?”

“Yes,” Goblin Slayer replied. “We press forward and hit them from behind.”

“The little devils never do think they’ll be the ones to get ambushed!”

“It would defeat the point if any of them were able to use our hole to get outside. We should finish this in one fell swoop.” Goblin Slayer was brief, decisive. A completely different person from when he was taking in the tournament in the capital.

High Elf Archer, still engaged in her argument, flicked her ears. He’s feeling lively. But that was certainly nothing to be pleased about. She sighed an extremely elegant sigh.

The metal helmet asked, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing much,” she said, her ears wiggling. “It’s just, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised how the student turned out with a teacher like this.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

She didn’t love that answer. Her beautiful eyebrows arched in annoyance, and she spun on her heel—though she looked like a dancer doing it. The next second, a delicate white finger was poking Goblin Slayer in the helmet. “What? Going to claim you’re not her teacher?”

“I grant I instructed her to some extent. However…” However. A mutter: “What she has accomplished is all the fruit of her own labor.”

High Elf Archer seemed to like this better. “Huh!” she intoned, her eyebrows taking on a curve of pleasure this time. “Good enough. If she’s going to buy us some time, then we better get on with the adventuring…”

That was when they heard it: a plik, plik, plik of scraping rock echoing around the room.

Being adventurers, they all reacted instantaneously, drawing their weapons, dropping into fighting stances, preparing themselves for whatever came next.

And then they saw it.

They had taken it to be one of the statues decorating the chamber. It towered up to the very ceiling, and now it moved.

“ MA…!!!!” it roared and raised its brutal arms.

“Turns out the gods don’t like it when you try to steal their toys!” Dwarf Shaman chirped.

“Don’t try to blame this on me!” High Elf Archer shouted back. “If anyone here is in for some divine punishment, it’s Orcbolg!”

“So it’s some sort of moving statue…” Goblin Slayer had no idea that it was a monster called a golem. He did know, however, that he was in the company of someone who knew more about stone than anyone. “What do you think?” he asked.

“Swords won’t be helpin’ us against that,” Dwarf Shaman replied. The statue rumbled, its joints shaking and screeching as it began to move forward. It reached out, worked its legs, and slammed its fist down.

It was like a hammer blow against the floor of the chamber, but the adventurers leaped back and managed to avoid it. Pebbles and bits of rock came raining down. Dwarf Shaman growled, “If we had a hammer or a maul, we could finish this in one shot!”

“Smashing weapons?” Goblin Slayer looked at the bits of goblin that came tumbling toward his feet, then grunted. “Hmm.”

Then he grabbed the staff out of High Elf Archer’s hands and, without another thought, flung it through the air.

The Earth Mother’s sacred instrument was grabbed in its flight by a huge, scaled hand that held it fast.

“Then smash!” Goblin Slayer said.

“So I shall!”

There followed a blow no less stupendous than the one the monster had struck. The huge statue took the attack on the hip, reeling backward and slamming into the wall.

“Hah!” cried Lizard Priest, the breath hot in his nostrils. To stand on two legs without even a tail to lean on was sheer foolishness! “Still, I would prefer not to use this weapon!”

“I told you, it’s not a weapon!” High Elf Archer shouted, completely ignoring the golem, which was struggling to stand back up. Arrows wouldn’t work on it anyway, she decided. Instead, she was watching the passageway that extended out of the chamber. With all this roaring and crashing, the goblins might notice them…

Then again, they’re such cowards, she thought. They wouldn’t dare come into the room.

“What will you do if it breaks?!” she called.

“If this was all it took to break it, they would have done it a long time ago,” Goblin Slayer said.

“Fair enough…,” she replied, but privately she vowed to give him a good kick later—seeing as, despite her glance at the ceiling, no heavenly punishment from the Earth Mother appeared to be forthcoming for him.

The goddess seemed to be hiding her face more and more recently.

“Oh well… I guess an adamantium staff’s perfect for this sort of work,” Dwarf Shaman mumbled, not interested in arguing. Instead, he focused on watching Lizard Priest bring the staff to bear.

To reiterate: There’s no better weapon than sufficient mass combined with sufficient speed. The effort involved in reducing the golem to rubble was nothing compared to the effort Priestess was expending at that exact moment.

Which is to say, it was a very easy thing indeed.