Chapter 75

The dwarves got us up after we’d been resting. We’re not sure why yet; since I thought we’d be able to sleep longer. They also don’t like being here longer than necessary.

I started to lose track of time too down here. It’s not easy to keep good time measurement underground. Perhaps that’s because we’re used to seeing the sun?

I got up after the other two, Asakura and Rina. They’d been grooming and combing their hair, and cleaning up our camp area. It seems like it was one of the few times we were able to rest in the tent without any problems. It was nice to just sit here and talk with the girls too. We’re actually encouraged to rest by the dwarves, since they think there will be a fight with the goblins soon; based on increases of scouting parties in our area and the fact that they made it so those scouting parties aren’t coming back alive. They want everyone rested up except for the guards it seems; though it took us about a half hour of sand Pictionary with them to figure that out.

So now we’re all laying down on our side in the tent. The other two are with me.

“Ah man. It’s hard to sleep well, when you think stuff is sneaking up on you all the time,” Asakura said. She’s frowning and looking all around us for trouble.

“I know that same feeling. I find myself doing it too,” I said.

“Like just because we got a few skills doesn’t mean we’re not scared of the dark anymore,” Rina said.

“Of course, when monsters weren’t real I wasn’t scared of the dark. Now that I know they are real…” Asakura shrugs and admits with her.

“Yeah, I know right. I kept feeling rocks and stuff poking into my back too. The ground is so uncomfortable at this hotel. Felt like I never got any sleep at all. We need to tell the management we’re going to sue them and to go to hell. This is the worst hotel I’ve ever been to,” Rina said acting kind of crabby and sarcastic at the same time.

We both smirk at her calling it a hotel. It’s nice that she can joke around when things are so serious. It helps lighten the mood.

“So does that mean that short dwarf over there is the bell boy?” Asakura jokes at a dwarf that we can see through the open front tent door flap.

“Oh shit, he saw you pointing at him,” Rina says in surprise.

“You’re in trouble now,” I joked.

The dwarf in question frowns at them but keeps working. He scowls at Asakura though briefly. How did he know? They can’t speak our language…

“Maybe it’s like emotional intelligence. Even though they can’t speak our language they can tell something is up,” Asakura said.

“That makes sense. They are smart,” Rina admitted.

The dwarves are working out some of the work ahead for our escape. Suddenly I feel wary, because I’ve noticed they are wary. It seems goblins have been spotted swimming towards us in the tunnel. One of the work teams on the water ladder had spotted them and swam back quickly to spread the alarm of a large group of them headed this way. When they spread the alarm they are shaking their weapons over their heads so we know there is danger from battle. Plus, they are all having fight or flight excitement reactions that are hard to miss, and getting riled up.

But I’m sure of potential problems ahead again because there’s a team of dwarves getting out of the water and all of them have gotten their weapons ready. Plus we already know the cause of recent events has been the goblins.

“Ah man, I was having such a good dream too,” Rina said, stretching.

“I’m just glad these tents are clean. Can you imagine how rough it would be without something as simple as a tent to keep the bugs off us?” I said.

“Yeah, bugs suck right bro?” Rina nodded at me.

“It wasn’t a dream about being trapped underground was it?” Asakura smirked, coming back to what she’d said earlier.

“Nah, definitely not that; that sounds like a nightmare. This hotel doesn’t allow bad dreams like that,” she retorted back with even more biting sarcasm than before.

“I guess it’s not really funny to say that huh?” Asakura admitted. It seems like she’s getting a little bit attached to Rina.

“Yeah, kinda,” Rina said.

“Cut it out you too. We need to be quiet,” I said, trying to be alert. “We don’t know everything that’s down here anymore.” Even though we’re supposedly resting we can’t be ignorant or stupid.

“Uh, Shun, the dwarves act like there’s something coming through the tunnel like right now,” Asakura says with a warning lilt in her voice.

We revert to looking at the pool. The dwarves look like they are about ready to rumble. We don’t have to wait long.

“Let’s get ready, quickly,” I said.

The other two follow suite, as we get up from the tent and get our shoes on and our weapons ready. We got to the pool just in time, as things were starting to happen.

Sure enough there was a bunch of splashing around but at first it started as a bunch of big bubbles starting to go to the surface of the pool. Then there was a pool ton of bubbles suddenly. The goblins were pouring out of the water tunnel like locusts going for grain after that.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if in hell goblins looked like big cockroaches.

Dang it...and the water ladder we’d been excavating will lead them right to us!

“Wow, there’s so many of them,” Asakura cried out.

“Crap, is this another full army of them?” I wondered.

“So the ones before were probably scouts huh?” Asakura said.

We had to act fast. Every second counted in trying to contain them. There are so many just pushing out of the water one by one, even before they can get their weapons up in time to defend themselves.

The dwarves have already engaged them. But there are a lot of them. They keep going through.

This is good practice though, but only if we can all survive.

I wonder how many monster cores a freshly slain ‘real’ goblin gives? I still hadn’t been able to calculate it accurately.

I hadn’t been able to consider the possibility of this or how many orcs have earlier, but I want to find out. Of course the only way I can tell is kill as many of them as I can in a day and measure it at the end of the day. Then divide by the number of kills.

I shot off a starry missile spell and knocked what I thought was a goblin lieutenant into the water. I was lucky to have spotted him. He looked like the others, but there was no mistaking his mouthy barking for orders on the others. He lays prone for awhile but I’m disappointed that he’s not dead. Even though I can’t understand what they are saying, psychology of seeing bullies seems to be a good way of figuring out goblins’ culture and how they operate as a pack.

He may be laying prone as a fake death skill too. I don’t trust him being dead till I can verify it. It seemed to easy to one shot kill one of them that was a boss so soon.

“Did you get him bro? I hope you nail them for what they did,” Rina asks.

I don’t say anything yet. I want to be sure he’s dead...

Asakura is shaking her head, looking like she’s thinking ‘I can’t believe I got into this mess’.

I try to figure out where he went but I’ve lost him. We can’t let the leaders live, but even as I roved my light spell over the area I can’t tell where he went. Did he swim back? I’ve somehow lost him. I flick it back and forth looking for him while the dwarves keep trying to get the others. After a little while I can verify there’s nothing where he had fallen down before. It was a setup to get away for sure.

“He got away using a sneak skill of some kind,” I told the others.

“Eh? I didn’t think that goblins could be smart. Isn’t that cheating bro?” Rina asked me.

“If they can play dead then they must have other skills too,” Asakura said. Ah, she must have been watching closely to be able to say that, I thought.

But if the leaders get away, won’t they just come back with more troops? The seriousness of our situation is getting more stressful.

The dwarves are trying to put up a good defense. They are both yelling and screaming orders, as far as I can tell. They try to get a group feeling of some weird form of cheering battle shouts together, and they are angry as hell.

“I’m sure they won’t retreat or fall back when they outnumber us by this much. Plus the water tunnel is so big that they won’t want to swim back. So they’ll be tough to fight,” Asakura says.

Because of the length of the water tunnel I’m sure she’s right. Crap.

“Stay right, we may have to fight soon,” I made sure Rina understood our situation. She seems to be getting it.

But I’m surprised there are still enough goblins to try something like this. They must be desperate to get us or just completely mad with violence. Why would they risk such a dangerous water tunnel crossing? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The dwarves are smacking them down as soon as they can. They have a huge advantage because the goblins are tired and out of breath from the swim. Thus the dwarves are able to catch them with a weakened tired state. That doesn’t make me happy however, because I know we’ll be in at least that bad of a state when we have our turn crossing the water tunnel.

Plus the goblins are resistant to dying, despite not looking as strong as the dwarves. They do look more fearsome than humans for some reason. I vaguely have an impression that dwarves are tougher than humans by quite a bit but I’m not sure if it’s a correct impression or influenced by my feelings of fear and what’s going on around us.

The goblins are dying fast from dwarven hammer and sword work, but some of them are veterans and try to strike back. The veterans aren’t dying very quickly at all too. How can so many of them pull out of the water at once? It’s almost like a school of fish the way they are flowing out.

There’s a familiar ‘ping’ sound when dwarven metal war hammers smack into goblin skulls, that’s kind of sickening to listen to. Even if they are goblins I don’t like it.

But why did so many goblins get through the swimming tunnel?

Do goblins specialize in amphibious warfare? I hadn’t thought that they could do something like this. But it’s very clear that they are gifted at it.

One of them was trying to sneak up on a dwarf and had somehow been missed. He’d been hiding under the bodies of his brethren. When he’s trying to get up and about to assassinate a dwarf I run forward and cast the runic shield spell on him. It’s my first time trying it this far away.

I’m still reluctant to cast that spell from a far distance. I don’t know if it will fail and I have to test my limits carefully and I don’t like wasting mana on things I don’t know if they will work or not. In this case I wasn’t touching the dwarf but I’d still gotten within about five feet of him.

Is that its distance limit?

If I hadn’t done that shield he would have surely have taken a blow to a vital spot. Even with the shield, because he’d aimed at a vital the runic shield spell is gone in one hit. This one looks more skilled than the others! His weapon techniques also prove it!

Was this a goblin assassin?

I’d not seen my shields get punctured in one hit before now. Because of seeing it like this, I’m reminded of my own mortality.

Still the dwarf survived and has faced the new threat. He’s a little scratched up but holding his own, and dazed but grateful that I saved him.

As other dwarves are getting wounded I try casting the runic shielding again on a dwarf that was getting swarmed by two goblins at once. It wavers and barely works. It seems that the limit of distance from target is about five feet right now, the same as the distance before. Because I was right at the edge of that, it almost didn’t take effect. The shield is cut to ribbons within a minute, while I get ready to renew it.

But my distance cast limit range a few weeks ago was touch, and now it’s five feet. So that means I’m growing. Maybe next week my range limit will be increased to double that?

I think the goblins also have some kind of speed attack berserker skills, I conclude as I’m watching them work.

I’ll need to practice enhancing the distance of the runic shielding if I want to protect and save more lives. It would vastly improve my war potential to be able to do it across a field or not even close when we get in bigger battles. That way I’d be able to use it but not be in the front lines.

We’re lucky that the goblins are tired from the long swim. But they make up for it with huge numbers.

They are still seething out of the water tunnel so fast! Even after this long the flow is steady.

They must have had a lot of training in siege preparations to pull off moves like this. It’s the kind of tactic to overwhelm with numbers.

The dwarves are better fighters’ man for man, but they have to work hard to not get overwhelmed with the dog pile tactics.

I decide right now I can’t let any of them fall. It’s also easier to keep Rina and Asakura alive this way if we’re behind them too. I’d rather the dwarves be my meat shields than someone frail like Rina. She wouldn’t last five minutes on the front line.

“Hey you two, stay close to me. But don’t go to the front line,” I warn them with a hard edge in my voice.

“Right. As if we’d want to do that! I’d mutiny first,” Rina said sarcastically.

“Well he had to cover the bases,” Asakura answered back at her. “Keep us alive Shun! Please!” she added.

I’m afraid something will sneak up on us and pull them away. It’s what I would do if I were a goblin. Alertness pays off well.

Sure enough somehow some goblins are behind us, though it makes no sense that they’d be able to do such a thing when the water tunnel is in front of us. I unleash the starry missile spell and one of the goblins is critically injured after the missiles hit him in the spine crippling him.

I’d had to let it loose fast and risk the mana usage to protect the girls.

Hm…

The goblins are tougher than I thought. It takes more than just one spell to finish them off. But having it knocked off its feet is enough. But I do have to admit he was one of the smaller ones and a bit sickly looking.

Asakura moves to intercept the other goblin as it charges her and Rina.

I cast a runic shield on her just in time as the shield cracks against the goblin’s blow. She’d tried to block it, but because the goblin was stronger than she was, as it hit her shield there was more power from his end. The shield holds with only a small two inch crack. It’ll still hold for awhile it seems. Of course, he’s now pulling back for another swing.

Rina and Asakura both attack the goblin from different sides while I cast another runic shield on a wounded dwarf.

“Monsters aren’t real!” Rina yells. It echoes in the cavern as she tries to defend herself. She’s not doing so well but at least she’s surviving.

Even though the dwarves are killing the goblins by the dozens there seems to be no end of them.

“With this many goblins, there really must have been no chance for the gnome colony to have survived,” Asakura says with finality. Then she heaves and punctures her spear into the goblin’s stomach. He screams just as Rina’s spike club is clobbering him in the back of the head.

There’s an icky ‘spluck’ sound when he dies. The sound of blunt weapons hitting skulls is the worst thing imaginable. You can never get used to it.

“There really is no end of them is there?” Rina asked seriously.

“Keep your mind on the game instead of talking Rina. Also, scavenge him for weapons and anything useful. I wouldn’t trust anything food related that they’ve made, or their water skins,” I ordered.

“So its a game huh…?” Rina joked back while still swinging at the dead goblins remains.

“We do need more water skins. But I don’t trust goblins enough for theirs,” Asakura admitted.

“I think the dwarves sneak alcohol in theirs. I was by one guy when he opened his,” Rina said suddenly.

“I’m sure the goblins sneak blood in theirs. You know what alcohol smells like?” Asakura said in surprise.

“Blood? You think so? Like they get high off blood or something?” I wondered. I’m not sure what that meant. But it could be a possibility actually. It explained a lot about both goblin and orc willingness to pillage.

I suppose it could happen. Hell, if there was an evil god that had created them, such a trait might compel them to fight all the time.

“Please, I’m a teenager. I have to know those kinds of things,” came back the protest.

“You guys are too chatty for having enemies around us close to us. Focus!” I reminded them.

The girls do as I ask while I reinforce another runic shield on another dwarf. After this long this probably like the fourteenth shield on the dwarves that I’ve cast after a series of casting them in whatever weak spots I could spot in the line. The runic shields are well placed and I noticed that Hrogin’s lieutenant is now guarding us to make sure nothing happens to me and my team. Of course he’s only doing that because I kept his men from dying.

Good, with them valuing us more our survival chances went up a ton.

After some time I realize that the hope of my runic shield castings and the dwarven leaders slaying potential is the only thing keeping the dwarven troop from running away from such fierce terror the goblins have created with this many of them all together. They can tell the difference between fighting with and without the runic shielding up.

“Shun, I hope your magic can hold out,” Asakura says in open shock.

Hrogin the elderly clan leader is fast and strong, moving in and around several goblins at once slaying them mercilessly and cutting them down like flies. I want to watch him fight to evaluate his skills but I have to worry about the others.

Actually he’s so good at it, it’s like watching some version of gore baseball. If we hadn’t been in danger, I would have wanted to watch his smooth moves. You can learn a lot by watching someone else, provided that you can piece together what they are doing and why. If you can’t then there’s no point obviously.

Rina and Asakura are trying to keep us from getting snuck up on at the same time as watching our front. It’s a weird hedgehog formation with the dwarven lieutenant with us.

After putting a runic shield on Rina I’m trying to get a feel for how much mana I have left. I also have to think about the exercises that I’d learned to stimulate mana flow. I’m trying to make my chest and heart feel the burning feeling of what overwhelming mana flow feels like.

I’m not sure but I still think I have at least three-quarters of my mana filled up still. It’s unbelievable that there’s still this much left. Before receiving the shared mana pool, if I’d been in this situation we would have died for sure.

We try to rescue some more strong but desperate dwarves. Some of them are getting pinned down and that makes the runic shields bleed out quickly. I have to adjust and work faster to compensate. But that means I’ll lose more mana quicker.

Then they try to raise rallying cries as they try to hold their line in the sand.

“Shun, how did the goblins know there was a force here?” Asakura asks. “That’s what I’ve been wondering all this time. None of the others survived and made it back so…”

“You think they know there’s a pocket of resistance still?” Rina asked.

“I think so, because before now they’d had much smaller scouting parties. This a full army force,” she answers back.

She’s right, but I avoid answering for now.

“It’s possible just enough scout groups disappearing on the same spot with someone watching a map may have tipped them off,” I said finally.

I cast a heal on the lieutenant guarding us after he was cut open near the neck. He’d taken the blow stopping two goblins from coming towards us. It was close enough to a major artery that I couldn’t risk the blood loss weakening him.

The dwarves are starting to get really nervous I can see.

They’ve killed a lot but they just keep coming. I can hear some of them are breathing hard too.

“We have to stop them here,” I said.

I wish they could understand me.

I’m tempted to use the energy sword, but I know if I do I’ll run out of mana. I have to save it for a situation that is really bad.

I also am trying to cut up goblins. I sniped one that was going for our lieutenant bodyguard’s back. I used my axe to cave in his rib cage. He was dying after that. I finished him off by chopping his skull. My axe is dropping gore everywhere now, from just that single goblin.

This must be how messy it is for the dwarves too. They hate getting goblin guts on their clothes and armor.

We keep fighting hard. I use runic shield reinforcement on any dwarves I see that are getting in serious trouble. But to do so, one of the dwarf lieutenant’s has to bark orders for keeping a walkway so I can move around. He was pretty clever, to have noticed I have to be in a certain range to use that spell.

By now the dwarves have a semi-circle formation around the pool where it drops into being in front of the cavern wall. Nothing can get past them supposedly, unless it muscles through. Dwarves are pretty strong and that isn’t likely but it can happen.

Even as we’re watching and fighting every now and then a really tough and big goblin can push through them. I finished two of those off with the starry missile spells. It also stunned them enough for the others to get in some blows and now the formation is protected again. Because they were bigger goblins, it was necessary to burn down their ability to push forward and even the playing field.

Slowly after fighting for a long time we managed to push them back to the pool of water from the spring.

If this keeps up, victory is within our possibility! We might survive!

This formation around them is helpful since the watery pool has a mossy floor under the water. The goblins have a hard time fighting both uphill against us and can’t get good feet traction to brace themselves. Sometimes they fall back in the water. Then often that invites them to be skewered by a dwarven spear.

We keep fighting this way for at least an hour, possibly two. By now I think everyone is hurting really bad. We keep hanging together. I’m lucky that I can make a difference without burning out tons of energy. But I feel bad for the people on the front line, who have had to put out all the energy they can muster to work their muscles non-stop this long.

That must be why dwarves like alcohol?

We’re getting tired and it’s not a good situation. I worry if the dwarves get as tired as the goblins will they start losing ground? There’s also nowhere to go from here that would have a good defensible position.

I can hear Rina wheezing too.

I have to reinforce her with the treatment using my mana skills. The heal works well but I have her on standby. She’s wheezing less but it’s really hard to get her to stop wheezing entirely once it’s already started.

“Thanks...” she panted afterwards. “That’s a bit better.”

“Please keep an eye on each other,” I asked Asakura. She’s noticed my worry for Rina.

“Yeah,” she nods.

Asakura also is helping point out anything that tries to sneak up on anyone. She will yell and point out a goblin sneak attack and it’s helped keep a few dwarves alive. The difference has helped with cultivating dwarven respect and I can see it in their eyes.

I’m surprised that even is possible but the goblins have some kind of weird magic all their own that they use to be sneaky and unnaturally be able to sneak attack when they shouldn’t. It’s strangely limited and weak, not many of them have it, but try it enough and even a couple with it can do some damage.

I think that’s how they can sneak behind our line sometimes. It’s a new inspiring thought that explains a lot. Couple the sneak strategy with playing dead and a few berserker skills and they are pretty tough little buggers.

Still goblins are strange creatures and there are other forces at work driving them. Their technology isn’t even good enough for camping in the wilderness I think.

The dwarves suddenly are upset and trying to stay calm.

What’s going on?

A few of them are pointing into the water. They pull back a few paces. They are still fighting but seem to not trust the water anymore. The goblins that are remaining mistake it for a sign of defeat and are trying to surge forward.

That’s not good. They’re losing their defensive position. Some of them are calmed by their comrades from running away in terror.

“Wait, the dwarves are tempted to run? What’s going on?” Asakura said suddenly.

But then I see they are afraid of something else coming through.

That was the real reason they ran!

What the freak is that thing?

“Shun, you still think we should stay with the dwarves?” Rina asked. The tone of her voice says she’d have ran away already if me and my runic shields weren’t here.

“Hmm, good question,” Asakura says.

I almost didn’t hear them, as I’m trying to figure out what that thing is. Through mana sensing it feels like something really big, and vile coming up.

We can see something dark and inky black has come into the pool. We can’t see a thing anymore. It’s like the water pool is a giant bottle of ink. The goblins are still pouring out of it, but not as many as before, probably because they can’t tell which way is what now.

Is it some kind of darkness spell focused on the water to camouflage what’s coming up from below? I’m actually glad it’s not focused on the air. That would be worse, if we couldn’t see anything. I would have a hard time protecting Rina and Asakura that way.

I wonder if they covered up all the water with that darkness thing, wouldn’t that make them lose a lot of troops due to drowning?

But goblin lives are probably cheap. It’s a terrible way to live. The last few goblins die quickly. Slowly the dwarves are barely maintaining themselves. But they aren’t relaxing. What’s wrong with them?

I then hear a harsh baritone voice echo throughout the cavern. It’s Hrogin. He’s spotted something and shouted his battle cry in the still unknown dwarf language and pointing his sword deep down in challenge. It’s an eerie courage that makes him seem more than mortal the way he can face evil so fluidly. But the target of his challenge is something still yet to be seen.

How did he know it was there?

But even as I consider the possibilities there is a deep rumbling roar coming out of the water. Rather than high volume the sound of the roar is like a deep penetrating echo that rolls through the cavern. It’s definitely a creature that isn’t humanoid, but I have no idea what it is.

Crap.

The goblins brought something nasty and wicked with them.

It’s something really, really big. It’s about the same size as an ogre, or wait…even bigger still? I can’t tell for sure though, because it’s still covered in the inky black water.

Can the dwarves deal with it?

Even as I wonder about it there are two more.

Crap. Serious trouble.

I don’t like caves. I feel trapped. Also the air holes here…what if the goblins find those too?

We don’t have food either. Since the gnomes are dead our food supply is gone. I suppose I should be happy. Now I don’t have to eat any of their barf soup.

If things get bad…nah I could never do that. I couldn’t eat goblin meat. It’s too pathetic. I think I’d rather check out.