MBGSP Chpt 113-115

We're back from our short break with 3 new chapters! I hope you enjoy them, and have a great rest of your weekend.

EDIT - It's come to my attention that a few chapters were skipped due to duplicate chapters in my manuscript. I'll be fixing it here.

Chapter 113 - Research and Rescue

<Your tribe has decreased to 899 members>

<Your tribe has increased to 925 members>

Once again, we sent  scrappers out. Once again, they took a mauling—but not near as bad. And they found dead boglins—not killed by us—who were missing the tips of their ears. Another kerosene derrick went dark, as well.

In the morning, with the scrapper priority pushed to max, we now had more scrappers than we’d started with. The search lights on the boats seemed to ward off the ambushers, but I worried they might also be scaring the boglins. We were still a way off from night vision and thermal imaging, so they’d have to do.

As the scrappers made their way to Huntsville throughout the afternoon by wagon, buggy, foot, or even airdrop, we continued iterating and improving on the lights and electric motors. The swamp village was filled with the electric zaps and ozone smell of poorly insulated wiring shorting out. Electric motors whirred and buzzed as they were fit to fan boats and lights flickered atop pylons. Occasionally, something sheared or exploded. But that was business as usual for the tribe.

Armstrong had exercised his secretive service skills to make it clear again in no uncertain terms that I would not be riding a patrol boat, or one of the choppers retrofit with lights instead of guns. I threatened to fire him, but the scrapper chief wouldn’t budge. So, we’d reached a compromise. The airship was a much more secure platform, more easily defended, and we could supplement the patrol boats by putting search lights on the bottom—which I worked with Sally to do as the rest of the tribe worked glass and wrapped wiring.

Once lighting was set up, I started in on a second project. Since we were already making copper cones and simple transducers, it was a natural leap to integrate a sound-powered phone hand-set to the deck and rig it up to an electrically amplified horn on the bottom. The effect was about as incomprehensible as you’d expect, sounding somewhere between a tornado warning siren and an outdated high-school PA system manned by a two-pack-a-day vice principle. It also sparked whenever I spoke through it. But it would at least let me bark orders at the boats from altitude.

As the light began to fade, we fired up the engines on the airship and cut loose from the dock, hovering overhead as the scrappers and their teams carried the river patrol boats—now outfit with search lights and recoilless rifles—down to the waters of the swamp. I stood on the deck with Armstrong while Promo worked the engines and one of Eileen’s pilots steered. The airship itself had also been augmented with the latest generation of goblin weaponry. It still sported a pair of slingers with net launchers, but the main armaments were now the three recoilless rifles and a nozzle and hose hooked up to a bladder of kerosene with a dedicated pump goblin.

“Take us to where they found the boglins last night,” I ordered the pilot. She saluted and cranked the rudder. By no means fast, the airship still made good time and could fly over islands that the patrol boats had to navigate around. The bog was fed from several tributary streams and rivers from the mountainous terrain to the northeast, and it was there that I wanted to focus the search. My stomach growled, but it was necessary to be hungry in order to stay awake into the night.

Armstrong looked back at me from the bow. “She needs a name, boss!”

“What?” I shouted back.

“Like Gerty.”

“Oh,” I said, considering. This was the tribe’s second airship—and unless we could secure access to more canvas, these two twin sisters would be it for the foreseeable future. Hmm… Twins…

“Gemini!” I shouted up to the front. “Her name is Gemini.”

The sun dipped below the horizon. At the bow of the airship, I flipped the switch for the search-lights, and the engines sputtered for a moment as the generator added to their load. Two brilliant columns of amber light from two new sponsons split the air ahead of the ship. Twin circles of illuminated swamp tracked back and forth as the operators swung the lighting arrays around.

I leaned over the side of the airship, watching the loose canopy below for signs of activity. The problem, if anything, was too much activity. Lanclova’s nights were more active than its days—which is probably why most goblins are diurnal, being perpetually level 1 at all. Large, shifting shapes moved throughout the bog—larger than the croc-knockers. Still, it all seemed endemic, and I saw none of the strange behavior I associated with the red spirits.

For two hours, we moved from one tributary to the next, watching from overhead as the patrol boats maneuvered up the narrow waterways looking for signs of the boglins or their mysterious attackers.

I began to wonder if we’d find anything at all, when one of the search-light operators began squawking from his station.

“Armstrong, with me,” I said, dashing to the port gunwale and looking over the side. Below us, the amber light had lit on the wreckage of a patrol boat—not one of the new ones, but one of the missing scrapper teams.

“Good work,” I told the operator, who puffed out his chest with pride. If there was wreckage, maybe there were survivors holed up somewhere. “Armstrong, get on the big voice and let the boats know to search that area.” I looked at the operator. “Bring us down a bit lower for a better look.”

Our pilot tilted us down and let some of the hot air out of the envelopes to sink us closer to the canopy where the search lights were a bit better at dispelling some of the gloom. The boat was in bad shape. It had been warped as though struck with immense force, and the engine had torn completely off. I moved to the bow with Armstrong, getting a closer view while he barked orders into the big voice. It was a bit surreal, hearing a goblin voice amplified and broadcast over the air. The swamp muted any echo it might have had, but I still saw the lights on several boats slow as they lowered their throttles to better hear the updates. Several of the lights turned and began heading in new directions. Not all of them were going the right way, and Armstrong struggled to call out specific boats to get them on track.

We need radios, I thought to myself, and not for the first time. If each of the boats had a callsign and a radio operator, we could more easily coordinate the search from the airship. Hell, that might be the next priority. The badlands had crystal. I’d seen quartz and other types in the rock formations of the whistler canyon and in the pylon we’d knocked down. Crystal radio receivers and simple frequency modulation transmitters are simple electronic devices, and it would be a trivial matter to integrate the speaker tech we’d already solved to—-

“Boss, look there!”

I shook myself out of the musings and followed where Armstrong pointed. A flicker of bright flashes, partially hidden by canopy, had broken out somewhere north of the wreckage site on one of the bigger islands. A few moments later, the sounds of rockettes and poppers reached us.

There was fighting in the forest, and it was using goblin weapon tech.

“Have any of our boat teams gone ashore?” I asked.

Armstrong shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

“Lights!” I shouted. the two searchlights panned across the terrain, and I caught a flash of movement through the foliage, something small and blue being chased by something big and green. Survivors from the wreckage, being pursued by something. “Armstrong, do we have any boats close enough to help?” I asked. Armstrong shook his head. I muttered to myself. “Battle stations! Break out everything we’ve got.  Armstrong, have the boats converge. Pilot, take us down!”

Chapter 114 - Extraction

Air hissed out of the envelopes again as we descended. The deck became a riot of activity as goblins ran about, pulling out guns and squeezing into armored vests. Others began loading the recoilless rifles and priming the slingers. Armstrong handed me one of the plate carriers, and I pulled it on and tapped a fist against the ceramic tile in its front pocket. Since coming to Rava I’d been stabbed, arrowed, bitten, and beaked. Multiple times, those would have activated the head of the snake skill and killed other goblins in my place, had I not been wearing the armor. I’d seen many goblins likewise saved by (and many still killed despite) the ceramic armor.

We dropped low enough that the tallest trees began to scrape across the underside of the airship’s thin hull. Prometheus had the engines full-bore to get us closer to the fight that had broken out below while the searchlight operators tried to get a fix on whatever was chasing our people. Someone handed me a rifle, and I braced it on the gunwale and peered down through the sights. The rest of the goblins lined up next to me, and the airship tilted. I caught a dark silhouette, framed by the flash of a popper, and fired toward it. All the goblins to my left and right squeezed off shots as well. The treetops erupted in shredded leaves and thrown sticks as the rockettes tore through, and the thump swoosh of the recoilless rifle on the bow sent a plume of earth skyward.

Something down there roared, low and terrifically loud. I cranked the lever of my rifle and fire again, pointing my muzzle as close as I could to the source of the sound.

The scanning lights centered on several blue figures dashing toward the ship. They were hauling butt through the trees of the island, and it looked like they were carrying something. A half-dozen scrappers and twice their number in non-variants, running as fast as their short legs could pump.

“Oy, it’s our lads!” said Armstrong beside me.

“Armstrong, the ladder!” I shouted.

My scrapper chief dropped his rifle to Gemini’s deck and ran to the aft of the airship, kicking a bundled rope ladder over the side. It unfurled, swinging down into the trees. The scrappers below pointed to it and redoubled their sprint. But a massive shape crashed through the trees behind them. A six-legged, four-eyed reptile that moved more like a gorilla than a lizard bounded across the floor on its knuckles, sauropod mouth open wide and tiny rear legs scurrying to keep up. It was maned in bright feathers, like the dartwing. Idly, I wondered if it was a muscular evolutionary offshoot. Either way, it had its sights set on my boys, and I wasn’t keen to let it catch up.

I whistled for attention and pointed down. “Recoilless rifles! Poppers! Anything we’ve got!”

The goblins shouted and began throwing the small grenades over the side at the beast, and several landed beside it, showering it with shrapnel. It came on anyway—until the recoilless rifle rounds smashed it into the dirt.

However, it wasn’t alone. Two more of them came out of the woods—strangely in sync in their movements and pace. They even roared in harmony. It was almost uncanny to watch them, as if a single mind worked behind both brains.

“Reload!” I said. The recoilless rifle teams worked to open the breeches on the smoking guns, but the beasts were moving fast. Ahead of them, the scrappers and their goblins reached the rope ladder and began to climb up with the speed possessed only by those with sharp teeth snapping at their heels.

The airship sagged again and I waved to Promo and the pilot. “Take us up! Quick!”

The pilot signaled to the burner teams to increase the heat, but it’s a lot faster to let hot air escape than it is to make more of it. And we had the added weight of the survivors. Promo at least kicked the throttle up, and the fans began to spin faster and faster. We at least moved forward, back toward the water, as our rescues scrambled up toward the ship.

Then the airship lurched, and I fell against the gunwale. At least two goblins went over completely, and even Promo nearly lost his balance. He caught himself on the throttle lever, which resisted for a moment before snapping off completely.

Through the slats on the gunwale, I looked down at the end of the rope ladder to see one of the lumbering lizards had leapt up and caught the bottom rung even as we lifted away from the ground. It reached overhead and began to pull itself up with hungry eyes and salivating jaws. And, with two of my scrappers trying to navigate the climb with loads slung over their shoulders, it was catching up.

Pushing myself back up, I shoved my gun through the slats and fired down at it, careful to avoid the goblins climbing above it. It jerked as a shot hit its shoulder, and then more goblins on the deck followed my example. Two zealots leapt past me with spears, screaming their heads off with fury—and then panic, as our forward air speed meant their attack was going nowhere near their target. Still, the barrage of rockette fire was slowing it down and letting the scrappers make up the distance. Armstrong was there to begin pulling them onto the deck.

Despite our fire, the lumbering lizard kept coming. It had a thick, bony crest that seemed hard enough to deflect the rockettes, with four small eyes set deep into it. And on the ladder, it was out of the firing arc of our recoilless rifles.

“Cut the ropes!” I shouted.

Goblins started looking around, squawking in confusion as they pulled out knives and cleavers, and a few of them started sawing on the ropes that held the fuselage to the hot air envelopes.

“No! The ladder ropes!”

Squawks of understanding passed back and forth between the crew, and they went to work sawing at the thick cords of the ladder as the last of our survivors were pulled aboard. The monster on the ladder must have realized what was happening, because it climbed even faster. My secretive service were at the top with spears, thrusting down at the beast and barely keeping it at bay. Armstrong jumped in with his cleaver held high and brought it down so hard it severed the line and stuck fast in the gunwale. The ladder swayed and spun, held on by only a single cord. But half-shredded in its own right and struggling under its doubled load, it snapped as well.

The creature fell away, windmilling its arms and roaring up at us. The crew of the airship cheered and fired off their rifles into the air (and more than a few into the balloon itself, I’m sure).

I began to relax, but something raised the hackles on the back of my neck.

The roar of the creature choked off, and then started buzzing. A cloud of red mist poured from its mouth and shot up towards us. My eyes widened.

“It’s not over!” I shouted.

The rifles came back down, shooting at the mist. But you can’t shoot fog. I looked around, and my eyes centered on the flamethrower. I ran over and grabbed the nozzle, making sure the primer ember was secure at the tip. In an extraordinary display of diligence, the pump goblin had never stopped pumping throughout the whole debacle, and when I tested the pressure on the weapon, the backwards force of the spray knocked me on my butt. A jet of flame shot out into the evening sky, brighter even than the searchlights.

Hands wrapped around my shoulder and hauled me to my feet, and I looked back at Promo, with his smithing mask down. He picked up the back half of the hose, and suddenly the assembly felt lighter and more comfortable in my own hands. Bonus to heat-based weaponry.

Running to the extent of where the hose reached, I shoved the nozzle down, angled it at the approaching cloud of red mist, and squeezed the nozzle lever. Flaming kerosene gushed out, dropping into the swamp below. I swept the flame back and forth, bisecting the lance of red mist several times. The heat rising back up was immense, like shoving my face into a kiln. But it was nothing compared to the havoc it wreaked below. The flaming liquid clung to trees and smoldered brush, turning the forest into a flash fire. The red mist faltered, scattered, and then reformed.

Though we’d diminished it, it kept coming, zig-zagging with purpose to avoid the jet of flame. It hit the side of the airship and began to force its way through the gunwale. I closed my eyes and felt the beat of thousands of tiny wings against my eyelids as I flailed my hands. The air filled with angry buzzing. It wasn’t a spirit.

It was a swarm.

And it was on my ship!

Chapter 115 – Snap, Crackle, Pop

The goblins panicked, shooting rifles in all directions, frantically waving away the biting, stinging bugs. One of them hit a cable attaching the deck to the airship’s envelope, and the front right quarter of the boat lurched down, spilling several goblins off the side. Still others abandoned ship of their own volition, hurling themselves off the boat—only to be reminded by a deafening roar that there was still a monster on the island below us.

<Your tribe has decreased to 915 members>

Bugs crawled through my fur, looking for flesh to sink their stingers into. I resisted the very goblin urge to turn the flamethrower nozzle around and sweep myself with its flames, along with the whole deck. I’d always joked that a loose spider in the house meant we’d have to burn down the whole thing, but a goblin actively would do something that crazy.

I opened my mouth to shout, and several of the red bugs forced themselves inside. I chomped down, crushing them between my teeth, in what should have been a revolting mix of grit, carapace, and guts. But, again, goblins. I hated how delicious my brain interpreted them as being.

Nearby, I spotted Armstrong trying to punch the air around him. The air was filled with a glistening sea of red malevolence, with the luminescent glitter of thousands of diaphanous wings sparkling in the deck lights. The whole swarm moved as if guided by a single mind. Was there some sort of queen we could kill? How could we even find her? My only consolation is that goblins seemed to be immune to whatever let these swarms take over cliffords and other swamp creatures. Probably because they were devouring any bugs that tried to work their way inside.

Small favors. I dropped to the deck and began rolling, hoping to crush the bugs. My frantic desperation brought me over to Promo, and thank God I was already on the ground, because he’d have crushed my skull with his hammer otherwise.

<Your tribe has decreased to 907 members>

Promo swung his favorite hammer around in wide, wild arcs. It’s head was coated in a red paste and blue fur, but it wasn’t exactly efficient. He needed a flyswatter, really. As I watched, claws digging at my own fur, he clipped one of the deck lights with his hammer. The bulb burst in a shower of sparks, and a tendril of electricity zapped a handful of the bugs. The entire swarm flinched back. I felt the pressure of bites and stingers ease up for a moment.

“Promo!” I gasped up. The noblin chief looked down at me, realizing for the first time that I was beside him. I pointed up at the sparking tines of the bulb.

Luckily, my ignis chief was no fool. He dropped his hammer to the deck and wrenched free the pylon from its housing, sweeping the bare contacts through the swarm. The hissing snap of that familiar bug-zapper melody was music to my ears. Again, the swarm flinched and pulled back.

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Zap-em goods>

I heard another smash of glass, and looked over to see that Armstrong had followed suit, pulling down a pair of the deck lights and smashing them together to wield electricity in each hand. This time when he punched the air, the swarm reacted, getting fried by the hundred. All across the darkening deck, goblins turned lamps into weapons wielded against the encroaching swarm. It was like a tiny summer storm, with the warm orange light almost entirely replaced with the harsh blue flicker of arcing electrical leads.

I felt the swarm flow off my fur as one, and I lay gasping and sore from the bites across my skin and face. The red bugs flowed through and over the gunwales, and back down to the jungle below. The deck was a carpet of red carapace. But we’d won. The goblins, so recently brushed with imminent death, began to sweep up the bug remains and drop them into their mouths. I turned away. The human part of my brain still wanted to hurl.

“Pilot, get us back to Huntsville, pronto.”

Luckily, if the insects had been envenomed, the goblin immunity to toxins and poisons seemed to be completely resistant to it, so the only lingering pain was that of the tiny punctures that actually managed to break skin under my fur. Instead of watching the smorgasbord, I turned my attention to the scrappers we’d pulled onboard. I made my way aft, to where they had collapsed from exhaustion, too drained even to join the fight against the bugs. But in the heat of the moment, I hadn’t even noticed that not all of them were forest goblins. They had 3 boglins with them, one of which was Ringo’s closest advisor, George.

“King Apollo,” said George, eyeing me warily. “Am I to assume we’re your prisoners, now?”

I gestured to the side of the deck. “You’re free to try your luck on the ground,” I said. As if to punctuate my point, something large howled on the island below.

George’s eyes shifted left and right. “Ah, well, we’ll accept your hospitality. For now…”

I rolled my eyes. I’d just saved him, and he was already planning his inevitable betrayal and escape. Still, it was good fortune that we’d gotten one of the rare talking boglins—though Ringo had grown his tribe enough that he’d unlocked a hob-boglin variant. And while I didn’t want to take full credit for that, it certainly hadn’t happened before we’d started trading with them and slowly introducing more tech into their society..

“What were you doing out here, anyway?”

The royal advisor perked up. “Ah, my king sent me to find you. We captured one of the invaders!”

So there was a guiding force behind the attacks. “You did? Where are they?”

One of the other boglins approached with a leather cover over something the size and shape of a fishbowl. He pulled it away to reveal a small, wicker cage—which contained a creature that, if I’m being honest, I had no idea what to make of it. It was smeared with dirt and grass, making it look like little more than a piece of peat with strangely muscular arms and legs. It held up a hand against the sudden light, and I heard a high-pitched cavalcade of what could only be dog-cussing in its native tongue.

“I have no idea what this is,” I said. “But I know someone who should.”

George snatched the cage away, which rattled the creature inside and renewed the string of foreign expletives. “Then we should make all haste! Take me to them, at once. My king’s life depends on it.”

His king’s life, and therefore, his own. But I left that bit unsaid. It took us an hour or so to limp back to the swamp village and dock at the tower. We were down two more boats, but the scrappers with their new gear and lights had managed to rebuff a few attacks by more crazed swamp creatures.

I found Sourtooth working with Promo and Taquoho on a helicopter and had George show him the prisoner. The sour old orc sniffed down at the cage and laughed. The creature inside was just as peeved at the orc as it had been at us, and began making what I can only assume were rude gestures involving splayed fingers and vigorous up-and-down motions.

“Tis elves,” said Sourtooth. “Burn down to cinders the swamp, you may wish, as the only way to be sure you’ve got them all out.”

“No way,” I said.

“He speaks true,” said Taquoho. “They have, on occasion, visited The City. And they are very difficult to persuade to leave once within the walls.”

“Elves?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. I looked down through the tiny bars of the cage. I must have got too close, because the little bastard put a fist in my eye. I recoiled, putting a hand over it.

Sourtooth held out his hand for the cage, and then carried it over to one of the water tanks where he treated the creature to a deluge of water. When he was finished, he offered the cage back. With all the grime and moss and sticks washed away, sure as death and taxes, there was a six-inch tall pointy-eared man who was very wet and very cross.

“Naught seen one a’fore, have you? Worry not, harmless once parted from their staves.” He laughed down as I rubbed my stinging eye. “Well, mostly harmless.”

“Not in person,” I admitted. I ran a hand through my fur. “I was just expecting…” I don’t know what I was expecting, more Lord of the Rings and less Fudge Stripes, certainly. Though, that didn’t fit the bill either. This looked more like a micronized dude-bro that would have been right at home in a scaled down version of a jungle commando movie from the 80’s—or at least the action-figure aisle at the toy store. The elf even had a little red bandana and close-cropped hair above his pointy ears. Now robbed of his camouflage, the System populated the level above his head at 32. 32. For this one little elf. He was at least as strong as an ifrit paladin, and the only things stronger that we’d come across had been badlands beasts that required a whole convoy of war buggies and heavy weapons to best. The fact this tiny cage contained him was astounding.

“Lines up it does,” said Sourtooth. He scratched at his stubble. “The attacks from stealth, strange behaviors of local beast and bug, and even your scrappers getting ambushed. Natural sneaks, are elves—for obvious reason, they seek not to fight on fair term. I wager their team numbers 6 strong, perhaps. Tis a number of significance to elves. 5 mages and a leader.”

Only 6? I suppose that was a blessing, but it was hard to believe just 6 of these things had disrupted operations so much.

“Yeah, but why are they here?” I asked. Though, it did explain why the boglins had been attacked so viciously, if the other elves were trying to recover their comrade.

The little elf gave me an answer I’m sure would have been inappropriate if I’d understood it.

“Wiped out the javeline, did you. When disrupted the trade of goblin ear, the elves took note, I’d say.” He raised his eyebrows. “Know you, what they do with it?”

As if I could forget the rutter’s words that had been burned into my brain whether I liked it or not. “Ear to elf for make potent.”

Make potent. We were their rhino horn.

I shuddered, looking down at the little wretch. “Came to get your fix from the source, yeah?” I leaned in. “Or maybe came to find out what happened to your javeline?”

The tiny creature lashed out through the thin bars of its cage, attempting to punch me. But this time, I was ready.

“Armstrong. Show this jerk what happened to the last people who came to my neck of the woods looking for goblin ears.”

Armstrong licked his lips. “My pleasure, boss!”

They were consuming us. Turnabout was fair play, after all.