MBGSP chpt 98-100

Wow!

It's hard to believe we've made it to 100 chapters! This story continues to be a blast to write, and I had a ton of fun writing the Stampede. If you've some of my other books, you probably know how excited I get about monster fighting and hunting, especially when I have a chance to make the monsters especially strange. It should come as no surprise that I'm a big fan of the Monster Hunter games, and that Monster Hunter Wilds is my most anticipated title of next year.

Enjoy the chapters, and the rest of your week.

Scott out.

Chapter 98 - Vertical Thinking

<Your tribe has increased to 465 members>

Finding out we had to let the dartwing go dampened some spirits, but finding out we got to eat anyway lifted most of the goblins’ moods back up again. Still, I had a taste for competition and I still wanted to get the Flock a placement that would see hunting rights secured for the tribe.

Since the Blood Gorgers had secured the latest totem beast, that meant they were the ones who decided when the Stampede would resume. And they weren’t in quite as great a hurry as the upstart Lura. Which suited me since it gave me a full 2 days to do some much-needed repairs and modifications using Sourtooth’s stockpile of supplies as we regrouped and planned. Chuck helped me out when he wasn’t busy with the dogs, and I couldn’t help noticing the resident canoneers eyeing us closely as we worked on engines together.

“With the dartwing out, what’s our next best option?” I asked Sourtooth. I hammered at an engine that had developed a warp, trying to get it back to spec—er, goblin spec, at any rate. Reinforcements from Village Apollo had brought more vehicles, including one small biplanes with a crew of only three goblins. The orcs found flying goblins to be a novelty, rather than a threat, fortunately.

“We find ourselves trapped twixt anvil and hammer, little brother,” said Sourtooth. He rested, crouched, on a flat rock in the middle of the forge yard. “What totems remain play cruel tricks upon us, either elusive or deadly.”

“And the dartwing wasn’t?”

Sourtooth ignored the jab and sucked at his namesake a moment as he thought. “The Dawn will seek the red trapper totem, having been denied the rasker by the Blood Gorgers. Lura gained insight fair on the location of one. Never beat her to it, we. A lesser drake perhaps, should one hunger enough to leave the dunes—alas, likely not this time of year. A long shot. A vine-grabber perhaps. How fare your artifice in swamps?”

“Not well,” I admitted. “But we’ve got boats and cliffords—er, the red badlands dogs.”

Sourtooth shook his head. “They would cower before the thing.”

I pursed my furry lips. “What about trying to muscle out one of the smaller teams? You’ve seen what our guns and rockets can do. We defeated the javeline with them and only gotten stronger, since.”

The old orc huffed a laugh. “Brag at bagging bacon, you. Orcs are no rutter mob. Keen hunters, we, even of temperament and steady of hand on spear and pommel. No, the weakest of the teams would not for you a victim be, but might, of you, a victim make. Skirmishes are good sport, but best not raise their ire.”

I put down my hammer and examined my handywork. With an arm in front of my face in case the ensemble exploded, I dropped a starter rockette into the chute and let the engine turn over. It rumbled to life, rattling, shaking, and generally raising an unholy ruckus. In other words, perfect working order for GTT tech.

I cocked my head. “What about… the whistler? Is that what you called it?”

Sourtooth stilled. This was a very touchy subject for him, I expected. I pressed on with caution.

“It had to be released, right? Since Lura beat you to a kill? That means it’s still out there, right?”

“You’d feed it my spare leg, little brother,” growled Sourtooth. “Your tribe’s not ready for a beast of that caliber.”

“But you know where it is?”

Sourfang held still a moment. “Aye. It’s gone to ground in the canyons to lick the wounds given by the Flock, grandfather spirits rest them.”

I cut the throttle on the engine and leaned against the crank case. “And no one else has it in their sights?”

Sourtooth straightened. “No other team is damn fool enough to follow it into a canyon where its charge can be evaded not.”

“How tight’s the canyon?” asked Chuck.

<Your tribe has decreased to 459 members>

<Your tribe has decreased to 457 members>

<Your tribe has increased to 482 members>

<12 of your tribe members have assumed the zealot job>

Eileen and the canoneers must have converted another village. That was the third so far.

No new variants?

<The tribe had only one variant: hobgoblin scrappers.>

I tsked. Bad luck. I’d hoped each tribe would introduce a new needed skill or specialization into the tribe. So far we’d narrowly missed something called flatulators and gotten a duplicate variant.

I turned back to the problem at hand. “That’s a problem. We won’t have room to maneuver in the canyon. Maybe we could build a big missile and launch it into the canyon? We’ve got two-stage guided rockets. We just need one with a big enough warhead to send this horn-beast to the next simulation.”

But even as I spoke it, I knew it wasn’t feasible, yet. Guided rockets with enough payload to function as long-range artillery were going to take time and trials to develop. We’d gotten lucky with the net missiles working as planned, but short-range ballistic missiles were another beast all together.

Still. We had manpower, we had materials. That meant this was an engineering problem. A canyon might not have enough space to maneuver on the ground, but they had plenty of verticality. Maybe we needed to attack this problem from a different direction. Literally.

“Let’s go talk to Promo. I have an idea.”

I choked out the engine and wandered over to the forge-yard. Several of the Blood Gorgers were still sleeping off hangovers, dozing in the heat given off by the forges. The ringing of hammers on anvils seemed to bother them not at all, and I had to step over one of them in order to reach the head of my smiths.

“How long would it take to dismount the the engines from, let’s say, half the buggies?” I asked.

Promo cocked his head at me. “Rest o’ the day, reckon. What you gettin’ at, boss?”

I nodded to the Ifrit floating around the camp in their coaxial vessels. One of them floated by a pair of orcs, who offered what I had learned was a sign of both respect and warding to and from ancestors.

“We can’t get at this next monster from the ground. The next option is the air. Do you understand the principles enough to make a version big enough to carry a crew?”

Promo scratched at his jowls and a glaze passed over his eyes, typical of a person looking at System menus. A grin spread across his face. “Reckon I can at that, boss. Why only half the buggies?”

I huffed. “Because the abomination unto aerodynamics that are helicopters are very fuel inefficient. We’re going to drive them to the canyon and launch them from there to maximize flight time.”

Sourtooth grunted. “I’ve seen your skyborne artifice, little brother. If you hold notion that I’ll ride the winds on a wreck in the making, absolve yourself of it. For my lads that goes, as well. We tolerated your wheeled contraptions, but good faith and daring takes an orc only so far. An oryx twixt our legs is the only sure thing in terrain like that.”

I shrugged. “You’d be too heavy anyway. We need to minimize weight. Besides, someone’s going to have to be the bait.”

“The what?” asked Sourtooth, having very clearly heard me. “I know the rate at which goblins produce, but an orc life is not easily cast before the charge.”

“Figured you’d want to be as close as possible when you get your revenge. The canyons might not have the terrain for buggies to maneuver, but what if I could make you a shield capable of taking a hit from the whistler?”

Sourtooth closed his eyes and muttered something under his breath. I caught Lura, blight, and womb and a few other terms best not repeated in polite company. And of course it wasn’t Lura he was upset with. It was me.

“Alright, little brother mine,” said Sourtooth. “But once we commit, there will be no turning back. The whistler will not keen be to grant us a third audience. It is like a meteor made flesh, and it will finish what I started.”

“The whistler, then.”

Sourtooth absently rubbed the remnant of the leg he’d lost to the beast. “The whistler. More than those peashooters, we’ll need. What more artifice have you a will to unlock in your tech tree?”

I thought about the advancements we’d made so far. I hadn’t followed the linear path of human technological development. I’d skipped around, cut corners, jumped entire fields of research by already knowing the terminus those innovative yet obsolete stepping stones had led. We had internal combustion engines and I hadn’t even gotten around to making a radio or a transistor, yet. In some regards, we were up to the early 1900’s. Hell, we were getting ready to make helicopters. But in many other regards, we were still in the BC era. We didn’t have running water or sewage, our government was a pure monarchy—or some sort of gestalt colony with a king at its heart. We didn’t even have agriculture, despite my best efforts. On the other hand, we had heavier-than-air flight, we had rifles with internal magazines, and we had multi-stage rockets. Military technology was certainly progressing. But, then, a large amount of innovation and development had been spurred on by conflict on Earth. Well, if we were doing it by hunting wild animals instead of killing humans, I certainly didn’t have a problem with it. Bonus points if it kept my tribe sufficiently fed.

But they also needed to be protected. Sourtooth didn’t think the buggies would cut it, and I had a feeling the oryx weren’t going to get the job done, either. The majority of our military technology was about at a pre WWI level. Well, the first world war introduced more than just biplanes and trenches. There was one area of technology that we were still behind on.

“Promo. Bring the Big Hoss Rig around. We’ve got work to do.”

Chapter 99 - Keeper Secrets

<Your tribe has increased to 561 members>

The morning of the third day, the Blood Gorgers finally signaled their intent to continue the hunt. And believe me when I say, we didn’t waste a single minute. We wasted many, many minutes. Goblins aren’t exactly the most diligent of workers. So when we rolled out behind our scout bi-plane, we didn’t have as many vehicles as ready to go as I’d hoped.

But we had more than I’d expected.

We had more company than I’d expected, too. Word from the Blood Gorgers must have gotten around that we weren’t just a gaggle of goblins, but a competent team capable of bringing down totem beasts. It wasn’t just a contingent of Blood Gorger scouts that set off after us. A party with black and white bands followed us, as did one of viridian green, and even a set of Lura’s colors were present.

What surprised me most was our keeper climbing up on the lead vehicle and leaning down to our engine to give the sign of respect to elders.

“Elder, you honor us,” he said before settling back to ply his beads.

I glanced at the engine that glowed with a soft blue, distinctively ifrit flame, and then to the elder orc I couldn’t help it. I sidled back.

“If orc grandfather spirits are so cunning and devious, why would they help us?” I asked.

“I’m sure they have their reasons,” said Keeper. “Perhaps you should ask them.”

“But the Ifrit deny that they are orcs,” I said.

“So…?”

“So… they couldn’t possibly answer the question.”

“How convenient.” Keeper tapped the side of his nose with his finger. It was such an Earth gesture that it stunned me for a moment. A series of beads spun in his hand.

“I think I’ve figured out,” I said, pointing to the beads.

Keeper raised a solitary eyebrow.

“At first I thought it was like a serial connection. Some beads for sending, others for receiving. Certain faces of certain beads represent syllables to exchange messages. I figured their must have been some central keeper operating a switchboard to keep message traffic flowing. I bet I could optimize the whole system with a few days to iron out inefficiencies. Pass more data with less fluff, you know?”

“Clearly you no longer believe this to be the case.”

Around us, the vehicles had begun to start up.

“I think all the teams are represented on each string,” I said. “That’s why we couldn’t join late as a new team. Each one of those multicolor beads represents one of the team’s colors, and the beads that follow give very basic information on direction, intent, proximity, and status. The rest you infer and pass it off as having more knowledge than you actually do.”

The corner of the hooded orc’s mouth twitched upwards.

“I bet I could still improve it for you. Bidirectional communication based on simple syllabic syntax and short phrases, maybe encoded in hexadecimal with a central operator sending mass notifications. One side of the beads would be out and one side would be in. I’d be happy to help you figure out a basic communications manual,” I rubbed my hands together. “If I could get a couple sets of those beads for my tribe.”

Keeper considered for a moment, and then reached out and offered the beads to me. I grinned and reached out, wrapping my fist around the links.

As soon as my skin touched them, my vision flashed white and a lance of pain shot through my temples.

In my head I heard a cacophony of voices, some shouting some whispered, but all trying to burrow into the folds of my brain.

Dawntreaders15milessouthof PIN VALE headingeast

Flatbottoms HUNT by dust storm sullied—

—FRIGHTENED bycarelessscouttingcost

finding tracks led to carcass killed by GARGA—

returningtoStAgInGcampWeStNoRtHwEsTofrookery

“Jesus!” I let go of the bracelet as if I’d been stung—and it felt like I had. My fingers steamed, and I shook them out and put them in my mouth to sooth. My hair stood on end, something the other buggy occupants had taken notice of, and humor from.

“Yer culda trld me thr were just margic” I muttered around my fingers.

“And dash hopes of yours for syntax and short phrases?” Keeper leaned over. “I may not a grandfather spirit be, little brother. But I am a stranger not to mischief.”

“Clearly,” I said.

Boy, orcs must pull some serious pranks on each other. So. Orc magic. The first I’d seen of it, outside of the Ifrit—though they were beings of magic, apparently, they didn’t practice it. I had so many questions. Unfortunately, I didn’t think I was going to get them out of the recalcitrant keeper.

I had Girmaks take us alongside Sourtooth’s bike and made the transition over. As a human, I never would have considered jumping from a moving buggy onto a moving motorcycle, but as a goblin it was as easy as walking down the sidewalk. I’d made a gunner’s mount on the back of the chopper, and I busied myself doing a quick once-over until Sourtooth stopped glaring at me.

“You been on lots of these Stampedes?” I asked.

“Across the burning sands and the shimmering salt, ‘neath sun and moon in years remembered only by song.”

“Ah, so yes… I think. Who’s the toughest? After the orcs, of course.”

Sourtooth laughed. “Pad the ego not, little brother. Flattery gains not amongst my kind.” He scratched at his chin. “The Noll are the best fighters, man-to-man. Strong and swift, fierce and cunning. They melt into the forest as though made from subtle breeze. When the Stampede reached their shores, a wide berth we offered their fortress monasteries—and a Noll team was offered a place at the hunting table.”

“How about Habberport?”

“A splinter of the Duchy of Habb. Sealed within their loathsome castles, they, when my kin come to hunt. If strayed a totem to the coast, we would chase it through their market square with not a fear.”

“Their prince wanted to capture me. Sent the javeline to do it.”

Sourtooth barked a laugh. “He will stop not, then. Men of the Duchy are not turned ashy so easily. Long have they coveted this land, and long has it rebuffed them.”

“What about the strongest magic practitioners?” I asked.

Again, Sourtooth considered. “Elves are quite skilled in natural magics, but physically not so imposing. Outside of the elves, perhaps the Midnight Queendom. They read fortunes in the stars. They are impossible to ambush, on land or at sea, and through trade they have amassed great riches. They can see your movements and intents reflected in the night sky.”

“Astrology?” I scoffed. “Fortunes are best left in cookies where they belong.”

“Mock them at your peril, little brother. But they have swept greater foes than you aside as you might brush dirt from your tunic.” He pursed his lips. “Greater foes than I, as well. Numbers amount to naught, for they count them. Planning counts for not, for they see them. There is only one thing that blinds their eyes and one place they dare not tread.”

“What’s that?” I asked, admittedly now a little worried. On Earth, Astrology was junk mysticism. But I had to lend credence to the idea that maybe in this world, it might be a job that came with serious skills of tactical and strategic benefit. I’d been bitten by underestimating Rava’s version of Earth analogues before, and I needed more information about everything outside of my local sphere.

Sourtooth pointed up at the moon, nearing its eclipse. “Raphina shadows this land from the stars. It is the one place the queen is blind.”

Chapter 100 - Canyon Model

<Your tribe has increased to 583 members>

The number of goblins we’d amassed in the convoy of gear-headed speed freaks had grown noticeably. Even though we’d added new vehicles, the fact that the convoy was self-sustaining in terms of food meant that the spawning penalties had been rescinded—at least for the time being. One extra benefit I found from the spawning submenu was that I could restrict new goblin births if I so needed, to maintain the tribe at a certain level with only enough growth to account for daily attrition—which had been markedly higher after inventing multi-stage missiles and internal combustion engines.

Our fleet was now over 20 strong, with each new replacement vehicle hauling bladders of fuel pumped from the swamps of Huntsville and framed from the steel refined from its iron. And that figure was after accounting for the bi-plane that was attacked by a four-winged bird and the bike that was taken by a dire trapdoor spider creature while we were setting up camp for the night—taking 6 goblins with it.

But having split the fleet into a mix of ground vehicles and choppers made it slow going as the buggies struggled to haul their heavy loads across the badlands. Our rival teams kept pace easily and kept a safe distance whenever we camped for the night. Spirits in the tribe were high, but Sourtooth kept mostly to himself the closer we got to the beast’s lair. The terrain grew rockier and more mountainous, turning into sharp stone and pink gravel that crunched underfoot.

At a maintenance stop, a glint caught my eye, and I reached down and picked up a piece of the gravel, turning it in the sun. It shined with a greyish luster in a couple spots, and I held it up to my eye. I could see metallic flecks in it. Some sort of surface ore. Worth collecting later, maybe. For now, we were on a time crunch to make sure we hit that horn job before Lura tracked down her own quarry. I returned to the convoy, where the igni were overseeing the unloading and reassembly of the new aircraft.

When I say aircraft, I mean it in the barest sense of the word. Helicopters are aerodynamic freaks of nature, flying primarily by rattling and shaking so hard that the ground rejects them. In fact, I wouldn’t even have to dumb them down or make them more dangerous for them to fit in the Goblin Tech Tree. If a Blackhawk had followed me to Rava, it would have immediately triggered a GTT unlock prompt.

Still, it was another step toward the terminus of orbital space travel and landing a spacecraft on the surface of Raphina, whose watchful eye hung fat and heavy in the sky above. It must have been getting close to summer on this continent as well, because the days were getting hot and I was grateful for the shade that offered brief reprieve from the rays baking the dusty hardpack. I’d been to the salt flats in the summer to watch races and a rocket test fire, but I hadn’t been blue and furry at the time. It wasn’t quite to the point where I considered the limited coverage favored by the Shafts and Motors club. But it wasn’t far off, either.

Clutching the gravel in my tiny fist, I stashed it in a pack I kept on the back of the buggy and then helped Promo get one of the choppers sorted. None of them had a standardized layout—having been cobbled from disparate parts meant they had unusual setups in terms of number or rotor blades, tail configurations, and payloads. Each one would fly completely differently from the next, so the canoneers had their work cut out for them trying to canonize them. Hell, it’d be a miracle if the pilots didn’t crash them on takeoff, even with the Ifrit smoothing out controls and flight. So far, we’d only tested them with tethers, and never multiple together. It was time to change that.

“Fuel ‘em up!” I called. “We’re going on a dry run.” The tribe cheered and ran to the back of the new and improved Big Hoss Rig for bladders of kerosene to power the choppers. The wranglers, meanwhile, were fighting with the goblins possessing abnormally high mechanical aptitude for who would get to be at the controls, and it somehow managed to work out that every wrangler pilot seemed to be squeezed into a craft built for a nonvariant, while each of Eileen’s air deliverymen were stuck between reaching the foot pedals and the flight stick (called a ‘cyclic’ on helicopters).

As for me, I had my vehicle already marked out, and Armstrong was already in the gunner’s station waiting for me.

“Ready, boss!” he said, offering a salute. His skull mask had been painted with ash-grey streaks—matching the grey and white of the Flock’s colors. I climbed into the pilot’s station above and behind Armstrong while a half-dozen other goblins clambered onto the various stations, or just kind of held onto the bare-bones frame. Even with them aboard, the heaviest weight by far was the engines and fuel bladders. But around the engine, I could see Girmaks’ pale, blue shimmer. I dropped a charge in the engine compartment and started it up.

The engine roared to life, and I cranked the clutch belt to engage the main rotor as it warmed up. Overhead, the coaxial blades started to turn, but I kept the pitch flat while the rest of the fleet got their vehicles up and running. In total, we had eight choppers of various sizes. Three of them didn’t have controls at all, being controlled entirely via Ifrit while the goblins aboard were simply along for the ride.

The thing about helicopters is that they’re loud. You not only have the engine noise, but the noise of the main rotors and tail rotors cutting through the air essentially gives you sound at three different frequencies that drowns out nearly everything. Voice communication is nearly impossible over the racket, and goblin helicopter blades had none of the modern aerodynamic creature comforts that reduced the sound profile of Earth helicopters from deafening all the way to nearly deafening. Necessity being the mother of invention, and being a fantastic engineer with 2,500 hours in the cockpit, I had foreseen this—and built the tribe’s first electrical device: a simple sound-powered intercom.

A crucial first-step on the way to radios, I slipped a pair of leather ear-cups over my head and pulled a hand-set closer to my mouth.

“Check, check,”

Inside the handset, my voice caused a diaphragm to vibrate, inducing a charge across a pair of lodestones connected to a wire in what amounted to the world’s dirtiest transducer, and the Goblin Tech Tree did the rest of the heavy lifting. In my ear cups, the process reversed, and the faint electrical signal repeated my own voice, sounding hollow and tinny—but understandable.

<Goblin technology unlocked: Zap-talkies>

<Goblin component technology unlocked: Tranduce’ems>

<Goblin component technology unlocked: wire-talkies>

<Goblin Component Technology Unlocked: Induced zaps>

“HEY BOSS IT WORKS!” shouted Armstrong. I pulled one of the ear cups away from my head as he shouted, wincing. The scrapper tossed me a grin and a thumbs up over his shoulder.

“NOT SO LOUD!” I yelled back. He flinched in his seat.

Tribe Apollo had the means to build one of these ever since Rufus’ second visit to the bluff, but they hadn’t ever been a priority, what with the tribe suffering crisis after crisis. Electrical devices had simply fallen to the wayside in favor of weapons and vehicles to hunt with. But now we were starting to unite the tribes of the region, work out a way to keep them fed, and we were going to need communication more reliable than glider messengers to get it. Sound-powered phones were a step on the road to AM radio—and the jump wasn’t as big as you might think. A power source, a modulator, an amplifier, an antenna, and a receiver to demodulate and reverse the process. But that would still take time and focus to develop the electrical components, so right now comms were limited to per-aircraft, while red-tinted smoke swirled from two flares at the back of our craft to let the other pilots know to follow our lead.

I twisted the throttle and checked the response on the anti-torque pedals before lifting the collective pitch control lever. The chopper started getting light on its wheels, and I tilted the cyclic control forward.

Our engines still weren’t amazing. Don’t get me wrong, it was amazing that they worked, at all. But they were heavy, being made primarily from cast iron, steel or ceramic, which meant a strength-to-weight ratio less than ideal for heavier-than-air flight. Combined with the inbuilt inefficiencies in the aerodynamics of helicopters, and we had a fleet of whales that struggled to get off the ground with a full belly. Luckily, helicopters become more efficient at around 15-20 knots. It’s where you stop getting recycled air killing your performance as vortexes form at the edges of your rotor disk. I pressed forward, letting our ground speed climb, and I felt the aircraft shudder as we passed through that boundary into clean, efficient air. I hauled back on the cyclic, and we lifted into the air to cheers and the loss of one goblin who got so excited she forgot she still had to hang on.

I craned my neck to see most of the rest of the fleet had gotten off the ground, with the exception of one aircraft that tilted too far back, sheering off its own tail in the process. I winced as the crew bailed out before the still-spinning main rotor could turn them into furry, blue clouds.

Flying the choppers was strange, being used to fixed wing aircraft as I was—and yet again, I felt the tell-tale pressure of System’s increased attention on me, as I often did when I was flying. I focused on maintaining the controls and checking the simple gauges I’d built to monitor the remaining fuel weight and rotor RPMs. It all seemed to be working as I climbed. The whole aircraft vibrated, but the feeling of peace that flying always gave me still settled into my core. Every problem I’ve ever had was on the ground—and lifting off left them all behind. I was part of the sky while I was in the cockpit.

I banked to the right, towards a formation of stone pillars that created a small channel. With the whistler licking its wounds in a canyon, rocky, tight terrain was going to be our battlefield. Dumping collective, I brought us low and then flared back. I lined up on a spindle formation down the center of the lane. Geological forces had conspired to give the formation an hourglass shape, heavy on top and bottom with a narrow bit in the middle.

“Armstrong, hit the skinny part.”

My scrapper lined up the two recoilless rifles built into the nose of the chopper and let ‘em rip. Acrid, smoky back-blast blew through the open cockpit, stinging my eyes. But through the haze, two small explosions burst against the pillar, near the narrow section. Around us, a half-dozen other sets of rifles fired, and contrails raced ahead. Some of them missed, but most of them hit. A handful of cheers came over the sound-powered headset from the goblins on board. I tilted us to the right and traversed us while endeavoring to keep the nose pointed at the spindle. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t used to flying sideways. But several goblins took the opportunity to fire rifles and pistols at it.

I straightened us back out and circled behind our target pillar, weaving through the forest of stone formations. The engine and the main rotor thumped, stressed by the hard maneuvers. I pulled the stick back and raised the collective to bring the chopper up and slow us before banking around for another pass.

I grabbed the sound-powered handset. “Tally ho!”

One of the goblins squawked and climbed down to the compartment underneath the cockpit. Once we were lined up, I cranked hard on a plunger built into the front dash, and I felt a mechanical clunk from underneath. The chopper got significantly lighter as our primary payload dropped away. I banked us and looked below, where a rocket had detached with a single goblin holding on. The rocket motor kicked on, and I swear I could hear the EEEEeeeee as it sped towards the spindle on a plume of dirty smoke. To my left and right, two other teams released their payloads as well, goblin guidance systems steering the rockets to the pillar.

Just before impact, three gliders unfurled and the goblins detached from their rockets, turning velocity into altitude as they caught the air and soared high above the choppers. They’d find their way back to the convoy, having completed their task. Below them, a trio of explosions kicked up a cloud of dust and smoke against the spindle. A thunderous CRACK echoed throughout the confines of the canyon.

Uh oh.

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Excavation blast’ems>