Chapter 25

It got easier to navigate the tunnels when Luke started thinking of them as streets and giving them names, though easier was a relative term. So much of it looked alike that it was by no means simple to determine where he was at, but after half an hour spent wandering around, he thought he had a pretty decent mental map of the place.

What he didn’t have was a pile of notifications about all the goblins he’d killed, mostly because he was having problems finding any goblins. The only things he’d found were abandoned chambers and more boobytraps. They were a lot easier to spot when he wasn’t charging a firing squad, and he’d still missed one. [Twitch Reflexes] saved his ass there, and Luke considered that it might be time to push it up another rank with his next level.

His explorations eventually saw him walking into a big cavern, probably four of five hundred feet across and with a ceiling twenty feet overhead. Wary of a trap, Luke scanned the outer edges for anything waiting to ambush him. There was no movement, and he cautiously stepped into it. It was nice to be able to stand up straight for the first time since he’d started his spelunking mission.

The cavern had two balconies ringing it, a feature that he kept a close eye on since he couldn’t tell if any goblins were crouched there. There was enough room for a hundred of them to be hiding up out of sight, but it was an easy thing to confirm. He flexed his legs and jumped the eight feet he needed to reach the first balcony. From his new vantage point, he could see that it was empty.

The second balcony was directly overhead and required a bit of acrobatics to reach, but Luke was so strong now that reaching up to grab the edge and doing a one-armed pull up to haul his body up wasn’t any harder than taking the stairs. That balcony was empty too. He walked its length, noted that every twenty or thirty feet there was another room carved out of the stone, and that like everywhere else, it was empty.

Luke lapped the entire cavern twice, once on each balcony, before he returned to ground level. As always, there was plenty of evidence that the goblins had left in a hurry, but no sign of where they’d gone. It wasn’t until he got down to the ground floor that he finally saw something interesting. After yet another paranoid sweep of the area to confirm that nothing was liable to jump him while he was distracted, Luke returned to a spot on the wall.

In front of him was a metal door, remarkable both for being a huge chunk of metal and for being the only door he’d come across the entire time he was underground. Not only was it metal, but the stone around it had been carved square to accommodate it being there. That was entirely unique. The few barricades Luke had run into had been patchy, ill-fitted things with plenty of gaps and holes around the edges.

There was no handle on it, no latch or keyhole. If not for the fact that he could see the hinges, he would have thought it was an iron panel stuck to the wall. He had no tool for punching through steel other than brute force, and he suspected it might be a lot more work than he was willing to go through to make that happen.

Fortunately, goblins weren’t good architects and didn’t understand why the hinges went on the inside. Luke rummaged through some of the abandoned chambers until he found a thin piece of metal, then used that to pop the pins off the hinges. The door didn’t exactly swing wide open, but it did fall out of place a little bit, enough for him to get his fingers around it and pull it out of the way.

Behind it was a tunnel and, for the first time, noise. It was maybe ten feet wide, but only six feet high. The ceiling hanging so low over his head was annoying, but better than being hunched over again. He made his way forward, mace in hand and eyes peeled for traps and ambushes.

Every time he found a new tunnel, he wondered if this was going to be the time the goblins jumped out and attacked him. Every time, he was disappointed, though sometimes there was a nice trap to liven things up. But there was something at the end of this one; he could hear it.

He followed the tunnel as it curved downward in a spiral until it eventually opened to a great room, almost as big as the cavern he’d come from. He’d come in near the top, and there was a sloping path that followed the curve of the room until it reached ground level. There were probably a hundred goblins there, but they didn’t look like the ones he’d been fighting. Most of them were under two feet in height and he doubted they weighed even thirty pounds. There were a few that were normal sized, but they all seemed to be in a daze and covered in… slime?

He wasn’t sure, but he thought he might have found a goblin nursery. For the first time since he’d been shoved into this world, Luke found himself with a moral quandary. Every single goblin he’d met had been a murderous little asshole, and he hadn’t any guilt about killing them. This wasn’t what he was expecting though, and now he wasn’t sure what to do.

While he stood there contemplating the ethical ramifications of turning to the dark side and the irony of his own name, one of the tiny goblins let out a shriek and started running in his direction. Immediately, a hundred faces turned in his direction. The adult goblins stared at him blankly, but the kids went berserk. A tide of two-foot terrors swarmed up the ramp leading to him.

Luke took an involuntary step back into the tunnel and spent a precious second trying to figure out what to do. At first glance, it looked like baby goblins were tiny little murder machines, even more vicious than their progenitors. Then the first one reached him and jumped a full five feet into the air, a feat of agility he’d only seen matched by one of the adults.

Almost reflexively, Luke swatted it with his mace. It bounced off the wall and rolled several times before coming to its feet. Fangs bared, it charged right back in. “What the fuck!” Luke yelped as he danced backwards to avoid its snapping jaws. Any normal goblin would have had its head splattered from either the mace or from the wall, but this one just bounced off both like a rubber ball and came right back at him.

He swung at it again, this time like he was wielding a golf club, and threw it back thirty or forty feet to splatter across the far wall. Except that, once again, it just bounced right off it and fell into the swarm below. He lost track of it as more of them reached him. With him backpedaling the whole way, he fended off their attacks.

Luke reached the main cavern again and twisted his way through the door. Four of the mini-goblins leaped through before he managed to shove it closed and drop one of the hinge pins back into place. He could hear the rest of them bouncing against the door as they charged it, a relentless staccato rhythm of blind rage.

There was no time to put the rest of the pins in, and Luke just hoped the door would hold while he dealt with the four that had followed him through. They were already coming for his back, but with room to fight, it was a lot easier to keep them at bay. It was like being up to bat, except the ball was two feet tall and trying to rip his throat out.

He found he had better luck with overhead strikes doing damage as long as he followed through and caught them between the ground and his weapon. If he gave them any room, the little fuckers just bounced away, completely unharmed. For the first time since he’d gotten the mace, he wished he had something with an edge on it.

It was easy enough to keep them at bay simply by swatting them across the room, but that was a losing strategy. He only had to miss once and he’d have a shark mouth of teeth latched onto him, and even if he didn’t ever miss, he would get tired eventually. Maybe they would too, but so far they weren’t showing any signs of slowing down.

Even the ones with the scrapes from where he’d managed to spike them straight into the ground were still going full tilt. Luke needed to change the game somehow, and the easiest way to do that was to change up his weapon. He leaped up to the balcony overhead and raced across its length, trying to find the room he’d seen that had a small table in it.

He spotted it about a third of the way round the circle and promptly smashed it with his mace. Shards of wood went flying everywhere, leaving him with several jagged wooden legs. Luke scooped them up and returned to the main area, where he found three of the mini-goblins had made their way up and were hot on his trail. Luke held the leg with the best point in front of him like a fencer and waited for the goblin to jump.

Then he angled the point in and let it impale itself on the impromptu stake. He’d been afraid it would just bounce off like it did against walls, but between its momentum and the smaller surface area, there was enough pressure to puncture the little bastard. It squealed in what he hoped was pain and deflated like a rubber ball full of gray-green pus.

“What the fuck?” Luke said as the monster turned into a goblin-shaped sac and the ground was covered in the watery liquid. A ding sounded off in his head, confirming to him that he’d gotten the kill.

He didn’t have time to check it before another mini-goblin reached him. Luke shook the flesh balloon off the jagged table leg and lined himself up for the next one. Predictably, it popped itself too. The third and fourth somehow arrived at the same time, which he handled by simply sidestepping them both and stabbing one from behind.

The damn table leg broke when it rammed into the stone though, and the other ones he had sadly weren’t nearly as sharp. Luke picked the best out of the lot and waited for the mini-goblin to circle back around again. When it leaped at him, he rammed it with the jagged edge and made sure to take it all the way to the wall so that it would be pinned there and the wood would puncture it.

Four dings meant four kills, and Luke was safe for the moment. He immediately opened his notifications to see what the hell those things were.

[You have slain Proto-Gobling (lvl 4). 16 XP awarded.]
[You have slain Proto-Gobling (lvl 4). 16 XP awarded.]
[You have slain Proto-Gobling (lvl 5). 25 XP awarded.]
[You have slain Proto-Gobling (lvl 4). 16 XP awarded.]

“System, what the hell is a proto-gobling?” Luke asked.

“The progenitor species that create goblin offspring. Goblins do not reproduce sexually or asexually. Instead, a proto-gobling will grow a goblin inside it, somewhat similar to the cancerous growths that humans die from. In this case, the growth, or goblin, is passed after roughly two months. As long as the proto-gobling has a ready source of food, it will continue to grow new goblins inside it and pass them indefinitely.”

“And… it’s not a goblin itself? Why not?”

“As you have seen, the species itself is very rubbery, not at all sapient, and knows no emotion except for hunger and rage. Proto-goblings will even eat the goblins that grow from them if they go long enough without food.”

“This is beyond fucked up,” Luke muttered. “And also not why I’m here. Where are the actual goblins that have been trying to kill me?”

As if on cue, six goblins appeared at the far end of the cavern. All of them had crossbows, and all of them were high level. Luke grinned and grabbed his mace in both hands.