By the time dawn arrived and the lights of the apartment began to flicker to life, all we could hear were weak groans and hoarse mutterings. Chez had maintained his vigil throughout the night while I wallowed in disgust and shame. I had reached level five in poison. I slowly rose to my feet and turned to face the door. I could see just enough through the hole in the door to know what waited for us in the hallway, and the smell of rot and death had long since joined the blood, piss, and shit of the sty of an apartment we were hiding in. I took a few deep breaths and then opened the door.

Only half of the goblins were dead, and the living would be better off dead. Just like the intruder from last night, all their bodies were ashen and pale, their veins bulging and black, and thick, black blood leaked from every orifice. Their bodies were contorted in pain, and many of the dead had died screaming. The living were quiet, even as every muscle in their body was tensed, and they writhed in pain. Their hoarse, barely audible voices cried and begged. I was expecting all of that. I had seen the goblin that came through the door and heard their screams and pleas throughout the night. What I hadn’t expected were the children. They must have gathered their spawn for the feast because three little goblin children lay amongst their kin, and they had endured the same torture I had wrought upon the adults.

A healthy, fearful scream that was drastically different from the weak, tortured groans tore my eyes away from the dead and dying before me. Halfway down the hall, I saw an emaciated, mostly naked female goblin sink to her knees at the end of the hallway. She appeared to have escaped the poison. She might have been immune somehow, but looking at her thin and frail body, I found it far more likely she hadn’t been allowed to share in the feast.

At the moment, she wasn’t a threat, and I didn’t care to deal with her. It wouldn’t change what I had done, but I wasn’t going to finish off a weak, helpless female right now. Chez seemed to be just as disinterested in her as I was as he gazed upon our victims with a distant stare. He approached the first of our surviving victims, slowly lifted his spear, carefully placed it above the dying beast’s heart, and then ended its suffering.

Shame that I hadn’t acted sooner drove me to action. These beasts were suffering, and it was my responsibility to end it. I couldn’t sit idle and force that responsibility onto Chez like I had guard duty last night. I used my hunting knife, as it was far sharper than a wooden spear and hopefully less painful. I drove it deep into their chests, but to my shame, I missed the hearts of two of them. The blue window that appeared felt mocking rather than congratulatory.

~Ding

Skill Improved: Critical Strike Critical Strike has reached level 8

My task was done, and the hall fell eerily silent. I had listened to screams and moans for so many hours that silence felt disturbingly unnatural. My mind shifted to what I had to do next to avoid lingering on what I had done. The bodies had to be removed, or else this floor would become uninhabitable, and the sooner I did it, the better. The big issue was, what the hell was I supposed to do with them?

The thought of subjecting the monster in the stairwell to the same agony as the goblins made my stomach turn, but I didn’t really have any other options. The solar glass windows didn’t open, and the windows on the other sides were designed to match. They didn’t open either. While I had designated one stairwell for corpses and one for trash, the beast would just break into the other one if I started dropping bodies down the trash side.

It should have been an easy decision to abandon this floor to plague and rot rather than poison yet another living creature, but it wasn’t that simple. If I was just going to seal up this floor and never return, then why did I fight and kill all these goblins? I knew the answer was that I couldn’t risk being caught in the stairwell without a safe floor to retreat to nearby, but it seemed like I was wasting their deaths if I just left it all to rot. More than that, as much as I had come to see the monster in the depths as a pet, it was living on the ground floor, in the lobby. As long as it was alive, I could never leave. I had no illusions that it would remember me fondly enough to spare me just because I fed it.

I felt sick, with the haunting memory of last night fresh in my mind, but I was going to feed the poisoned goblins to the monster. I felt that I couldn’t ask anything more of Chez right now, so I would have to harvest the shards myself. As I hefted my pipe wrench to shatter the ribs of the corpse in front of me, I heard footsteps quickly approaching from behind me.

I leaped to my feet and brandished the pipe wrench, eliciting a scream from the female goblin who was slowly walking towards me. Her arms were stretched towards me, empty palms facing up. She was shaking slightly from what I assumed was terror, and her eyes were wide with tears streaming down her face. She wasn’t as blatantly submissive as Chez had been, but she seemed to be attempting to show she had no ill intent.

Any other day, I might have been delighted to find another goblin that desired peace, but I just didn’t have it in me right now. I would leave her be and try to ignore her. She was unarmed. If she attacked, I would put her out of her misery. She stopped just a few feet away from me and started speaking in the incomprehensible language of grunts and growls that goblins used. I had absolutely no idea what this goblin wanted from me. I only knew that she was hysterical. Her eyes were wild, and tears streamed down her face, but she was determined and soon resorted to pleading and begging when I continued to stare at her with indifference.

I hadn’t even begun to process Chez slaughtering a bunch of young goblins, and it was a raw reminder of the barbarity of even the most civilized goblin I had met. I doubted she would be any different. I wanted nothing to do with this goblin.

Her wailing returned at my continued indifference to her plight. She sank to the floor, defeated, and started sobbing.

I hadn’t slept last night, and while I usually could stay up for days, I was mentally drained from the stress, fear, and screaming. I was standing in a hallway full of creepy, contorted corpses oozing black blood, and now I had a half-naked female goblin having a mental breakdown right in front of me. I was too far past my limit. I really didnt want to deal with this right now, but i didn't see much of a choice.

“Chez!” I yelled and then struggled to think of anything I had taught him that could even apply to this situation. “Chez, take!” I finally tried, gesturing wildly at the goblin in front of me.

Chez tilted his head, pointed at the female, and then himself, and said, “Chez?” in a questioning, but strangely hopeful, voice.

I stuck out my chin and only hoped he would get rid of her. I just needed her gone. Chez took her by the hand and dragged her through a goblin hole into one of the rooms. I turned away and hefted my pipe wrench to start harvesting shards. I just needed to power through, clean this up, and crawl into a bed with what was left of that bucket of ice cream.

A single blow was all it took to break the ribs off the sternum. Then all I had to do was slice through the breakage, carve out the ribs I wanted to remove as if I was serving beef ribs at a barbeque, and pry it open. The heart was easy to find, though it was discolored and sickly, just like the outside of the poisoned corpse. It seemed far too easy. Chez usually had to fight and hack away at the corpses, but he was weaker and might not understand the easiest way to carve them open. It took a minute of slicing and probing the heart before I found the shard, and I placed them in a bowl I had brought from the kitchen.

Goblins were very fragile creatures, despite their vicious nature. After the first one, the rest came easily, though the butcher’s work turned my stomach.

Chez returned sometime later with the female goblin in tow, much to my chagrin. He seemed happier and less traumatized. Now that he had recovered, I wanted to have him take over the harvesting, but I couldn’t trust him not to eat the hearts or lick his hands. I was fairly confident that the poison was harmless on bare skin, given that I had rubbed it into the post-mortem wounds last night, but snacks were definitely out of the question. I had Chez sit in a corner of the hall to leave him as far away from temptation as he could be while still being in sight and got to work.

There were twenty-one in total. I had spent twenty-five to gain twenty-one. Numbers-wise, it was a loss, but in hindsight, I had used too much. Of the partially-eaten corpses, none was more than half-eaten, and most were only nibbled on. If I had to guess, they had feasted on the first few I killed that they pulled back through the door, and then when I had dumped the five poisoned ones through, they had feasted on the “tastier parts.” I could probably have only used two corpses and gotten the same effect.

I started hauling the poisoned corpses to the stairwell, and Chez eventually helped after staring worriedly at the sickly, unnatural bodies for a few minutes. Once Chez started helping, he barked something to the female, and she began dragging corpses too. I sighed in defeat. It looked like Chez’s new girlfriend was here to stay.