The Second and Third Priorities: Water and Food were pretty much handled. Just eat tree bark. Tasted like the devil’s own backside, but it’d do. You could even get the water you needed if you knew the different layers well enough. The bit just beneath the bark was actually quite moist, and more than enough to meet my basic needs. I’d already tried the hunting option, and it’d worked, but if it kept working out the same way I’d have inch deep claw wounds all across my body by this time next week. I needed time to heal and get my feet back under me before I tried anything risky, and that meant playing things safe.

More important were the humans. They wanted to harvest me after I’d grown, but I doubt killing a single bird would be enough. If I couldn’t afford to delve deep enough to hide, then I couldn’t afford to grow enough to be worth killing, so it was tree bark for the foreseeable future.

First Priority: Not Getting Murdered. Now this, this was a doozy and included most of the long term stuff. Getting food was hard enough, but it was something I’d been doing since I’d been weaned. Surviving vindictive adventurers was a whole nother matter, and necessitated a multi-step subplan.

First: Heal. Simple time and rest would handle that, so long as I built a good nest to shield me from predators. Plenty of good materials for it, what with all the thorns lying about the place.

Second: Weapons. Better gear would enable my survival in the depths, and crafting was one of the few productive things I could do that wouldn’t fuck up my wounds and limit my recovery, so that could overlap with the healing. I wouldn’t get anything particularly impressive from it, but a few days’ work was better than a few minutes’.

Third: Delving. The most dangerous step of the plan, and what the rest of it was centered around planning for. Head down and evade the humans long enough to gain the experience I needed to escape for good. They’d outright admitted the possibility of gaining greater strength than them, but while the priest may have intended his comment to goad me into serving their purposes, but I had no intention of playing along.

I’d hide in the dungeon until the damn geezer died of old age if I had to. When a goblin dedicates themselves to cowardice we don’t fuck around. Any fool could find somewhere safe to wait out the heat, but it took real dedication to do it in the most dangerous place for five hundred miles in any direction.

There were a variety of options for holing up, and why yes, I did consider myself an expert on the matter. I, like my erstwhile fellows, typically preferred a literal hole. But with the only actual dirt up here held in a precarious position clutched by roots and branches, that wasn’t an option. Tunneling down could drop me a hundred feet down with no notice, so I’d be going upwards instead.

I picked out the position for my nest carefully, finding a location with plenty of thorns. Which was every location. Still, this one had a nice little nook to serve as the beginning of a floor. Once I worked my way up there I stowed my weapons (i.e. pointy sticks) by jamming them in a branch fork and began the long and arduous task of weaving the more flexible branches around my hidey hole.

Needless to say, I had added plenty of new injuries to my collection by the end of the day, but most of them were little scratches. In exchange for a safe shelter, not a bad trade. Wish I could say that about all my injuries, but nobody was perfect.

The shelter was pretty damn close though. I’d woven a dense net of brambles, blocking off all sight from the outside, and any entrance from anything larger than a thimble. The inside was nice and cozy, with all the thorns carefully stripped off and set off to the side in a neat little pile. It’d been harder than I’d thought, the little prickers were hard as iron towards the tips, but I’d figured it out. They became softer at the base, as that was the part that was still growing, which enabled a clever fellow to put them towards his own uses.

Which I’d be happy to do…..tomorrow. I stretched out and yawned before curling up into a tight ball on the opposite side of my nest from the pile of thorns. I drifted off, dreaming of better days, and better pies.

Mmmmm, pies.

I woke up bright and early, excited to begin my day of making lethal weaponry. First I sorted the thorns. Riveting, I know, but the first step to success is resource assessment. I swear I’d been an accountant in a past life. At least these were more interesting than diversified investments, and no less likely to save your ass.

I took the straightest ones to my javelins, re-pointing them with the harder and shaper thorns. There were all manner of ways to get a good spear head, but most were beyond my means. The supernaturally durable material of mana-fed thorns wasn’t a bad option though, and I’d be using it for more than just spear points.

I took the rest and set them aside, they’d serve me well later. For now I focused on the club, slowly stripping it down from a unwieldy club to a flat bar of hefty hardwood. I swished the weapon through the air and nodded in satisfaction at the results. The weapon had less mass, but was both easier to control and focused its force onto a bone breaking narrow edge.

Of course, I wasn’t done yet. I took the hardest and sharpest of my thorns to the wood, carving a thin groove along the edge. From there it was a simple matter to wedge in the rest of my thorns and bind them tight with thin strips of bark cut from the trees around me. My grin only widened as I admired the vicious edge. Good, good.

I indulged myself in a nice cackle.

By the time I was done night had fallen, and I let myself drift off to sleep.

The next day was just as busy crafting far less violent, but no less essential items. Namely, what I’d need to carry all my crap around. Bark wasn’t the best crafting material, but it wasn’t the best food either, and it’s not like that was stopping me.

Of course, some types were actually quite nutritious, and others great for all of things, but I didn’t recognize any of the species here, so I was essentially just putting random junk in my body and letting my stats sort it out. Still a step ahead of putting random junk in my body and relying on luck to save, so I was moving up in the world.

And, of course, I knew the trick to it by now. There are three layers to tree bark you see, and they were not all born equal. The first is what everyone knows, the protective barrier, and I wouldn’t recommend eating it, whatever your stats. I striped this off in large sheets and set it aside. This wasn’t a type with the crumbly bark, so I’d be able to use it later. If the bark can maintain its form without the tree then you can use it for clothing, rope, all sorts of shit. As a generally rule, if you can make something out of cloth you can make a shittier version from bark. In other words, the kind of product we goblins used a lot.

The second and the third were where it was at. Pine and white birch could sustain you all winter, and this stuff didn’t look all that different. I peeled off a strip and threw it, immediately gagging as the one-two punch of taste and texture hit me.

Aw yeah, that was the stuff. Like a handful of moist sawdust. I choked it down. I didn’t have the time to be picky, I had shit to do. Shit like slowly choking down several pounds of tree bark.

The temptation to resort to hunting for some real flavor, but I managed to resist, if only barely, by simply gorging on bark till the very idea of eating anything made me want to throw it back up again. Soon the area around my little hideout was bore the telltale scars of my presence, whole trunks stripped of bark from twenty feet up down to the ‘ground’.

When I wasn’t occupied with my own personal deforestation efforts I kept myself busy running a one man production line. Hardly as efficient alone, but I didn’t have to deal with anyone else and I got to keep what I made, so it more than evened out in my book.

The healing was coming along better than expected too. Taking wounds was plenty familiar, and that gave me a good chance to take a good look and examine the differences. Stuff like speed and toughness weren’t always easy to measure, but the healing was more tangible, easier to see.

And what I was seeing was quite impressive. I’d been seriously injured just a week ago, and I was already pretty much entirely recovered. It wasn’t the supernatural regeneration of a troll, but even the mundane healing common to all living things was cranked up to eleven by my stats. Constitution and Metabolism overlapped, ensuring the nutrients I took in would be converted into new tissue incredibly quickly.

Still, fast or not, the days stretched on. The slow progress of crafting was satisfying in its own way, but there was only so much honest work a body could tolerate. With nothing else to occupy my time, I focused inward.

No, not in a meditative self-actualization way. More of a greedy, hungry for power kind of way, although come to think of it, that was technically self-actualization, wasn’t it?

So yeah, as I was saying, I meditated in the pursuit of enlightenment. The kind of enlightenment that gave me kickass superpowers.

I was no expert on magic, not even the relatively simple magic you could actually reliably find among goblins, but I did know the basics. The easiest and most commonly seen manner of learning it was to have someone else teach you, just like with any other skill really, but magic had a critical first step that basket-weaving didn’t: the Awakening.

Awakenings had all kind of cultural bullshit built up around them, but they were pretty basic at their core. All it took was a pre-existing caster channelling some manner of power through you. From then on you had a starting point for practicing that kind of magic yourself.

And, to that end, I closed my eyes, safe in my cocoon of thorns, and remembered the most painful night of my life. The writhing agony of celestial might bearing down on my soul, the divine guillotine coming down to cut my very essence apart.

I took a deep breath, centered myself, and sought out that awareness. The extreme pain of reforming my soul might have been unpleasant, but it was also exactly what I needed to bring the normally intangible soul to my conscious awareness.

And by focussing on that memory I brought it to my conscious awareness once more. It started out subtle, barely discernible, a little tickle at the back of my brain, but it grew with time. I could feel it with every beat of my heart, and the stars dancing in the blackness behind my eyelids swirled in abstract patterns before slowly forming into a coherent shape.

The shape of my soul.

The core of my self blazed with magical power, but that wasn’t exactly surprising. What was more interesting was the structure of the thing, particularly because that was how this whole thing was supposed to work.

Not that the mysterious animating force of all life wasn’t interesting mind you. It was fairly fascinating, and not at all what I’d expected. The soul itself was suffused with energy, like a sponge held water, and held within a scaffold of divine power. I presumed that’s what it was anyway, cause it certainly didn’t look anything like the rest of it. It wasn’t porous, and contained the natural energy generated by the soul rather than absorbing it or letting it through.

It wasn’t entirely self-contained, there was a certain allowance for connection, but it wasn’t free-flowing. There were seven gates that let energy flow forth in an organized fashion, the difference between a river delta and a carefully cultivated system of canals.

I followed one of the flows, just to double check, and sure enough, I found it terminating in my physical body. I felt a sense of durability, of Toughness as it reinforced every cell with an unyielding will. The other six then, would be my other stats.

I gave the rest of my soul a quick once over, but found nothing revolutionary, just a few neat tidbits. The soul scaffold was essentially square in shape, but, much like a real scaffold, there were bits of structure reaching upwards, preparation for future growth. My actual soulstuff didn’t extend up there, but I assumed that’s where my soul would expand once I got down to gaining strength.

I also noticed that not all of my stats were equal, some took more energy than others. I was already getting antsy with how long I was blinding myself to the world around me, so I didn’t go into too much detail, but I did look enough to get an idea of their relative power levels. Toughness was the weakest, Senses the strongest.

After returning my awareness to the physical world I was happy to find myself not dead, or even maimed, which was nice. Still, I resolved to wait to do it again, it made me quite vulnerable, and there was no sense staring at the same thing. I’d check it again after I’d killed something and there might be something new to see.

I continued on in my mundane tasks and was nearly ready to leave for the depths when my brief facade of routine was disrupted. When I emerged from my nest of thorns I found an unwelcome face surveying my various endeavors with an expression caught in a funny zone somewhere between bemusement and disdain.

My veins flooded with adrenaline, my heart going from zero to full in a second flat. How hadn’t I known!? My ears flicked forwards to focus on him, but I couldn’t hear him. Nothing, not even a heartbe- no, scratch that, I could hear the slightest rhythm, but I’d have thought it belonged to a mouse rather than a human if it wasn’t centered directly in the adventurer’s chest.

When he turned to me the look beneath his stupid cloak shifted from its strange blend of emotions to something far more familiar: hate. “You.”

He wasn’t supposed to be here! The humans were supposed to be a vague threat, abstract doom looming over my head, only to descend when I tipped the balance and achieved enough power to be worth taking. But that was no longer the case, and I had more important questions than why he might be here early.

Could I take him? No, he was too fast to dodge reliably, and there was no way in a dozen hells that I was gonna take any of what he could dish out. Could I evade him? No, that was barely better than fighting. He was damn fast, and he’d demonstrated enough skill at three-dimensional movement that I doubted my ability to stay ahead for long. There was an outside chance his stupid cloak might catch on some thorns and slow him, but those weren’t good odds. Could I play him?

Maybe.

“Me!” I gave him a broad grin and threw my arms wide open....just far enough to put my hand nice and close to where I’d left my thorn-bladed club. “To what do I owe the honor?” I said with all the cheer I could muster.

The adventurer, Garrett I think the old priest had called him, just shook his head as he stepped forwards. “I should have known an animal like you would have no drive to excel, no will to conquer.”

Well, wasn’t that insulting. I loved excelling at shit. The drive to conquer bit though… the insinuation that he considered that admirable merited a ball punching.

I chuckled amiably. “Oh, silly ol me, not showing proper respect to a guest. Please, can I get you anything? A drink perhaps?”

Garrett blinked. “Eh?”

I nodded knowingly. “Yes, I’m afraid you won’t find my selection all that impressive.” I strolled past him, casual as could be, every ounce of panic at passing so close to him, unarmed no less, bottled up inside, where it couldn’t break the ruse.

I kept my ears on Garrett, of course. No sense being stupid. If a human wanted to assume my eyes indicated where my attention truly lay, then that was their mistake. Thankfully, I didn’t pick up any aggression, even though it wasn’t hard to tell he was no more comfortable than I was.

“So what brings you to my humble abode?” I asked as I reached the bent up leaf I’d laboriously retrieved from the canopy above to store water in. I scooped out a nice leaful with my smaller drinking leaf and walked over to over it to Garrett.

“Leaf of tree juice? No? Your loss.” I sipped at the tree juice when Garrett’s expression made it clear he’d rather drink his own piss. I’d already closed the distance.

“What the hell are you doing?” The adventurer might have wanted to sound intimidating, but he just sounded confused at this point. Perfect.

“Why living my life good sir! What are you doing?” It’d be nice to know. It wasn’t exactly standard operating procedure to engage goblins in conversation, and I’d be disappointed if it was something as simple as loving the sound of his own voice.

“You’re supposed to be struggling! Fighting, killing! Not sitting around and happily eating tree bark.”

Ah. That made a degree of sense. I’d assumed that they were relying solely on magical tracking, but I’d allowed the bumbling nature of humanity to overshadow Garrett’s impressive stealth. I pushed back a slight shiver as I realized that he could have been watching me at any point in the last week. Or even all of it, if he could go without sleep that long.

I took advantage of his ranting to punch him straight in the balls. Tragically, I couldn’t stick around to admire the look on his face. The best I could manage was flicking my ears backwards and catching his pained gasp. Heh.

I snatched up my club and a prepared bundle of javelins on my way out. Any good paranoiac had a bug-out bag, and I was no exception, even if I couldn’t afford an actual bag to keep it in. The weapons were the only essential that I didn’t keep tied to my body at all times, and that was only because I knew I’d stab myself if I did.

The adventurer wandering in to camp was unfortunate, but ultimately not an issue. I was already about as prepared as I was gonna get, and if they wanted me to hurl myself into danger, well, they shoulda been careful what they asked for.

I moved as fast as I could, weaving through the branches and thorns at a breakneck pace. My ears scanned for sound, but it was no use. Garrett’s unnaturally quiet heartbeat was already lost beneath the echo of my footfalls.

That immediately sent a spike of nervousness through me. Having a dangerous foe right behind you was bad enough, losing track of them was far worse. They could turn up right in front of you.

My ears swiveled forward and my eyes shot wide open….finding nothing but open air and trees. Huh. I guess I wasn’t that unlucky. Just thinking of someone wouldn’t make them app-

The sound of splintering bark and shattered wood exploded from my right. I grabbed a branch and pivoted around it, gritting my teeth and dealing with the pain as the thorns sawed into my fingers.

Garrett, propelled by the explosive power of his legs, sailed past me as I went right. I did my best to put more distance between us, but the second Garrett hit a tree he slammed his feet into it and reversed his direction. The hardwood cracked with the impact, but Garrett’s legs seemed just fine as they surged forward and propelled him forwards again.

Damn, but he was fast. But I didn’t have to stay ahead of him for long. In the darkness beneath he wouldn’t be the one with the advantage anymore. I wove through the woods, taking advantage of my smaller size to keep out of reach. Garrett could move as fast as he wanted, it would still be a result of brute force, not finesse. His reaction speed wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anywhere near as fast as his movement.

His great leaps propelled him in straight lines, but he couldn’t change course mid flight. I darted through thickets of thorns, changed directions on a dime, and wove my thin frame through impossibly narrow gaps, keeping just ahead of Garrett’s knives.

I’d gone over my return to the depths in my head a dozen different times, iterating on my plans and searching for the optimal path, but in the end I returned to the innocuous looking hole in the woods in much the same way I’d first discovered it: mere feet from instant death and diving headfirst into the abyss.

But this time I had the benefit of experience. I hooked a rope on the edge as I passed it, letting it trail out behind me as I plummeted down. The tree trunk blurred past my face at breakneck speeds for half a second before I kicked off and swung outward.

I clutched the tough bark fiber rope as my entire weight jerked it taut and the roots above creaked and bent, but my rope held firm in my grip. The makeshift construction probably would have broken under the weight of a human, but I was no human.

The wind of my passage overwhelmed whatever small sounds Garrett might be making, but I didn’t have to be able to hear him if I already knew what he was going to do, and I had more immediate concerns. I was in the open air for the moment, but I was boxed in on all sides. Above me was the matted floor of roots, beneath me lurked a deeper, darker, more dangerous layer of the jungle, and on every side loomed the titanic trees that connected the two.

I twisted myself as I neared the apex of my swing, steering towards the nearest pillar tree. Any second now…

The rope jerked in my hands again, the taut line going slack as it was hacked apart far above. With no rope to drag me back my flight continued forwards and I spread all four limbs wide to maximise drag. Drag or no, I hit the tree with enough force to break a dozen human bones, but I was made of sterner stuff.

Or, more relevantly, lighter stuff. I hit with my limbs first and absorbed the shock smoothly. My smaller body just didn’t have the mass or momentum to override my supernatural Toughness enough to cause serious harm.

Hurt like a son of a bitch, yes, serious harm, no.

I latched onto the bramble encrusted trunk like a fly on a wall and glanced back up for some sign of the human adventurer even as my ears scanned in the opposite direction for more monstrous threats.

From this distance the hole I’d dived in from was no more than a larger than normal shard of light in the fabric of the sky, and Garrett’s passage through it no more than half a second of shadow fliting over it. Stealthy he might be, but half of stealth was knowing not to be where others were looking, making choke points as damaging to stealth as they were to assaults.

As for the monsters… well, I had no choke point to aid me there. Far from it, there could be any number of them in any direction, and from what I heard there certainly were. Dim echoes of distant sounds reached my ears, but nothing stood out as distinct from everything else. There were plenty of critters down here, but it didn’t sound like any were close enough to be an immediate threat.

I pulled in the rope, yanking it up hand over hand until I reached the severed end. The cut was smooth as silk all the way through, rather than ending in a tear halfway as you might expect when cutting a rope under tension. Garrett’s blades would have to be incredibly sharp.

I set aside the issue of his weaponry for the moment and scrambled diagonally down the side of the tree. I’d made some distance, now I needed to break his sightline so I could keep it. As soon as I’d put the trunk between me and Garrett I tied off the rope and kicked off the trunk, repelling downwards.

I didn’t care how fast he was, his inferior preparation would keep him from beating me to the lower depths without learning to fucking fly. Which, come to think of it, I was only mostly sure he couldn’t do. I let myself fall farther with each jump, the rope sawing at my skin as it ran between my fingers.

I ran out of rope and, after a quick glance down, let myself plummet the last twenty feet down. Falls weren’t nearly as dangerous without the massive weight of a human driving you downwards, something many a goblin had used to their advantage while scampering over the rooftops and stealing humans blind.

I hit the ground running, or hit the trees climbing rather. I’d made too much noise coming down, and I couldn’t afford to attract undue attention. If I was going to live long down here I was going to do it as a goblin, not a human. No picking fights. For all his talk of excelling and conquering adventurers like Garrett ended up dead more often than not. I had no interest in joining them.

This layer of the dungeon wasn’t completely different from the first. Honestly, it was kinda surprising to see such a large gap between them, but who was I to question nature? Maybe it was some magic bullshit, the mana certainly seemed denser down here.

My skin crawled, a foreign tendril worming its way through my mind like a eel beneath the sea, and I’m talking one of those freaky electric ones here.

I froze, ears scanning across every dimension, searching for some sign of an enemy I could evade or kill. Nothing. Fuck. Of course a telepathic attacker would take pains to make no sound, and I wasn’t about to locate them by sight. With the state my eyes were in I was lucky I’d been able to find the tree in this light, let alone anything that was actually trying to hide. I swear, if the venom damage to my eyes was any worse my vision would be downright human.

Except I could see, increasingly well as the shadows stretched further and further. Shit. I turned, dreading what I was about to see, but already knowing I couldn’t afford to not confirm it.

From halfway down one of the titanic trees a light shone out into the darkness, held aloft by a dim silhouette of a man. But hell, it wasn’t like I needed to see him to know who it was.

Garrett.

I did what any good goblin would do when confronted with an adventurer waving around an unknown magical artifact. I turned and ran. The intrusion deepened, spreading like a wave of spilt oil over clean water. I gritted my teeth in impotent fury, accomplishing little more than cutting the edges of my mouth on the thorn-bladed club I was carrying in my mouth.

I went deeper, diving from the top of the canopy into the bramble, where thorns loomed on every side and any number of enemies could be hidden. Still, better them than Garrett. Whatever curse he was laying on me, I wanted no part of it. My only hope was going deeper, where the mana was thickest. I doubted that a curse would be as sensitive as a divination, but every little bit helped.

The foreign touch on my mind spread out, encircling my brain and cutting me off from the outside world. Everything around me dimmed in a way I couldn’t fully understand, losing what little color it had. Strange how you could not notice something until you lost it, but the second I was cut off from the subconscious magical awareness all beings possessed I felt my skin crawled.

I lashed out against the malevolent magic reflexively and broke through the spell’s edge. I took a deep breath, revelling in a feeling of freedom just as real as breaking the surface of the sea and taking in a lungful of fresh air. But that relief was short lived, as the magic slammed back around me and locked down, securing its grip.

NO. I would not be a slave again.

I slammed my will into the spell again, barely reaching through to connect myself to the outside world again. Thank bloody fuck. The spell attempted to cut me off again, but I latched onto the mana of the outside world and held on like my life depended on it.

The foreign mana around me flared and the world vanished into an all-consuming light.