I turned and ran. Not far obviously, but running was running, one way or another. I reached the farthest corner of the room in less than a second and heaved one of the ghoul corpses up and over myself before letting it fall again. The body was’t as heavy as I expected, hardly comfortable, but the weight of its gaunt frame weighed closer to a goblin than a human. At least I wouldn’t have to crush myself against the stones, but that was hardly the most unpleasant part. No, things were about to get a whole lot worse.

I took my stolen dagger and slit open its belly, shivering as I felt its cold and slimy entrails spill out over me. I slipped the weapon back beneath me, careful to keep it flat against the ground where it couldn’t stab me, and began slathering my body with black ichor. It smelled worse than a tannery built on a sewer, but that was the point. Even as the ichor burned my nostrils it fulfilled its true function, overwhelming the scent of blood from any scratches I might have.

I was safe. Ish. I activated the Skill. I think? I didn’t feel any different. After a few seconds of panicked fiddling I began to question my confidence. I had a Skill, I had felt my soul changing, how in the hells did I turn it on? Was it already on? Was it always on? How had Garrett activated his skills?

It was when the burning pain started that I realized my mistake. It was exactly the damn same as the pain back in the temple, when I’d first gained my Stats, and for the same damn reason. I’d set my soul energy to moving, but I hadn’t properly set it anything to do. My Skill was not yet fully formed. As for how to do finish it...

“[Beggar’s Disregard].” I whispered the name of the Skill and felt it settle over me like an old cloak, comfortable and familiar. Names were how we saw the world, how we categorized what we perceived. If you wanted to imbue something with meaning, you gave it a name.

The name completed the final step in granting the level the purpose I intended and finalizing the Skill. I could feel the power of my soul energy flowing through me and outwards, whispering in the minds of any and all. This isn't important. This doesn’t matter. Look somewhere else.

Well, that was a relief. Unfortunately I couldn’t be sure how well it was working, if it did I had what would likely be some pretty terrible muscle cramps to look forward too as I spent the foreseeable future pressed up against the ground, if it didn’t I wouldn’t know until the ghouls hauled me from my hiding place with bloody claws.

Not that different from normal hiding really. Kinda disappointing, but if it kept me alive I could deal with some disappointment. I could deal with boredom too, and I lay there patiently as the sounds of rending flesh and breaking bone gradually gave way to an awful silence. Garrett lasted far longer than I had thought he would, but it the end some things were inevitable. If you pitted your strength against the weight of the world there could only be one ending.

Garrett sure seemed determined to try though. I’d learned long ago that now matter how many you beat down there would always be more, but life seemed to have taught him a very different lesson.

When life gives you lemons, fuck the lemons. And then fuck life too. Garrett wasn’t going to back down just because life was against you, or because it was the smart thing to do. And he thought he wasn’t like goblins. At least goblins were smart.

Good at killing though. Stars, how was he still standing? I squirmed under my nice, safe pile of disgusting bodies to get a better look. I managed to finagle an angle, and what I saw wasn’t pleasant. No surprise there, the surprise lay in exactly what was so unpleasant.

Garrett had transformed into a bloody storm of blades and death. The entrance might no longer be plugged, hells, the entire wall could scarcely be said to exist anymore, but that didn’t seem to be slowing down Garrett any. The jagged brick edges stuck out like broken teeth and the fading alchemical light did little more than cast eerie green shadows writhing with unseen horrors.

Stars, that was a lot of ghouls. There was no avoiding them now, although I much preferred my method of hiding beneath dead ones to Garrett’s method of getting swarmed by a dozen living ones. Incredibly enough, that still wasn’t enough to put the bastard down. Their claws skated across his skin without catching and his retaliatory blows crushed skulls like overripe watermelons.

‘If I had something I’d use it’ my ass! The lying bastard had been keeping something up his sleeve the whole damn time. It’d be almost admirable if it weren’t such bullshit. I don’t know what magic item or Skill let him do this, but I was damn grateful that I got a chance to see it now. If I’d worked with him till the end he might have still had this shit in his back pocket when one of us finally decided to launch their sudden but inevitable betrayal.

I kept a keen eye on the fight, looking out for any potential weaknesses that might be exploitable. The obvious flaws in this combat were hardly anything I could use, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to take away. First of all, he wasn’t actually exhibiting any new abilities, just drastically enhancing what he already had, or maybe altering his body directly somehow. Either way it seemed to do little more than make him better at killing things, it certainly didn’t let him see any better in the fading glow of his alchemical light.

I, being the wise and handsome goblin that I was, had no such issues. Even with the funny green goo lost in the chaos and largely obscured by ghoul bodies I had no trouble seeing well enough to keep track of everything important. A far cry from Garrett, who was reduced to finding his enemies by touch. Not a pleasant option against human foes, let alone clawed ones.

Drastically increased power or no, it wasn’t going well for Garrett. As the light dimmed and his responses slowed from precise death blows to fumbling jabs his wounds only grew in number. Even if his newfound power turned what should have been serious injuries into mere scratches he would still be dragged down eventually.

He wasn’t even going to take all that many down with him. Haphazard lashing out might work for killing anything that breathed, but against the unliving you needed either overwhelming force or incredible precision to do the job. A blind man with a dagger was capable of neither. A blind Garrett...he could kind of do the overwhelming force thing, but not well enough to matter.

His entire life in miniature right there.

I wriggled my way backwards, letting the corpses block my view. Garrett was free to die, but that didn’t mean I wanted to see it. After all, I’d hate to get put off my lunch. I chuckled at my own joke as the combat fell out of view. Put off my lunch. Imagine! Having so much food that you had to segment your eating into different times of day! Ludicrous.

Also I was buried beneath corpses and drenched in ghoul ichor. The thought of eating was already nausea inducing enough. Maybe Garrett had better food than tree bark. Who was I kidding, of course he had better food than tree bark. I just hope he didn’t get too much blood on it when he died.

I was waiting for the fighting to die down when I felt a strange draining sensation. I blinked, struggling to get the fuzziness out of my vision. Stubbornly, the fuzziness had not only stuck around, but spread across my entire field of view by the time I opened my eyes again. Fucking stars and bloody stones, I had better not be passing ou….

I blinked my eyes open. Fuck. I had passed out, hadn’t I? Beneath a pile of ghouls was not particularly high on my list of places to sleep, and for good reason. It had certainly put quite the crick in my back. What the hells had happened? I’d just passed out for no reason after activating my Skill…

That fucking Skill. I growled for half a second before forcing my frustration back down. No. Empty emotion served nobody, least of all me. I needed to pull back and look back at this logically. Was anyone about to kill me in the next minute? Not that I could see, so I was safe to get to the bottom of this.

I closed my eyes and called up my soul sense, but no obvious problem made itself evident. If anything, it looked better. Deaths made it stronger after all, and there’d been a lot of death here. I wasn’t sure if I had to kill them myself or not. I frowned. There had to be something, right? I’d been tired, sure, but not enough to pass out like that. Fuck it. I really didn’t like the idea of finding the problem by fucking around and waiting for something to go wrong, but I liked the idea of not knowing even less.

“[Beggar’s Disregard].” I reactivated the Skill while keeping my soul sense active. It’d turned off at some point while I was under, and it had been one of the few things that might have forced me unconscious. I could only hope I hadn’t been caught in some AOE poison attack by Garrett. Or the ghouls- shit, was it ghouls that spread by disease, or was that zombies?

I eyed my ichor drenched body. Zombies. It was fucking zombies. If it wasn’t...well I was already dead, so no use worrying about it. Fortunately no disease was responsible for my unconsciousness, I could already see the true culprit. The soul energy in the level I’d invested in Beggar’s Disregard wasn’t staying stagnant or building up the way it did in my other levels. Instead the soul energy slowly drained out, leaving only the permanent soul stuff behind.

I deactivated the Skill again and the drain stopped. That explained things. Skills didn’t run on excess energy the way Stats did, something Garrett hadn’t seen fit to mention. Or, considering my lack of real knowledge, I’d done something wrong. Either way I could only try not to rely on the Skill unless I had no choice and hope that draining my soul energy had no lasting drawbacks.

I’d missed the last half of the fight, but Garrett had given a good showing of himself. Over a dozen more ghouls had joined the slain, bearing great cleaving wounds that cut them open from hip to shoulder. Difficult to say where the body was, but that was natural. The ghouls here were even more gaunt than normal and they weren’t picky eaters at the best of times. Starved for stars know how long down here and I wouldn’t be surprised if they ate Garrett’s boot leather.

A shame. I could use some good boots, even ones that fit terribly.

I pulled myself out from beneath the stack of bodies and twisted around to lie on my back. Nice as it was to have my face neither ground into the floor or pressed up against dead flesh, my legs were still trapped, and I had to painstakingly inch them out. Annoying, but there was no way I was risking unnecessary noise now.

I stood to survey the wreckage, finding no life or movement inside. The darkness beyond loomed, but nothing burst forth to seek my life and devour my flesh. Nothing was watching, and they wouldn’t as long as I didn’t draw attention. I slouched down so I could rest my splayed fingers on the ground and crept along, moving only one limb at a time and setting them down gradually. Neither the impact of my steps nor the displacement of air would produce sound to betray my presence.

I picked my way through the corpses, keeping an eye out for potential danger as I looked for any good loot. Tragically I found not a single thing worth stealing, unless you had an inordinate fondness for dead bodies I suppose. Though if that was true I figure you’d probably enjoy making your own too much to bother stealing them.

At least none of the ghouls looked to be faking death. Everything here was very thoroughly dead, which conveniently made it easier for me to not be. I’d hoped to find at least some more of Garrett’s knives, but the ghouls must have dragged the body off and taken any potential loot with it. A shame, but I doubted I’d be finding any of his loot. If the ghouls had taken it off to some hole to eat in peace I wasn’t about to follow them down it.

I crept out of the room, keeping an eye out for any blood trails. Just because I wasn’t willing to die in pursuit of Garrett’s sweet, sweet loot didn’t mean I was willing to give up on it entirely. If I saw an opportunity I aimed to take it.

The space beyond the wall was more than a little intimidating, but I certainly didn’t intend to live the rest of my life in that single room, so I had no choice but to move forward. The cave stretched out into a long hall lined with stone sarcophagi, but the first thing I did was check my corners. The room we’d been ported into was basically what it appeared to be, a brick box planted in a more natural cavern, and those harsh right angles created places for people to hide.

No one was, naturally, but paranoia was always completely useless right up until it saved your life. Satisfied that nothing was about to ambush me from that angle, I turned my attention to the path forwards. The sarcophagi provided plenty of hiding places, both behind and inside them, even with many still mortared shut. Were sarcophagi usually mortared shut? I had a feeling not, and I knew why these might be an exception.

That was relieving in a strange kind of way. Sure, there could very well be a ghoul locked in every single unopened coffin, but at least I knew that it would be ghouls, not something more powerful, like whatever breed of undead it was that had originally dwelled in the room behind me.

Despite my wariness, I didn’t see any mobile ghouls. Quite a few dismembered ones though. I kept moving after a brief mental debate. Yes, any and all of them could be faking a true death, but they looked pretty dead to me. Still, even in the best case scenario something had killed them, and I had no idea if their black ichor would clot up the way blood would so they could have died half a minute ago or back when this place was built.

And that’s when I realized the obvious; I could see. Of course I could, the combination of natural goblin eyesight and my Senses Stat meant I could see in barely any light, as I was now. But there was light. A familiar green glow, just barely reflecting off the wall ahead of me to form an incredibly dim ambient light.

I wasn’t the only one who wanted to loot Garrett’s shit, and whatever had taken it was smart enough to use it.

That wasn’t a good sign. I drew my dagger. Well, I tightened my grip on my knife, I didn’t exactly have a proper sheath to draw it from. I continued forward, heartbeat growing faster and faster as the corpses strewn across the floor grew thicker and more numerous. By the time I rounded a corner and brought the light proper into sight there was barely any floor left to stand on.

An unliving ghoul could be nearly indistinguishable from a slain one, and that certainly wasn’t doing anything for my anxiety, but I could hear noises from up ahead and I doubted any ghoul would be lying out hear when there was food to be had.

Besides, there were some things you just couldn’t afford to ignore.

I navigated my way through the corpses and peered around the door.