I had no idea why I’d told that story. I’d fully intended to never tell anyone about any of it for the rest of my life. I’d been in a weird mood, sure, so maybe I could blame it on being thrown off when Mia called me her partner. Maybe that enormous idiotic counterpart of mine could move on, but I knew I never would. I only had one partner, and even though we’d never be together again, I could only ever have one partner. It was for the best that Mia knew that. She probably didn’t mean partner in the same way that I did, but the word alone brought up memories that were best left buried forever.

Mia herself hadn’t even asked any questions. She’d just silently absorbed everything with a somewhat thoughtful look on her face. It was a little bit painful, being met with such a non-response after pouring myself out like that. But what was worse, in my view, was that I’d told the story so badly. So many important things had been left out, and so many pointless things were left in. I didn’t really think I’d managed to fit any proper lessons in, either. It was the first time I’d ever actually told the story, and I’d never been very good at telling stories anyway, but what hurt most was that I knew I hadn’t done justice to the memory of my lost half.

We’d broken camp hours ago and I was still dwelling on it, which wasn’t good in all honesty, but there was a reason I tried not to remember anything to do with my other half. I needed to be focusing on Mia and the job we were doing. She was, after all. Completely absorbed in our hunt and evincing not the slightest reaction to what I’d said, which was what she should be doing, and I knew that. I knew that, but I was still moody over it. She was just lucky I was so fond of her, and that I needed her around. The rotten little darling.

We were approaching what had to be, given the patrol patterns and the sheer stench, the goblin’s main camp. I hadn’t originally intended on pushing so far during our first outing, but I was just too mystified by those basket goblins. I mean, it was obvious they were gatherers of some kind, but it was what they were gathering that compelled me to seek out their camp. Mushrooms I could understand, especially since I was tasked with collecting some. But the tree bark? I’d had a sneaky taste and, yeah, no. It was tree bark. What I really wanted to understand, though, was that stick. It was too suspicious.

There were probably hunting type goblins somewhere, too. Hadn’t seen any but it kinda figured they’d exist. Though what they might be hunters of, I didn’t have a clue. Hadn’t seen any kind of major wildlife that just screamed eat me, I’m delicious! No birds or small vermin, and when I thought about it there weren’t any insects, either. All pretty weird, but kinda lent to the whole game-like atmosphere the place had. In my experience it was a challenge to create complex ecosystems that would end up being truly convincing, and so there was little reason to try. A few critters that hopped around would generally suffice to fill in the emptiness, and no one really wanted to deal with creepy crawlies anyway.

But that’s not what I was dealing with. I had decided this place wasn’t actually an immersive simulation, back when I first arrived. I’d played enough with those in my old life to know this was just too much for that. The fidelity was too high, and there was just an indefinable weight to things that even the best sims couldn’t emulate. Yet it also didn’t quite feel real. Magic aside, there were too many elements that didn’t really fit right. I knew what implants and augmented reality could do, and what I was experiencing wasn’t that. It seemed more like a real place that had been changed to be more game-like, for whatever reason.

The more I learned about the Braid, the more it seemed like the sort of thing my research had indicated might be possible. Not that I had known what it would be like, not exactly, I’d just seen a way to maybe get somewhere that didn’t work quite like the rest of reality. Magic, elves, monsters, and all everything else I’d seen certainly qualified as different from the reality I’d known before. There were many other possibilities, of course, and I shared my thoughts with the big oaf. Not that I wanted to, not after telling Mia that story, but our oh-so-generous Patron was capable of things that I wasn’t anymore.

As we discussed things I realized that I had, in fact, heard the noises of what might be distant animals on a few occasions, and there was a definite undercurrent of what I could only describe as insect noise which would pick up when the forest had been completely quiet for long enough. Well, and obviously there had to be birds or Brin would have taught us different covert signals. I took a deep breath after signing off and considered that, in all, I wasn’t as cogent as normal. I was a little shaken, even. It wasn’t good, wasn’t useful, and forced me to really get a grip on myself and focus on Mia and our little outing.

It would help if it wasn’t so boring waiting for the squirt to whistle me over yet again, so I could wait on yet another patrol to waltz into the kill zone, and then yet again stab one of the reeking little creatures while my golden girl took out the other. Sometimes I’d even get to kill two of them! Wheeee. I really needed tougher opponents. Something worth fighting, worth my time and attention. I wasn’t holding out hope, though.

On the other hand, Mia was getting seriously competent at record speeds. The girl had a real talent, and I was super proud of her! So obviously it was a surprise when I heard the whistle and trotted over to find an absolute herd of goblins! Pack? Wait, a surprise of goblins! Yeah, that’s perfect. A whole dozen of them. I’d feel intimidated by their numbers and their obvious wariness for an ambush if it weren’t for the fact that I wasn’t. It was completely impossible to be scared of things I could punt the length of a regulation-sized arena, after all. Probably one of the laws of nature, that.

I honestly wanted to just dive straight into the lot of them and go wild, but that wouldn’t be a good example for Mia. I took a breath for a retreat-and-meet whistle, but paused. Oh, I really wanted to go nuts on them. If I did, I just knew I could find the only thing I ever truly wanted anymore, the one thing I craved. That singular feeling of being lost in an endless moment, teetering on the edge of failure with every nerve screaming and every muscle singing. The high of dodging by the most razor thin margin, and then sometimes not, the sweet burn of wounds driving me to fight even harder. Where life and death became the same thing. It was truly the only thrill that could ever even matter at all.

I let the breath go and took another one slowly. No. No. If I wanted to do that I never would have chosen to follow my golden girl in the first place. She was going places that I couldn’t get to on my own. A very long life of completely unrewarded effort attested to where I’d end up on my own, so no. All I had to do, all I could do, was help her get wherever she needed to go. Reaffirmed in my course I carefully backed off and trilled until Mia popped up next to me as though by magic. Wait, scratch that. Definitely by magic. Took some getting used to, rewriting all my idioms, but whatever.

“Great [Scout] work, Mia.” People, especially children, could and should be trained, just like any pet. Well okay, it was slightly more complicated admittedly, but in a good way. Instead of waiting for a desirable behavior to show up before rewarding it, I could just explain the right thing and she would take it from there. So much better! Couldn’t overdo it, of course, but I could offer a hug since she seemed to like those, and children needed touch to grow up properly. Well, I couldn’t be certain of that given my situation, but it was the sort of thing I could probably assume without any real downside to it. Mia returned the gesture with an intensity that blew any doubts I had away. My sweet girl absolutely needed contact.

“Alright,” I continued when she’d seemed to get her fill. “I hadn’t expected we’d bump into a group that size so soon but, now that we have, we should talk about how to handle it.”

“Yes!” She said, with a grin so eager and pure that I had to remind myself we were talking about killing a bunch of living creatures, and not something more wholesome.

“So then, Mia, how do we handle it?” She locked up completely with a cute noise.

Rewards for good behaviors were all well and good, but the best thing was to foster systems of thought that generated positive behaviors – as well as rewarded them – without my needing to do a thing. All of which was a fancy justification for pushing things off on her just as fast as I thought she could handle them. Kids needed to be independent, right? Right!

I expected she’d be unable to handle a responsibility like that just yet, particularly since I’d sprung it on her out of nowhere, and I wasn’t wrong. But she managed to surprise me when her expression morphed from cute and stunned to cute and thoughtful. From the moment I’d met her until that moment she’d been a constant source of impressively levelheaded thinking and good ideas, though none of that had been in tactical matters, which I considered something of a personal forte. But that track record earned her a lot of credit with me, so no matter what she came up with I’d at least hear her out. I let her sit and think as long as she needed while I spent that time formulating several different plans of my own, before she finally spoke up again.

“Could Mea make the ground crumbly?” I nodded. It was a rather non-specific ask, but I’d figured out how to use the earth element well enough to do many things and could figure out what she really needed from context clues along the way.

“Yay! The gobbies are small, so Mia thinks some of them will get stuck like that, and some of them will run out into the woods. Then Mia can sneak up on them one at a time!” It was a pretty messy plan and didn’t establish any agreed upon contingencies for things that were likely to go wrong, but I actually didn’t have much in the way of substantial criticism either.

If the ‘crumbly ground’ trap caught not a single goblin, and none of them ran either, we wouldn’t lose much since it would be easy to retreat at that point. That was one of the great things about traps of that sort, they could be converted to guerilla tactics in an instant. The combat portion of her plan was completely without the actual plan part, but that was actually good in our case.

With only two of us, and our being total monster-hunting novices at that, we really didn’t have many options. Well, I did, but we didn’t, and that was the important bit. Mia wasn’t ready for dueling or brawls, so anything that demanded that wouldn’t work. Of course, that Spell of hers made assassination a perfectly viable method for her to use, so there wasn’t any reason I could see for her to do anything else. Her plan was also pretty similar to one of the methods I’d considered, and anything that might go wrong would serve as a perfect teaching moment. All in all, yep!

“Plan approved,” I said with a nod. She practically beamed at me, which was so unfair I couldn’t even look at her. So unfair! Too cute for this world. No, no, having a cute sister was completely okay. I’d told that story to disabuse Mia of any notions towards being my partner, whatever she might want that to mean, so I just had to replace that with something and we already had the sister dynamic going. So! Cool older sister time, I could do that.

“Time to do this thing! Let’s go, Mia,” I said and dashed off before my cool could betray me again. I brought up my map and angled for a part of the path bounded by brambles for our little trap. Mia’s blip headed back to where we’d been and began moving slowly along, presumably following the gobs. With my inexhaustible stamina I arrived at my destination in short order, checked it over, and decided it was the best I was going to get.

As I began methodically weakening the ground I considered the issue I’d just noticed. I could see Mia on my map because she was a party member and I’d marked her as such, but I wasn’t able to see enemy targets. It was so annoying that I’d have to see if there wasn’t some kind of Skill to mark targets, or maybe some sort of hunting sense Ability. I just had to hope it wasn’t locked by class or something stupid like that. I could always ask the big doofus to just grant me something like that, though I had no doubt there’d be some kind of cost I wouldn’t want to pay, so that was a last resort.

I checked on Mia’s progress once I’d finished laying the groundwork for the trap and saw I had plenty of time to add some extras. I could probably make the trap so vicious that not a single goblin would escape alive, but that wouldn’t be useful to Mia or satisfying for me, so I discarded the idea. Instead I chose to imbue several of the branches and vines along the most-likely escape routes from the main path with frost. Not enough to kill, but enough to make anything hit by them clumsy and slow.

I’d really been wanting to test if the goblins had any elemental vulnerabilities, but so far I had only been able to use my cold Spell because the other option was fire. That was truly disappointing on a lot of levels, but I couldn’t argue with the fact that I had no way to stop things if the forest caught fire. Being responsible really was a total drag, but I could live with that for Mia’s sake, and because that kind of restriction was the perfect breeding ground for creativity. I’d even managed to figure out how to vary the output so I had more options than just instant popsicle!

I heard the patter of the approaching goblins and hid myself in the densest patch of brambles. The wicked looking thorns scratched me up all over, but the wounds healed up almost instantly. Having an absurd constitution was amazing, no doubt, but the lack of pain was a little disturbing. Pain was there for a reason, after all, and not having it was already making me feel reckless and less than fully alive. Yet another thing to pester that gracious Patron of ours about.

The goblins entered the trap area, but were rather spread out. That wouldn’t do. It was a bit off script, but I summoned a pebble and imbued it with a lethal chill. Originally, when I’d been contemplating ways to use magic, I’d thought in terms of bolts of frost and the like. But it turned out magic was a far more interesting phenomenon than that, because at least when using Imbue I could make it act like a thing that had infinite heat capacity and conductivity. That meant I could pack enough of the enervating down mana into a single pebble to bring a volume of water around goblin size to near-freezing in an instant. Which was nonsense, of course, but such was life and I liked the results so I wasn’t about to complain.

The moment the lead goblins passed in front of my hiding place I hit it in the face with my rock, causing the creature to stumble and fall over without a sound. A chorus of hissing came from its companions, and though at first they tensed for further attack, they soon went to check on their comrade. Without any obvious wounds they began poking it, maybe hoping it would wake up. Not that there was any chance of that. Especially since they’d all conveniently bunched up for me like that. With a flicker of thought I canceled the magic that had been holding up the path since I’d undermined it, causing it to crumble like a sinkhole. Only four of the creatures that had been far enough, or alert enough, managed to escape.

The perfect number for Mia to handle!

I watched for a moment as they simply milled about at the far end of the sunken area and waited for them to run away. Then I remembered what Miss Byulla had said – that goblins didn’t run – and decided to improvise. I leapt out of the brush and stabbed one of the trapped goblins in the face before yelling an admittedly sad version of a battle cry and scampered off the path at an angle towards where Mia had been. Since her four targets were on the far side of the trap they wouldn’t be able to see me for all the forest cover in between, which allowed me to immediately double back and wait for them to finish chasing after my phantom. Thankfully they were all stupid enough to fall for the bait, which left just six for me.

I had to admit it was a little more exciting, dealing with so many at once, but only a little. Next big group I was just gonna go all in and absolutely face-tank the whole group and let Mia pick them off from the back, no matter what she said. Shaking off such visions of fun I gave myself a mental countdown to make sure Mia had enough time to start her game of tag. Then it was just me and the fellas.

When I strolled back out in front of them again, I noticed that every single one of the goblins was actually in really bad shape. Some were trapped above the knee, some had broken their ankles, or whatever they had, and were limping around. None were a challenge and a few quick pokes ended things, leaving just the unappealing work of hulling them for their cores and pulling the horns from their greasy scalps. I’d had enough practice to get decently good at it, so it didn’t take long. When I finished I took a look at my map, which seemed to indicate that Mia was still hunting the others down.

I wanted to join her, or at least get near enough to offer some help, but I hadn’t been particularly neat about my harvesting and things were a bit everywhere. Since I didn’t want my girl to have to see the mess I’d made, I needed to dispose of the bodies. Previously I’d simply avoided the problem by sending her ahead to find the next group, but from here on out I didn’t think that would work. I would have preferred to cremate them, since I didn’t know if undead were a thing or not, but there was still the whole forest fire issue. I had to settle for just burying them under solid rock with magic before heading off to track down the action.

“Mia,” I called as I approached her icon on the map. If she was hunting a gob it would probably be attracted to my voice and give her a nice opportunity. I stomped about with all the thudding weight I could muster, snapped branches at random, and generally had fun making noise tromping through the woods until a screeching creature with a rock tied to a stick for a weapon ran out from behind some trees and barreled into my leg, knocking itself out. Mia herself appeared immediately afterwards and stared hard at the crumpled-up goblin at my feet for a long moment.

“Mia doesn’t know what to do.”

“Why’s that?”

“Disappointed,” she said, poking the creature with her foot.

“Me too, sweetheart. Me too.”

“The book said goblins would be scarier.”

“Well, are we fighting the goblins the same way your hero did?”

“No,” she giggled, “it’s different!”

“Well there you go then. That’s probably why they’re not scary, right?” That was absolutely not why, but it was a good way to introduce a lesson anyway. “Books are great, you know? You can learn from them so you don’t make the same mistakes. That’s why you should study hard, listen to people’s stories, and think things through for yourself.” She nodded with all the gravity she could muster, which ended up so precocious I had to hide my smile.

“So, with that in mind, let’s talk about how that plan went, and how we can make it better.” She was easily the most attentive student I’d ever known, which made things easy. Situation-problem-solution, that was one of the best easy systems I’d come across in management training and leadership manuals, and I used it on Mia, though I decided to call it a tactical debrief purely for my own ego. Have her explain how she thought things went, then ask that she point out the problems, then she needed to offer solutions. I did the same at every step, and after a surprisingly short back and forth she hashed out an improved version of the plan. She really was a very clever young lady.

Then it was off to find the next surprise of goblins. I suspected we were beyond the simple ones and twos of the early patrols and would begin encountering larger groups as we closed in on their camp. We were in no real danger, except perhaps of having the day end on us before we’d finished, so we just kept plowing through group after group. After each one we held a little meeting on how it went and tried new things until I heard her whistle the signal for found it — urgent! I checked my map and noticed her marker up ahead, near a large clearing in the woods. I made my way over as quickly as I could and ducked down next to her to scope things out.

She’d found the camp!

It was just as awful smelling as I’d feared, but aside from that it was bizarre. The architecture was somewhere between a nomadic camp and a permanent dwelling, a mixture of wood, stone, and even bone walls holding up canvas, skins, and what looked like clothing sewn together. It had streets! Sure, dirt paths, but some that had cobbles. It was deeply confusing on a lot of levels, but that was secondary to the sheer size. It wasn’t so much a goblin camp as the home of a tribe. I was estimating upwards of five hundred of the monsters based on the number of dwellings alone. The most pressing concern about that, however, was that most of them had congregated around our end of the clearing that the camp sat in.

Clearly they knew we were coming.

“So, Mia. How do you want to handle this,” I asked, once I’d taken everything in. I was really hoping she’d choose to press on, but I figured she’d want to call it a day. We hadn’t slept since the day before, and the last break had been a short one at noon. Even if we had untiring bodies it was still a lot to ask.

“So many!” Mia said, but when I glanced over she seemed to be deep in thought. “Mia wants to know if we could make them come over here?”

“I’m sure we could, but there really are too many to handle at once.” I was pretty sure we’d be fine, actually, but that would be leaning on our unnatural constitution to a degree that truly did count as cheating.

“Mia knows that!” She said, giving me a poke I could barely feel. “Is there a way to make only a few of them come?”

“Mm, good thought.” I’d been considering the same, but I wasn’t sure if there were any unseen rules in place guiding things. If this was some kind of game, or acted like one, then maybe I could pull just a few towards us. If not, I risked a small-scale army bearing down on us. I threw away the idea of luring them and considered our goal. What we really needed was to not be overwhelmed on all sides by their numbers. The easiest way was, as we’d been doing all along, ambushing their patrols and ensuring conditions were in our favor during every encounter.

I had an idea, though.

We could just simulate a series of small-scale engagements with clever use of the terrain to narrow their options. The goblins were very small; it would only take a little mounded dirt between trees and tying some brambles together to channel them where I wanted. I consulted my map and considered the terrain around us in the fading light before finding just the right area for us to use.

“So! Here’s a plan, tell me what you think,” I laid out my idea of funneling the gobs into smaller groups, and then playing tag with them in the woods.

“Mia can make it dark!”

“Ah, yes you can. Thank you, let’s do that too.” I hadn’t really taken her abilities fully into account when formulating the plan, which was a good lesson for me, too. Fortunately it was an easy thing to add in, so I didn’t bother hashing out any details and set to preparing things as quietly as possible. The area around the clearing was consistent with a secondary forest, having many young trees and a dense undergrowth, which was what made the paths so necessary for the runty gobs. I enhanced the effect by raising little bracken and bramble covered cliffs to make sure there was only one way for them to approach. With any consistency, at least. I imagined a few might manage to slip around, but that was fine.

“While you’re at it, can you do that to me too?” I asked of Mia when I noticed how useful her control of the dark Spell was. She was making my little hills look more imposing by dramatizing the shadows, which sounded silly in my head, but I couldn’t argue with the results I was seeing. Everything looked sharper, more sinister, and more dangerous. At the same time it had an almost hallucinatory effect of making me misjudge distances and shapes. Perfect for herding hapless mobs, and perfect for giving me an edge!

“You ready for this?” I asked once everything was ready and we were spying on them once again.

“Yeah!” She cheered, though quietly. We’d botched our ambush on an early patrol because of that, and she’d been careful ever since.

“Mia will hide,” she said excitedly, covering her face with her hands, apparently as a demonstration, “and sneaky sneaky, then surprise!” She continued, uncovering her face with an explosive motion. “And then, and then, bam, zoom, woosh, hide again!” It was slightly less nuanced than our earlier discussion on the topic, but I was forced to admit that the vigorous gesturing and noises she made really helped convey the main points. I could also empathize with the way she seemed to get slightly less coherent the more enthusiastic she was, since I had the same problem. I ruffled her hair to keep her occupied while I wrestled the stupid look off my face.

“That’s perfect,” I told her once I’d gotten myself under control. “Alright, I’ll try and lure in just a few to start with, but it’s likely that we’ll get the whole bunch!

“Let’s go!”

Well, enthusiastic as we were, it turned out to be less go and more sneak around and throw rocks. I’d been doing a lot of throwing rocks lately. Enough that I wondered if I’d get a specialized Skill for it. In any event the gobs just weren’t having it. Forget carefully pulling a few of them at a time, I couldn’t seem to provoke them at all! Even after getting pelted in the face they held back from the forest’s edge, with some better equipped and larger comrades hissing and clicking along behind them. Seemed like slow and careful wasn’t going to work and if that was the case then maybe, oh just maybe, crazy and suicidal would be better.

“Mia,” I turned my head slightly to where I thought she was near me. “Stay back and stay hidden, I’m going to try and draw them in a little more forcefully. Plan stays the same though besides that, okay?”

“Okay!” She said from a completely different direction. I retreated to the main path that we’d fortified and chose to distract myself from my embarrassment by thinking about how quickly she’d picked up that word. My Mia really was brilliant! She really made all my effort worthwhile, and for that reason I had to make sure her work was rewarded by forcing our plan to work. I had noted that the gobs were all arrayed in a nice big empty space away from the woodland. Like some kind of prepared battle area. It really was just so convenient.

I conjured a handful of small stones and readied them. I’d tried frost already, and normal stones too of course. I didn’t know wind, but I did know how to set things on fire with magic. I could use the temperature adjusting touch Spell, which would result in very hot stones indeed. But by using Imbue on them, each stone would pass on the full force of the Spell as though I’d touched the target myself. It was beautiful and saved on mana too. Not that I worried much about that, as my regeneration seemed to be more than a match for anything but the most intensive work.

“Come get some!” I yelled with all my might, stepping forward to be fully visible and then began hurling the deadly rocks into the masses of monsters. I was immediately stopped in my tracks, provocations dying on my lips and all thoughts of the plan blown away like ash in the wind.

Turned out, goblins were very vulnerable to fire.

It was better than I’d hoped. Better than I could have ever wanted. Any goblin a rock touched immediately burst into flame, catching its neighbors and turning them all into torches. I watched as their carefully arrayed forces broke, hissing and chittering and writhing and fleeing. Their wild terror had me clutching my face and biting my fingers in high tension, it was just so good. But when one of the big armored ones charged at me from out of the roiling masses, I realized my error. Mia was waiting on me, and I was letting her down. I took a calming breath and threw off the dizzying and heady feelings I’d been suffering from, squared up to my foe, and drew my lovely sword.

I was struck again, as I always was every time I so much as touched its handle, that the estoc was an admittedly rather strange choice. Swords weren’t something foreign to me, as I had enjoyed various weapon sports for most of my old life. I’d even had an arena built for combat sports and was a frequent champion fighter there. Yet the two-handed medieval derivative of a longsword I readied was one of the stranger ones in form and function. I’d chosen it because, when I thought about the idea of fighting monsters, I expected foes with natural armor where slicing and crushing would end up being sub-optimal. This would be the first real test of that decision – and against a more traditionally armored opponent, at that – so I expected great results.

I jabbed at the monster quickly to keep its guard up, then slipped the tip between armored plates and skewered its left shoulder. When it lowered its shield in pain I was able to dart in close, grasping my edgeless sword near the tip to better guide the next jab right into its eye. The death of one of their comrades seemed to sharpen up the remaining goblin soldiers, which all began herding the lesser gobs towards me. I taunted the creatures in as loud a voice as I could muster and retreated until I was surrounded by the thorny walls of the trap we’d crafted.

In such tight quarters my choice of weapon shone brightest. No need for grand sweeping slashes that would get stuck in or inhibited by the walls. No need to worry about the edge being dulled, since it didn’t even have one. No need to worry about their armor. It was an admittedly weightier option than many swords, but remained comfortably within my ability to wield, and as that extra came from the significant length, it was more than enough to deal with most threats at a comfortable distance.

“Mia!” I called, hoping she was close. Since holding the path here was proving so simple, I thought I might give her a more challenging, and therefore more interesting, role in the plan.

“Mia is here!” She said, nowhere evident.

“The big ones with armor in the back. Can you deal with them? I’m fine here.” I wanted to know how well she’d fare against creatures that wouldn’t go down with just one poke from behind. Pitting her against targets like that would make her grow, and wasn’t that the whole point?

“Yeah!” Was all the reply I received, echoing out from the dark woodlands, and then she was gone. When I caught a small break dealing with the minions, I checked on her using the map and noted that she’d begun hunting out in the camp. When I listened closely, I could even hear occasional armed clashes, though they were always short lived. My Mia had obviously cleared the hurdle of assassination against armored targets with remarkable ease, so much so I really wanted to give her something more challenging. But that would have to wait, as these were goblins after all. I’d have to check at the guild to find something more appropriate.

After an increasingly irritatingly slog against waves of ever more trivial goblins I finally managed to wade through and back out onto the field. There were plenty of gobs left there for me, but they weren’t even worth considering. I’d gotten so used to them that even clustering together and attacking from all sides wasn’t effective against me. The worst part was I didn’t even feel cool doing it. They were just so slow and clumsy that I’d actually feel like a real screwup if they managed to hit me at all. It was like being attacked by toddlers with foam toys. That being the case I began moving the party away from the forest and closer to their town, since I was going that direction anyway and it made things marginally more interesting.

Once I was done and not a single new one appeared, I considered the mess while cleaning up my sword. There was a trail of bodies mounded up where I’d been, and I was not looking forward to dealing with them. There was a lot of work to be done and since I didn’t want to be interrupted I’d have to put collecting their resources until after I was sure things were clear. I noted armored bodies lying about here and there, evidence of Mia’s triumph, but no sign of the girl herself. The map showed she was closer to the middle for some reason, so I went to investigate.

The camp’s profile was over all fairly low-lying, which was some combination of the natural result of the gob’s complete lack of height and the fact that their buildings were partially dug into the ground. But even so it was difficult to get a clear view of the whole thing. Which meant I couldn’t see where Mia had run off to or why, and was stuck relying on the map to find the place. Eventually I rounded yet another poorly made structure and found a team of gobs waiting in a dusty bowl-shaped arena. Calling it an arena might be generous, but I decided I was feeling exactly that magnanimous.

Because what I found there promised to give me a good fight. There was one extra big, though still shorter than myself, goblin in the middle surrounded by an organized group of what were clearly minions. The boss was very heavily armored in articulated full plate, a tower shield, and the handle of some sort of weapon poking out over its back. The eight soldier goblins in half-plate, which I recognized as the sort who’d directed the rabble earlier, were each wielding sturdy halberds. My living gold vision showed that there were a handful more gobs hiding in the surrounding huts, but I couldn’t tell what they were like. I was instead more interested in the small robed goblin behind the boss. A caster, perhaps. I was getting a little excited, since I might really get to have fun.

“Mia, wanna take out the smaller ones while I deal with the big guy?” I said to the seemingly empty air. I knew she had to be close and was likely the mass I saw crouched behind a large rock nearby. I received an amusingly out of place bird call in reply and took that as my cue. I sauntered on up to the big full plate gob while laughing at how cute my little sister was. It glared at me but didn’t make any other move until I’d gotten really close. It just kept glaring, as though I was planning on being suddenly intimidated after wiping out the whole camp. Weird thing.

If it was going to be so accommodating as to allow me the first strike completely unopposed, I figured I might as well take the invitation. The question of how was answered by the careless way the goblin held its shield, which I knew would be annoying to fight against, so I launched it with a flying kick using all my weight. The huge thing went skittering across the ground and collected the robed caster on its way to smash into a nearby hut, causing the entire goblin team to stare. Out of the corner of my eye I caught Mia taking advantage of the moment to slip out and dip her dagger under the helmet of the last soldier goblin in the group before dragging it off. Clever! Maybe not super heroic, but I approved anyway. The goblins turned back to me slowly, which was actually pretty comical.

“Why are you so surprised?” I wondered more to myself than them. I hardly expected the goblins to have anything useful to say, even if they could answer. It felt so much like a standard boss fight setup that I wondered for a moment if I’d messed with their script, but since all living things ran on scripts of some description, that was probably a fair assessment of the situation.

As though to prove the point the biggest gob unslung an absolutely huge weapon that combined an axe head on the front with a hammer on the back and took a swipe at me. I was well out of range, so I wasn’t really sure what it was doing, but then it roared so loud that it drove me to a crouch with both hands over my ears. The moment the warcry ended I sprang back up in a vicious mood, all amusement completely gone. I just could not abide noisy things. I hated them so much I’d far rather get stabbed than screamed at. I swept the hair out of my face so I could better focus, brought my weapon to bear, and killed it.

Well, it was a little more complicated than that.

In spite of my weapon being purpose built to go up against exactly the kind of armored foe I was facing, I held back. It was wielding an awfully big battle-axe, and was doing extremely easily. The thing was strong no doubt about that, and as tough as I was, I didn’t really want to take the hits that thing could dish out. I began to test the thing; a flickering strike, a feint, a quick jab that skittered off its armor. Another jab as I sought out a seam, a gap, any sort of joint between the plates. The goblin largely didn’t bother defending, aside from turning its body slightly to give my questing strikes a less favorable angle against its armor. Clever, and confident, but the open face of its helmet bordered on arrogant.

Arrogant was good, I could use arrogant. I began sending my attacks exclusively towards its ugly mug, which put the thing on the defensive. The moment it turned its eyes off me, I lunged, stabbing into the joint just above its knee. The thing hissed and backed off, looking at me more warily before hooting a call. Archers came crawling out from the places I’d seen life signs before previously and began taking shots. It was a pretty annoying development, forcing me to dodge a few of them before letting one wing me in the arm just to see if it was worth the effort. It wasn’t, so I stopped and ignored them afterwards. Besides, Mia had already begun hunting them.

I reengaged the goblin chief and, before I knew it, I was outright playing with the creature. It was easy to goad, easy to feint against, and most of all, it was predictable. It kept using the same moves time and again, and I kept taking advantage. The goblin evidently could sense the tides turning and began growling and stamping, working itself into a frenzy. It flipped the battle-axe around to the hammer side and went for an enormous two-handed strike. It was so obvious and telegraphed that I had no trouble avoiding it, but that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was when the hammer hit the ground, the world rang like a gong and the stone of the arena beneath my feet shuddered in watery ripples. The goblin didn’t miss that chance and came at me with a cleaving strike, which I only barely managed to avoid. My head was ringing so badly that the next few moments were a blur as I backed off and tried to regain my senses. I had the thing’s number, knew its moves, knew it strength, and its weakness. I threw my earlier caution aside and began engaging it with full force, my estoc’s razor point finding gap after seam after joint. The goblin retaliated with another monstrous ground-strike-and-cleave combo, which this time did catch me in the shoulder. I felt the hit, if barely, but I couldn’t even hear myself think.

My fury erupted as I just started screaming swears in every language I knew. The goblin had to go, immediately if not sooner, and I was leaping at its face before I knew what I was doing. I slugged it once, and that was the end. All I wanted was for the noise to stop, but I weighed thousands of kilograms and I was rather good at punching. The result was that the thing’s head vanished in a puff of gore and its body rocked back before collapsing, noisily, to the ground. I was tempted to do the math on how much force one of my punches, or a good kick, could generate now that I was so heavy, but my ears were still ringing, and I just didn’t care that much anyway.

It was a shame, in a way, to end the fight like that. I wasn’t even having fun anymore, and if I wasn’t having fun then there just wasn’t any point to it. Worse, I hadn’t even finished it off with my sword, opting instead to just explode its head with a punch. Well, it made me mad so it got what it deserved. I was just glad Mia had ended up running off chasing the archers before that point. I didn’t want her to see me get hit in such an idiotic manner, nor lose my cool afterwards, nor the gory mess I’d made of the gob. I looked around at all the work I had to do and sighed.

Whatever. At least it was quiet now.

“Mea, Mea! There’s a talking box of ice!” Mia said as she ran up to me. I took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Of course it wasn’t going to be quiet.