The other group of goblins were marching on their position quickly so they had little time to make it quick and clean. Charging through the remainder of the goblins they made a fighting retreat. There were only a handful of gobs left but they couldn’t afford to be waylaid. It was fine though as the gobs weren’t about to give up, after all they still had the bigger numbers than the big peoples, and girls! All can be sacrificed for girls!...

Micky’s crew smashed the goblins as they ran, not letting them slow them down. But it was barely enough. Luckily they were much faster than goblins. Actually, goblins weren’t that much more dangerous than an ankle biting chihuahua. But like the mighty chihuahua, they were ankle bitters that will slow you down, aggressive as all get out in spite of their size, and had an annoying yip that just made you want to punt them.

Luckily they were easily finished up on the run. But unfortunately, the worst happened. There was another group, or the rest of the group at the closest T section. Not only that but the other group was catching up. They had rat riders, small gobs on big rats that moved in swarms. The only way was to fight there way into the tunnel and block it off. These weren’t the forest gobs that were easy prey, nor was this a place that Prin and Micky could use their vastly superior movement and ability.

Micky and Prin decided to it was best to take the tunnel at the T section and block it off. It was highly unlikely that there was going to be another group coming from further in the slime area, even if there was a shift. Micky thought a prayer to system for the lowbes caught up in this mess, they were likely to die. Of course Micky himself would be considered a lowbe in a shift do to the fluctuations of large groups of monsters but Micky summarily ignored that.

Charging headlong into the somewhat unaware goblins Micky and Prin took the head to block of the exit while the girls stuck behind them to support. While Micky was not a melee he was a bit over leveled for gobs and he wasn’t about to let the girls get pulled in by the gob swarm that was heading their way.

Prin, on the other hand, was surrounded already. Each strike or thrust would kill a wave of gobs but a swarm was a swarm for a reason. In the end, they were still retreating but just enough to keep the swarm manageable. But the gobs had a leader, in the group you could tell because he was a head taller then the rest, for a gob though that was still short. The leader was able to keep the battle lines tidy. Or more likely, keep the goblins in enough of a frenzy that they wouldn’t notice how many of their fellows were dying.

Then the other group of goblins showed up. Things were not going Micky’s way. Maybe the crawl was cursed, something terrible always seemed to happen when he was in the crawl. No, maybe it was dungeons, yeah, something always goes wrong when he’s in a dungeon. So that’s probably what it is. Maybe he should have Marry check him out to see if he has a curse for dungeons, or maybe just overall bad luck? But he heard they needed a black cat, or some symbolic familiar of luck to check that kind of thing.

Micky received a mace to the side for his wandering thoughts. He needed to stow those kinds of things while in combat. Focus only on the opponent and nothing else. But the only reason he let his attention slide was because he didn’t see the mace as much of a threat. It was more of a big wooden club, and it didn’t even have nails or spikes in it. What kind of goblin doesn’t have a bunch of nails and spikes in their club? A dead one that’s what.

The other larger swarm morphed together with the first one they were battling. Shit, Micky knew that the leader was a bad thing. Only they started to attack each other, up to and possibly more then Micky’s crew. Finally, Micky had a target for his quasi frenzy. Now the pressure was off, well reduced for their group. The gobs were still swarming in on them, but it was noticeably reduced. The only unfortunate thing with that is that it meant the goblins started to use more tactics. Which for a gob, meant that they actually tried to dodge that giant shouted swing. Of course, the key word is tried to, and not succeeding, but for a goblin that was a major improvement.

The swarms came into contact with each other more and more. They started crawling on top of each other and tearing into each other in two giant waves of flesh. Micky thought he remembered this tactic from last time with the kobolds. He wondered if it was a common tactic in the tunnels. At least it meant more goblins were fighting each other and especially that his frenzy was working. Micky wondered if he even needed to have the frenzy targeting either side, but then he saw some more gobs pop out of the flesh wall and decided to reinforce the murderous instincts to destroy this other tribe. He was glad to see it worked and about half the gobs would launch themselves back into the flesh wall.

Of course that still mean that they had half a tunnels worth of goblins to fend off with each wave. Prin was still doing well but was breathing hard. As the levels increased fighters could go at it full tilt for days. Of course, this only really mattered when running away or when in the middle of wartimes. But Prin was not there yet. She was facing down the majority of the gob waves alone. Micky was facing off the other side with the support of the girls. He was tanking with his attributes instead of his class and it was hurting him. With any other mob, or any other monster it wouldn’t be something that would work. But gobs were the lowest rung, base level, trash tier monsters.

But he was also starting to flag. Micky was casting his new abilities and old ones when he could, mostly in AOE form. But he was still spending more stamina than he was mana. This was a good thing, if it wasn’t so terrible. He felt like he had been at this for hours or days, but it was only a few minutes. He was wondering why the tunnels weren’t clogged with bodies giving them a slight break, but the crawl didn’t work like that. The mana tunnels were just like regular dungeon tunnels even if they weren’t tied to an active dungeon crystal. Not every dungeon had an overlord, but all the dungeons had the same basic features, and one of them was eating the bodies.

Now that there were so many the dungeon had actually increased the flow of energy in this part which made the bodies disappear faster. At another time Micky might be happy as this would increase the likelihood of ‘drops’ that would spontaneously spawn items or [Material]s. This was not one of those times. There was a grinder of gobs and there was no way to retreat from it. Micky got hi in the side again with an axe this time. It hit the same spot as the mace bruised. Or well, close enough. Luckily, his armor could take the gobs shitty axe. Unluckily, his bruise was now worse. Micky made sure to double down on the quasi frenzy in the gob zone.

Micky struck out with his daggers in order to whittle down the gobs that much quicker. He couldn’t do it often but he would be able to toss out a large number of projectiles at the enemy ranks to thin them down just a little, and ease the groups fighting just a little.

And that’s when it happened. He didn’t know when, why, or how but Prin went down. Now there was a gob with a bloody mace leering over her unconscious body and putting her grubby hands on her trying to drag her back into the gob pile.