Like anyone who takes an arrow to the back, I did the sensible thing and fell down on my face. Not so much that I wanted to, but more that between being hit and already having been in a fight, I was almost done for. The red bar told me my health was down to about a third, the blue mana one was virtually gone, and my green stamina was well bottomed out.

The worst thing about this is there were two archers behind me and two goblins in front of me. The good things are that the archers were awful shots, and the guys in front of me were fighting. As I started to get up, Blink ran past me towards the ravine edge.

By the time I regained my feet, the two goblins in front of me had remembered that I was here and that they were on the same side. Now they were coming back at me, and I didn’t have much range of motion for my staff because of the arrow in my back. The spear guy without his spear yelled and charged while the hatchet guy also ran at me. I charged up my last blast with my staff and poled the spear goblin to the face.

Between the hatchet, he took to the back and my strike, the goblin went down in a burning pile of stinking green flame. That left axe guy heading right for me with his axe completely above his head. Without having the time to ready my staff again, I checked the guy full-on and sent him rolling back. While I was doing that, I dropped my staff and pulled out my knife, and went for the belly flop attack.

I knocked all the air out of the goblin by jumping on him, and then I started to get a little overzealous with the knife. I’m not sure how long the goblin was dead when I stopped with the knife. I knew that I hadn’t been attacked after that, and no more arrows were flying.

I stood up and looked across the ravine to see two more dead goblins and about 5 dead gremlins all on that side. In the ravine were two of the goblins that we had knocked down, and they were clearly dead as well. What I didn’t see was any movement, nor did I see Blink.

I dropped my pack to the ground and started to dig out my salves again. I needed to stop the bleeding and see if I could get some of the debuffs go away so that I could find Blink and get out of here. The good thing was that the arrow to my back wasn’t a deep wound, and it came out quickly when my pack came off. The rest of it was terrible. I could not reach the wound on my back. The one in my leg was deep, and the one on my cheek was bleeding badly.

I got the salve into my chest wound and bandaged it the best I could. Then I worked on my leg. It was slow going since twisting was difficult with my back sore and my front messed up. I think I was at it for about thirty minutes before I got everything patched up enough that I was no longer losing health. Which was good since I was down to a tiny sliver when I finished.

I then put my knife back into my belt and climbed back down and over to the other side to see if I could find Blink. As I got up to the other side, I heard her. She was making a whizzing hiss sound that sounded bad. I searched for about 5 minutes until I found her; she had blended into the ground to look like the dirt and rocks.

I only found her because of the sound she was making. I got her up and looked for wounds on her but could not find any. She must have something crushed on the inside to sound the way that she did. So I put her in my pack and started back. I stopped long enough to grab both bows and the quivers. They weren’t much, but it was better than what I had.

Before I left the battlefield, I looted the weapons and the coif. I packed it all in my bag before getting Blink on top. I didn’t want to take the time, but I also wanted to deprive these guys of weapons if another group came. I would rather not rearm anyone, and it was only a few minutes anyway.

Hiking back with a pack that now weighed close to 40 pounds wasn’t easy. If I wasn’t wounded, it wouldn’t have been much of a problem. As it was, the slight incline to get to the river was hard work. Then the rocks that I had to climb over that in the past weren’t a big deal became hard. Everything was more taxing than it was, and everything took longer.

What should’ve been about a 10-minute run or 45-minute walk ended up taking me over an hour and a half to get back to my campsite. The climb up, even with my ladder, was no fun, and I almost slipped twice.

Once I got back to my home, I dropped my pack and checked on Blink again. She was still breathing but didn’t look that great. I laid her on my bed and got out my herbs to make a salve. While what I usually used was great for open wounds, I needed to make something that could help reduce pain so that she could feel better.

It took longer than I had wanted to make the medicine for her, but I applied everything that I could and then got a bowl of water and food for her and brought it all back to my lean-to. I didn’t start a fire because I didn’t want the smoke. When I had made my camp, I wasn’t thinking about fighting off things that could climb. When I went back out, I thought I was the hunter, not the hunted.

Today went sideways on me, and I was in a bad way. I still had some sort of debuff that kept my health from being over halfway, and my stamina wouldn’t budge from a third full. My mana was filling back up, but it was just as slow as ever.

The best course of action that I could think of was to just sleep. It might not be the safest thing, but if I could rest, perhaps the debuffs would be gone, and then I could figure out how I could make my home safer against the goblins in the woods.

When I woke up, it was dark. The stars were out, and the moons were showing. There was a stillness in the air that seemed peaceful like everything was taking a breath. I checked my status, and my health had returned, and my body was feeling better, not entirely better but not almost dead. I saw that Blink was breathing normally, and her status screen showed no debuffs. Then I fell back asleep.

When I woke up again, it was daylight. I had things that I needed to do first thing, like trying to brush out my tracks. It would be bad if they followed me all the way to my home. I didn’t have any way out of this other than a climb, and they had bows so they might could get me before I got away.

I also didn’t have any place to go. I needed a few bug-out locations so that I could escape and run. That might only prolong my death a little since it seemed I was too low on the power level to live for long.

Two near-death fights in the past two days seemed to tell me that the goblins and gremlins were too close to me. I needed to be better geared and better at fighting in general. Both times I went into battle, I almost lost. I was getting my butt kicked by little green guys that should die by the dozen.

Another big thing that I was taught in these fights was that the goblins had much better equipment than I did. I would complain and say something like it wasn’t fair, but that was the world I was in. Nothing fair, and the closest to “fair” I got was that I had a necklace that let me make magical items.

“Blink, we need to go brush out the trail and make sure that there aren’t prints leading back here.”

She looked at me and huffed, got up, and started down the rock ledges one jump at a time. I snatched up my staff and headed downriver. We had work to do if we wanted to stay safe. As we made the 10-minute trip, I kept my eyes out for signs of trouble. I was happy to see that there were no new threats around.

Blink and I took the bodies down to the river and tossed them in. My hope was that they would wash away and perhaps get found downriver and confuse the monsters. Mostly I just didn’t want easy signs of the fight.

I gathered up the arrows and the little spears and brought them all back to camp with me. Things had changed. I knew that the green things were a danger. I hadn’t been treating them with enough respect. That was going to change as I needed to be safe where I was. So I needed to take them out, and traps would be how I did it.