Chapter 36: I Have a Bold Idea

Sharlock had assumed that once the quest went live, the players would go screaming "Waaaaa!" into the kobold horde, wave after wave of them, get gloriously slaughtered, then buckle down — grind coins, take combat classes, buy gear — and go right back to "Waaaaa!"-ing their way to a gruesome death under those kobold hammers.

Rinse and repeat a good fifteen or twenty times, grow the dungeon to more than twice its current footprint, and THEN, through sheer relentless hustle, the players would finally exterminate the kobold pack and cash out fat rewards.

Or maybe the kobolds would get spooked off by the players' never-say-die zerging and retreat back into the Spider Nest. Sharlock had even prepped for that contingency — ready to step in at the critical moment, grab the kobolds, and lock them down with magic so they couldn't flee, keeping them conveniently on tap for the players to keep challenging until the main quest was done.

What he had NEVER anticipated was this main quest landing him in this much trouble.

Here's how it went down.

"Goldmane, could you tell me about those kobolds? Y'know — the notorious Kobold Chief Kramo! As a master smith, you must've racked up some serious adventuring experience back in your younger days, right?"

The player with 【BurningChestHair】 floating over his head handed his hiltless short sword over to Goldmane for the push to +4 enhancement, and figured he'd fish for intel while he was at it.

His event-exchange Frostlake City short sword had stayed behind at the Spider Nest entrance when the kobolds killed him earlier — which meant it was kobold loot now, probably in the fists of some kobold warrior strutting around showing it off this very second.

"CRACK!"

Blacksmith Goldmane brought his hammer down and snapped the +3 hiltless short sword clean in two, tossed the dead blade into the furnace beside him, and dropped one ice-cold line:

"Your sword's gone."

"NOOO——!!"

Over BurningChestHair's howl of pure despair, Blacksmith Goldmane put his hammer away, banked the furnace coals, shuttered the smithy, and — under the stares of the other players — marched off toward the dungeon core hall.

Sharlock was busy drafting his dungeon's future construction plans. Seeing Blacksmith Goldmane come over, he sat down, propped his chin on one hand, and asked:

"Goldmane, the goblins bugging you again? Didn't I tell you — whatever they say, whatever they do, don't engage. Treat it like you heard nothing, and they'll get bored and leave you alone soon enough."

"Lord Sharlock! All I did was mention — ONE offhand line, mid-forge — that 'the kobold is a creature of subnormal intelligence,' and within the HOUR, those goblins with the weird green name-tags glued to their foreheads had come round one by one, in shifts, TWICE each! And every single time, the same question: Kobold Chief Kramo! The kobold chief the Underworld's residents have feared since they were knee-high — KRAMO!" Blacksmith Goldmane's beard practically levitated with rage as he roared, spittle flying.

"If I'd known that someday I'd be interrogated in shifts by goblins over some kobold chief nobody's ever heard of — back when I was young and could still swing a hammer, I swear it, I swear on every ancestor my clan has ever produced — I'd have marched straight out and hammered that childhood-terror-of-the-Underworld kobold chief's skull into paste the moment he crawled out of whatever hole he crawled out of!"

Sharlock brewed the fuming Blacksmith Goldmane a cup of bloodfern nectar, soothed him for a while, promised on the spot to go have words with the goblins responsible, and re-emphasized the whole "do not talk to the goblins" doctrine. Once Goldmane's insides had cooled a notch, Sharlock saw the irate dark iron dwarf out.

NovelPhoenix's website carries the author's chapter, while the text shown here was copied without their permission.

This was hardly the first time Blacksmith Goldmane had come in to complain — but this was the first time Sharlock genuinely felt his pain.

Because the players hadn't spared Sharlock himself either. Less than two hours after the announcement went up, a double-digit number of otherworldly players had already tried to squeeze intel on Kobold Chief Kramo out of HIM.

The players had grilled every "NPC" they could corner: Blacksmith Goldmane, the newbie trainer Moros, the little pixie, and Sharlock himself.

Over and over, they asked:

"Do you know kobolds? You familiar with Kobold Chief Kramo?"

Blacksmith Goldmane, for saying one little sentence — "the kobold is a creature of subnormal intelligence" — got hounded by these players for a solid hour.

The newbie trainer Moros, meanwhile, had followed Sharlock's advice to the letter — total silence on anything outside training — and came out of the whole affair unscathed.

As for the little pixie, no matter what you asked her, she had exactly one line:

"Even if I die — die and rot in the dirt — I will NEVER help you evil demons!"

After two hours of this nonsense, the players moved on to their next operation.

Some twenty-odd players stripped off their armor and weapons and left every last metal coin they owned back in the dungeon, with other players watching their stuff for them.

Then they set out just like that, wearing nothing but the shorts and shirt they'd spawned in.

Sharlock couldn't for the life of him figure out what these players were doing. He used magic to observe these bare-handed, zero-protection players as they booked it nonstop to the Spider Nest entrance and then went screaming "Waaaaa!" into the kobold horde.

What followed was a straight-up massacre. Some players got hammered flat on the spot; others broke and ran, fleeing back into the "safe zone" — the reach of Sharlock's dominating aura — and the kobolds, hollering to one another, broke off the chase.

Sharlock figured the survivors would come limping back. Nope — after conferring on the spot for a bit, they turned right around and charged the kobolds AGAIN. Cue massacre number two — one swing, one pancake. Sharlock watched the players scatter in every direction, get run down and hammered into the dirt one by one, and before long every last one of them was dead. Shortly after, the kobolds dragged most of the bodies back to their nest, while the remainder stayed behind as food stores for the tribe.

Then, one portal after another opened in the dungeon core hall, and the players came strolling out of them — the otherworlders had used Sharlock's mana to reroll their characters.

"What are they doing? Is this an otherworlder thing too?"

Sharlock was good and thoroughly confused now. He knew these players loved brutal, adrenaline-junkie combat — he did NOT know they loved dying. And not just dying: dying stripped down, with zero resistance.

"They're pushing hard content."

Bru said:

"It's one of the ways they crack bosses back in their world. With no strategy guide to lean on, they keep throwing themselves back into the fight, over and over, using trial and error to map out the boss's attack skills, the intervals between them, and its movement habits — then design a battle plan to match. Games like World of Monsters, Second Life, Final Fantasy, and so on — this is how those players push through bosses too. Relying on this method, they routinely take down opponents they should have no business beating."

Sharlock listened to Bru's explanation. Some of it went over his head, but he caught the gist:

"So you're telling me these otherworldly players use combat itself to learn their opponents, and then they draft up actual battle plans for them?"

"Lord Sharlock, you do seem to carry something of a bias against these otherworldly players. Back in their own world, they've earned nicknames like 'two-legged locusts,' 'walking disasters,' and 'remorseless grinding machines.' Besides, this is hardly the first time they've shown off this method. They couldn't beat the subterranean spiders at first either — but once they'd gotten familiar with the fight, didn't they start clearing subterranean spiders in parties in no time? Same logic applies to the kobolds." So said Bru.

Now, Sharlock HAD seen the otherworlders pull off tight, wordless teamwork against the subterranean spiders — but he'd always credited that to Moros's coaching. Going by Bru's words, these players' capabilities were apparently miles beyond what he'd budgeted for.

Sharlock had originally regarded these goblins from another world as pure manual labor. Even carving out the Spider Nest as a combat venue hadn't been for the players — not to hone their combat skills or anything — it was on Bru's advice, setting the Spider Nest up as the otherworlders' rec facility, so they'd have somewhere to blow off steam between shifts of hardcore coin-grinding.

Other dungeons generally kept this sort of facility too. Regular goblins were into watching shows, watching wrestling, playing in the mud — that was about the ceiling. This crowd of otherworldly goblins, though? They were into adventure. The spicy kind.

To Sharlock, there was no meaningful difference at the end of the day. If anything, these adventure-junkie otherworlders were easier on the magic-stone budget.

As long as they worked hard and never cost him a single extra magic stone, Sharlock could not care less how they entertained themselves.

From start to finish, Sharlock had never once counted these otherworldly goblins as a fighting force. To him they were cheap, endlessly exploitable labor — with a side perk of occasionally entertaining him via their antics on the official site and the forums.

But looking at it now: a pack of otherworldly goblins that could scout intel on their own initiative, probe the enemy through combat, and then draw up a matching battle plan — and the kicker, goblins that could respawn without limit.

Sharlock watched the freshly-respawned otherworldly players outside — buck naked, getting dressed, chatting and laughing the whole time.

"Bru. I have a bold idea."

So said Sharlock.