Chapter 32: The Goblin King and His Harem
Chapter 32: The Goblin King and His Harem
Two weeks went by.
Two weeks of forest, of hunting, of mana. Tracking, watching, stealing, fusing. My body was no longer the one I’d arrived with, and Goblinia now ran through me as if I’d been born with it.
But the hardest part of those two weeks hadn’t been the learning, or the sharpening of my mana control.
The hardest part was everything else. Tending my wounds, even the small ones. Disinfecting them however I could, with whatever was on hand. Finding food, building a fire, sleeping with one eye open. All the things I’d never once worried about, because there had always been someone to handle them for me.
Alice. The food she made every evening without my having to ask. Her Garden that closed my wounds before I’d even thought about them. Her presence, simply, that had made everything easy from the very first day.
The hardest part, in all of it, was her absence. Was that she wasn’t there.
That day, following the freshest tracks, I came out into a wide clearing. And I knew I’d found the heart of the goblin territory.
A cavern opened at the far end, guarded by a swarm of green creatures. But two things caught my eye.
The first: a circle of goblin females before the entrance. About fifteen of them. Finer, more slender than the warriors, draped in bones, feathers, and fetishes, a long ritual staff in hand. Shamans.
They were my one real frustration of those two weeks.
I’d worn myself out trying to copy them. I could see the mana move in them perfectly when they cast a spell — the way it rose, gathered, took shape. But between that shifting of mana and the spell itself, there was a step. A single one. And that step, I couldn’t see.
I could copy the way they made their mana flow. The passage from mana to magic itself still escaped me.
The second thing was him.
A giant on a crude throne of bone and wood, fifteen shamans in scant garb arrayed around him. Twice my size, gnarled muscle rolling beneath dark green skin seamed with scars, and a gigantic sword laid across his knees, so heavy no ordinary man could have lifted it.
The king.
I looked at the scene for a moment.
"I crossed a whole forest to run into this," I said, more to myself than to him.
He watched me step out of the treeline, and a cavernous laugh rose from his chest.
"Khkhkhkhkh~. So it’s you." His voice rolled in a guttural tongue my Blessing translated without trouble. "You’re the one who’s been slaughtering my goblins all these days."
He rose, the enormous sword coming to rest on his shoulder like a twig, and threw a hand toward me.
Everything went off at once.
The fifteen shamans raised their staves as one, and the king charged. The sky above me filled with spells while a giant bore down on me, his sword already sweeping up.
Goblinia took me before I could think. I dropped low, oblique, at the exact moment the sword came down — it split the ground where I’d stood, throwing up dirt and stones — and I rolled aside, right under a volley of fire that smashed into the spot my slide had taken me.
Caught in a vice. The giant in front, the deluge above.
I danced between the two. A fireball; I dodged it against the king’s flank, and he took it without flinching. A backhand of the sword; I slipped beneath it, straight into a bolt of green light I twisted my body to avoid by a hair.
And it didn’t let up. The moment I dodged the sword, a spell came down on me; the moment I fled a spell, the sword caught back up. They’d found their rhythm, all of them together, as if they’d done nothing else their whole lives. The shamans aimed exactly where the king drove me, and the king drove me exactly where they could fire.
A shard of stone grazed my temple. I shunted the mana into my hip, changed my footing mid-leap — and the sword passed so close I felt the wind of it on the back of my neck. I didn’t have a second. Not an inch of free ground.
A violet mist smeared across my leg in passing, and I felt it weigh on me all at once, heavier. A slow. It dissipated at once, Apotheosis scrubbing it out before it could truly bite, but the message was clear: they were waiting on one thing. For a single one of those curses to hold long enough that the sword could finish the job.
I gritted my teeth and kept dancing, searching for an opening that wouldn’t come.
"Khkhkh..." The king struck without pause, and he spoke between his blows. "It would seem you’re in some difficulty, little human."
I started to laugh, sliding under his blade.
"I’ll admit it was weighing on me, slaughtering a harem." I dodged a shard of stone, rolled. "Whatever the race. Goes a little against my principles, you see."
"Khkhkhkhkh~." His laugh swelled. "The madness has gone to your head."
"Probably."
I stopped dancing, planted my footing, and I answered for real.
"Infinite Arsenal."
Water burst up around me, hardened — a dozen spears, swords, points of every kind that began to spin, hissing. I loosed them with a single motion, straight at the circle of shamans.
They shot across the clearing, whirling on themselves, and fell upon the goblin females before a single one could raise any defense.
And where they struck, it was carnage. The weapons didn’t merely pierce: the water, exploding on impact, tore the small green bodies apart, ripping off arms, legs, scattering limbs in a red mist across the whole clearing. Most of the shamans dropped at once, gutted, pinned to the ground.
And I pressed on before the survivors could grasp what had happened.
"Dash."
The world tore open. I reappeared in the middle of what was left of them, a water-sheathed saber already mid-swing — and I reaped. In a single arc, the last goblin heads rolled into the moss, their bodies collapsing a second later.
Silence fell over the slaughter.
I looked down at my saber, dripping, and I sighed.
"Aah... This kind of thing really does weigh on me." I wiped the blade with a backhand. "Elsa’s a real demon, making me do this."
A roar answered me.
The king. Stripped of his pack, alone among his gutted shamans, pure rage twisted his face. A green aura exploded around him, sending dust flying and grass bending flat, his mana pouring off his whole body.
He charged.
This time, I didn’t just dodge. I played with him.
I danced around his bulk, Goblinia flowing through every motion. He feinted a direction — I read it before he did. He loaded his mana into one arm to sell an angle — I was already on the other side. Every trick he tried, I turned back on him, because I knew his own style better than he did.
It’s insane, I thought, opening his flank. He’s probably spent his entire life on this art. And me, thanks to a single skill, I already master it better than him.
I bled him little by little, one blow after another. A knee cut, a flank opened, a tendon severed. He struck at empty air, again and again, his rage making him slower, more readable with every assault.
In one last surge, he gathered what strength he had left and brought his gigantic sword straight down on me.
I leapt. And I landed on it, balanced, light, on the flat of his blade held out at the end of his arm.
He raised his bulging eyes toward me, unable to understand how I’d ended up there.
Perched on his weapon, looking down at him, a strange feeling passed through me.
This reminds me of something.
A slender silhouette, golden eyes, one foot resting effortlessly on my own saber while I collapsed at her feet. Sylwen. The difference was that this time, the monster staring up at the scene, disbelieving, wasn’t me.
I’d come a long way.
I let my two sabers slide down along his blade, sprang onto his arm, and drove them into the back of his neck.
He collapsed face-first into the ground, and moved no more.
[ Level Up ]
> Level 57 — Path of the Spellblade applied
Fifty-seven.
I stared at the number a moment. Seven levels in two weeks. It was laughable, and I didn’t care.
What I’d gained in this forest didn’t read as a number. It read in the mana control poured into every fiber of my body, in my skills fused and transcended all the way to Goblinia, in the way I’d just moved, read, killed, without having to think about it once. Everything had changed.
I sheathed my sabers, wiped the blood from my face, and raised my eyes toward the gaping cavern and the last goblins trembling at its mouth.
There was only one left now. The orc king, somewhere on the far side of this forest.
The work went on.
~~~~
Author’s Note:
A couple of quick notes before you continue.
Chapters 33 and 34 are told from Sylwen’s point of view, alongside Alice. Since the main story follows Kuro’s perspective, these Chapters are entirely optional (much like Chapter 6). You can skip them if you prefer to experience the story strictly through Kuro’s eyes, or if you’d rather not learn things he doesn’t know.
Chapter 35 is an R18 bonus Chapter featuring an explicit solo scene with Alice. It is also completely optional and contains no essential plot developments.
In short:
Kuro’s POV only (no side POVs, no R18): skip directly to Chapter 36.
Full story without the R18: read Chapters 33 and 34, then skip Chapter 35 and continue with Chapter 36.
Everything included: simply keep reading Chapter by Chapter.
See you on the other side!