Chương 14: Onboarding

The tree produced, without fail, without pause, without maintenance. That was all the tree ever did. It was the perfect machine. It had been producing since the day after the siege, pods swelling and splitting with a frequency Matthew had never seen, and the reason was the mana. The demon commander and the imps fed the fungal patch, the patch fed the tree, and the tree converted the energy into goblins like a line running at maximum capacity. The rival dungeon's assault force had become the fuel for the recovery.

The irony was not lost on Matthew, and he had no time to appreciate it because the newborns were arriving so fast. Nine adults. That was the starting number, the morning after the siege, when the survivors stood in the ruined core chamber and the first post-siege pod split open and dropped a squalling infant onto scorched stone. Fourteen by day three.

Twenty-three by day seven, when the spike hit its peak and the tree produced four goblins in a single day, Matthew ran out of names from his mental directory and started pulling from the cast of a sitcom he had watched in college. Forty-one by day ten. Past the pre-siege number, past everything he had built over months of careful, measured growth, achieved in a week and a half because the mana was flooding in and the tree was spending it as fast as it arrived.

The problem arrived fast, and it was a good problem, and it was also a disaster. The new goblins could quickly walk and climb and eat and make noise, with the physical capabilities of adults and the cognitive capabilities of newborns. They wandered. They ate things that were not food. They walked into walls and into each other. One walked into the stream and had to be pulled out before being swept away. It came to the point he had to put up a waist-high wall on either side of the embankment and a bridge over it.

The veterans were outnumbered four to one. Nine goblins with training were trying to manage a sea of oversized toddlers who understood neither language nor danger nor the concept of stop eating that. Matthew watched one of them try to eat a mush-mush. The mush-mush responded to being bitten as expected, venting spores directly into the goblin's face. The pup coughed, sneezed, staggered sideways, and tried to eat it again.

"Nicole," Matthew said.

"We need to talk."

"No," Nicole said, which was still her primary conversational contribution. He knew she could say more. She just gave off angry-secretary energy and never seemed to want to. They didn't have a labor shortage. They had an onboarding shortage. So many bodies but zero skills. Most of their institutional knowledge died in the siege. Matthew had been turning a problem over for weeks, and the problem belonged to the species as a whole rather than to the warren. Every generation started from zero.

Nothing was passed down and nothing was preserved. A goblin was born, lived a short, brutal life, died, and was replaced by another goblin who knew exactly as much at birth as the first one had, which was nothing. The species accumulated no institutional knowledge and developed no order of social specialization. Each goblin was identical to the last, a disposable unit produced by a system that had optimized for quantity and sacrificed everything else. Sarah knew how to run a construction team.

Steve knew how to train hunters. They were gone, and what they knew was gone with them. Every day without training, these new ones were learning the wrong things.

"We need a school. A training program. Every new goblin goes through it before assignment to a department. And we need a teacher." He looked at Nicole. Seeing his gaze on her, she turned her back to him and walked away. Matthew sighed and then he looked at Janet. Janet was by the nursery, humming. One good hand, one crushed hand, three infants in nesting boxes, and a rabbit on her lap. Janet was patient with the rabbits, who were skittish and bit when frightened.

The infants, who were helpless and required constant attention, she would hit now and then. She loved animals. But she hated children. This made her, Matthew realized from his own time in the public education system, the picture-book image of every teacher he had ever had. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

"Janet," he said from the doorway.

"I need you to do something." She looked up. The humming stopped. The pits were in the back corridor, past the warehouse. Two new pits. Two new prisoners. The guild contractors, confined to individual holes carved from the stone floor, smooth-walled and many feet deep, were built to the same design he had used for the captive scout. They were watered and fed and alive. They were also on a schedule. Matthew had learned.

The fungal patch, left alone, would drain a high-value host, like the sorceress, to death in a matter of weeks, taking everything and leaving a husk. A low-value host, like a thug, would be empty in a day. That was the equivalent of burning through a nonrenewable resource instead of managing it, and Matthew was done being wasteful. The new approach was rotational. He pulled a man from the pit on a three-day cycle.

The patch took him for twelve hours, the roots sinking in and drawing mana in slow, measured pulls that Matthew monitored through the dungeon sense. After twelve hours he had him released and put back to the pit, where his body recovered before the next cycle. In the meantime, his partner would come out. Then the scout. And then back all the way to the start. They all had a shift. The mana was modest. But a modest, stable income that could be planned for was better than incremental spikes.

Really, it was no different than the rat or the rabbit farm, right? The prisoners did not see it that way. They were quite unhappy every time they were dragged away to the fungus. But the way he saw it, they owed him for the damages they caused. Lost income by distracting his labor force, damages to his property and resources, and so on. For each of them, he made a personal assessment of what they owed him in reparations. Once they paid that off, they could go. That was his promise to them.

— He wasn't an unethical businessman, after all. The goblin tribe needed a new way, a different way, and he would guide them to it. Sarais pulled the handcart along the road. The cart creaked under the weight of what lay in it. The tarp covering it was heavy canvas, the kind she used to cover the root cellar in winter, draped over it. Underneath, visible when the fabric shifted, was a woman, breathing shallowly. An adventurer, some low-level sorceress. But something had happened to her in the goblin's cave.

Sarais didn't rightly know what, but she also didn't probe. The sorceress was pale and looked wrong, sickly. Her body was pockmarked by scabbing, as if she had the pox. She didn't respond to touch or stimulus, but she was alive. She breathed. She had a heartbeat. Sarais knew better than to ask questions. The arrangement was clean and required no conversation. It required only that she pull the cart, deliver the cargo without drawing attention and questions, and ask nothing. Matthew had paid her in materials.

Lumber. Carved stone. Fiber cord. Tools. The things she needed to rebuild. The remote church she was told to bring the sorceress to for recovery was half a day's walk in each direction and for what she was getting for it, she was content to take the trip. She'd take a detour around by Dunkelhollow on the way first, though. Matthew was in the hearth chamber, working on the smoke system, when the sound reached him. It came from the main corridor, and it was none of the sounds he had catalogued. Laughter.

High and sharp, uncontrolled, the sound of small creatures encountering something funny and reacting without any filter at all. A litter of playing goblin pups ran past him. Weeks old, chasing each other through the corridor with directionless joy. No drill, no order, no task. They were just… playing. Matthew stopped working like a man who just saw a phantom walk by his cubicle.

He watched four of them streak past the hearth chamber entrance and down the corridor, feet slapping against padded stone, voices echoing off the walls in a cascade that was too loud and too alive for what he knew of this existence. He turned his head. Nicole was standing across the corridor, watching them too. She never smiled, and her ears were up, both of them tilted forward. She looked at him. He looked at her. The laughter echoed between them. Nicole nodded. Matthew nodded back and went back to it.

"The hell do you mean he's missing?" Sarais asked at the counter of the Adventurers' Guild hall in Dunkelhollow. The receptionist was young, barely past her apprenticeship, and the panic in her voice made her look younger still.

"Ah- I- Mr. Ghost hasn't returned yet from his business," she stammered.

"I've sent word to Weltbaumshaven, but you know how long the post takes out here." Sarais tapped her fingers on the counter. Varran was up to something, probably. He'd gone missing, and 'missing' could mean many things, most of them bad. Should she worry? Varran gone might mean no more questions. But it might mean someone else was asking them now. It might also mean he'd gone looking for answers or found them. She pushed a stack of furs across the counter. She pushed it flat and unceremoniously.

"Put this against my debt."

"Y-yes, of course." The receptionist opened the ledger with a shaking hand, the digits she wrote uneven, uncorrected, unmentioned by either of them.

"Farming seems to be a lucrative business," the girl said, innocent and curious, not yet aware you didn't comment on other people's finances in a guild hall.

"Stick behind your counter," Sarais said dryly, walking out the door.