Chương 8: Chapter 7: Is There Anybody Out There?

His dreams that night were chaotic and full of teeth. He dreamed of sharp white points flashing inches from his face, of hot breath and snapping jaws, of claws raking across his back as something small and vicious tried to drag him down into the dirt and end him. In the dream, he couldn't get his dagger free. His hands were too slow, his body too light, and the fox's weight crushed the air out of him until the world narrowed to panic and the taste of blood. He jerked awake with a sharp inhale.

For a heartbeat he didn't know where he was, only that his heart was hammering and his skin felt too tight. Then the early morning forest noise seeped in around him. Birds calling out to one another. Leaves rustling softly in a slow breeze. Somewhere farther off, something heavier moving through the brush. Pale light filtered through the roots above his head in thin, dusty shafts, and the cramped darkness of the foxhole pressed in on him from all sides.

Gideon swallowed, breathed through the last of the adrenaline, and tried to steady himself. Then the ache hit. His back and shoulder throbbed where the fox's teeth and claws had torn into him. He slowly raised a hand and felt along where the fox had torn his skin the day before. The skin there was whole now, knitted shut by the System's slow Health regeneration, but the soreness ran deep, buried in muscle and bone. When he flexed his fingers, his forearms ached as if he had been clenching his fists all night.

He took another deep breath to calm himself and checked his Status to see his Health pool. Health: 30/30 He groaned and pushed himself upright in the cramped foxhole, and immediately regretted it. Dirt crumbled from the roots above his head. For a few seconds he just sat there, breathing, feeling his pulse in every bruise. Then he exhaled and shoved himself toward the entrance. Outside, the morning light streamed through the trees in pale shafts. The air was cool and damp, smelling of wet soil and old leaves.

Gideon stepped fully out of the den, rolled his shoulders, and winced.

"Alright," he muttered.

"Time to stop being fragile. First things first." He started stretching. It was slow and awkward at first. He rolled his shoulders, twisted his torso from side to side, pulled each arm across his chest until the muscles tugged and burned. He rotated his neck, feeling every knot complain. Then he moved to his legs, shifting into crouches, straightening, holding his balance on one foot, then the other, testing his new center of gravity. His goblin body protested at every movement.

But little by little, the stiffness loosened. His joints moved more freely, his muscles warmed up. By the time ten minutes had passed, the worst of the soreness had lifted. He blew out a breath and nodded to himself.

"That's going in the daily routine. In a body this weak, being limber might literally be the difference between living and getting my head bitten off." The mental image of a goblin doing morning stretches in the forest made him snort. Somewhere out there, a DnD rules lawyer was probably having a stroke.

"Yeah, yeah," he said under his breath. He couldn't help but let a small smile come across his face.

"Laugh it up, world. For I am the flexible goblin." He flexed his thin little arms, and the memory of him and Max in the gas station came to him unbidden. His smile faded, and he forced himself to focus on the present. If a little bit of morning routine gave him even a fraction of a second more to dodge or move when it truly mattered, it was worth any imagined embarrassment. His gaze drifted back to the foxhole.

Even from here, he could see the smear of dried blood on the roots and smell the mix of damp earth and old death. Memories from yesterday flooded in. The fox's weight slamming into his back. Hot breath on his neck. Teeth snapping at his face. His dagger punching into its soft belly over and over until the light went out of its eyes. He'd survived, but only barely.

"Panic and adrenaline saved me," he said quietly.

"But that's not a plan. Not long term at least." Hiding. Fleeing. Scraping by on luck and weak Skills. That wasn't going to be enough. Not if he wanted more than a few extra days before something bigger or smarter found him and finished him off.

"If I stay this weak, I'm going to die," he told himself. Saying it out loud made it more real. He swallowed, staring into the trees beyond his little shelter.

"And I'm not dying here like that. Not when I got another chance." Not when Max might have gotten one too. That thought settled beneath the fear that was already creeping back in. Somewhere under this same impossible sky, Max might be waking up alone, confused, and trapped in a body he didn't understand. Or maybe he'd been lucky. Maybe he'd chosen better. Maybe the System had dropped him somewhere safer, somewhere with walls, roads, people, and food that didn't have to be chased down or scraped out of the dirt.

Gideon tried to imagine what Max would have picked if he'd been given the same choice. Human, probably. Max had never been the kind of person who gambled with things that mattered. Then again, neither had he, and look how that turned out.

"If he got the choice, he absolutely went Dragonkin," Gideon murmured.

"Or something with a giant sword. I can see it now. Big dramatic wings. Fire breath. A total power fantasy." He let himself picture it, just for a heartbeat. Max stomping through a dense forest like this one, covered in scales, wielding some absurd greatsword, complaining about menu layouts and asking where the nearest village was. The image brought the smile back despite everything. Then, another thought followed it, colder.

"What if he isn't some invincible Dragonkin," Gideon whispered.

"What if he's in a place worse than this. Worse monsters. Worse terrain. Alone, like me." He couldn't know. The Adjudicator had given him nothing. Just that paths diverged and sometimes crossed again. Or didn't. He ground his teeth in frustration at the memory. Damn thing. Then he shook his head to clear his mind, and looked around. Gideon straightened his back and stretched one final time.

"I'm going to choose to believe he's here," he decided.

"In this world somewhere. The Adjudicator thing said the System registered the act of saving the kids and gave me a second chance at life because of that, so I will assume the same thing applied to Max as well. And he's alive. And he's doing what I'm doing. Trying to survive." He looked around at the forest, then added, "and he's somewhere safer than this." He nodded, cementing the thought in his mind. If he had no way of knowing, at least he could do this, and pretend. It gave him some peace of mind.

If there was even a chance their paths might cross again, then lying down and giving up was not an option. He owed Max more than that. He owed himself more than that.

"New step one," he said.

"Stay alive. Step two, get strong enough that if I do find you, I don't drag us both down. Step zero, I want to see what happened to that fox, see if I can get its fur." He nodded to himself again, then turned away from the foxhole and walked back toward the place where he had fought last night. It took him a while to find the stream again, and then a while longer to follow it back to where he'd been attacked. What remained of the fox lay in a messy heap. Something else had gotten to it during the night.

Half the body was gone, ripped apart and devoured. The rest already crawled with pale maggots, flies buzzing in a cloud over the torn fur. The stink hit him like a slap. He covered his nose with his forearm.

"Right," he muttered, thanking his instincts.

"Good thing I ran." If he'd stayed and tried to rest or recover from his wounds there, whatever had come to scavenge the corpse might have decided to add goblin to the menu. He shuddered involuntarily. He had come so close to death, and somehow it still didn't feel completely real, like he was watching everything happen to someone else. He didn't dare linger. He followed the creek until he found a quieter bend with fewer rocks and more shade. There he knelt and drank until the dryness in his throat eased.

After that, he stripped and washed himself properly, scrubbing at any dried blood he had missed the day before. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Mud and diluted red swirled away downstream, vanishing into the current. He washed his torn sack-cloth tunic too, working it against the rocks until the worst of the stains faded, then laid it out flat to dry while he waited naked under the trees.

When he finally pulled it back on, still a little damp but vastly cleaner, he felt more like a person again and less like a walking biohazard.

"Water, food, shelter, information," he recited softly, ticking each point off on his fingers.

"Basic needs first. Then power." He began moving in careful circles away from the creek, marking landmarks as he went. A twisted tree split by lightning, its trunk blackened and hollowed. A boulder that looked like a crouching beast from one side. A shallow gully that hooked in a distinctive curve. Each time he chose a new direction, he made sure he could orient himself back to the stream. Get lost in the forest and he would die of thirst long before wolves or whatever else found him.

Between scouting loops, he hunted again. The day ended up being busy. He managed to bring down two more rabbits, a squirrel fat enough to be worth the effort, and even a bird that had perched too low on a branch. The bird had been more luck than skill. He had spotted it, crouched, taken a few steadying breaths, then cast Pebble Toss as cleanly as he could. A small wisp of smoke came from his hand after casting, but quickly dissipated. The stone shot upward and hit the bird square in the chest.

It dropped without a sound. Each new kill made the next one easier. His Skinning skill lent a ghost of guidance to his hands, turning what had started as hacking and sawing into something closer to method. He wasted less, cut cleaner, removed fur and feathers more efficiently. It still wasn't very good, but there was a noticeable difference between the crude hacking he'd done the day before and what he was doing now.

When he finally had enough meat to justify a fire, he chose a sheltered hollow near the creek, ringed it with stones, and built his fire up slowly. He watched the surrounding trees constantly this time, not feeling eager to repeat yesterday's encounter. His Cooking skill nudged him away from burning everything. The meat came out only a little charred instead of blackened on the outside and raw in the middle.

The smell alone felt like a triumph, and for the first time since waking in the cave, he ate until his stomach was full. Not just not hungry. Actually full. Warmth spread from his belly outward, heavy and pleasantly sleepy. He sat near the coals for a while, letting himself have that much.

"This," he said quietly, staring into the dull red glow, "is step one done right." He had water. He had food. He had somewhere to return to. For the moment, that was enough. But enough for tonight wasn't the same thing as enough to survive. Tomorrow, he needed more information. Careful scouting. Better landmarks. A clearer sense of what lived nearby, what hunted where, and what places he needed to avoid before they became lessons learned the hard way. And people.

He didn't know what kind of world this was yet, or what kind of rules guided the System that had thrown him into it, but he refused to believe he'd been dropped into an endless forest with nothing but animals and trees for company. There had to be someone else out there. Whether finding them would save him or kill him was a different question. The discovery came by accident the following day. He was following the creek upstream, searching for a better vantage point, when he found the pool.

It was tucked into a low depression, fed by a narrow trickle spilling from between two rocks. The water was clearer than the creek, still and deep toward the center. As he knelt to wash his face, something else caught his eye. Footprints. He froze, then moved closer to investigate. They were pressed into the soft mud at the water's edge. Three or four clear impressions, partially softened by time and weather but still distinct. Narrow feet, long toes, short claws that had dug into the earth at the front.

His eyes flicked from the prints to his own bare feet. He gently pressed his own foot into the ground next to the prints on the ground. When he pulled his foot back, he drew in breath sharply. The same number of toes. Same shape, same marks from the same nails. The prints were just larger and deeper, as if made by someone heavier, taller, or stronger. Gideon squatted, heart beating faster as he took a closer look.

"Goblin," he breathed. He looked around, suddenly hyper-aware of every sound. Bugs buzzed faintly. A bird called in the distance. Leaves rustled in a breeze he could not feel. He found more signs once he started actively looking for them. A bit of old leather half-buried near the pool, chewed at the edges but clearly cut once by a tool. A small, crude spear tip carved from bone, snapped near the base and discarded beside a tree.

Scratches on bark at about his eye level where something had gouged lines into the trunk, marking it. Branches had been cut in a rough pattern in one direction, as if dragged or broken to clear a path. He crouched near a tree and ran his fingers over the exposed wood. The marks were too controlled to be animal, yet also too random to be human. His nostrils flared. There was a smell in the air, faint under the usual forest scents. Smoke, long cooled. Grease. Sweat.

A lingering, sour musk that prickled at something instinctive inside his goblin body. Hope and dread twisted together in his gut. He straightened slowly. Everything he had read on Earth came back to him. Goblin camps in fantasy novels, ruthless raiding parties in games, chaotic tribes in tabletop worlds. Clever, mean, and opportunistic. Food chains made out of whatever was smaller or slower.

"Goblins travel in groups," he muttered, trying to remember the stories he'd read.

"Tribes. Clans. Whatever you want to call them. On their own, they're weak. Together, they're dangerous." He decided to not trust that his information was correct, as what he "knew" was from stories and games from Earth. Maybe the goblins here in this world had different behaviors. He had no way to know at this moment. But, he was one of them now, for better or for worse.

"What does that mean for me?" he whispered to himself. These goblins could mean protection. There was strength in numbers after all. Safety from wolves and foxes and whatever else stalked this forest. Or, they could just as easily decide he was competition or weakness and solve that problem the old fashioned way. Was it worth the risk to search these goblins out? He crouched down again near one of the prints and let his fingers sink into the damp soil over it.

"Alone, I'm dead meat," he admitted.

"With a group around me, I at least have something resembling a chance of survival." But only if he played it right. He followed the trail away from the pool, staying low and moving carefully, letting Stealth guide his feet to quiet steps. The signs became clearer the further he went. Footprints began overlapping each other. A place where something had sat or slept, matting the grass. Gnawed bones scattered near a log, cracked open for marrow.

A crooked stick thrust into the dirt with feathers tied to it, some kind of crude marker or warning. He paused by that stick longer than he meant to.

"Territory marker?" he wondered aloud.

"Or just goblin art?" A faint smell of old smoke drifted on the breeze when he reached a slight rise. He crept up to the edge and peered over. Below, in a shallow depression, the remains of an old campfire blackened the ground. Bits of charred wood and ash lay scattered. Around it, the undergrowth was trampled flat by many small feet. He saw impressions in the dirt that mirrored his own prints, plus others a little larger. He crouched lower, instincts screaming at him to hide. Then he heard them.

Voices up ahead in the distance. He could hear them faintly from where he crouched. Harsh, guttural sounds he had never heard before. His human brain couldn't latch onto them as words, yet his goblin senses reacted to the cadence with a strange sense of familiarity. He sank down behind a fallen log and held his breath. He didn't see anyone. The voices faded and rose again, then drifted away in another direction, indistinct and distant. No shapes emerged from the trees. No weapons glinted in the underbrush.

He stayed hidden there for a long time, his muscles tense, every sense straining to hear something, see something. Nothing came. Eventually, he exhaled, slow and quiet.

"Too early," he whispered.

"I'm not ready to just walk into a goblin camp. Not until I know what they're like here. Not until I'm a little stronger." He forced himself to turn back, carefully retracing his steps. He marked the path in his memory, fixing every landmark, every bend in the trail. He would continue scouting and searching again in the morning. By the time the light began to fade, he had chosen his next shelter. It was a shallow stone overhang hidden behind a curtain of vines, barely tall enough for him to crawl into.

The floor was cold and damp, but the rock above him felt solid. Defensive. Easy to block off if he had to. He dragged fallen branches across the front, breaking up the outline. From a distance, it would hopefully look like nothing more than part of the hill. Inside, he sank down, exhausted. His stomach was no longer empty, but a deep ache remained in his muscles, a reminder of everything he had been through in just a few short days. Hunting. Running. Climbing. Fighting. Stretching. Crawling. Always moving.

Always planning. Always on edge, on the lookout for the next threat. He was tired. So tired. He stared at the rough stone ceiling and let his thoughts drift. Other goblins were nearby. That changed everything. Didn't it? No longer was the forest just beasts and him alone. There were thinking, possibly intelligent minds out there. Potential allies. Potential enemies. He imagined what it'd be like meeting them. Would they see him as one of theirs? A stray who had gotten lost and needed to be folded into the tribe?

Or would they smell the human habits on him, the foreign fear and mannerisms, and decide he was wrong somehow. Broken. Worth less than meat. Max's voice came to him,"You gotta roll the dice eventually, man." Gideon smiled faintly.

"I know," he whispered.

"Just not today." Sleep didn't come to him easily. When he finally drifted off, his dreams were tangled and restless. Wolves with Max's eyes ran past him through the underbrush. His parents, sitting at a kitchen table with the Adjudicator hovering behind them like a silent judge. Goblins circling him, their faces all his own, sneering and laughing. He woke before dawn with his heart hammering and the taste of fear in his mouth. The forest outside was still dark and cool.

He pulled the scraps of fur he had saved tighter around himself and forced his eyes closed again, snatching whatever rest his body could get. Later, as dawn light crept into his little shelter as a thin gray haze, Gideon pushed aside the vines at the shelter's mouth and began to exit, intending to stretch out some of the stiffness in his limbs. He didn't get to finish the motion. Six goblins stood in front of him. They were arranged in a loose half circle around the entrance, eyes fixed on him.

Three of them held short bows with arrows already drawn, their points aimed squarely at his chest. Two more gripped crude spears, shafts of rough wood with jagged stone or bone lashed to the ends. At their front stood the largest goblin in the group. His skin was a darker green than Gideon's, mottled with scars along his arms. A battered wooden shield was strapped to his left arm, and in his right hand he held a shortsword that might once have belonged to a human child or a small adult.

A dented metal helmet, clearly also taken from a human, sat crookedly on his head, almost slipping over one eye. Somehow the sight was intimidating, not ridiculous. His yellow eyes never left Gideon.

"Hello little one," the large goblin said.

"Out." Gideon blinked a few times. His ears definitely didn't hear English, but he understood the words as though they were. He was confused for a moment, then his brain caught up. The goblin language. It made sense that he would speak and understand it. Did that mean he was speaking goblin this whole time while talking with himself? Thoughts for later. He focused again on the one that had spoken.

Gideon raised his hands slowly, heart pounding, careful not to move too fast and give anyone an excuse to loose an arrow. His resolve didn't vanish. If anything, it strengthened. He had wanted to find goblins. They had just found him first." Alright," he thought, forcing his face to stay calm." New goal. Survive this. Then figure out how to turn it into an advantage." He stepped fully out of the shelter, hands still raised.