Chương 16: Chapter 13: Blood In The Water

The stream ran cold over his hands, turning the water faintly pink where it met the blood. Gideon knelt in the shallows, fingers scrubbing at his skin until they burned. Behind him, a goblin Hunter stood a few paces back with his spear planted in the earth, silent and watchful. The forest around them murmured quietly. The cave's stench felt like another world. He kept his breathing even. Kept his face calm. Inside, he shook.

After the skirmish in the cage, three soft chimes had rung in his head, one after the other, as clear as metal struck on stone. The memory made him focus on the pulsing notification still waiting in the corner of his vision. [You have slain Goblin Warrior - Level 4. Experience earned.] [You have slain Goblin Warrior - Level 3. Experience earned.] [Congratulations! You have reached Level 3. 3 Stat Points Available.] [Proceed to Stat Allocation.] His stomach lurched.

He swallowed, forced the notifications away for the moment, and bent back to his task. The water stung where it touched the scrapes across his knuckles. The fox's teeth felt like they had done less to him than a pair of goblin skulls. He scrubbed until the last red threads spiraled downstream and faded. He lifted his head and stared at his reflection in the black surface. A goblin stared back at him. Same green skin, same pointed ears, same too-bright yellow eyes. Blood still clung in faint streaks along his jaw.

He looked like every other goblin in the Ironfang tribe, except for the tension in his shoulders and the way his gaze didn't quite fit the face. He shut his eyes and breathed. The memories slammed into him in jagged snatches. The other slaves' eyes constantly followed Gideon. They had hated him from the very beginning. He knew that. Their glares had followed him since the first day, when he hauled away the Ironfangs filth instead of shouting for blood. Their whispers were constant background noise.

"You crawl like a dog."

"You shame us. Grub." He usually just ignored them. But, resentment was a slow thing, quiet at first, then heavy, then suddenly everywhere. And he'd been here long enough for it to rot and swell. A little over a week he'd been a slave of the Ironfang now. Long enough for them to watch him work. Long enough for them to decide what kind of goblin he was. Long enough for hate to simmer until it found a spark. This night had felt different somehow. The air in the cage had been heavier, like a storm about to break.

Gideon had sat near the bars as usual, knees up, eyes half closed, listening to the tribe settle for the night. The other slaves huddled together at the opposite side, six of them pressed shoulder to shoulder, pretending distance would protect them from whatever they feared. They sat there muttering to one another, shooting him dirty looks. He ignored them as always. The burly one with the crooked jaw finally stood and spoke.

"Better to be dead than licking their boots," he snarled, voice low but carrying. A few of the others muttered their agreement. Hard eyes turned toward him, anger flashing across their faces. He hadn't truly believed they would act. Not until they moved. The first one came at him with a jagged shard of bone clutched in his fist. The strike missed his throat by inches but momentum carried his assailant forward, and he smashed into Gideon's chest shoulder first and knocked him onto his back.

The weight of the goblin crashed down on him then, driving the air from his lungs. Nails raked his face. Teeth snapped for his nose. Hot breath washed over him, full of old meat and rot. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't get the weight off. His hands had scrabbled blindly across the matted straw and packed earth until his fingers brushed against a stone. He instinctively grabbed it and swung upward with everything he had. The crack rang up his arm, blinding in its finality.

The jolt caused him to lose his grip on the rock, and it fell to the ground and clattered away. The body on top of him went slack. The dead weight slammed into his chest harder as its limbs loosened. Something warm and thick slid across his forehead and into his eyes. He tried to shove the corpse aside, but it was too heavy. He couldn't breathe. His heart was hammering in his chest and the blood was rushing through his ears in a deafening roar.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. The other slave struck then, snarling, hands closing like vices around his throat. Pressure crushed his windpipe. Lights popped at the edge of his vision. He grabbed for the rock again. His fingers found only matted straw and a small, smooth pebble. He grabbed it and acted without thinking. Mana surged, that now-familiar cold pressure rising from his core. Instinct bypassed thought. He didn't form the spell name.

Didn't picture the System window. He simply thought: Hit the eye. A spark snapped between his fingers as the pebble vanished from his hand and zipped forward. The other goblin's head snapped back. For an instant Gideon saw it clearly, closer than his own hand. One eyesocket sat suddenly empty, a neat, obscene tunnel punched through it. Then the body toppled, collapsing half over his head and chest. Silence had followed in the cage.

He had lain there for a few moments, buried under two corpses, staring up at the ceiling through a haze of blood. The smell of iron filled his nose. His own heartbeat continually roared in his ears. He hadn't felt brave then. He had felt small. And so very, very cold. He opened his eyes by the stream and plunged his hands into the water again, washing that memory away as best he could. He knew deep down that he wasn't in the wrong, that if the pebble had missed, he would be the one being dragged into the forest.

If he had been a little slower, the bone shard might have found his throat. If he had hesitated, even for a second, he would be meat. The thought didn't make him feel much better. He cupped his hands in the stream and poured the ice cold water over his face, shivering as the chill cut through the tremor in his chest. He thought back to his time alone in the forest. Killing animals was one thing. They had been food, necessary and distant, even when his hands had felt clumsy and wrong skinning that first rabbit.

These had been goblins. They had spoken to him. Glared at him. Hated him. Lived in the same cage. They had chosen to attack. He had chosen to live. Why should he feel bad about their choices? And yet, his mind kept snagging on something else. Something earlier. His first kill. First real kill. Not the rabbit or the fox. The goblin Warrior. The nameless one whose face he could barely remember now, only the rush of panic and the flash of the spear tip and the way the world had narrowed to a single desperate moment.

It had been back when Throk and his hunting party had caught him. Before the cave, before the routines, before the slow grind of safety, resentment, and watching eyes. Back when he was still half-wild and starving and running on nothing but fear and adrenaline. He remembered the way it had happened: fast, ugly, and necessary. A blur of struggle, the certainty that if he didn't act, he would die. There hadn't been time to think. No time to recognize the other goblin as anything but a threat that wanted him dead.

Afterward, he'd been shaking, yes, but it'd been the kind of shaking that came after a sprint. His body dumping the last of its terror. He hadn't stared at his hands and wondered what they were becoming. So why did this feel different? Maybe because that first Warrior had been a stranger in the morning. An enemy out in the open. An oppressor, drawing a line in the dirt. Kill or be killed. But these two? These had been slaves. Prisoners. Held against their will, just like him. They had eaten beside him.

Slept beside him. Whispered behind him for more than a week. They weren't faceless Warriors. They weren't a single goblin standing between him and the forest. They were just goblins struggling to survive, to come to grips with their situation, same as he was, and he'd just killed them while he was close enough to feel their breath on his skin. Close enough to hear bone crack. Close enough to smell the blood pouring out of them, to feel it coating him as he lay beneath their bodies.

That was why it stuck differently in his mind. He wondered, for a brief, dangerous moment, what his mother would have seen if she looked at him now. A murderer? A killer? Or a survivor? He wondered if his father could still find his son in the yellow eyes staring back from this stream. If Max would've recognized the way he had reacted, the way he had killed without thinking, or if his best friend would've looked at him and only seen a monster looking back.

"Enough," the Hunter said quietly, pulling Gideon away from his spiraling thoughts. He nodded, pulled his thoughts back under control, and climbed to his feet. His hands were as clean as he could get them. The goblin jerked his chin toward the cave. They walked back in silence. When Gideon stepped into the cage again, the four remaining slaves shrank away from him as far as the wooden bars allowed. They pressed together at the back, whispering, eyes too wide. They had seen. Not everything. But enough.

He settled back into his usual place by the bars and finally pulled the System notice fully back into focus. He read the last line again. [Proceed to Stat Allocation.] He mentally acknowledged the words, and the letters pulsed gently for a moment before they folded into a familiar window.

Name: Grub Race: Goblin Level: 3 Resource Pools: Health: 30/30 | Stamina: 20/20 (+2/10 mins) | Mana: 50/50 (+4/10 mins) Stats: Strength: 2 | Constitution: 3 | Dexterity: 3 | Intelligence: 5 | Wisdom: 4 | Stat Points Available: 3 He stared at it for a long moment. The System had taken his name without hesitation. Grub stood there on his Status, taunting him, as if trying to remind him he lived a different life than the one he'd known on Earth. Now it rewarded him once again for killing. Cold. Impartial. Absolute.

He thought back to the cave he'd woken up in, and remembered why he had avoided Strength before. No matter how much he put there, he would never be as physically strong as an orc or a hobgoblin. Goblins were small and weak. That wouldn't change. But Strength meant Stamina. Stamina meant running longer, climbing higher, or fighting a few moments more before his body gave out. Sometimes survival came down to those last few moments.

He resolved not to invest too much more into Strength in the long term, but every point helped a lot at his current level. He put one point into Strength and watched as his Stamina climbed to 30. A faint heat spread through his limbs. Muscles coiled a little tighter along his arms and legs, lean and ropey. Not a huge change, but he felt fractionally more solid when he flexed his fingers. He placed the second point into Intelligence, and the last point into Wisdom. Mana: 60/60 (+5/10 min) Better.

He let the window fade and stared at his hands instead. They looked the same, but he knew the numbers behind them had changed. Knew the System had made him a little more dangerous.

"You think killing them makes you one of them?" a voice rasped from the back of the cage. Gideon didn't look over at them, just continued staring out into the cavern, watching as the tribe settled back down for the evening.

"No."

"Then you're nothing but their dog," the tall slave spat. Gideon turned his head to look at him. His face was still swollen from earlier beatings, one eye ringed in purple.

"You fetch. You scrub. You wag your tail for master." Gideon let the words drip off him.

"What's the alternative?" he asked quietly.

"Fight them and bleed for nothing? Try to run and die in the forest on the first night? I've been out there, alone, starving, listening for wolves in the dark. Here, I'm a slave, yes. But the fire keeps me warm. The food isn't enough, but it's warm and fills my belly. The tribe's numbers keep the predators away." He sighed.

"I know which option I prefer." One of the others spat on the floor.

"Better to be free and dead than alive and chained."

"Easy to say while you're still breathing," Grub murmured.

"Harder when something has its teeth in your throat." He heard his own words and felt a twist inside. He sounded unlike himself. He sounded cold. He wondered briefly how Max would have answered. Max, who had thrown himself into a group of bullies without thinking to save him from a beating. Who had gotten his nose broken for standing up for someone else more than once. Gideon shut his eyes for a moment. The others fell silent. They had no answers for him. Neither did he.

He turned away from the others, laid down on his thin bedfur, and eventually the exhaustion dragged him under. Sleep wasn't kind to him. When he finally drifted off, dreams came to him, vivid and terrifying. They weren't coherent, instead tormenting him with flashes of disturbing imagery. Bone cracking in his hand. Blood pouring on his face. Max's voice shouting his name and then fading into distant goblin laughter. He woke to the noise of the tribe stirring, and for a moment he lay still, listening.

The cavern sounded the same as always. Crackling embers. Shuffling feet. Low voices and distant arguing. Life continuing, indifferent to his torment. Gideon flexed his fingers slowly beneath the thin blanket of straw, feeling the phantom ache of bone against his palm. Then he sat up, stretched briefly, and exited the cage.