Chương 37: Chapter 15: Not Berserk Goblins (Thank God)

Ben eventually got his goblin. It was a small mercy.

They were maybe four hallways into the dungeon, past the first chamber, past a stone bridge over a small pit of water that smelled like how old water smelled when it had been still for an unreasonable amount of time, past a corridor with rusted iron grates over alcoves where the carved skeletons of small humanoids still wore the rusted armor they had died in—Ben had not looked at those for very long since it was very corny—and they had come to a small room with three goblins in it, and Maddy had said, casually, like she was offering him a fucking McNugget, you want one, and pointed.

He had taken his wax knife out. He had walked over. The goblin had screamed. The goblin had charged.

He had remembered, in the half-second between the charge and the contact, that he had STR 12 and DEX 16 and that the goblin had a hundred and thirty HP and a knife made out of a rock, and he had remembered, more importantly, that he had once watched a YouTube video about how knife fights actually worked, narrated by an Australian man, which had said in essence that if someone with a knife was coming at you, you needed to commit, you could not flinch, you had to step into it and end them faster than they ended you.

He had stepped into the goblin. He had slashed. The wax knife had gone across the goblin's throat in a long arc, and the goblin had stopped, and the goblin had made a small wet sound, and the goblin's body had crumpled forward into the stone, and Ben had stood there with the wax knife in his hand and the goblin's blood—which was green, what a fucking surprise—sprayed up his forearm. He had felt nothing. The nothing was a numb-procedural nothing, like his body was deferring the emotional processing for later.

Which wouldn't happen. Because the goblin was a fucking clump of code lines and more stupid shit. The other two goblins were carbon by the time he turned around. A panel slid in. [Goblin defeated!] [Ben: +XP.] [Level up!]"You got one!" Maddy said.

"I got…one."

"Congrats."

"Yeah."

"How'd it feel."

"... weird."

"Weird?"

"Weird. Yeah."

"Like."

"It was easy."

"Yeah."

"It was really easy."

"Yeah." She wiped a streak of green goblin blood off his cheek with her thumb because they were close to each other in the small chamber and her hand was the closest available cleaning tool, and he stood very still while she did it, because he did not have a category for how to feel about that exact small gesture in the middle of a fantasy dungeon while wearing a smoking-shouldered Uniqlo shirt.

"There," she said.

"... thanks."

"You had goblin on your face."

"Yeah."

"Now you don't." You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"Yeah." They kept walking.

They looted the goblins after the next few rooms because Maddy said it would be very un-fantasy like to clear an entire dungeon and not loot a single corpse. The looting did not pay. The looting did not pay because the goblins had nothing on them. Or—they had things on them, but the things were the kind of things a person who lived in a cave and stabbed themselves with a sharpened rock would own. The list, as Ben kept it: A rusted knife. A different rusted knife.

A piece of bone that had been carved into a shape that might have been a charm or might have been a fork. A few copper coins so fucking wrecked the faces were illegible. A tunic that the system, when Maddy held it up and asked, classified as: [Stained Tunic (Common).] [Hygiene: -2.] [Wearing this item may apply: Mild Skin Condition.] [Sparkle]"Mild Skin Condition," Maddy said.

"How the fuck is Hygiene a stat."

"It's saying we'll get herpes from the goblin tunic."

"Worse than herpes."

"This is so racist toward goblins."

"The system is racist and sexist."

"I'm leaving the tunic."

"Leave the tunic." She left the tunic. They took the knives. They took the copper coins because money was money and possibly John would take them. They left the bone fork. The level-ups came at irregular intervals, because the system had been designed by an LLM that did not have a strong opinion about XP curves and was apparently just rolling dice. After the eighth or ninth chamber Ben hit Level 5. After the tenth or eleventh he hit Level 6.

Maddy hit Level 5, then 6, then 7, all in roughly the same span, because the system had been giving her credit for the kills she was doing and the kills he was doing both, which meant she was outscaling him, which meant— He looked at her. He looked at her pink screen, at the level number on it, at the seven sitting there next to the Level. He looked at his own. The six. She was a level ahead. She had been a level ahead since the start.

And his brain kept SPAMMING six-seven six-seven six-seven because he was a child. He allocated his points. He put four in INT—he could not stop himself, the gap had to close—three in STR and three in DEX because he had to do something tactical. INT 23. He had crossed her. He had crossed Maddy. He felt nothing about this except a small ugly satisfaction that he chose not to interrogate. She was watching him allocate. He could feel it in his peripheral.

"You did it again."

"Yeah."

"Four in INT?"

"Twenty fucking three""Ben."

"What."

"You're not even using INT."

"I'M USING IT."

"You haven't cast a single fucking spell this entire dungeon."

"I'M USING IT MENTALLY."

"You're using it MENTALLY?"

"Yeah."

"That's what dumb people say."

"FUCK YOU." They kept walking. The dungeon, predictably, was structured. The structure was clear after a few rooms, with corridors branching into chambers, chambers with goblins, goblins with loot that was not loot, the occasional larger chamber with a stone slab in the center that had probably been used for a thing the system did not want to elaborate on because the system was a coward. The carvings on the walls got worse as they went deeper. That was the second thing Ben noticed.

The first carvings, near the entrance, were vague rune things. Generic fantasy gibberish. But about halfway in the carvings started to change. There were diagrams. Formulas. Something that looked like an alchemy circle. Something that looked like a body diagram with notations. A long stretch of wall that had what Ben, with his lit-major brain, recognized as a manuscript, a person had been writing on this wall, with intent, in a hand that had been deliberate and then frantic and then deteriorating.

He stopped in front of one stretch of wall.

"Maddy."

"What."

"Look at this." She came over. The wall had been carved in a script he could not read. But there were diagrams. A figure. Then the figure again, larger. Then the figure again, larger still, with extra limbs. Then the figure again, very original, larger still, with the extra limbs broken off. Then a figure he did not recognize as the same figure, because the figure had stopped being a figure, and was now something else.

"He was trying to make himself stronger," Ben said.

"How do you know."

"Look. The figure gets bigger. Then the figure gets weirder. Then the figure stops being the figure." She looked.

"... yeah."

"And the handwriting gets worse over the course of the wall. He was rushing toward the end."

"Toward what end."

"Toward whatever's in the boss room." A pause.

"Ben."

"Yeah."

"Is this—Elda. Elder. Fuck I forgot his stupid name."

"It's gotta be."

"He was trying to —""He was trying to become stronger. Yeah."

"To fight the DarkVeils, you think?"

"I don't know."

"Or was he a DarkVeil."

"I don't know."

"It's so fucking cliché."

"I know."

"Like. Sad genius scholar transforms himself to fight his enemies and becomes the very thing he—""DON'T."

"What."

"Don't do the antithesis thing."

"... the what."

"The not-x-but-y thing. The becomes-the-very-thing-he-sought-to-defeat thing. Don't."

"... you're insane dude. This is not even an anti-thesis."

"I'm a literature student." She took a tone filled with sarcasm.

"He didn't just become a goblin," she said.

"He fucked one too."

"This is not an antithesis."

"Well it's already better."

"…right." She kept walking. He stared at the wall for another second. The deteriorating handwriting. The diagrams getting worse. The body that was no longer a body. A small panel slid in next to his head. [Lore Discovered: Eldarion's Workings.] [+50 XP.]"... thanks system." He kept walking.