Things probably don’t make sense to you right now. You no doubt have some questions about how all this came to be. Like how I ended up in the Tutorial dungeon to begin with. Who are those soldiers, or my friends?
I told you I would make things a bit dramatic, didn’t I?
Everything will be explained. For now, you simply need to know what was going on and why I ended up slaughtering the soldiers inside that cave. It was for my own survival. Pretty cut and dry there, I think.
So, let’s get back to it.
Perez’s body lay in the dirt, and I stared down at Reitlin.
“Stand down, private, that’s an order.”
I tilted my head sideways as I tried understanding why Reitlin looked so shocked and confused. I didn’t assume they were truly stupid; I thought they must have realized the gravity of what they had asked of me and thus understood my action.
It appeared they didn’t.
“I’m not a soldier, Reitlin. It doesn't matter what Nieve told you. The government can’t reach their fingers inside here.”
“You think you’ll get away with this once we are out of here?” Mathews yelled.
“Yes, I do,” I said.
I stepped over Perez, placing myself closer to them. “Because, who the fuck is going to tell them? You won’t be.”
Understanding finally dawned on them, and I could see it in all of their eyes. They rushed me right after, which was the smartest move they had made that entire day, even if it was futile.
I swung, and my sword struck Mathew’s neck right as he came in first. The blade tore through his flesh and out the other side in one swift motion. The entire left side of his body was covered in slick blood within moments, and he crumpled to the floor to join Perez.
Johnson was next. He attempted to tackle me to the ground.
I lowered my center of gravity and took his shoulder charge before I quickly stabbed down through his shoulder blades. Blood arced across the cave wall as I pulled the weapon back out, only for Reitlin to grab my arm to wrestle the weapon from me.
Slamming my fist into Reitlin’s elbow was all it took to force him to let go. His arm was already bent forward in the wrong direction, white bone sticking out through the skin.
“What the fuck, what the fuck!” Reitlin stumbled back against the cave wall.
The last soldier, Reyes, swung his rifle at me. Again, surprisingly smart on his part, but futile.
I stepped to the side and leaned away from the attack, causing it to miss me entirely. I lashed out with my shortsword, catching him on the shoulder and leaving a large gash. I followed up, trying to slash his neck as well, but he stumbled away.
The short reach of my sword was already annoying, and I wished for a weapon with a longer blade.
Reyes lunged again, swinging wildly. I simply slapped the rifle down to the side that time and rammed the point of my blade into his sternum. It punctured just a bit past his vest, but the second and the third thrust went further until I felt the blade had gone deep enough to hit his heart.
He joined the now-growing collection of bodies that decorated the cave floor.
“Okay, I get it. Let me live, I won’t say anything. Hell, I’ll even say you saved us.” Reitlin was slumped against the wall, cradling his broken arm. His eyes darted from me to the weapon in my hand, and then to the bodies lying around me.
“No, sorry, I can’t risk that. And I mean…”
I mentally brought up my status screen as I talked, looking for what I had expected. I had gained another level for killing Mathews, Johnson, Perez, and Reyes. “You placed us in this situation in the first place. And come on, we both know how this goes.”
Reitlin had sat down on the ground, and I knelt in front of him, weapon still in hand.
“You will keep up your end of the deal for a while. Then something in you makes you think you can extort me, or turn me in for some kind of reward. A promotion, money. Information on a class, or a magic item.”
He looked at me, dumbfounded, when I said that last bit. Which meant his stupid ass really hadn't figured out anything so far. By then, my mind was already racing ahead, noting the tropes in games and novels I had read in my early years.
The chain of events was obvious.
People would unlock classes, get special powers, and items. The world outside would completely change: markets, power structures, and laws would be utterly rewritten to conform to these new realities. Currency would become whatever those portals, those dungeons, could provide to us. It was inevitable, ironically, as the sunrise.
My eyes flickered to my status screen, and I saw that my unspent stat points had increased to six and my level to three. So each level gave three points, easy enough to figure out.
I tapped the screen to select my stats, then tapped again to place the points where I wanted. The entire system was rather intuitive actually. I couldn’t understand how those morons didn’t figure it out sooner.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Reitlin sputtered.
“Oh? Just adjusting my stats.” I finished my task and swiped the screen away with a wave of my hand. “But you don’t have to worry about that. Goodbye, Reitlin.”
I brought the sword up and down into his neck, ending him as I had Mathews. His body slumped to the floor rather undramatically, and silence settled into the cave quickly after.
It was over, and I had no regrets about what I had done.
Then I stood and walked out of the cave.
After taking care of the soldiers, laying them to rest in that small cave, I went about my plan regarding the Tutorial Quest. I would kill all the goblins. Simple enough.
It wasn’t hard to find the very first roaming hunting squad. They weren’t smart enough to cover their tracks, nor to be quiet. All ideas around stealth were probably as foreign to them as the concept of soap, or bathing.
The first group I came across was a set of three goblin scouts. I rushed them with the knowledge I was doing a service to the universe by removing them from existence.
A yelp from the front goblin alerted the others to my ambush, but it did little to help them. Mid stride, I brought my foot directly into the lead goblin’s chest with a front kick. The green little freak was sent tumbling across the forest floor before crashing into a tree in a heap of broken bones. Some even poked out its skin, leaking blood into the dirt.
[You have Slain Goblin Scout - Lvl 1]
The other two came at me with small daggers, which was only a minor threat given their already short reach due to their size. My sword was longer, and my arms. But most importantly, I was twice their height; I had the high ground!
A thrust of my blade impaled the second goblin before it could even get close enough to attack, and I twisted as I pulled my blade free. I pulled back, moving out of reach of the third goblin as it swung its dagger at me, missing by a good foot and change.
I lunged at the goblin right after, slashing downward, my blade biting into and through its shoulder. It shrieked and dropped its dagger before trying to jump at me with its sharp teeth barred.
With a quick backpedal, it landed short with a snarl. I promptly kicked at its head, sending it to the ground in a plum of dirt. Before it could stand again I reversed the grip on my sword and brought it down, forcing the tip through its skull.
[You Have Slain Goblin Scout - Lvl 1]
[You Have Slain Goblin Scout - Lvl 1]
My heart beat wildly in my chest, blood coursing up my neck and roaring in my ear drums as I looked at the results of my effort.
Three down.
It was certainly a start. But that’s what it was, a start. There were many more. And if the thrilling feeling of victory I just had then would continue with every kill, I knew I wouldn’t stop until I had succeeded.
“Gobbly fucks!” I yelled as my sword cut down into the creature’s neck, tearing through the flesh and sinking into its torso, creating a large spray. Droplets of greenish blood splattered my face, which I wiped away.
The warrior squad lay out on the ground, all six of them dead by my hand.
It was only four hours since I had turned on Reitlin and the others, and began my hunting spree, and there was a lot of information I had gained about the Gobblys, the Goblins, along the way.
They had a hierarchy system that helped me figure out how strong they were. The lowest were the scouts, with their shoddy daggers. Then there were the warriors, goblins with slightly more muscle, more fighting experience, and carrying blades that were less rusty and pitted than their lower brethren.
It wasn’t explicitly stated, but I figured out that scouts were a lower level than the warriors. This was further confirmed around the two-hour mark when I realized there was a combat notification log, so I could look back at all the kill notifications I had received so far.
[You have slain Goblin Scout - lvl 1]
[You have slain Goblin Scout - lvl 1]
[You have slain Goblin Warrior - lvl 3]
It didn’t show experience drops, something I found annoying. What game didn’t show experience points?
That was part of the grind for games on Earth. Our stupid monkey brains loved seeing those numbers pop up. We’d sit our fat asses down in a chair and slurp Mountain Dew for days at a time to see those numbers.
But I got over that particular pet peeve quickly.
Shown numbers or not, the green-skinned, sorry excuses for existence that were those horrid creatures still did give experience. Something I confirmed by figuring out how to bring up another notification.
[You have reached Level 5]
“Good, shit.”
I wiped my blade on the tattered shirt of the goblin warrior before bringing up and tapping on my status screen to immediately spend my newly received stat points.
There was no reason to hoard them, at least not right then. There might be some godly meta strategy for those stat points figured out by humanity later (spoiler, there wasn’t), but at that moment, in my situation, being as strong as possible was the best way to make sure I survived.
And my stats were already looking a lot better.
[ Name: Adam Pierce
Titles: N/A
Class: N/A
Level: 5
Unspent Stat Points: 0
Stats:
Strength: 7
Dexterity: 10
Vitality: 8
Intelligence: 6
Willpower: 6
Skills: N/A
Abilities: N/A
Spells: N/A]
For most people in a situation like this, it might be tempting to throw everything they had into strength. That was the basic meathead strategy, one that was a tried and true method by gym rats and men horribly insecure about their dick size.
But for every eventual mega-strong behemoth that resulted from such a strategy, there were also thousands of dead idiots who never made it that far.
The eventual leaderboard rankings would pan out in a way that showed I was correct in this regard.
Rather than that crazy play, I focused on Dexterity. The goblins I was fighting were small and rather weak already, but they were quick as fuck for their tiny size. So, I needed to be faster. Moving about in the forest was also a serious pain, which increasing my Dexterity assisted with.
Increasing Vitality also meant I wasn’t getting tired as often. Every one of my fights was against multiple enemies, so I had to make sure I wasn’t exhausted and overrun. That single point put into strength was due to a simple reason: strength still mattered; I wasn’t a fucking moron.
With the stat spread I was building, I had already slaughtered seven goblin squads as I stalked the forest. Seven squads may not seem like a lot, I get that. But it was an entire forest, and the little bastards were good at blending in with the foliage because of their skin, even if their loud garbled language and their atrocious smell gave them away.
So seven squads was rather good.
But it wasn’t enough. The quest said to survive until dawn, and that was roughly seven hours away. I needed to get a move on if I wanted to complete the optional objective listed on the screen.
[You have entered a Tutorial Dungeon
Quest: Survive the Goblin Assault Until Dawn
Optional Quest: Kill the Goblin Chief
Time Remaining: 7 Hours, 16 Minutes, 23 Seconds]
The implication was that a camp or small village of goblins was somewhere in the forest. I had been searching for it the entire time I was cutting down these scout and warrior parties. So far, there was nothing. But I wasn’t too worried, I felt I would get to it eventually, I just needed to slaughter my way there.
I bent and touched the warrior goblin at my feet, activating another aspect of the system I had learned during my killing spree. The loot system.
[Loot, Goblin Warrior: +12 Copper credits]
Not a whole lot. But I figured it would all add up.
I looted the rest, each time getting nothing but copper credits. Their gear wasn’t in the loot drop. If I wanted it, I had to take it from their bodies the old-fashioned way. But their armor, if one could even call the shit they wore armor, wouldn’t have even fit me as a human anyway.
It was just useless junk that I left to rot along with the bodies.
The trek into the forest continued.
The goblin village was not at the center of the tutorial level, as I had assumed, but was actually set against the cliff wall, completely opposite of the starting cave where we had first been placed.
It made sense that was the case, but it still was irksome. I ended up wasting a lot of time searching the forest around the center of the map.
A lot of time and effort, actually. As I eventually tore through squad after squad of the yipping ugly bastards as I travelled. It gave me a haul of copper and a nice, slow grind of my level, which was the only saving grace.
[You Have Reached Level 7]
[Stats:
Strength: 7
Dexterity: 14
Vitality: 10
Intelligence: 6
Willpower: 6]
Would these new stats be enough to take on the threat in front of me?
I looked at my hands, flexing my fingers slightly. The added strength point didn’t really feel like much. But my dexterity had doubled, and that, I noticed. My balance and reflexes were far better than before, and my movement was faster. Vitality was the same, my body felt… healthier? My breaths deeper.
The shortsword felt lighter, and I was far more confident with its use even after only ten hours of fighting with it. That wasn’t necessarily because of my stats, at least I didn’t think it was. It felt like something was feeding me information on how to use the weapon, increasing my competence with it.
Some kind of videogame fuckery was going down, surely.
Typically, someone would be rather upset that an unknown ‘System’ was affecting their mind. And yes, I would usually be one of them. But it was happening, there was nothing I could do about that, and stressing over things I couldn’t change or affect was just a waste of time.
Time that I didn’t have.
“One hour,” I muttered before swiping away all of my system screens and notifications.
I peered out through the brush where I was crouched, locking onto the small collection of huts that was the goblin’s camp. There were roughly thirty small structures, along with various smaller stick racks and tied-together lean-tos.
I had been hiding in the trees for about an hour, just watching them. Over that time, I estimated their numbers to be around thirty. It was probably much higher than that at the start, but I had chipped away at their population, having killed roughly sixty of the things already.
The inhabitants were nothing new; a smattering of scouts and warriors who walked about doing menial tasks such as cooking. A few sat by the campfires playing with small objects I assumed were dice. Others wrestled with each other, barking and squealing incessantly, their creepily proportioned bodies rolling about in the dirt and shit they had left in piles throughout the area.
Because, of course, the fucking idiots didn’t dig holes to shit in. That would require a bit of intelligence, something goblins were vastly in short supply of. Instead, shit piles were their tactic.
The reek of piss that wafted from the area left little doubt about how they handled that particular problem, as well.
But beyond the unsanitary status of the area, and the typical brain-dead citizens of Camp-Gobbly, my attention was drawn to three figures who sat near the back, next to a structure slightly larger than the rest.
The biggest goblin of all, standing roughly four feet instead of the usual three, was among this small group I eyed. He was clad in furs and had an axe looped into a belt around his pudgy waist. His small mop of stringy hair completed a visual that reminded me of Dr. Branderton.
On either side of him were two warriors, but each wore similar furs instead of the shoddy cloth and leather of the typical warrior. On top of that, their swords looked mostly just metal and lacked the rust blotches the others seemed to like decorating their weapons with.
“Gotta be the chieftain and his guards then,” I whispered.
I was staring down thirty goblin scouts and warriors, two beefed-up bodyguards, and a chieftain. It was a level-boss fight if I’d even seen one.
I tightened my grip on the sword as I drew in a deep breath. My switch had been flipped hours ago, so I wasn’t overcome with fear. Instead, I was looking forward to the fight. I wondered how many levels I would gain for killing them all.
With that thought, and a smile on my face, I stalked out of the trees and into the camp.
1.02 Learning To Hate Goblins