The celebration didn’t sound much like a welcome for a new member of the tribe.
Judging by their frenzied yellow eyes, and the saliva dripping between their jagged teeth, it sounded rather more like they were celebrating a fresh meal.
Standing before a few dozen hungry goblins, Magna began trembling all over again.
The goblins kept letting out ear-piercing cries as they closed in on him, bit by bit, their intentions painfully obvious.
Then a far louder roar tore through the cave, drowning out every other voice at once.
"GRRRAAAUGH!"
It was the very same thunderous sound Magna had heard drifting down the river, only now it went off right beside him.
Instinctively, he looked up at the female goblin holding him.
The gentle look she’d worn only moments before had vanished completely. Whatever replaced it sent a sudden, warm trickle running down between his legs.
’Ah. I peed myself.’
The female goblin’s eyes had gone almost entirely red, wide enough now to look like two crimson orbs set into her round face.
Every jagged tooth in her mouth stood fully bared, the sort of thing that looked like the most primitive, terrifying weapon nature had ever thought to forge.
But it was the horns that truly froze him solid. Two jet-black spikes slowly tore through the skin of her skull, pushing outward, as though she were mutating, right there, from some low-tier monster into something closer to a demon.
Fortunately, Magna wasn’t the only one terrified by the sight. The other goblins fell silent at once and started backing away.
Moments later, as though nothing at all had happened, the horns receded, her face settled back to normal, and she calmly carried on toward another tunnel, deeper into the cave.
A few minutes later, Magna found himself in another chamber.
It wasn’t as large as the last one, but at least there were no other goblins in it. This chamber seemed better aired too, and better lit, which made it far less suffocating than the rest of the cave.
Bones lay scattered across the ground. Some clearly belonged to animals. Others looked rather more disturbingly human.
Magna had little doubt they truly were human remains. Rusted swords, shattered bits of armor, and a handful of personal belongings, several worn books among them, lay scattered in with the rest.
There was no denying it, gentle as she’d been with him so far, the female goblin was still very much a predator, and every bit humanity’s natural enemy.
While Magna took in what was apparently going to be his new home, the goblin carried him to the corner of the chamber and set him down gently on a bed woven from soft leaves.
Smiling warmly, she began speaking to him.
"Grok... gruk... Kuh-hurr..."
’Miss, I really don’t understand a single word you’re saying, but never mind that...’
Knowing his only real chance of survival rested on this mother goblin, he decided to play along.
He gave her a toothless smile and reached up with his tiny hands, trying to grab hold of one of her long, clawed fingers.
The terrifying sight of her from moments ago still lingered in his mind, but it was becoming clearer by the second that she had no intention of hurting him.
"Chruk-kuh..." she said happily, and carried on playing with him.
A second later, her pointed green nose twitched as she caught some smell in the air.
Tracking the sudden foul odor, she unfolded the thin blanket covering him, peeled off the damp cloth serving as his diaper, and tossed it aside without much thought.
Magna felt a brief flicker of adult embarrassment at being so exposed, but it vanished at once when the goblin held out her palm and began to chant.
"O Vein o’ Livin’ Worl’... Riva dat flow since ’fore Firs’ Dawn... Silen’ Motha o’ Rain an’ Sea... gif me pure wata..."
Magna was rather taken aback.
It sounded, if anything, like she was speaking some broken, heavily distorted version of the human tongue.
Then something even more astonishing happened.
A small sphere of crystal-clear water slowly formed above the goblin’s palm, then burst apart, splashing across his whole body.
He coughed a few times, clearing the water from his throat, then looked back at the goblin, eyes wide with shock.
’She just chanted a spell?’
Magic itself wasn’t all that surprising, really. He’d already accepted he was in a fantasy world, and such things naturally came with the world setting.
What actually caught him off guard was a lowly creature like a goblin speaking something this close to human language, and casting a spell on top of it.
With that, a new kind of hope began to bloom inside him.
If even a goblin could use magic, then why not him too?
If he could learn to cast spells, his odds of surviving in this world would go up rather a lot.
’Miss Green, please teach me how to use magic.’
Seeing his excited reaction, the goblin let out a string of cheerful squeaks. Assuming the baby was simply delighted by the water and her little display of magic, she happily began chanting again.
"O Eclip’ o’ Fadin’ Sun... Darknes’ dat gatha’ since ’fore Firs’ Ligh’... Blin’ Motha o me Ash an’ Ruin... gif me ya sacre’ fire..."
This time, no sphere of water appeared. Instead, a small flame flickered to life above her palm, and she used its warmth to dry the baby off and chase the chill from the cave.
Meanwhile, Magna’s mind was racing, trying to piece together how magic actually worked in this world.
’So chanting’s required to cast a spell?’
The goblin’s pronunciation was rough and hard to follow, but he could still make out most of the words well enough to reconstruct the proper incantation.
’O Eclipse of the Fading Sun, Darkness that has gathered since before the First Light, Blind Mother of Ash and Ruin... grant me your sacred fire.’
It sounded rather less like a spell and more like a prayer, actually. The caster was simply begging some higher power to lend a bit of its own.
This kind of invocation-based spellcasting wasn’t unfamiliar to Magna. In recent years, plenty of full-dive VR games had adopted similar systems, meant to make spellcasting feel more immersive for players.
Instead of triggering spells through some menu, players had to recite the incantation aloud, and pronounce every word just right, which made the whole thing especially appealing to anyone who’d grown up reading novels like Henry Porter.
In fact, Magna himself had once built a game around those exact mechanics, though the memory was distant enough now that he could barely recall the details.