Here is what I know about goblins at this moment: nothing at all.
I knew only what two days had taught me. A creature of my own level had nearly dissolved my arm. A creature fifty-four levels above me had switched me off like a lamp. The goblin standing in my firelight was one level above me, and I tried to place that on the scale, found nothing in either direction I could trust, and understood that I was about to find out.
It stepped closer. In the light I could see more of it: thin as a coat hanger, ribs showing, one ear notched, a string of tiny pale things around its neck that I decided not to look at. It said something to me in a low, clicking gravel of a voice. I did not speak goblin.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't..."
It repeated itself, louder, and lifted the club. Not at me. Over my shoulder, at the mouth of the lean-to, where the doll sat upright with her glass eyes catching the fire. The goblin tapped its own chest, then pointed the club at her. The meaning needed no translation.
I would like to report that what I did next was brave. It was nothing so grand. It was the same reflex that had grabbed her when my living-room wall opened, some stubborn nerve in my spine that said no.
I stood up, with the carving knife in my right hand, and I stepped between them.
"No," I said.
The goblin tilted its head.
It was faster than the slime. It crossed the firelight in two bounds and the club came around in a flat arc, and I got the knife up in time to accomplish absolutely nothing. The club took me in the ribs with a sound like a dropped suitcase. The air left me. I went over backward across the log I had been sitting on and landed on the edge of the fire in a cloud of sparks.
The Registry, ever helpful, chose that moment to update.
HP 7 / 14
I lay there looking at the number while the goblin stood over me. Its eyes were yellow and very bright, and it raised the club with both hands.
My right hand, flung out behind me, closed on a stick. One end was glowing.
I do not remember deciding to swing it. I remember the arc of orange light, the hiss when it found the goblin's face, and the scream, a high, thin, horribly ordinary scream, the kind a person makes. The club dropped. The goblin staggered back, clawing at its eye.
I was on my feet with the knife again, and my body, which has never once been in a fight, did the only thing it knew. I did what I had done with the slime. I looked for the weak point and went in.
Under the jaw. Once.
It was not like the slime. The slime had sunk into the moss and vanished. The goblin sat down, very slowly, like someone who has remembered something. It looked at me. Its eyes were strangely serene.
Then it lay down on its side and did not move.
The panel appeared a moment later, with perfect indifference.
Deed recorded: First time defeating a goblin.
Experience gained: 20 XP (Goblin, Lv. 3)
First-time-defeat bonus (Goblin): +80 XP
LEVEL UP. Level 3.
Max HP: +2 HP 9/16
I sat on the log and put my head between my knees. The panel said Level 3. My ribs said otherwise. My hands shook so badly that I had to sit on them.
I have worked in a cubicle for twenty years. The nearest I had come to violence was an argument over the office thermostat. And I had just killed something that looked back at me.
I told myself it was a monster. The Registry had labeled it one. But a slime had not screamed.
It was a long time before I trusted myself to look at it again. I did, finally, because it seemed wrong to leave it alone. The goblin lay on its side at the edge of the firelight, one hand curled near its face. It was not much bigger than the doll.
At its belt hung a dagger and a pouch. I do not know why I opened it. I think I wanted to know what it had been carrying when it came for me.
There was a brass button. A blue glass bead. A bent spoon. The bowl of a tiny clay pipe. A broken comb with three teeth missing, wrapped carefully in a leaf.
I knelt there with the comb in my hand and understood something about the goblin that I would have preferred not to.
It had not been hunting me. It had been collecting. It had wandered out of the dark, seen something beautiful with a painted face and glass eyes, and wanted it, in exactly the way I had wanted every single doll on my shelves. It had wanted her for the same reason I did.
I put the comb back in the pouch, and the pouch back on its belt.
The only thing I kept was the dagger. It was rusted and pitted, with a handle wrapped in dirty string, and it was a better weapon than any of my hobby knives. I told the goblin I was sorry. It was a stupid thing to say to a corpse, and I said it anyway.
I did not sleep that night.
I sat with my back to the fallen trunk and the doll beside me, and fed the fire with every stick I could find. Around midnight I heard a long, wavering howl a long way off, and then another, closer, from a different direction. Then a third. Clicks and chittering answered them out of the dark. Something was calling something, and I knew who they were calling for.
I took the dagger in my left hand and the carving knife in my right and waited to die.
They came. I know they came, because I heard them. Branches creaked, and the ferns whispered with small, quick feet, and at the very edge of the firelight, there were eyes. Dozens of them, yellow and small, ringed around my clearing.
They did not come closer. They stood there a long, terrible time, looking at me, and then at the thing on the ground, and then, one after another, the eyes blinked out. The ferns whispered again. The clicking faded into the trees.
I do not know why. I have thought about it many times, and I do not know why.
In the gray light of morning, the goblin was gone.
There was no blood on the moss. No scuff in the ferns. Only a thick root, black and wet with dew, that had risen out of the ground and lay across the place where it had been, like a scar across a field. The pouch was gone with it. The ground was smooth and clean.
I looked at it for a long time.
"Who did this?" I asked the empty air.
The Registry, as always, said nothing.
I was alive. My ribs hurt, and my hands were raw, and I had killed something that had wanted my doll, and I had been spared by something I could not see. I was beginning to understand that in this forest, being lucky was not the same as being safe.
But I could not shake the feeling, standing in that cold dawn light, that something much larger than me had tidied up after my mistake.
And that it had not been angry about it.