Chapter 150 — Fifty Goblins

Chapter 150: Chapter 150 — Fifty Goblins

The goblins noticed them the moment the party broke into open ground.

Shouts rippled through the first chamber. Crude weapons snatched up. A ragged, disorganized scramble rather than any real formation.

Arlen had expected panic to go one of two ways — a full charge or a full rout. What actually happened was messier than either.

A dozen surged forward at once. The rest hung back, confused, leaderless.

Grennig planted himself at the chamber’s natural choke point without needing to be told. Shield raised. Stone-Aura spreading across its surface in a dull gray shimmer.

The first three goblins broke against it like water against a breakwater.

"Predictable," Grennig said, dropping a fourth with an unhurried counter-strike. "Exactly how I like my mornings."

Rurik fought beside him with no shield at all — raw strength, gathering Aura bristling along his forearms, tearing through the crowd with the calm rhythm of familiar, unremarkable work.

Osric held the chamber’s edge, staff planted, weaving a low ward around Kess and Ilyana as they broke off toward the two larger goblins. Two spear-thrusts turned aside before either woman seemed to notice the danger had existed.

Arlen didn’t linger to watch. A cluster of six had broken toward the side passage, and nobody else had hands free for it.

He closed the distance in a burst of Storm Step, three goblins scrambling to reorient before he’d even landed.

The first died to a clean strike across the collar, Edgeline Strike gathering along the blade with the ease of long practice. The second’s crude axe met Aura Ward and skidded wide. The third lunged straight through the space where Arlen should have been standing and found nothing there at all, its own instincts betraying it a half-second too late.

"That’s new," Kess called out somewhere behind him, delighted rather than alarmed.

"Recently," Arlen called back, and finished the goblin before it understood its mistake.

Three more converged on him from the side passage’s mouth. He met them with Enduring Vitality steadying his breath and Hawk’s Eye sharpening every twitch of movement in the crowded dark — a spear thrust here, a wild overhand swing there, none of it especially threatening once he could actually see it coming clearly.

He dropped one with a low sweep across the legs, caught a second’s crude blade on his own and turned it aside, drove the third back with a burst of heat gathered quick and hot along his palm before finishing it properly with steel.

A seventh goblin came at him from an angle he hadn’t tracked — Shadow Sense caught it half a breath before it would have mattered, a presence pressing against the edge of his awareness from a patch of near-total dark behind a jutting outcrop. He turned into it rather than away, and the goblin’s own surprise cost it the fight before the fight had properly started.

"Behind me’s covered," he called toward the rest of the party, mostly out of old habit.

"Wasn’t worried," Ilyana said, somewhere off to his left, sounding entirely unbothered as her spear found the larger of the two standout goblins. Frost-touched Aura drove clean through hide that had shrugged off cruder weapons for years.

Kess’s laugh carried over the chamber’s noise a moment later, sharp and satisfied, acid-laced claws finishing the second before it managed more than a single desperate swing.

The goblins’ numbers meant less and less the longer the fight stretched on. Loose clusters broke apart under sustained pressure, panic replacing whatever crude coordination they’d started with. A knot of a dozen tried to funnel back toward the eastern passage — straight into whatever Osric had sealed there — and found the way blocked, the ward humming faint and solid across the gap.

Arlen pressed further into the second chamber, curious rather than cautious now, testing the edges of what the fight still offered him. He caught two goblins mid-stride with Storm Step, closing before either could raise a weapon properly. A third tried to flee down a narrow crevice and found Earthen Grip’s warning tremor useless against a target already committed to running — he let that one go, no reason to chase what wasn’t fighting back.

A cluster of five held their ground near a cookfire, backs to the wall, spears leveled with more genuine discipline than anything he’d seen from the rest of the camp.

"Careful with that lot," Kess called from somewhere behind him, catching sight of the same thing. "Might be worth more than they look."

Arlen studied them a moment — steadier stances, weapons gripped properly rather than clutched in panic. Not mutated, nothing like the two Ilyana and Kess had already dropped. Just goblins who’d apparently survived long enough in this camp to actually learn something.

He didn’t rush it.

He circled instead, letting Duskveil thin his presence at the edges of their notice, and watched the five track a shape that wasn’t quite where their eyes kept insisting it should be. One broke formation first, jabbing at empty air, and the gap it opened was all Arlen needed.

He took two of them before the other three properly understood the formation had already failed. The fourth swung wide and desperate, and Aura Ward absorbed the blow with barely a stagger. The fifth simply ran, and this time Arlen let Storm Step carry him the short distance needed to end it before it reached the tunnel mouth.

By the time he made his way back toward the main chamber, the fight had largely burned itself out. Scattered bodies. A disrupted camp. The low, uneven quiet of something that had been considerably more numerous ten minutes earlier.

"Not bad," Ilyana said, surveying the chamber with the same unhurried satisfaction she’d give a completed chore. "Kess, mark whatever’s worth taking. Osric, note the ore vein properly before we move on."

Kess moved through the fallen goblins with quick, practiced efficiency — sorting crude but genuine iron tools from worthless scavenged junk, pausing over the two mutated bodies to carefully harvest a pair of dense, oddly hardened claws.

"These’ll fetch something," she said, holding one to the light. "Denser than ordinary Rockhide claw. Alchemist might want a look."

Arlen crouched beside the smaller fallen goblins nearby, turning over which of it was worth his own attention. Most wasn’t. Common hide, common bone — nothing worth the weight in a pack.

He rose, sheathed his blade, and found Ilyana watching him with warm, evaluating curiosity.

"You covered more ground than I expected," she said. "Whole second chamber, near enough."

"Seemed like nobody needed help back here."

"That’s not really an answer." She studied him a moment longer, something thoughtful behind her composed expression, though she didn’t press further. "Good work regardless. You’ll do fine down here."

Osric finished logging the ore vein’s location and glanced up at the settling chamber, at Grennig already dragging a fallen goblin’s crude spear aside to clear a proper path through, at Rurik stretching out a shoulder with the satisfied ease of a man who’d barely broken a sweat.

"Guild’ll want a full report on the population size," he said. "Fifty’s well past what the last survey recorded. Someone’ll need to come confirm whether it builds back up this fast on its own or whether something’s actually pushing numbers this way."

"Not our problem today," Kess said cheerfully, tying off the last of her harvested claws into a small pouch. "Today we just clear it and go home with something to show for the walk."

Arlen looked around the chamber one last time — cookfires still smoldering low, the scattered proof of a colony that had, an hour ago, numbered in the dozens — and found himself, despite the sheer scale of it, entirely steady. No trembling aftermath. No adrenaline still hammering through his chest the way it had outside Miller’s Bend, more than a year ago.

Just the quiet, settled satisfaction of a job done properly, alongside people who’d trusted him to actually do it.