One quick trip back to Bluff Apollo to swap the jet for the helicopter, and I was on my way back to Red Rock with Armstrong and Chuck. I glanced at the two hobgoblin taskmasters. “Looks like we wrangled the dragon that went down. System just gave me a new sub-job choice for hobgoblins.”
Chuck leaned against the door of the chopper, looking out at the forest passing below. “So long as I ain’t gotta stop wranglin’, boss.”
“If it’s like zealots or the secretive service, it’s a bonus on top of what you’ve already got,” I said.
Give me the deets, System
Supercharged offense or supercharged defense, I summarized. I looked out the chopper door at the moon hanging overhead. Is there a distance cap on the Hunting Trip skill?
Yeah yeah, I figured.
Wardens would have been amazing at several points in the past few months. From night haunts to javelines to elves, and now Habberport soldiers, a sub-variant with a home-field advantage would have been the obvious choice. Up til now it had felt like we were chasing behind the power curve and staying one step ahead of disaster. But for the first time, it felt like we’d pulled slightly ahead of the curve, instead. Where the elves had given us grief for weeks, the dragon riders had been repelled in hours.
Our technology was pulling far enough ahead of the rest of this medieval world that even advantages like fire-breathing dragons and mages were less of a threat to us now than a half-dwarf-half-pig with a helmet and spear had once been. And I had to keep our goal in mind. Wardens might help us secure the bluffs, but our future wasn’t on the bluffs. It was in the stars. If Hunting Trip was like the zealot skill, it had linear scaling rather than a flat bonus. Presumably that scaling was meant to be limited to Rava’s surface. Would the 100,000 plus extra kilometers to Raphina supercharge it? I had to take the chance that it would.
Give me the Poachers. If even 25% or 30% converted, it would be a huge boon.
<235 hobgoblins have converted to poachers>
I stiffened. “How many hobgoblins did we have in the tribe?”
“There’bouts 350 last I looked,” said Armstrong.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
I opened up the tribe submenu and scanned through. “Nearly every hobgoblin just converted. Over a 70% conversion rate. When I unlocked zealots, only about a third made the swap.”
Chuck shrugged. “No one fixin’ to get left,” he said, thrusting his chin up toward the moon.
“The rest are already secretive service,” I noted. “Can’t be both, I suppose.”
Armstrong flexed. “Where you go, we go, boss!”
I grinned. “Ad Luna?”
“Ad Luna,” said my two hobgoblin taskmasters.
With the big, bad null devils waiting for us on Raphina, we were going to need any advantage we could get. Two and a half hundred wranglers and scrappers with an anti-proximity bonus on an interplanetary scale would certainly help even the odds.
We flew until the forest turned craggy and rocky, white stone cliffs starting to split the greenery beneath us. The storm had mostly cleared, though a few towering cumulus clouds still remained above Red Rock Rise. Chuck spotted the flares smoldering on the ground before any of us and pointed them out while Armstrong pulled a trio of personal gliders out of a stash in the chopper. I tapped on the pilot’s shoulder. “We’re going down ahead. Find someplace to set down.”
The air delivery goblin gave me a salute and then squawked as the unheld controls jerked to the side. I grabbed for the aircraft frame as the chopper shifted, barely managing to avoid tumbling out the door early. Once we leveled out, I took one of the personal gliders from Armstrong before leaping from the aircraft with my two taskmasters.
On the ground, foliage had been scattered into a small clearing where dozens of goblins swarmed with a few orcs and Ifrit, working to keep the dragon restrained while the armored mage sat tied to a tree. Gliders were scattered across the clearing, discarded from where members of Red Rock had jumped directly from the bluff in order to apprehend the downed knight and his mount.
“Well done, boys,” I called as I flared the glider out for a landing. “Glad to see neither of them spinning over a cookfire already.”
One of the noblin igni quickly shoved something behind his back that trailed smoke, but I elected to ignore it. I approached the restrained human on the ground. System put his level at 45, the highest human I’d seen so far. The dragon itself was 55–for being smaller than some of the badlands creatures, it was no less powerful than any of the totem beasts the orcs hunted. Even injured, they would have been too much for the goblins of Red Rise alone. But they’d brought the Ifrits’ newest toys. One of them lumbered up to me, gas engine chugging.
“Wel…come, Apollo… king,”
I looked up at the Ifrit in the new Goblin Tech Tree version of their war form (steely fire whomp’ems). The kerosene-powered bipedal vessel looked lanky and apish, similar to one of the swamp big-jaws except for the twin recoilless rifles and the firing deck of goblins that the real thing fortunately lacked. After seeing them in the City of Brass, there was no way I could not integrate our own version into the tribe—albeit they were internal combustion powered rather than being manipulated by unions with a dozen or more members. Even with two-way transportation now completely open with the City of Brass, only a small fraction of the Ifrit exiles had any desire to leave the tribe.
“Thanks,” I said. “You’re all getting better at spoken language.”
The subtle fire in the vessel flared a bit in acknowledgment of the praise. I moved past to where the knight watched us. Through the slit in his helmet, I could see his eyes drift up to the crown on my head. His suit of armor was a blue-colored plate mail with a padded robe over top.
I didn’t have to lower myself much to get on eye-level with the sitting human. His presence still had that disconcerting effect, the natural wariness that my goblin side harbored for large hominids. This creature was something that readily killed goblins. But in its eyes I saw a distinct lack of emotion reflected back at me. Like he didn’t care that he’d been caught and tied up.
“The orcs and the Midnighters tell me there’s no way humans would ever negotiate with a goblin king. But neither of them are here right now, and I have to try. I have to see if I can put the brakes on this escalation before it moves beyond something we can stop. Are the others right? Will you never see me as anything but vermin to be exterminated?”
The mage cocked his head at me, as though he couldn’t understand me even though I was speaking Rava’s unified language.
“Nothing to say to that?” I asked. Still, he said nothing. I scowled. “What kind of knight are you?”
“Him? a knight? The AUDACITY!”
I turned to see who had spoken just in time to watch the dragon throw off its captors with a sudden move that brought its head out from under the net.
“Get hold of it!” shouted Armstrong.
The dragon turned to me and opened its mouth, and I saw a roiling light deep in its ebon throat, like a torch at the end of a tunnel. Before I could react, that deep pilot light became a cascading white-hot blast that enveloped my world. I smelt ozone and burnt fur and felt myself lifted off my feet.
Department of Otherworld Rescue
Each year, teens around the country are spirited away to other worlds and made to fight on their behalf. It is this department’s position that these events are tantamount to human trafficking and child-soldiering. We’ve been empowered to make all efforts toward their recovery.
Before you ink your name on that dotted line, let me tell you these kids ain’t being called to the Bahamas. These are desperate, dying worlds. You have to be at the end of your rope to put all your faith in little Johnny with a sword and an F in algebra.
The danger is real. That’s why the casualty rate is there in bold print. But when you play in their sandbox you play by their rules. Rules that could let you peel open a tank like a can of C-rations if you play your cards right.
Figured as much. Welcome to the team.
Don’t forget to fill out the next of kin info.