I tried to send my skeleton through the obelisk ahead of me, but it was stopped as if the obelisk was in fact made of stone. With a shrug I crossed over, thinking maybe it could only follow me. I turned back around only to catch the tail end of my skeleton minion falling apart and dissolving into dust or ash or something that blew away in a gentle breeze. Damnit!

  “Hey, wait a second,” I called out to the rest of the group. I only just noticed that we had stepped from a forest into a tropical jungle. Unlike the last dungeon, this one didn’t seem to be made of separate rooms, but stretched into the distance. “My skelly couldn’t cross the obelisk. I need to make a new one…or two.”

  Mara glared at me.

  “What?”

  “It just takes soooooo long,” she complained.

  I gave her the finger and shoved my spear into the earth, wrapping it in spiritual energy until the undead minion creating process took hold. I summoned a second spear and did the same thing.

  Then we waited. Mara tapping her foot while the others very unsubtly didn’t look in my direction was not very helpful for making the time pass more quickly.

  A few minutes later I handed two spears to my two newest minions. With a grumble from Mara about taking forever we headed away from small clearing we’d appeared in. I sent my skeletons out as scouts. Sort of. They would only walk about a hundred feet in front of me, and I’m not sure how much they were actually paying attention to the environment around them.

  John transformed his mithril coated arms into machetes and carved us a path through the thick vegetation. I followed behind Oliver. Ashley brought up the rear behind me.

  “What do you want to do?” Ashley asked quietly.

  “I don’t know. Survive?”

  “No, I mean for a date. We’re going on a date when we get out of here.”

  “Oh,” I felt myself blush and was glad I was facing away from her. “Y-yeah. That sounds good. Ummm, what kind of stuff do you like to do?”

  “Well, we already kind of know each other,” Ashley began warming up to her topic. “So, we don’t need to do the whole like coffee date thing. We could see a movie, get dinner, I don’t know.” Her voice got a lot quieter and I had to strain to hear her, “I haven’t dated a lot.”

  “Oh,” I replied stupidly. Apparently it was my new favorite word. “Me neither.” We were both quiet for a minute. “But, surely we can come up with something less lame than dinner or a movie.”

  Ashley chuckled behind me. “What do you propose, Miss Judgy?”

  “I don’t know.” I took a deep breath, “Maybe we can find one of those sip and paint things? I don’t know that Whitcomb is hopping with a lot of fun date ideas. We may have to drive somewhere bigger.”

  “How far would that take us?”

  “Honestly I have no idea. I don’t know if there even is anything bigger nearby. Goddess, I hope so,” I whined.

  “I thought you didn’t like big cities,” she teased.

  “I don’t. But they don’t even have a Walmart, Ash. A Walmart!”

  She snorted behind me. I turned and she had a hand covering her face that was quickly turning red. She was so adorable.

  Just then I heard some weird pinging sounds coming from up ahead. I turned back around in time to not run into Oliver as the group all came to a rushed halt. I looked around the others to see what was going on.

  Ahead of us, now standing still because they refused to move more than a hundred feet away from me, the skeletons were being briefly knocked in different directions. Each little twitch was accompanied by one of the funny pings.

  Apparently whatever was going on became impatient that what they were doing was having zero effect on the skeletons. There was a high pitched screech, like a hundred buzzsaws grinding at once. From the underbrush and in a few instances dropping down from the trees above, a whole cadre of little green things jumped onto the skeletons.

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  It was then that the skeletons apparently finally felt threatened. They both turned and began stabbing the little fuckers. I finally got a good look at one as a skeleton booted it backward and it rolled in front of our little group.

  It was small, no more than three feet tall. It had large, bat like ears. A fat, bulbous nose. And short, dagger like teeth. It scrambled to its feet facing us. Its scrawny arms and legs supported a short, squat torso. It was naked except for a long loin cloth. Thankfully. I did not need to know what goblin dick looked like. I was still traumatized from the troll dick from earlier.

  It let out one of the buzzsaw screams and dashed at us. John stepped forward and casually booted it the hundred feet back into the melee around the skeletons. Unfortunately the damage had already been done. Several more of the ugly little things looked back at us and decided that we looked like easier targets. Or maybe just tastier. Either way they broke off from their original fight and ran at us.

  Suddenly there was the sharp bark of a gun going off nearby. I looked over and saw Ashley with her pistol out, rapidly firing into the goblins running at us. None of them made it more than halfway.

  By then though one of my skeletons had become overwhelmed by the little green villains and had been literally ripped apart. Seeing an opportunity, and remembering from last time, I called out to the group. “Raising some zombie goblins! Don’t shoot!” I glared daggers at Mara who just shrugged her shoulders before she returned to flinging fireballs into the horde around the skeletons. Holy cow there were so many of them. And they just kept coming.

  I shook my head to clear the distractions. I gathered up the ambient spiritual energy from the area. There was actually quite a bit more in here than there had been out in the forest we’d entered from. It was much easier to bundle it up and shove it into four goblin corpses. That felt like my limit. I didn’t think I could raise more than five at a time. And I remembered that having raised so many, they wouldn’t be any smarter than the skeletons.

  They didn’t require any verbal commands. Through my link to them I sent the command to attack their former kin. With silent grins the four goblin zombies leapt onto their still living compatriots.

  The living goblins were more than a little confused. It took them way too long to realize the danger the dead goblins represented. They were able to take damage and keep attacking. Little stone knives, daggers, and spears slashed and stabbed into living flesh until their brethren were dead. And they kept going until they themselves were torn apart. But by then there were more dead goblins to raise to replace them.

  I thought about giving a maniacal laugh. You know, for ambiance. But figured Mara would laugh at me and never let me live it down. And well, as much fun as it sounded to give a good evil cackle, I couldn’t afford to give Mara more ammunition for teasing me. She already had more than enough with the whole Ashley debacle.

  I think John being in the thick of things was the only thing that kept Mara from going super saiyan. That was something not even he could shrug off. Instead she threw out balls of plasma that splashed and burned through everything around it like supercharged napalm. She mixed in the occasional tight beam of pure energy or whatever she was throwing these days.

  Ashley had replaced her pistol with the larger military gun. The thirty-knot-are or something… I don’t know. The shiny purple one. It had more bullets per magazine thingy it looked like, so she could kill more goblins before having to switch. She only occasionally reshot one of my zombies. But there were now so many bodies and so much ambient spiritual energy that it was basically moot.

  John was John. He’d waded into the direct center of everything, where the skeletons had been stopped. There he acted as a lawnmower for goblin bodies. He kicked, punched, stabbed, sliced, and diced goblins left and right. Even for someone as experienced with death as I was it was a little morbid to watch for too long. He had come a long way from the minotaur.

  I for once wasn’t running around trying to run interference between Ashley and whatever was coming at us. I was too busy recycling corpses and directing them to do that for me. As soon as I got one on its feet another two would go down. I’d raise their replacements and then John would slice off another’s head at the ears. It was a never ending battle. I needed a way to distinguish my dead from everyone else’s soon to be dead, but I didn’t know exactly what I could do to accomplish that. Especially as fast as I had to replace them.

  Eventually the horde of goblins petered out. There were a few final stragglers that leapt out. Soon there was silence. Just John’s and Mara’s heavy breathing. Ashley’s changing mags. And my lone zombie that was left after John killed the other two before reining himself in.

  It very obviously left a big gap between it and John as it snuck closer to me. It was missing several fingers, one eye had a stone knife sticking out of it, and one of its ears had been chewed off. In a word…it was rough. Even I was a little off put by it, so I surreptitiously removed the spiritual energy from the zombie and it dropped like its strings were cut. No one looked at me.

  I would pick a less disturbingly dead goblin or two for my next zombies. I was curious if these fresh undead would make better scouts than the idiot skeletons that couldn’t even tell they were under attack.

  Speaking of my skeletons under attack before this all kicked off. I looked around where they had been standing and under a few bodies I found crushed little darts. It looked like the goblins had been shooting darts at the skeletons before they attacked. I wondered if they were poisoned. I held up the dart and called out, “Hey guys. We may have a problem.”

  [Your party has killed: Forest Goblins x 31]

  Apparently the System had been waiting for me to not feel so much like I was in danger to alert me. That was handy to know. Only thirty-one. It had felt like so many more. But then again I guess the fight hadn’t lasted all that long objectively. Just subjectively it had felt like it would never end.