(Book One Complete!) Friendly Neighbourhood Goblin (Mercenary Company LitRPG)

Mom... Kill me...

Stump snapped awake, thrust from his nightmare. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and pushed himself upright. The drumming of his heart slowed, and at his side was the familiar shallow breaths of a sleeping goblin.

"Gold-Blooded..." he mumbled, but when he reached for her it was Yeza's shoulder he touched.

Around him the dark hollowness of his childhood home retreated with the dream. Jagged walls of unworked stone gave way to the old wooden pillars of the Knight Inn, the cavernous ceiling became cobwebbed rafters, the throne of the matrons proved to be nothing more than the modest desk of his company hall surrounded by snoring goblin bodies, and the phantom of Gold-Blooded whisked away.

Yeza mumbled something before turning to her other side. Across from her Morg's rounded belly rose and fell in the manner of deep sleep, his snoring like the snarl of a Stonecrawler prowling through the woods.

Stump waited for the bloodlust to settle before he laid down and closed his eyes again, but his mind refused to rest.

Why did Thrung say that? he thought, hearing the goblin's dying words as if he were in the room, bleeding into the woodwork.

Mom... kill me... please...

The next time Stump sat up, it was to spy the flaring red glow atop his desk, beyond the dim bubbles of mycolight.

The ruby tome. The book from which Thrung had extracted his powers. It was only after the burned goblin had received the tome that he'd had visions of another world.

Shekago...

Stump rubbed the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes and slipped through the delicate pre-dawn silence of the inn. He hauled the book under an arm, tip-toed over the sprawled tribesmen, and crept up the stairs.

Not even dust stirred beneath his careful footfalls.

Although he was met with the ever-fading light of evening as he clicked the door shut behind him, the forest beyond the inn managed to carry the heavy stillness of the hours suspended between the depths of night and the somber bustle of morning. Nothing hummed or chirped in the tree line. Even the wind held its breath.

It was in this quiet that Stump shuffled to a spot by the road—the crunch of leaves underfoot sounded like snapping wood—and cracked open the ruby tome.

He still had a focus point to allocate and a number of focus trees to explore, but there were secrets he suspected were bound between the pages of the book. As he flipped through and read the once unfamiliar ramblings of its author, its hidden knowledge began to clarify like the swirling ink of his arcane ledger.

"Lightsabers. Actual lightsabers. Other clear uses (create friggin rainbow road) but LIGHTSABERS my guy," was scrawled in rather frantic lettering beneath a hooded figure holding a glowing sword. Snippets of lore spilled into the next page, describing the possibilities of light shields and turning illusions into tangible objects.

"Good powers. Strong, maybe OP. Expensive as shit tho," read an underlined section near the bottom of the page.

At the end of it Stump's body hummed with arcane power as the scribblings splintered in his mind, unearthing a synergistic tree between Lumenurgy and a previously undiscovered skill—Graviturgy.

New Focus Tree Discovered

Solumancy

"Meld the powers of Lumensa and Gravanus to solidify light."

Requires: Flectomancy AND Chromomancy

The following pages delivered incoherent tangents, complaints of the fungal cuisine of Aubany, and half-baked cultural commentary wedged between test notes on system mechanics and the diverse powers of Thermalurgy. Half an hour of skimming ended with the buzzing of another synergistic focus tree, this time forged between Lumenurgy and Animurgy, the domain of life.

New Focus Tree Discovered

Phytomancy

"Meld the powers of Lumensa and Anima to harness the mastery of arcane botany."

Requires: Illumomancy

The accompanying drawing was of a three panel sketch, the first of which housed a small budding plant, while the second was an overgrown mass of vines and leaves. The third had sprouted a gaping maw of thorny teeth and thick limbs of tree bark cracked by fungal colonies.

"Anima remains separated into three(?) cities. Chopped up, like a serial killer. Opala has the head?" mused the book. Stump shuddered, though whether it was at the thought of a dismembered god or the end of summer chill settling around him was hard to say.

Mom. Six-thirty. Shekago. Mom. Six-thirty, he thought as he scoured every page for the strange words he'd heard from Thrung. Instead he found a barely comprehensible block of text detailing the many uses of a combination of the skills of Lumenurgy and Chronurgy.

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New Focus Tree Discovered

Claromancy

"Meld the powers of Lumensa and Chrona to peer into the past."

Requires: Chromomancy AND Umbramancy

The final pages of recorded text ended abruptly, with an observation that read, "Amberhall's pretty neat. Wouldn't let me see the other two (entries tighter than NU), will circle back after vamp city." It crowned an unfinished sketch of what appeared to be the three towers of the Amber Bastion. "I think they've got secrets in Wintermoon. Only a heist will tell, but I should grind a bit first."

Was it shortly after that entry that he was taken by Garron and the others? But why then? What did they want? The remaining third of the book turned up nothing more than empty pages, and a second, more careful pass through the tome didn't uncover any more synergistic trees.

But there was a bit of text that gave him pause.

"None were interested in what I'd learned of Nevae. For light wizards they sure are blind," read one of the final entries of the book, only several pages before the Amber Bastion musings. "Had a bad time there. Won't be returning, not even for better Thermalurgy. Oh well. Still better than those creepy masked guys."

Creepy masked guys? The wheezing voice of the cultist at the temple of Umbralanus returned to Stump with unfortunate clarity. Her mask, her peeled lips and unblinking eyes. The blade in his belly.

The memory fluttered away with the leaves of the forest floor as a cold wind rushed by, and the woodland exhale reminded Stump that morning was near.

He closed the book and groaned to his feet, but when he turned to the inn he found no light bleeding from its windows.

They're still asleep.

Within the hour Reema and Jin would wake, and his own busy day in Grimsgate would begin. Registering the goblins as mercenaries was first on the agenda, before selling their treasures to Elmee and heading to Brinetown to begin the Blink And You'll Miss Him questline.

There would be no better time to choose his next focus.

Stump tilted his gaze to the spindly canopy above, turned his mind to The Words From The Sky, and found a number of glowing points in the constellation of skills and abilities that hadn't been there before his scour through the tome. Floating among them was a single lone thread, separate from any other.

The last time he'd tried to investigate it at the cave he nearly passed out before Durgish's interruption.

What is it?

Before he could think of what to do next, the simple nudging of his thoughts in its direction drooped his eyelids. The Words faded. Trees swayed, and so did he.

Not… yet…

The road came up to meet him.

Darkness lingered. For a long moment he expected the shape of his nightmare to carve itself out of the black, but like the windless woods all was still. But it wasn't quiet, or loud. It wasn't warm, or cold. Such temporal states had no stake in the realm he found himself in.

"Where am I?" he said, or thought, or felt. He liked to believe he was looking around frantically, but it was hard to do so without eyes. He might've screamed, if he had a mouth.

A reply came rolling out of the dark in the same way the uncomfortable certainty of being watched creeps up the back of your neck.

"Neither Here nor There," It said.

If where he was could be called a Place, in which moments happened in interludes of Time, it might've been said that the voice boomed all around him.

"Who are you? Am I dead?" he demanded.

"You are not dead, but you are late."

He'd known someone once, a being with a name he couldn't quite recall, who had a penchant for cryptic speech and vague prophecy. He remembered the lesson he'd learned of their charlatanry, and held a similar skepticism towards the sourceless voice.

"Who are you?" he insisted.

"I am you, in a way."

"In what way?" he said, and knew that it was the right question.

If Time were a feature of this darkness, he imagined quite a lot of it might have passed before he received an answer. Trees may have budded and bloomed and flourished and died. Kingdoms may have birthed and sundered. Stars may have forged iron in their bellies and spewed their rich deposits across cosmic seas.

"In the only way that matters," It said. Boom went another sun.

A name came to him out of the vacuum, a fragment of a memory from another world.

"Jaessun?" he wondered.

The darkness laughed, insofar as it was possible without a face. After a pause that must've spanned somewhere between a hummingbird's heartbeat and the lifespan of a star, It said, in tones of existential dread, "You killed him."

"I did?" he asked. Never even had your first kill, echoed someone who he'd once known.

"More or less," It insisted.

"Which is it? Is it more or is it less?"

"It is enough."

"Enough for what?"

"A boon," It said with all the weight of an ancient mountain.

What boon? he meant to ask. Or maybe he did. It was difficult to know in a realm that made no distinction between thoughts and words. The bleeding of white into the darkness didn't help, either, nor did the echoing call of a name he'd once called his own.

"Stump?" asked the void.

"Stump?" she repeated.

He blinked against the light and found a blurry set of goblin toes a sudden twitch away from his eyes. Around them leaves blew across the forest floor, and gentle shafts of golden light pooled over the inn.

He followed her voice from feet to face, and found Yeza bent over him, her cheeks ringed by tangled brown hair streaked with white. She tucked a strand behind her ear.

"Why did you sleep out here?" she said.

Stump groaned to his feet and massaged the pounding in his skull. Clumps of dirt fell from where the road left its mark on his face. "I was asleep?" he mumbled.

"On the ground," she said with a tremor of concern, then swiped up the book and brushed the leaves from its cover. "Were you reading this?"

Pieces of his dreamlike state arranged themselves in a vaguely chronological order in his mind. The dark. The voice. A boon, It told him.

Was I asleep, or was that something else?

"I tried," he said, but hesitated in explaining whatever it was he'd seen for fear of not fully understanding it himself. After a pause he finished, rather lamely, "But I didn't realize how tired I was."

Her narrowed eyes betrayed her suspicion.

"I'm sorry if I scared you," he added. "I meant to come back. I didn't want—"

Yeza shoved the book against his chest. "I wasn't scared," she hissed, but her anger fizzled quickly. "I only wanted to tell you that your tall man... woman, brought us all something to eat. Knife-Chewer stole Pebble-Crusher's portion, and Pebble-Crusher sought restitution in Dreeg's meal, but Dreeg had eaten so fast that there was nothing to take, so Pebble-Crusher struck Durza out of anger, and now Ironbone is yelling at everyone. And your dwarf smells of mushrooms."

He snorted. "By the end of the day you'll smell like mushrooms, too."

She snarled—a pleasant gesture in goblin society—and grazed his shoulder with her fist.

He barely had time to massage the pain away before she spoke again, her voice small. "Will you eat with me?" she wondered.

That coaxed a smile out of him. "Only if I get to teach you the manners of the tall men."

"I'm not the one who needs teaching."

Stump followed her to the door, through which spilled the warm tune of Reema's hum, stuttered by the rhythmic tapping of Jin's knife as he prepped vegetables for the breakfast rush. Somewhere the daily stewpot bubbled and sizzled and breathed curling fingers of steam through the inn's open windows.

Home, Stump thought, breathing deep. It was nice to be back.

But as Yeza cracked the door open and slipped through the threshold, he stalled outside.

One last time he called on the Words From The Sky, but found no trace of the lone thread that had lulled him into unconsciousness. Instead, glimmering like a gold coin beneath his name and class, was a second focus point.

A boon.