Phantasm

The second floor was mostly larger offices. They were soiled and torn to pieces now, but I could tell that this had been the fancy floor. Normally, you’d put your executives as high as possible, but perhaps they wanted to distance themselves from all the equipment that had been removed from the top floor.

Or perhaps this had all been designed by a crazy magical construct and there wasn’t any reason behind it. I kept forgetting about that.

Anyway, larger offices were more suitable to host large families of goblins. There must have been a hundred women and children huddled under desks and makeshift nests.

[Identification]: - Goblin Whelp - Threat: 12 - Properties: Skilled

[Identification]: - Goblin Female - Threat: 15 - Properties: Skilled

Much lower Threat values than the rest of the level, but there were enough of them to form a swarm.

Which made me wonder: did monsters grow? Would these children turn into full-fledged goblins in time? That didn’t seem sustainable, but they did have the elves going through, doing regular cullings.

I shook my head. Questions for another time. Right now I needed to find those documents telling us where to go next. Most of the rooms here were easily eliminated. They were filled with goblin families who were completely uninterested in preserving documents. Any papers in those rooms would have been eaten or used to line a nest.

There was one room, though, that bore further examination. The door, still on its hinges, was marked “Archives”. It was just as filled with goblins as the rest of the rooms, but there was one major difference. Instead of walls lined with fancy (now badly damaged) wood panelling, this room’s walls were lined with filing cabinets.

Some of them had been torn down. Some hung open, their contents distributed to the wind. Some were closed, though. Closed and empty, or did they still have papers in them? I’d have to check to be sure.

The dozen goblins going about their business in this room would make that difficult. I found an unoccupied corner and considered my options.

I could hear them talking amongst themselves. Most of the chatter was the normal interactions one would expect within a tribe. “Stop doing that”, “Give me that”, etcetera. Some of them were talking about current events. Specifically, what they called the hunter.

“It’ll pick us off, one by one. You’ll see, but it’ll be too late,” one of the females said to another.

“Nowhere for us to go, you know that none of us would last a day out on the streets,” the other replied. There was something off about the way they talked. The upset one didn’t sound particularly worried, nor did the nay-sayer sound particularly resigned. They were both speaking normally. Not without emotion, but as if discussing the choice of dying in the street and being hunted down indoors was a perfectly normal choice that people made every day. I suppose for them it was.

None of this was getting me closer to clearing the room. I decided to try using [Sourceless Sound] to make a scratching noise come from the walls. I couldn’t target “inside the wall” but I could target the wall’s surface, which sounded much the same.

They noticed. I was hoping it would make them evacuate, but if it drew more goblins, then I could always move it to another room, and draw them in there. As it was though, they just stared at the wall it was coming from.

“What is it? Is it the hunter?” one asked.

“I never heard that it made sounds like that. Doesn’t sound like no Tommies neither.” The one that spoke kicked one of the kids. “Go find Schmiedtrog, tell him what we’re hearing.”

One down, I supposed. No one suggested the sound might come from rats, which struck me as odd until I realised that I hadn’t seen any so far. This city floor might not have them.

You would expect rats to be a given in any war-torn city. With sanitation services ended, and plenty of rubble to hide in, they would quickly reproduce and spread to cover any areas they weren’t already hiding in. There might be little food for humans, but there would be plenty that rats could feed on. Dead bodies, for one.

However, this level only had the monsters that Axel had decided fit the theme. Ordinary rats were far too low a Threat to be considered, and monstrous rats weren’t a part of WWII.

Something to keep in mind if I had to provide Axel with a serious critique of this floor to get more information out of him. But right now…

There was one sound I’d heard the hunter make. I replaced the spell and watched everybody in the room jump like they’d been scalded.

I couldn’t make the shriek as loud as I’d heard it—the spell didn’t go up that high—but that fit. It was supposed to be coming from the other side of the wall, after all.

The goblins all started backing away from the wall. Encouraged, I cast a [Light] spell at that spot as well, making it as diffuse as I could. It didn’t look anything like an abomination, but from what I could tell, these folks had never seen one.

It did the trick. There was a panicked stampede for the exit.

Perfect. No doubt they’d be back soon, but it wouldn’t take me long to check out the cabinets. Some of them were locked, but I had a way of dealing with that.

Empty. Empty. Filled with bones. Filled with dried meat. A few scraps of coloured cloth. Yeah, this wasn’t getting me anywhere. I was going to continue, I couldn’t rule out the idea that one filing cabinet held gold after all. But then I happened to glance around.

A little goblin boy was standing at the entrance to the room, frozen at the sight of the drawers opening by themselves.

Ehhhh…

That was me busted, I supposed. But what was he going to do? Even if he could see me, I could take the little brat. And I’d be finished before he could fetch help. I opened another drawer.

Filled with brightly coloured rubble. Great.

The light changed. I whirled around.

Just like before, the abomination was coming out of the lightbulb. The goblin boy gaped up at it as it emerged, its eyes scanning the whole room.

My own eyes narrowed. I wasn’t anywhere near understanding it, but had it been attracted to the sound of its own screaming? Did it think another abomination was in trouble?

Whatever it thought, two of its eyes latched onto the goblin brat. Before he could unfreeze, it pounced, wrapping itself around him like a thick blanket.

It hadn’t been solid enough to stop a bolt, but it seemed solid now. The kid had started struggling, but he wasn’t making much headway.

I swore as I dashed across the room. The abomination had left the side with the eyes on the outside, giving it a clear view all around, but it couldn’t see me. I sank both daggers into its yielding flesh.

You have inflicted 203 damage!

You have inflicted 208 damage!

The abomination screamed again. It thrashed about as well, or the boy underneath did. It was hard to tell. The thing was thick, about four inches at the centre. That was thin enough that I could have stabbed the boy at the same time, but thick enough that I could avoid doing so. Getting only two damage notifications suggested that I had succeeded. That, or the kid was already dead.

Eh. He was a monster, after all. This wasn’t about saving the kid, it was about trapping the abomination. I’d seen how it had escaped before, curling in on itself. With the kid in the way, it couldn’t do that. If it wanted to escape, it would have to show me a new trick.

Rather than risk freeing it by pulling the daggers out, I tried slicing through its flesh. As far as the System was concerned, that was the same thing.

You have inflicted 201 damage!

You have inflicted 205 damage!

More struggles, more screaming. It released the boy, sending him staggering back into a wall, and tried to curl backwards over me. I wasn’t having any of that, though. I held my arms out straight and pushed out with both my knives. It couldn’t seem to bend as far around its eye-side, so all it managed to do was form an incomplete dome, anchored at two points by my two knives.

You have inflicted 206 damage!

You have inflicted 203 damage!

Then it seemed to remember that it was free to flee, now. It pulled itself off my knives. A white, glowing ichor fell from its wounds. Before I could finish it off, it curled up again and disappeared.

I stood there, panting, as armed goblins burst into the room. Safely ensconced behind the front line was my old pal, Grunwald.

“What the hell happened here?” he exclaimed. I took a few steps back, to better avoid the civilian shooters slowly making their way into the room. I noticed that whatever that white ichor was, none of it had stuck to my daggers. They were as clean as they were when I took them out.

The guards had noted the ichor as well.

“He hurt it?” one of them said, looking back at the unconscious brat. “How?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Grunwald growled. “Look!”

He pointed at the cabinets. I’d left some of them open, and some of them had been forced.

“Same as in my office,” he said. “The thief was looking around in here, and got interrupted.”

“The thief… hurt the hunter?” one of the guards said slowly. “But why?”

“Why indeed,” Grunwald said, staring at the holes I’d carved in the cabinets. The other goblins looked at him uncertainly.

“I’m going back to my office!” he suddenly announced. “Door’s staying open, but none of you go near it!” He paused. “Unless… there’s another hunter attack. Otherwise! Stay away!”

He turned on his heel and strode off. I watched him leave, frowning. This didn’t feel like a script. The British kobolds had. Even after giving us our mission, they relaxed around the camp with a number of set phrases. A large number to be sure, but they started repeating eventually. This… felt different.

Grunwald was reacting to a demon which shouldn’t be part of the script. He’d deduced that there was someone invisible who could help him, and now, unless I missed my guess, he wanted to negotiate with me.

Unless Axel had written a script that referenced my invisibility and the demons… which wasn’t impossible. That hadn’t happened on the last floor, but Axel would have been watching us our whole time there. That was plenty of time for a time-dilated magical construct to script something based on the abilities it had observed.

On the other hand, if this was a script then we were progressing. So I’d better go meet with Grunwald.

Just as he’d said, Grunwald was sitting alone in his office. He was perched on a bundle of cloth serving as a cushion so that it looked like he was sitting at the desk. A pair of glasses and one of the bottles I’d found before was set before him.

I walked into the office and shut the door. Grunwald watched the door close but didn’t otherwise react. After a moment, he poured some clear fluid into the glasses.

I cancelled [Greater Invisibility].

“I make it a rule to not drink while I’m working,” I said.

He looked up at me and made a fair effort to control his reaction.

“The damn Tommies really are sending giants,” he muttered. “Hope you don’t mind if I indulge.”

He didn’t wait for me to shake my head, but grabbed one of the glasses and tossed it down.

“Strange,” I said. “Are you not consumed with an overwhelming desire to kill me?”

He grunted. “Do my duty to the homeland, you mean? I’d be a hero of the State, for sure. If you didn’t rip me in two, bite my head off and spit out the pieces that is.”

He poured himself another drink, leaving mine untouched. “Do I look stupid?”

I chose not to answer that in the interests of diplomacy.

“Strange,” I said again. “But you wanted to talk, so what do you want to talk about?”

He rolled his eyes. “Like you don’t already know. But sure. You’re looking for something. You fought the hunter, I guess because it got in your way. We all thought that it was some kind of English superweapon, but I guess that’s not true.”

He looked at me through slitted eyes. “Or maybe it is true, and that’s why you’ve got the only weapons that can hurt it.”

“I couldn’t possibly comment,” I said. I picked up my glass and took a sniff. It smelt like poison, which is to say, alcohol.

[Identification]: - Tomtegeist Schnapps - Quality: Good - Properties: Intoxicating

I didn’t drink it, and I didn’t say anything else, just waited for him to continue.

“We can help you find what you’re looking for, and you can kill what we need dead. Let’s trade.”

To my surprise, I felt [Bargain] perk up again, as if I were talking to a real person. Not that I needed it, this was as simple as deals came. I nodded in agreement.

“This building was part of a project,” I said. “I’m looking for details about that project, as well as where the rest of it was.”

Grunwald sighed in relief. “That’s easy then,” he said. “There’s two people here that can help you.”