Chapter 3: Goblins

Goblins.

As infamous as cockroaches, they can be found in nearly every plane that has even the faintest connection to western fantasy.

These small creatures are by nature greedy and base. If not for the fact that their race ranks near the bottom of intelligent beings in average intellect, one might also call them cunning and adept at deceit.

Their species leans heavily toward evil, and their backward intelligence leaves them with poor productivity, so their way of surviving is often tied to plunder and theft.

In addition, their race has no females, which forces them to rely on abducting the opposite sex of other intelligent species in order to reproduce.

For this reason, in a sense, they possess a reputation across the multiverse even more vile than that of abyssal demons or infernal devils.

An individual goblin is extremely weak in combat; an ordinary farmwoman with a pitchfork could easily deal with a bare goblin that carried no weapon or armor.

But as the hunter Magi had just put it, these little things are like the stray dogs found everywhere in town.

Alone, one of them amounts to nothing. But once they gather, and their numbers climb into the tens or even the hundreds, their courage and the destruction they can wreak will multiply geometrically.

They raid caravans, attack villages...

Especially when their colonies grow to a certain size, a certain elite individual with the ability to lead will naturally emerge.

Left unchecked, they might even grow into a calamity on the scale of a kingdom.

At the moment, the goblin tribe being tracked by the Filthy Fish and Rubbish Squad had perhaps not yet developed to the point of pillaging towns.

But it was obvious they already had the ability to actively attack humans.

The corpse of that humorous dwarf, who had once liked to crack untimely jokes, now gradually growing cold on the ground, was proof enough.

"Roar!!!"

A bestial howl suddenly erupted through the forest.

The half-orc Gagu leaped up like a startled beast in the jungle, both hands gripping tightly his bloodstained great axe.

This sudden attack, along with the death of his companion, seemed to have awakened some ancestral glory in this hybrid with the faint blood of orcs.

His fangs appeared slightly longer and sharper, and the muscles all over his body visibly swelled and flushed red, showing that the half-orc was entering some kind of combat state.

The hunter Magi was the fastest of the entire Filthy Fish and Rubbish Squad.

Almost the instant the dark wooden club thrust out from behind Elki's head, he reacted.

While shouting a warning, he slung the longbow on his back, then used both hands and feet to scramble nimbly up the towering hard-bark oak behind him.

His lean figure vanished in the dense canopy in the blink of an eye.

Though he hated to admit it, Xanan was undoubtedly the slowest to react of the whole team.

For more than thirty years before his transmigration, he had gone from classroom to office, never even having killed a single chicken; in this life, he was nothing more than an honest, down-to-earth farmer with his face to the earth and his back to the sky.

One moment he had been wondering how to wring more information about this world from Elki's mouth, and the next the man had had his head smashed open by a club right before his eyes, brain matter spilling out.

Xanan's mind went completely blank. Though instinct made him seize the one-handed sword on his knee, his body remained frozen in place, as if locked in some kind of stiffness.

Until...

"Whoosh!"

Hair fluttered, and a fierce gust of wind scraped across his cheek, leaving a stinging pain.

A wooden arrow shot out from the shadows between the trees and flew from above through the canopy.

"Ah!"

A shrill cry of pain rang out from behind him.

Xanan shuddered violently and snapped back to his senses at once.

The world, which had seemed as though it had been muted, came vividly alive again in an instant.

With no time to thank Magi for reaching out to him from above, he turned quickly.

His eyes swept across the scene, and his pupils contracted.

Two small figures were crouched low there.

Their rough dark-green skin was covered in patches of scabs and blemishes, and their red eyes were filled with cunning and malice; each wore only a filthy brown rag around the lower body, while their limbs were thin yet still showed the faint bulge of muscle beneath.

Somehow, two goblins had silently crept up behind him.

If not for Magi's warning, he would likely have fallen prey just like the dwarf Elki.

A chill of lingering fear ran through Xanan's heart, and he unconsciously tightened his grip on the sword hilt wrapped in coarse rope.

"Wah-zha!"

Their stealth exposed, one goblin even had the top of its foot pierced clean through and pinned to the ground by the wooden arrow from above.

This creature, timid by nature, seemed to lose the courage to continue the attack in that instant.

It merely raised the club in its hand high before the young human before it, as if to threaten him.

The black shaft of the club reflected a dangerous orange-red in the glow of the campfire.

When Xanan saw the rusted iron nails embedded in its surface, the miserable image of Elki's shattered head flashed through his mind once more.

Like some kind of stress response, driven by the deep apprehension in his heart, he suddenly stepped forward with his right foot while bending his sword arm to gather strength.

Tap!

His sole sank almost at once into the soft earth.

Like the roots of a tree growing downward to draw nutrients from the soil.

An inexplicable force burst from beneath his foot and, along bones and muscles, gathered strength from his entire body.

At last it poured out through the blade.

[Whirling Slash]

Sizzle—

Accompanied by a piercing sound of air being torn apart, the lingering mist surged and churned violently.

A sharp silver gleam with a graceful curve flashed and vanished before Xanan in an instant.

At that moment, time and space seemed to fall into stillness.

The carefully maintained blade, combined with a technique practiced hundreds of thousands of times, rendered the goblin's skin, flesh, and bone as fragile as sandpaper, unable to withstand a single blow.

"Proficiency +1"

A string of translucent words flashed before his eyes.

Xanan only felt two brief moments of resistance in his hand before the one-handed sword had already completed a sweeping arc from left to right and diagonally upward, just as it had done in countless days and nights before.

Blood splashed.

On the muddy ground fell a goblin's severed hand, half its skull, stinking entrails, and its filthy, scalding blood.

Those two sinister creatures that had tried to ambush him were split cleanly in half by a single sword, as easily as the countless straw stalks that had once stood in the field ridges.

For a moment, the forest seemed to sink into a kind of deathly silence.

Above the towering canopy, Magi unconsciously loosened the longbow he had already drawn to full tension.

Looking at the two broken corpses on the meadow, then at Xanan, who was slowly exhaling and sheathing his sword, he swallowed hard twice, his face full of uncontrollable astonishment.

"Is this bastard a newbie!?"