Chapter 18: Interception to Interception

Although the goblins broke through the wall, it wasn’t like the whole thing broke down.

Only a portion of it broke where the goblins were coming out of, so the wall was still quite functional.

Loren decided that it was still possible to buy some time. He stirred himself up and took a swift step forward and swept his great sword sideways, cutting two of the goblins in half.

As he caught another one with a back swing, he realized something; the floor was too clean.

After all the goblins that rained down from the hatch and got crushed earlier, there should have been quite a bit of goblin corpses around it.

However, though there were bloodstains on the floor, he couldn’t find any of the corpses.

Loren, although not too familiar with monsters, had heard about goblins’ eating habits.

He knew that they would eat anything that they could find, but wondered if it was so bad that they would go as far as to eating the corpses of their own.

But still, it was weird that there was no trace of anything left.

Loren, thinking about how many weird things he has encountered this time around, continued to swing his sword with ease.

The goblins’ shields and weapons were meaningless against the weight and the force of the great sword it was being swung with.

While crushing shields, snapping daggers, and rendering the defenseless goblins into hunks of meat, Loren, without even turning around, called up to Ritz.

“Are you up yet!?”

“S-sorry!”

Loren glanced up at Ritz’s anxious voice and saw that he just above the half way point.

He decided it was going to take a while, and with a feeling close to giving up, he kicked a goblin that tried to slide under him and stabbed it.

“Can’t you guys pull him up!?”

Ritz was still far from the top, but Loren asked without thinking.

Meanwhile more of the wall crumbled before him, allowing more goblins to flood though.

Loren knew he could still fend them off, so he calmly looked at the number of goblins and the speed which the wall was being broken, and resumed swinging his sword.

He could feel the sensation of cutting flesh and crushing bones in his arms.

Taking a step back so he wouldn’t trip on the dead goblins, he heard the bad news from Lapis.

“Loren! More goblins have appeared up here as well! Jack and Nim are fighting them, but they’re slowly increasing in number!”

“Goblins again!? Why do these ruins like goblins so much!?”

Irritated, Loren took another swing, and another corpse rolled at his feet, staining the floor with its blood.

“Ritz! Are you there yet!”

“Wait just a bit more!”

“I’m fine but the guys up there aren’t! If we take too long, we’re going to be pincered from both sides!”

“I know! Damn it! I’m so clumsy!”

Loren focused on his own opponents, thinking Ritz and the others had to manage it themselves somehow.

The number of goblins coming past the wall continued to increase, and Loren immediately realized that soon enough, even he wouldn’t be able to deal with them all.

He was keeping them away from the ladder, but he started feeling impatient as the goblins started to surround him.

Even in such a situation, a calm part of Loren’s head caught strange movements from the goblins surrounding him.

Although the goblins came toward him bloodthirsty, as soon as they saw their allies’ dead bodies, they dropped their weapons and started gathering the corpses, ignoring Loren completely.

Loren had no idea what caused them to do that, but thanks to this weird behavior, he faced less goblins than he had first expected.

None of the information in his head explained their weird behavior, but he wasn’t about to ask them about it.

Even though he didn’t know the reason, it was an opportunity.

Not thinking about the logic behind it, if he killed a good number of goblins and spread the corpses around him, the goblins would retrieve them and leave, thinning their numbers.

There was no way that he was not going to take advantage of that.

The goblins that surrounded him were the ones that didn’t pick up the corpses, so if he focused on those, the goblins coming after would have to retrieve their corpses, and the number of goblins that Loren would have to face would not increase by much.

Loren couldn’t tell the difference between the two types of goblins, but he tried to choose to kill the ones that didn’t retrieve the corpses.

Above him, Ritz finally made it to the top and Quartz and Lapis pulled him up.

“You need to hurry Ritz. Jack and Nim can’t handle all of them.”

“Hurry up Mister Ritz. The goblins aren’t our only foes.”

“Huh? You mean something other than goblins finally appeared?”

“Well… Something that looks like a goblin.”

“What are you talking…Jack! Damn it! Jack!”

Ritz suddenly shouted and tried to rush up the last few rungs, but misplaced his foot, and

Quartz and Lapis barely caught him from falling.

Loren was irritated at Ritz’s clumsiness, but judging from their conversation, something had happened to Jack, and guessed that he needed to get up there as fast as he could.

“Man, why does so much shit…Keep coming at me!”

Loren, for the first time, changed the way he swung his great sword.

Up till now, he had only used his arms, but this time he twisted his body while he swung his sword, using the strength in his whole body.

He was already able to crush many goblins with a single swing, but this strike was sharper and faster than ever.

The goblins that took the strike not only got cut into two pieces, but became nothing but a rain of blood and pieces of flesh, and those flew back and rained into the goblins out of the sword’s reach.

Loren, who massacred the large number of goblins around him, used that opening to jump onto the ladder and climb up.

He then swung his sword at the ladder beneath him, making sure that the goblins couldn’t chase him up, and finished climbing up the ladder, setting foot on the upper floor with no help needed.

He immediately readied his great sword and looked around at the situation, and saw

Jack lying down with his back against the wall, blood dripping from his head.

Ritz was using his sword and shield to protect Jack, while Nim was struggling against something that pushed her down onto the ground.

“What the hell is that?”

No matter how Loren saw it, the things that were causing this situation were goblins.

At least, they looked like goblins.

Goblins were usually green and small like a child, but these were closer to black and were larger than Ritz, who was quite large himself.

“Loren, Nim is in trouble!”

“Hey old man, what about your magic!”

“I’m completely out! I can’t even use elementary level spells for a while!”

Quartz pointed to one of the goblin like monsters lying on the ground, smoke emitting from its body.

Quartz was able to kill it with a spell, but now he was out of spells to use.

“Loren, you have to help Nim!”

At Lapis’ words, Loren remembered he had things to take care of before assessing the situation. He ran up to the mock-goblin, with an arm that had a knife lodged into, it that was reaching for Nim’s clothes.

Before it could react, Loren kicked it square in the face.

If it were a normal goblin, the kick would’ve broke its neck and sent it flying, but the mock-goblin snapped its head right back and threatened him with a low growl.

Loren ignored it and swung his great sword at the base of its neck.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!?”

The sword that easily cut through numerous goblins got stopped by the mock-goblin’s hard skin and muscle, not even reaching its bones.

Blood dripped from the cut onto Nim, but the mock-goblin showed no signs of caring about the injury, raising its body to reach for Loren.

Loren pushed down with his great sword to keep it from standing up.

Nim, who was pushed down, managed to pull the knife out of the mock-goblin’s arm, and while it was distracted by Loren, she stabbed it in the eye.

The eye wasn’t hard like its skin, and the knife sunk deep into it. The mock-goblin roared and snapped its head back, covering its injured eye with both hands.

Nim used the opportunity to slip out from under it, while Loren pulled out his great sword, and with a fissured yell, swung it at its neck with all his might.

Although the blade got stopped by the skin and muscle earlier, Loren knew what to expect this time.

The blade ripped through its skin and muscle, reaching the bone and crushing it.

Added with the cut he made before, the mock-goblin’s head flew off, blood erupting from its neck.

“You okay Nim!?”

“I’m fine. But Jack and Ritz aren’t.”

Loren turned to Ritz at her words.

He saw Ritz dodge the mock-goblin’s grab, step close into it, and plunge his sword into its flank.

Loren thought that it was over, but with a swift movement that seemed to disregard the blade lodged in it, reached out and grabbed Ritz’s head.

“You bastard! Let go!”

Even regular goblins had quite a bit of strength, but if it was larger than Ritz, Loren had no idea how strong it would be.

He could imagine what would happen if something with so much strength grabbed his head.

Ritz knew it as well, and he twisted his sword to try and get out of its grasp, but the mock-goblin’s grip didn’t waver, and Ritz’s body started creaking as it slowly started to put pressure into its hands.

“D-damn it! My bones!”

Ritz would’ve been crushed by the mock-goblin, but Loren intervened before that could happen.

While it was busy with Ritz, Loren charged at it from behind, and with his momentum and centrifugal force added to the strike, he knocked its head right off its shoulders.

A moment after the head flew off and blood spewed from its neck, it dropped down onto its knees, dropped down, and fell straight into the wall.

“You okay?”

“You saved me. I was about to become a rag doll.”

“Don’t mention it. How’s Jack?”

“I’m alive…”

Although he was still bleeding from his head, he was alive.

When Loren asked what had happened, they gave their explanation.

At first, there were regular goblins, but two of the mock-goblins appeared.

They were able to kill one with Quartz’s magic, but Nim’s arrows had no effect on the second one, and she was pushed down onto the ground. Jack had tried to save her, but another one showed up and smacked him into the wall, and that’s when Ritz entered the fray.

“Sorry Jack. It’s my fault.”

“Hey, stop it, you’re being disgusting. Modesty isn’t your thing, so just tend to my wounds already.”

Jack pointed at his head and Nim, who kept apologizing in a sad manner, with her ears drooping forward.

Nim nodded and started to treat Jack’s injury.

Loren decided to leave them at that, and walked over to Lapis, who was squatted down, next to the two mock-goblins.

“Did you find something?”

“I can guess, but if my speculations are right, it means we’ve wandered into quite an unpleasant kind of ruin.”

“Unpleasant ruin?”

Loren couldn’t believe such words from Lapis, who was happy that she was able to explore these ruins earlier, and raised a quizzical voice, but Lapis didn’t answer him.

Instead, she walked up to Ritz and cleared her throat.

“Mister Ritz, I’d like to make sure of something.”

“Do we have to come with you?”

“No, but it should be in line with exploring the ruins. But above all else, if we don’t hurry and shut down these ruins, it’s going to cause lots of trouble.”

Lapis tilted her head slightly to the side, waiting for an answer. Ritz looked at Loren, asking for his opinion, but Loren shrugged, telling him not to ask him.

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