As I crawled out of the freshly re opened burrow, mana flowing into my cloak to enhance my stealth. I arrived on the outskirts of a battlefield, i saw corpses of green goblins wearing headdresses and feathers alongside brown corpses wearing leathers and trophies from past hunts. I had to stop the bile from leaving my throat as the scene reminded me all too well of the fall of Sigilhaven. The screaming in the distance was not helping.

  Turning to the nearest Fang Goblin corpse, I picked up the small spear i had etched the runes of Earth and Dimensions into. Its body shimmered with otherworldly indigo stones, I could feel its fragility, the damage done to it left it chipped and close to breaking, but it should be enough for at least one more spirit.

  My thoughts were interrupted as A war cry erupted behind me, the roar of a group of Fang goblins, led by none other than Rukk and his remaining rabbits.

  the Fang goblins were all atop their beasts, making for a… strange assortment of mounts and critters. The various beasts seemed furious at the death of siblings and offspring, no more than their riders were furious at the shamans for oppressing them.

  Rukk strode up to me, being carried by another of the rabbits, this one with a light amethyst sheen on its fur. It was somehow tall enough to carry Rukk like a small horse. “Must be a space affinity?” I muttered to myself in awe of the beast, its affinity pinging my dimensional senses.

  “Theo? Theo snap out of it!” Rukk was clicking at me, his teeth chattering off each other in those rapid, cut ways of the goblin speech. “I know he’s a beaut but we have work to get done! The shamans of the Gale are huddling around the shrine, something bad is going on in there.” He paused and looked down, a dark expression overtaking his face as he said the next part. “It smells like blood coming from within the shrine, it-“ his voice caught, “it smells like my Igrer.”

  I had no clue who that was, but clearly it was someone important to my newfound companion. “Rukk, who is Igrer? Is that your daughter, the one with the contract skill?” I couldn’t let something impact my allies morale, not when i’m finally those close, after months and months of fighting in this celestial forsaken forest!

  “No, no thank goodness they didn’t get her, at least not yet. Igrer is my mate, the mother of my daughter. Something happened to her Theo I can’t leave her there!” His voice was getting frantic and faster, the nervous clicking of the other goblins made it clear he wasn’t the only one with family being hurt or worse in the shrine. Everyone had something, someone to lose here, all except for me.

  “Rukk! Take a second to breath, if it smells like blood and not of corpse, she’s probably still alive. We just need to take down the shrine and we can free everyone in there, including your daughter. We can’t do anything if we’re panicked, that will make us sloppy, and these abyssal gale bastards don’t seem to have a problem casting a curse spell right on us if we slow down.” I tried to get the goblin to calm down, he had started shaking since i began talking with him. Crap, I thought to myself, If i don’t get this handled, we might have another problem on our hands entirely.

  “You could always just die”, the voice in my head said. “Try again, what’s another round anyway? It’s not like you’ll die for real, unless you want to of course.” That was a dangerous way of thinking, definitely a benchmark from my last life. I couldn’t afford to think like a unkillable tank, I was very killable now, my mortality had never been more clear.

  Placing my hands on Rukk’s shoulders, I held him steady as his rabbits nuzzled his legs and seemingly tried to reassure him. “We can always go back to the cave, we have a small militia on our side, we’d only be contending with the shamans from now on, it will only take time.” I felt dirty for this, like trying to guilt a father into fighting to the death to save his family, even though that was, admittedly, exactly what was happening. “Or, we stay here, we charge that shrine. Kill the shamans, kill the patriarch, save everyone in there and go have the wildest party you goblins have ever seen!” I cheered that last part, hoping to raise moral, it didn’t seem to work on anyone other than the slightly wobbly goblin in the back. Something tells me he already had a few.

  Rukk seemed to be calmer, a faint rattle still hung in his words, but it would be enough for what we needed, what I needed.

  “We fight, we fight to the end!” He yelled, “We will fight until we rejoin the great spirits, and then we will fight until they rebirth us as the very beasts we worship and care for. We will fight until they themselves, the very divine spirits who gave us life and power, acknowledge us as individuals, Until we are our own, without their meddling, until we are the Fang tribe of our own!” The goblins cheered and screamed in hoots and strange cries of war. And i Thought humans could be stubborn. DING! What the?

  BUFF RECIEVED: [Revolution Leaders Scream of Resolve]

  Effect: You will have +1% resistance to all status effects and damage per ally within 20 feet of you. Maximum resistance: +75%!

  By the hunt!

  This buff was insanity, Mana Sight flared in my eyes, and suddenly the battlefield blazed with color. Brown ribbons of energy lashed out from Rukk, weaving through every goblin, every beast. The strands wrapped around me too, tugging tight, not chains but a net, alive, pulsing, carrying the heartbeat of a tribe. For a moment, I felt their grief, their rage, their love, thrumming through me like drumbeats.

  “Everyone gather around the human! He has weapons that can kill the summoned spirits of our enemies!” Rukk shouted at the goblin horde, the ground thumped and rumbled as they all charged at me, making requests and demands for weapons and changes.

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  “I want a whip!” “I want you to make my sling shoot fire balls!” “Give me claws for my Lynx! Make them sharp sharp” That last one came from the stumbling goblin, a small hiccup escaping his lips. the requests came hard and fast, some doable, some not so much.

  “i can only do so much with the time we have, give me any weapons you currently have and i’ll change their properties to what you want, i don’t know how to make anything like you suggest!” Semi-shouting at the goblins odd requests and to settle down, I dropped 10 more spears from my Vault rune, each imbued with the [Rune of Earth] and the [Rune of Dimensions]. “Ten of you can use these, if you feed them mana they will activate and become at least thrice as effective at killing spirits! Anything else comes to me right now, no more weapons will be made after 10 minutes pass!”

  I should have given myself less time, less opportunity to be asked to make adjustments or additions to weapons. These goblins were almost as greedy as my Chain was, they wanted everything they could get, mana cost be damned!

  ———————————————————————

  “No Velka, I will not be etching an individual elemental rune into every single section of your whip.” I grumbled at the repeat customer, her face pleading as she described a while that could channel all the elements i could put into it. “But please Mr. Grandfather slayer, it would be so cool!” “you wouldn’t be able to keep it active for more than 1 attack, then you’d be out of the fire for the rest of the day, maybe even a week!” “But it would be such a cool attack” she stared at me, her eyes elsewhere as if in a day dream.

  “Get out of here and get ready, I can see your Crystadillo giving me the stink eye” I shooed her away as Rukk came up to me, the last i could help in anyway. He held out a small, bone blowpipe. The type made from hollow bones or reeds and used to fire darts at high speeds, it seemed this was his weapon of choice.

  He rubbed his head, seemingly embarrassed about it. “I know it’s a bit of an odd thing, but it was from my first ever hunt, i carved it myself as just a wee goblin, back when i was puny with only Raile next to my side.” The story was cute, but it seemed Raile was older than i had thought.

  “What do you want me to do with it? I can add elemental, property shifting, even change its shape with some of the runes i have.” I asked the shifting goblin, curious as to what he wanted to change about his oldest weapon.

  “Make it hurt them, make it hurt so badly they won’t ever forget it even in the Great Spirits embrace.” His eyes were staring right at me as his voice dropped with venom and barely contained fury. I knew just the thing.

  “I’ll hook you up with a new combination, special for you my friend, it’ll suck the life right out of the bastards.” I quickly got to work, carefully manipulation the Manifested blade of my chain to carve the [Rune of Siphon] and the [Rune of Dimensions] into the front of the pipe.

  The array would cause it to siphon off dimensional energy, also commonly referred to as “Divinity” from the spirits and shamans, ensuring it feels like their souls were being scraped against the entire time. According to my intuition, thanks to my profession skill, that it would feel like your blanket being turned into sand paper, then being dragged along your soul as someone ripped it off. Not pleasant at all.

  He held in reverently, as if it were a gift from an old friend. These goblins were truly unique creatures.

  Everyone rested by the small fires set up from Burnice’s nephew, a small maroon goblin named Peran. Apparently he wasn’t a direct nephew, but a few generations down from the mighty warrior, the same one whose gauntlets warmed my hands and emblazoned my strikes. The Embear still gave me the evil eye when ever i looked in there direction, despite him eating the gnarled arm of a Gale shaman.

  For now the goblins rested, a quiet and somber mood covering the camp. lacerated tents and homes lay around us, the tribe’s town long destroyed in the fighting. Peran was cooking food by one of the fires, spreading the food, raw in hand, to the fellow revolutionaries.

  In an hour, who knows how many of these goblins would be alive, how many would see their families, enact revenge. Would any? I had no way of knowing, I had armed them the best I could, and I’d be fighting alongside them to kill the patriarch and the Divine Spirits residing in this trial. I laid down, shutting my eyes to clear my mind of the horrors i’d seen, preparing the load for a fresh set of disgust for whatever was happening in that shrine.

  “We charge in in 1 hour, Theo. We need to get the beasts healed and the mana me and the lifegiver rabbits is going to take about that long to recover for it”

  “That’s okay, everyone needs to relax anyway.” there was a heaviness to the atmosphere as me and Rukk conversed, knowing we’d lose people today. for him, his family and friends were in danger. For me? I just needed to get out of here and find my family before Kael awakens his formation card, maybe i could help this time.

  ——————————————————————

  High above the resting goblins, within viewing distance of the shrine, were two glowing orbs. Each one swirled with distinctive patterns and colors, one, the orb that seemed to radiate heat and looked like metal, began to speak to its accompanying sphere.

  “So that’s the boy?” The air warped with each word, the voice wizened yet enthusiastic, akin to a craftsmen and his art. “I thought he’d be more… support based, from what the boss said about his last timeline.”

  The other orb, this one a swirl of different colors, more than the eye could keep track of, returned the chatter. “I’ve taken a look at what ails his soul, he had no choice but to fight. His capabilities being a mixture of happenstance, the enhanced tutorial, and his own usage of the art of runes.” The colorful orb’s tone shift, its voice lowering, “I want him as my choice, oh Spirit of the forge, you can have another. This one has used my art quite expertly, with no teachers and no blessings, he has still surpassed many bronze and even iron rank users of magic. He even has a rare profession pathway available to him, one he aptly chose without me yelling at him to do so.”

  The Spirit of the forge scoffed, the nerve of the other moderator insulting. “His affinity lies within my domain, a section in my divine garden has revealed many options for him. Look at all those items he’s crafted!”

  “Crafted using magic” the Orb of magic said in a nagging tone, reminding his friend of the difference in their fields. “Besides,” The orb pulsed with a golden hue, “My garden has bloomed a few options for him as well, he’s in 3 separate sections!”

  The orb of metal sent a pulse in the air, conjuring a myriad of weapons to hover around itself. The tips pointed at the Moderator of magic’s vessel, gleaming with a myriad of esoteric effects. “Old friend, do understand my plight, Civilization had already laid claim with the other candidate i had my eyes on. Do this old man a favor and look upon another.” The tone in his voice eerily polite for brandishing so many weapons at a fellow moderator.

  The Moderator of magic, his orb swirling with the possibilities of magic, seemed to settle. “Now now, How about a wager?” His orb blinked with the colors of indigo and amethyst. “If he beats the trial, and we both know that’s a very big if with how Gale and Fang are interfering, he will receive an orb of their respective elements. If he uses one for creating something knew in the material world he will be yours, but if he uses for something from the immaterial planes, the realm of magic, then he will be mine.”

  The spirit of the forge retracted their aura, unknowingly having spread it over the weapons hovering around them. “But he receives two orbs in the case of victory, he can do both? This test would have no winner.”

  The moderator of Magic seemed pensive, the swirling lights within its vessel changing and pulsing with a slowed pace. Finally, after several moments, it spoke again. “We can lock them before we distribute the quest reward. Carving into them a shift fundamentally shouldn’t be two hard with the two of us, so long as we classify them as magic items first in the system.”

  “Hm… I accept your proposition, hence forth the Deal of the Divine had been struck!” Indigo light swirled around the orbs as space and time warped, moving their vessels to another planet of existence, one far higher than the tutorial world.