The goblins panicked, shooting rifles in all directions, frantically waving away the biting, stinging bugs. One of them hit a cable attaching the deck to the airship’s envelope, and the front right quarter of the boat lurched down, spilling several goblins off the side. Still others abandoned ship of their own volition, hurling themselves off the boat—only to be reminded by a deafening roar that there was still a monster on the island below us.
Bugs crawled through my fur, looking for flesh to sink their stingers into. I resisted the very goblin urge to turn the flamethrower nozzle around and sweep myself with its flames, along with the whole deck. I’d always joked that a loose spider in the house meant we’d have to burn down the whole thing, but a goblin actively would do something that crazy.
I opened my mouth to shout, and several of the red bugs forced themselves inside. I chomped down, crushing them between my teeth, in what should have been a revolting mix of grit, carapace, and guts. But, again, goblins. I hated how delicious my brain interpreted them as being.
Nearby, I spotted Armstrong trying to punch the air around him. The air was filled with a glistening sea of red malevolence, with the luminescent glitter of thousands of diaphanous wings sparkling in the deck lights. The whole swarm moved as if guided by a single mind. Was there some sort of queen we could kill? How could we even find her? My only consolation is that goblins seemed to be immune to whatever let these swarms take over cliffords and other swamp creatures. Probably because they were devouring any bugs that tried to work their way inside.
Small favors. I dropped to the deck and began rolling, hoping to crush the bugs. My frantic desperation brought me over to Promo, and thank God I was already on the ground, because he’d have crushed my skull with his hammer otherwise.
Promo swung his favorite hammer around in wide, wild arcs. It’s head was coated in a red paste and blue fur, but it wasn’t exactly efficient. He needed a flyswatter, really. As I watched, claws digging at my own fur, he clipped one of the deck lights with his hammer. The bulb burst in a shower of sparks, and a tendril of electricity zapped a handful of the bugs. The entire swarm flinched back. I felt the pressure of bites and stingers ease up for a moment.
“Promo!” I gasped up. The noblin chief looked down at me, realizing for the first time that I was beside him. I pointed up at the sparking tines of the bulb.
Luckily, my ignis chief was no fool. He dropped his hammer to the deck and wrenched free the pylon from its housing, sweeping the bare contacts through the swarm. The hissing snap of that familiar bug-zapper melody was music to my ears. Again, the swarm flinched and pulled back.
I heard another smash of glass, and looked over to see that Armstrong had followed suit, pulling down a pair of the deck lights and smashing them together to wield electricity in each hand. This time when he punched the air, the swarm reacted, getting fried by the hundred. All across the darkening deck, goblins turned lamps into weapons wielded against the encroaching swarm. It was like a tiny summer storm, with the warm orange light almost entirely replaced with the harsh blue flicker of arcing electrical leads.
I felt the swarm flow off my fur as one, and I lay gasping and sore from the bites across my skin and face. The red bugs flowed through and over the gunwales, and back down to the jungle below. The deck was a carpet of red carapace. But we’d won. The goblins, so recently brushed with imminent death, began to sweep up the bug remains and drop them into their mouths. I turned away. The human part of my brain still wanted to hurl.
“Pilot, get us back to Huntsville, pronto.”
Luckily, if the insects had been envenomed, the goblin immunity to toxins and poisons seemed to be completely resistant to it, so the only lingering pain was that of the tiny punctures that actually managed to break skin under my fur. Instead of watching the smorgasbord, I turned my attention to the scrappers we’d pulled onboard. I made my way aft, to where they had collapsed from exhaustion, too drained even to join the fight against the bugs. But in the heat of the moment, I hadn’t even noticed that not all of them were forest goblins. They had 3 boglins with them, one of which was Ringo’s closest advisor, George.
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“King Apollo,” said George, eyeing me warily. “Am I to assume we’re your prisoners, now?”
I gestured to the side of the deck. “You’re free to try your luck on the ground,” I said. As if to punctuate my point, something large howled on the island below.
George’s eyes shifted left and right. “Ah, well, we’ll accept your hospitality. For now…”
I rolled my eyes. I’d just saved him, and he was already planning his inevitable betrayal and escape. Still, it was good fortune that we’d gotten one of the rare talking boglins—though Ringo had grown his tribe enough that he’d unlocked a hob-boglin variant. And while I didn’t want to take full credit for that, it certainly hadn’t happened before we’d started trading with them and slowly introducing more tech into their society..
“What were you doing out here, anyway?”
The royal advisor perked up. “Ah, my king sent me to find you. We captured one of the invaders!”
So there was a guiding force behind the attacks. “You did? Where are they?”
One of the other boglins approached with a leather cover over something the size and shape of a fishbowl. He pulled it away to reveal a small, wicker cage—which contained a creature that, if I’m being honest, I had no idea what to make of it. It was smeared with dirt and grass, making it look like little more than a piece of peat with strangely muscular arms and legs. It held up a hand against the sudden light, and I heard a high-pitched cavalcade of what could only be dog-cussing in its native tongue.
“I have no idea what this is,” I said. “But I know someone who should.”
George snatched the cage away, which rattled the creature inside and renewed the string of foreign expletives. “Then we should make all haste! Take me to them, at once. My king’s life depends on it.”
His king’s life, and therefore, his own. But I left that bit unsaid. It took us an hour or so to limp back to the swamp village and dock at the tower. We were down two more boats, but the scrappers with their new gear and lights had managed to rebuff a few attacks by more crazed swamp creatures.
I found Sourtooth working with Promo and Taquoho on a helicopter and had George show him the prisoner. The sour old orc sniffed down at the cage and laughed. The creature inside was just as peeved at the orc as it had been at us, and began making what I can only assume were rude gestures involving splayed fingers and vigorous up-and-down motions.
“Tis elves,” said Sourtooth. “Burn down to cinders the swamp, you may wish, as the only way to be sure you’ve got them all out.”
“No way,” I said.
“He speaks true,” said Taquoho. “They have, on occasion, visited The City. And they are very difficult to persuade to leave once within the walls.”
“Elves?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. I looked down through the tiny bars of the cage. I must have got too close, because the little bastard put a fist in my eye. I recoiled, putting a hand over it.
Sourtooth held out his hand for the cage, and then carried it over to one of the cisterns where he treated the creature to a deluge of water. When he was finished, he offered the cage back. With all the grime and moss and sticks washed away, sure as death and taxes, there was a six-inch tall pointy-eared man who was very wet and very cross.
“Naught seen one a’fore, have you? Worry not, harmless once parted from their staves.” He laughed down as I rubbed my stinging eye. “Well, mostly harmless.”
“Not in person,” I admitted. I ran a hand through my fur. “I was just expecting…” I don’t know what I was expecting, more Lord of the Rings and less Fudge Stripes, certainly. Though, that didn’t fit the bill either. This looked more like a micronized dude-bro that would have been right at home in a scaled down version of a jungle commando movie from the 80’s—or at least the action-figure aisle at the toy store. The elf even had a little red bandana and close-cropped hair above his pointy ears. Now robbed of his camouflage, the System populated the level above his head at 32. 32. For this one little elf. He was at least as strong as an ifrit paladin, and the only things stronger that we’d come across had been badlands beasts that required a whole convoy of war buggies and heavy weapons to best. The fact this tiny cage contained him was astounding.
“Lines up it does,” said Sourtooth. He scratched at his stubble. “The attacks from stealth, strange behaviors of local beast and bug, and even your scrappers getting ambushed. Natural sneaks, are elves—for obvious reason, they seek not to fight on fair term. I wager their team numbers 6 strong, perhaps. Tis a number of significance to elves. 5 mages and a leader.”
Only 6? I suppose that was a blessing, but it was hard to believe just 6 of these things had disrupted operations so much.
“Yeah, but why are they here?” I asked. Though, it did explain why the boglins had been attacked so viciously, if the other elves were trying to recover their comrade.
The little elf gave me an answer I’m sure would have been inappropriate if I’d understood it.
“Wiped out the javeline, did you. When disrupted the trade of goblin ear, the elves took note, I’d say.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively. “Know you, what they do with it?”
As if I could forget the rutter’s words that had been burned into my brain whether I liked it or not. “Ear to elf for make potent.”
Make potent. We were their rhino horn.
I shuddered, looking down at the little wretch. “Came to get your fix from the source, yeah?” I leaned in. “Or maybe came to find out what happened to your javeline?”
The tiny creature lashed out through the thin bars of its cage, attempting to punch me. But this time, I was ready.
“Armstrong. Show this jerk what happened to the last people who came to my neck of the woods looking for goblin ears.”
Armstrong licked his lips. “My pleasure, boss!”
They were consuming us. Turnabout was fair play, after all.