Chapter 6

  I woke up five minutes before my alarm was set to go off and stared up at the ceiling the entire time. My heart was still pounding in my chest, and I still felt sick with worry. It was five in the morning, earlier than I’d ever voluntarily woken up in my life. Outside the night sky was just starting to blush dawn, the black and blue sky lightening with just a hint of pink. I sat up just and stared out the window. I then promptly got up, ran to the bathroom, and puked. I heaved until there was nothing in my stomach and then for a good while after that. The sounds of my misery serving as a wake up alarm for the rest of the household. I heard soft knocking on the door while I was gargling water, along with the sound of my mother asking me if I was OK.

  “I’m good,” I said, my voice post vomit deep. I rinsed my face, brushed my teeth, then hopped into the shower for about ten minutes. By the time I left, wrapped in a towel, I saw Mom, Dad, and Uncle Dave waiting outside. I frowned at them in obvious confusion, so Uncle Dave volunteered an answer.

  “I’ve got one working bathroom,” he said, and I nodded my head at him, then brushed past all the adults to get some new clothes on. The stuff I’d not-stolen yesterday was all folded up inside plastic bags, name brand stuff like Carhart that had a reputation for durability, and all advertised to keep people cool in the hot weather. New socks, new underwear, new ankle high boots, new tan pants with pockets galore, and a new, rugged button up shirt, short sleeve. It was vain, but I did examine myself in the mirror, and I looked good. My face, I noted with satisfaction, was completely healed. The Weekend Recovery potion had done its work well. By the time it was all said and done it was about six o’clock, the sun had fully risen outside, and breakfast was cooking. I came downstairs to witness a disagreement.

  “Davie, we’ve got no idea if this is going to work,” Dad said in between bites of his breakfast, which was eggs with cheese on top.

  “I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t,” Uncle Dave said, also in between bites.

  “Because Goblin spawners are made by Goblins, Davie. Just because we piled up a bunch of garbage doesn’t mean it’ll magically turn into Goblin Spawners.”

  “Don’t see why it wouldn’t,” Uncle Dave said smartly.

  “I’m just saying we should have started smaller,” Dad continued, “with just one spawner, then worked our way up once we got a feel for how it was all going to work. Twenty-five spawners is just too ambitious.”

  “You’re being too careful, as usual.” Uncle Dave said, “You’ve got to take risks, like me.”

  “How many times have you gone bankrupt and had to sleep on my couch?” Dad asked, and Uncle Dave guffawed.

  “Off the top of my head? Too many times to count.” It was true, I reflected silently, that Uncle Dave had seemed to pop up at random times in my life for a few months at a time, and now I knew why. “Still,” he continued, “it’s a little late now to change anything.”

  “We’ve got a few hours,” Dad said seriously, “we could head out there right now and reduce the number of spawners down. I’m telling you Davie, I had nightmares about this last night.” His eyes were deep and haunted in that moment, and I shuddered to imagine what he’d seen in his dreams. Uncle Dave paused mid-bite and truly looked at his brother. He set his fork down.

  “Now you’ve got me spooked Dad,” he said, emphasizing the word and giving me a quick wink. “Come on, let’s get some work done. Twenty spawners.”

  “One,” Dad counter offered immediately.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Five.”

  “Ten.”

  “Seven.”

  “Ten.” Uncle Dave was serious now, and Dad sighed.

  “Ten it is,” he said, then extended a hand. They shook, and both of them looked at me. “Well son, let’s get moving.”

  --

  A truly large amount of garbage had been scooped out of the Goblin Burn Pit, doused in homemade napalm, and set ablaze. The smoke was oily, black and stunk like nothing I’d ever smelt before. Uncle Dave was shaking his head.

  “It’s like watching a pile of money burn,” he said forlornly, “you happy now?”

  “Ten’s still too many,” Dad said, watching the garbage burn intently, “but this is the best I’m going to get out of you.”

  “Two hundred EXP is better than nothing,” Uncle Dave mused, “but five hundred would be better. Still, there’s always tomorrow.” Dad nodded at this, and I could see they’d come to a peaceful accord.

  “We’ve got a half an hour,” I said, glancing at my phone and then showing them the time.

  “Call in the calvary,” Uncle Dave said with a big grin, and Dad immediately started making phone calls. I stood on the semi-compacted dirt walkway of the dirt dike surrounding the burn pit. It was at least six feet tall. I stared out at the desert wasteland surrounding us, all torn up from heavy equipment ripping up dirt to make the construct. I’d been there, I’d seen the backhoe tearing into dirt, seen the front loader scooping it into the dump truck, I’d been driving the dump truck and dumping the dirt in the perimeter, at least until it had gotten dangerous for me, inexperienced as I was, to be driving on it.

  “I think we’re ready,” I said to myself. Despite the desert heat, I felt cold. I strapped the GoPro to my chest, and prayed that I wasn’t about to record my own death.

  --

  “It is 9 AM, Day 4 of the System Calendar. Monster stasis has now ended. Monster spawning will now resume! Congratulations! Today is a special event! Congratulations, this Friday is a special event! This day will bring you purpose!”

  Mom, Dad, Uncle Dave, Ray, Terry, and I were all standing atop the dirt dike, staring intently at the piles of garbage below. They didn’t immediately start moving.

  “Davie I’ve got a bad feeling about this!” Dad yelled, and with a mounting sense of alarm, I watched as goblins spawned in-between the piles and started gleefully grabbing garbage to make their own piles. Without being told to, I started shooting at them, but they were ignoring me, and there were so many goblins, and so much garbage.

  I realized we’d made a serious miscalculation when I saw how much garbage was actually needed to make a goblin spawner, quite a bit less than we’d initially estimated. The first spawner appeared on the far size of the burn pit, far away from us.

  “Terry, go get it,” Uncle Dave ordered, and Terry started carefully running along the treacherous loose dirt, carrying an assault rifle and several jars of homemade napalm. Dad was picking off the goblins charging at us from below, Mom was getting the ones coming from outside the burn pit, and I was in charge of killing the ones that spawned up top with us. Uncle Dave and Ray, who both had the best throwing arms of the group, were supposed to be dousing the spawners with flaming death.

  The only problem was, the spawners didn’t appear all at once, like we’d been counting on. Our piles of garbage didn’t register with the system, only the ones directly created by goblins would turn into spawners.

  “This is taking way too long!” Dad shouted as he fought back an increasing volume of freshly spawned goblins.

  “There’s another one!” Uncle Dave yelled, and he and Ray immediately started burning down the spawner that had just appeared. We had plenty of napalm, plenty. But we had underestimated how much ammo we would need.

  “Davie,” Mom shouted, “I’ve already burned through half my bullets!”

  “Me too,” I yelled.

  “We need to cut it off Neighbor Dave!” Ray shouted, while still faithfully lobbing napalm at the increasing number of spawners.

  “We can get a few more!” Uncle Dave called back.

  “Hey!” Terry shouted in alarm, “Hey! They’re doing something weird!”

  I glanced up from shooting at another goblin running at our group to see that, yes, something weird was happening. A crowd of goblins was running away from us, led by. . .

  “Is that thing smoking a cigarette?” I said out loud. The goblin in question was vague and blurry, but held itself entirely differently than other goblins. It had a loose, long, and slack posture, like a marionette on strings. It was hard to see, but even from a distance, I could feel a sort of intense emptiness coming from it, a hollow feeling of a terrible and bleak void. There was also the unmistakable sight of a cigarette hanging from its bottom lip.

  “Dave, call it, we’re done!” Terry shouted, and Uncle Dave finally broke.

  “Damn it all!” he bellowed, “Ray, burn it all! I don’t want to see a single scrap of garbage left for them to use!”

  “Aye aye!” Ray yelled, then began lobbing mason jar after mason jar of napalm with mechanical precision, hitting everything. The burn pit turned into an inferno of red-black fire that stunk and hissed, an oily, foul incineration that clung to everything.

  “Retreat, retreat!” Uncle Dave yelled, and we turned our attention, and gunfire, towards the dirt slope behind us, clearing a path for a hasty and ungraceful retreat.

  “Get to the cars, get to the cars!” Dad yelled once we’d made it safely to hard packed ground. We ran to the cars and, just for a moment, it seemed we’d escaped the majority of the horde.

  “Oh, that was such a bad idea,” Uncle Dave said, heaving deep breaths, red faced, reeking of gasoline and slightly singed from the heat of the inferno of his own creation.

  “There’s a way to get it done, I’m sure,” Dad said, also breathing hard from the dead sprint we’d been running. “Don’t beat yourself up Davie.”

  “I know I’m just a kid and stuff,” Ray said, getting everyone’s attention, “But I think if we’re going to be farming EXP, Adam’s exploit is way more practical. Ten Experience isn’t as much as a spawner, but it’s way easier to steal a goblin club and use it as a weapon than what we just did.”

  “Ray’s right,” Mom said, “if we’re going to be doing anything, we should be using Adam’s exploit.”

  “That sounds about right to me,” Uncle Dave said, “we’ll start working on ways to use it after the spawning stops today at five.”

  “Goblin pack incoming,” I said, being the responsible, alert teenager that I was, “on our. . .er, on our five?” I guessed, visualizing an old-school clock face and where all its numbers were in relation to us. Our ‘five’ was behind us and to the right, where a group of about six goblins was running at us with reckless, suicidal abandon. Before any of us could take a knee and open fire, Ray acted.

  “I’m gonna try the exploit, these ones are mine. Bring it on bad boys!” he shouted at us, then at them, dropping his rifle and pulling out two hunting knives, then running at the six strong goblin pack in his street hockey armor. At no point did I feel the urge to run after him and join the fight, nor did any of the rest of the group. I watched him charge into the brawl and start stabbing everything in sight, taking a few blows in the process, but blows that were greatly mitigated by the body armor and the extra cloth padding he’d duct taped to his clothes to fill in the gaps. He dispatched the first five goblins, then squared off one on one with the last. He tossed it his second knife, which landed on the ground in front of the monster. The goblin literally rolled its red eyes at the weapon, then charged with its club. Ray dropped his other knife, snatched the club out of the goblin’s hand and then started screaming at it while he beat it and dragged out the fight.

  “I think that boy’s got some pent up anger,” Terry commented dryly, peeling his eyes away from the fascinating display of anger in favor of watching out for more roaming goblins.

  I looked away as well, copying Terry’s vigilance. My skin prickled as, on the very edge of the flat, desert wasteland horizon, I saw the sun. It wasn’t very high in the sky yet, but it seemed somehow obscured by some. . . thing. It was very far away, and I couldn’t even tell if it was real. . . but it scared me.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Hey, you guys see something over there,” I said, looking away to get everyone else’s attention. That immediately got the rest of the group looking in my direction. When I pointed at the sun, they all took a good look without saying anything. I looked again as well, but this time, I couldn’t see anything. “Guess it was nothing,” I said, shaking my head and then easily dispelling the bad feelings.

  “Everybody keep an eye out,” Dad said, restoring order, then shouting so Ray could hear him, “Come on Ray, we’ve got people in town waiting for us!”

  “yo Madre you pinchy culero baboso!” Ray finished cursing out the goblin in Spanish, giving it a lethal crack across the skull, after which it promptly crumbled to the ground, dead. Ray leaned over it, pressed the button on the radio, and we all got to watch the body implode into light. Ray picked up the EXP, then both of his knives, before jogging back to the group, looking exactly as beat up as he should after getting into a fight with six goblins. Which was to say, pretty beat up.

  “Don’t throw my knives into the dirt,” Uncle Dave said, giving Ray a hard look.

  “Don’t give those goblins stupid ideas about using knives,” Terry said, giving Ray a hard smack across the back of the head. Ray accepted the corrections in good humor, and I got the feeling he got that sort of thing a lot at home.

  “Did you get ten EXP for that?” I asked, conscious of the GoPro, having been sure to keep it pointed at Ray for the entire fight while he used the exploit. That was valuable data.

  “Yeah,” Ray said, holding up the little chit.

  “The boy’s got a point,” Terry said, “that was way easier than spawn camping goblin spawners. Safer too.”

  “Weapon check,” Dad said, prompting everyone to check that they still had their guns and ammo, “all right, load up into the trucks.”

  “Shouldn’t we have someone riding in the bed?” I asked, “ready to shoot?”

  “Hell no,” Terry said good naturedly, “mobility is our main advantage in a vehicle. If someone’s in the bed, we’ve got to drive slower. If we drive slower, the goblins might catch us faster. Plus, if we run into like. . . god forbid, like a thousand of the things, we want to be able to kick it into reverse and get out. Someone sitting in the bed accomplishes. . . well, I think you get the point. Sounds like fun though, kicking it in the bed, shooting goblins in the sun.” He smiled and shook his head, “couple of beers, couple of girls, and it’s almost like it’s not the apocalypse anymore.”

  Thoroughly chastised, I said nothing and got into the truck.

  --

  Transit time in the truck was spent refilling magazines and cartridges with ammo from the back seat, where the white boxes with the helpful pictures printed on them were stacked high. Anyone who wasn’t driving, was reloading, and the brand new road leading into the neighborhood shone with the wet, tarry smoothness that only comes with fresh American blacktop. Uncle Dave calmly drove around another car that had been abandoned in the middle of the street.

  “We’re going to need to get a tow truck out here,” Dad said, shaking his head, “these are perfectly good cars, and I doubt the auto industry’s going to continue running while all this’s going on.”

  “How long do you think it’s going to last?” Mom asked, pushing a final shell into a cartridge for my tactical shotgun and handed it to me with a ‘here you go honey’.

  “The Apocalypse?” Dad asked, and he and Uncle Dave exchanged a look.

  “Hm,” she said with a little grimace, then started in on reloading her assault rifle with renewed focus. I was staring out the window, having run out of things to reload. I stared at the flat yellow and brown desert as we raced through it, thinking about her question. How long? The System hadn’t ever given any indication that it would stop, that there was an end to all this. But. . . was this it? Just goblins, forever? That couldn’t be all there was to this stupid System, right? I squinted at what looked like a dust cloud in the distance, at what looked like something just on the edge of the horizon. What was that? That thing I’d seen earlier that nobody else had? I kept staring.

  “Hey,” I said, only loud enough so I could hear, squinting more. I couldn’t tell what it was, just that it looked like someone but I couldn’t see because of all the dust. . . !

  “Hey!” I yelled suddenly, pointing at the dust cloud. Heads turned, conversations died, and eyeballs examined the scene. Uncle Dave swore and pulled off the road, headed towards the dust cloud, and the goblin army that was making it. They were very far away, but there were so many of them. Too many for me to count, except to say that there were more than a hundred, and they weren’t ‘safely’ contained inside the Goblin Burn Pit. Uncle Dave swore again when he tracked their size, and their general movement.

  “They’re headed straight for Desert Bloom,” he said, shaking his head, “we’ve got to do something about this.”

  “Davie, we’re going to do something about this,” Dad said, giving me a confident look. “Strafe the army, get close, drive alongside it at a safe distance away. Adam, take that assault rifle, hang out the window, and start shooting.”

  My eyebrows shot up, and I exchanged a look with Ray, who looked both awed and jealous. Without giving Dad a chance to realize what he’d just asked me to do, I immediately unbuckled and rolled down the window. “Ray!” I shouted, “Grab onto my feet!”

  Then, as soon as I was secure, I stuck myself out the window and felt hands on my ankles, squeezing tight. The hot desert air felt good after the frigid interior of Uncle Dave’s truck, and I saw with growing excitement the huge horde of goblins getting closer and closer. . . to being in range. I fiddled with the strap of the assault rifle, made sure I wouldn’t drop it, ever, took aim and opened fire. The roar of gunfire instantly made me damn near deaf in one ear, and my initial barrage fired many rounds, but few hit. No goblins died. They noticed us, however, and the entire massive group changed direction to now be charging at us. “Get me closer!” I shouted, unable to even hear myself, but Uncle Dave steadily got us even closer to the army. We were close enough now that I could start to make out individual details of the little green monsters, and saw to my surprise that of the charging mass of wildly different yet totally similar goblin builds, there was at least one that stood out. It had a different kind of name tag, but it seemed to be actively maneuvering itself away from us.

  “Don’t like that,” I muttered to myself, and then opened fire again. This time, I was rewarded with a large pocket of shattering light in their throng, at least eight dead. “Get some!” I shouted, now fully sighted in and unloading the entire magazine. Goblins vanished as fast as the mechanism of the rifle could shoot, and my magazine was empty long before I ran out of goblins to shoot. I ejected it and blindly handed it back into the car, where someone took it, and gave me a new one. I slammed it into place and resumed my work. The goblins were getting awful close, I noticed, but before I could start to get too worried, Uncle Dave pulled us away with a burst of speed. Even to my gunfire deaf ears, I could hear him laughing as he pulled a wide turn away from them, then started approaching at a different angle. The goblins were shaking their fists at us and running at top, frenzied speed. . . but they had no chance, at all. I mowed them down until there weren’t but a few left, and then I saw the strange goblin. It was a little taller than its fellows, but what really got me was how weirdly focused it was. It was staring at me without blinking, and without much facial expression either.

  [Exceptional Goblin, Lv 1]

  I popped off a shot, and it stepped to the side with a quick little hop. I fired off a lot of shots, and it started running away. “Hold still so I can shoot you,” I shouted at it, and it obviously ignored my good faith suggestion. Still, in the end, this was a massively uneven fight, and it went down in the end. I couldn’t accurately gauge how much of a threat it was, except to say that if I saw one while I was on foot, I’d probably be extremely cautious around the thing. When I finally scored a hit, it went down, but wasn’t dead. It reached down to its side, into a little side bag it was carrying, and I shook my head.

  “Pull over!” I yelled, and Uncle Dave promptly did just that.

  “Adam, what are you thinking?” Dad shouted.

  “I’m going to use the exploit on it,” I yelled back, looking closer at the Exceptional Goblin.

  “What!” Dad shouted, but too late to stop me from getting out of the car. My heart was pounding as I ran up on the Exceptional Goblin, who was now watching me with eerie dead red eyes. Its face was a blank, limp mask of emotionless horror, with only a cold spark of malevolence animating it. A lit cigarette hung stuck to its bottom lip, and as I rushed at it, it flexed it up and took an enormous drag, one that caused the dart to cartoonishly turn to ash. It’s eyes, which were at a needle point of focus, dilated hugely. It charged at me as I charged at it, it was limping along in a terrifying display of disregard for its own comfort.

  We met, and I was slashed by its claws. I tackled it to the ground, using my superior size and weight, only to get my front shredded by the claws on its feet. It fought like a wildcat, growling and snarling, hissing and biting. It was so, impossibly fast. Every time I punched, it would whip it’s head out of the way like magic. Somehow, I managed to get it flat on its face and simply sat on the vicious monster.

  “Get the club!” I yelled, knowing my party was nearby and listening. Ray rushed over to where the club had been dropped and handed it to me. I was in agony, but I simply didn’t care anymore, my face fixed in a stupid expression of violence. I lifted the club at an awkward angle and began bashing in the skull of the exceptional goblin with the hilt of its own weapon, hitting it over and over. It began chuckling right before it died, a nasty, haunting sound that cut off with the final blow, leaving the desert wasteland in silence.

  “Local Announcement! An Exceptional Goblin has been slain by Exceptional Goblin- Error Twenty-Seven.” The voice of The System was still broadcasting from the goblin’s radio, which cut out abruptly after the error message.

  “Jesus Christ son!” Dad rushed over with a first aid kit and immediately began getting me out of my shredded clothes.

  “What’s it got on it Ray,” I said, then yelled in agony when rubbing alcohol was poured onto my cuts.

  “No way dude, you earned this,” Ray said, backing away from the Exceptional Goblin, which I was still sitting on, “you really earned this one.”

  No goblins were approaching our position at the moment, and the next few minutes were occupied by Mom carefully stitching me up.

  “When’d you learn how to do stitches?” Uncle Dave asked, watching as she expertly closed up the worst of my wounds.

  “I’m a mother,” she said distractedly, “I had Dad,” she nodded towards Dad, “buy me one of those practice kits every month, and I’d practice and watch YouTube videos. You never know when your teenage boy is going to get himself sliced up,” she said, tying a final knot, examining her work, then nodding. “Wrap him up in gauze and get him one of those potions as soon as possible,” she said, then walked away, trembling. I felt bad as I was wrapped up like a mummy, then I stood up and looked at the Exceptional Goblin I’d worked so hard to use the exploit on.

  “Well,” I said, then got down to start looking through its pockets, “let’s see if that was worth it.”

  The first thing I found was a box of cigarettes with a stylized goblin head silhouette printed on the box. I opened it, smelled the darts inside, and nearly gagged from the intense chemical smell. I stuck it in my backpack anyways, because who knows if it was useful or not. Next, I found a handful of little, solid gold idols, each one about the size of a marble.

  “There’s a rat,” I said, passing them around one by one, “a bat, and a snake.”

  “Are these real gold?” Ray asked, going to bite into the idol, but stopping when literally every person in the group glared at him.

  “They feel like real gold,” Terry said, weighing them with his hand, “how bizarre. What else does it have on it?”

  I started digging through the pouch clipped to its belt, and found a strange looking compass with six needles, each one pointing in a separate direction. Most of them were pointing towards the direction of the Goblin Burn Pit.

  “Oh,” Uncle Dave said, holding out his hand to look at the compass. I handed it over, and he started spinning, “Oh!” he said again, “I think these needles are pointing at Goblin Spawners.”

  “Really?” I asked, and he shrugged.

  “I can’t confirm it, but I’d bet good money,” he said, handing the compass back.

  “There’s a little book,” I said, pulling out the last item and opening it up. Rather than words, the moment the book opened, a translucent sphere of purple energy appeared over it, and my mind was flooded with a kind of alien understanding. “This is an enchantment booklet,” I said in a flat, mechanical voice, “containing the enchantment of Blur. This enchantment will allow the user to automatically attempt to dodge all incoming attacks. Use this item to create a squad of Magic Goblins. Seek other Exceptional Goblins to find other enchantments. Remaining uses, one. Aaaaahhhhhhh,” I said, feeling the alien intelligence recede, freeing me. “Oh I hated that. Check this out,” I said, handing the book to Ray and then pulling my boots off while still standing. The burning ground cooked straight through my sweaty socks, painful on the soles of my feet. “Ow ow ow,” I said, dancing from foot to foot.

  “Surface temperatures out here can get as high as two hundred degrees in direct sunlight,” Uncle Dave said trivially.

  “Book,” I said, and Ray handed me the book back. I set the boots down and opened the book. This time, the information settled in on me easily, nothing like the overwhelming flood of before. A translucent purple sphere of energy appeared above the pages of the book, and I picked up my boots and set them inside. Inside the bubble, they seemed to shrink for a moment, then expand back to their original size. The book imploded in light, the same way a goblin would after the exploit was used on them. Everybody was watching me, but nobody had said a word.

  “Ray, try and punch me,” I said confidently, and Ray immediately launched a powerful jab straight at my face. I dodged, but it felt normal. “Ok, now come at me from behind where I can’t see you,” I said, and braced myself as Ray positioned himself behind me. Before I knew what had happened, I moved my head to the side, avoiding Ray’s punch.

  “Woah!” Ray said, then threw another punch, which I blindly dodged about as well as I could if I’d seen it coming. “Adam this is crazy,” he said, throwing a few more punches. One of them hit. “Sorry!” Ray immediately let up.

  “No that’s OK,” I said, and to be fair, the hit had been a glancing blow.

  “Seems like it didn’t make him as fast as the Exceptional Goblin,” Terry said thoughtfully.

  “You’re right,” Dad said, standing over by the ‘armor smith’, “he’s only moving about as fast as he normally would.” Uncle Dave whistled.

  “Those Exceptional Goblins move quick,” he said.

  “Guys,” I said, hopping from foot to foot, “I think these are the most uncomfortable boots I’ve ever worn.” They felt like fire ants on my feet, though not like I was getting stung, just like they were crawling all over, with the possibility of getting stung. As I hopped, one of my feet ended up landing near the radio of the Exceptional Goblin. Immediately the female, mechanical voice of The System began speaking. “Item Classification: Low Quality Boots, EXP value: 1. Enchanted with Blur, EXP value: 15,000. A strange mismatch of items, these boots burn with badly controlled magic. Despite the discomfort, they are perfectly safe to wear.”

  “I can deal with this,” I said, and attempted to stand still. What happened instead was that it looked like I needed to pee from the way I was hopping from one foot to the other. “They’re perfectly safe, they’re perfectly safe.”

  “Fifteen thousand EXP!” Uncle Dave said, exchanging a look with Terry, “What do you think, some kind of way of measuring relative power?”

  “Or the price of the item in the System Store,” he said. “I wonder if you can raise the EXP value of the boots, and if that would raise their quality. . .” before they could continue speculating, the sound of distant goblins reached our ears. In the distance, we could see a large group of goblins, around twenty or so, running at our location.

  “Time to go,” Dad said, and we loaded back into our vehicles and resumed our strafing tactics to eliminate any large group of goblins we saw. The distant sound of gunfire alerted us that we were getting close to Desert Bloom. I stared out the window, idly running my fingers along the length of my tactical shotgun, staring at the horizon. . . then at the sun. My skin prickled and my nose scrunched as I stared at something I couldn’t see.

  “There’s something bad out there,” I said to myself, so quietly that only I could hear it.

  I really didn't like that! Learning about the monsters was like, 30-50% of the fun of fantasy books, and what is a LitRPG but the HARD LIQUOR version of fantasy???