“Myla, check your right! I’ll shield the left!” Eres roared, pulling Mana from his core out and into the form of a wall of force to one side of the Berserker. Myla swung at his instruction, cleaving straight through the green-skinned bastard that had tried to swing its rusty knife at her midsection.

  They hadn’t planned to fight an entire hunting party of Goblins when they left Manneck that day. They had spent the days since Myla’s duel mostly resting, doing the odd bit of shopping or, in Eres’ case, practicing with his new needles. It had only been yesterday that they had finally been able to pick up their new armour from Gregor at the Hydall Smithy. They had all made sure it fit properly and paid Gregor for the rest of his fee, and they were all more than happy with his work. Eres even threw in some extra gold for a pair of daggers he could strap to his belt in case he ran out of Mana.

  Happy with their new equipment and deciding it was time to test it out, a simple scouting bounty from the Guild seemed worth looking into. It simply required them to venture a few hours outside of Manneck to one of the nearby plains and confirm reports of Goblin activity. They had barely made it out of the forest and on to the plain itself before a full sized Goblin Hunting party had come sprinting over a small hill and rushed them.

  It had been Freya’s quick thinking that saved them from getting surrounded, their backs now up against the thickly wooded area they had just left as the Goblins dived into the fray. The creatures fought with no formation, just throwing themselves one after another at the closest combatant. Myla fought them with fury, her Great-spear thrusting, cleaving and rending all who attacked her, their wooden spears and rusted blades deflected by her new armour.

  Eres stood behind her with Freya, a bow of glimmering purple force in his hands, limbs held in a sweeping recurve by a faint, shining string. His right hand dipped into the empty space over his shoulder as if to find a quiver, and an arrow formed itself between his fingers, ready to draw. In one smooth motion, it was nocked on the thin string, pulled back flush with his jawline and released, flying through the air and plunging through the throat of a Goblin who was cocking his arm back to throw a spear. While he mostly preferred to fight up close, being behind Myla let him defend her much better with his defensive spells, and the bow helped thin out their ranks.

  He had found that conjuring weapons as magical constructs had the benefit of letting him recall much of his Mana, a quirk of his Blessing. While it wasn’t as efficient as his Shields and other defensive spells, it was more efficient than any of the elemental spells he currently had in his repertoire. He wasn’t able to launch huge area attacks with Myla so close anyway, so conjured arrows would have to do the trick.

  Freya was to his left, hands clasped with her staff resting against her hip. She had her eyes open and watching for threats, but her lips were constantly murmuring as she intoned prayers to help channel her miracles. Eres was slowly learning the different types of miracles she could invoke, and while he couldn’t feel the Divinity to tell the difference, the different colourations of the angel dust that she gave off gave him a good idea. At the moment, she seemed to be focusing on protecting Myla and increasing the Berserker’s speed and strength. As Eres loosed another arrow, he realised he had never asked Freya which of the Gods she followed, or if she prayed to all of them. After his experience with Ekros, he spent much of his time trying to move through life without thinking about them, but he still felt bad for never asking.

  Not to mention, I still need to work out what the hell happened with Ekros and my Spirit Art, he thought as he drew another arrow and sent more Mana into the shield protecting Myla’s left flank. I guess a temple or a church is the best place to try and do that.

  Eres watched as Myla tore through enemy after enemy with the head of her Great-spear. She was spattered in the thick yellow fluid that made up the monster's blood, but Eres couldn’t see any cuts or wounds on her yet, so he doubted they had to worry about her Spirit Art activating. It had only been a few moments since they had clashed with the hunting party, but already more than half their number were dead. Eres could barely believe that one of these creatures had nearly claimed his life those years ago.

  The Goblins at the rear threw their spears, little more than sharpened wooden sticks, over Myla in an attempt to remove the one filling them with arrows, but Eres smiled as he saw them. He had spent years learning magic, and while the magical constructs were incredibly useful, he always got a kick out of using his defensive spells.

  “Northwind Aegis,” Eres said, his Mana swirling out from his hands into a shield of wind above their heads, launching the spears off to one side before they could fall on their heads. The spell was one of a few that Eres had crafted himself, and he tried to use it often to keep the visualisation and workings fresh in his mind. Like any defensive spell, he felt much of the Mana cycle back into his core once the Magic itself was finished, and he used that Mana to form even more arrows to send into the Goblins.

  All in all, the fight probably took less than sixty seconds, and they all walked away without a scratch. In front of them were nearly twenty Goblins, wearing scraps of leather and animal hide wrapped around their bulbous green bodies. Rust-pitted blades lay discarded in the dirt, some snapped from Myla’s viscous parries, and most of the spears were little more than firewood now.

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  “Hardly seems like a fair fight,” Eres said, poking one of the worn blades at his feet. “Then again, they rushed us without a thought, guess they would have done the same for anything with a heartbeat, so fair doesn’t come too much into it.”

  “Yep, guess we can tell the Guild we confirmed Goblin presence, and even took a few of them out,” Myla laughed, wiping her face off with her sleeve. “I’m going to need to soak in the bath, though. These little green buggers just kept coming.”

  “Yeah, hard to argue Goblin activity is here when they are festering at our feet,” Freya said, handing Myla a damp cloth to clean herself off better. “Do we want to call it here and head back to let them know, or do you want to investigate a little more? We packed everything together thanks to the bags, so we have the tents if we need to camp out again, plus travelling supplies.”

  “Wouldn’t survive without you keeping us in check, love,” Eres laughed, pecking his former maid on the cheek. “I reckon we poke around a bit more. Might find a camp, they gotta be coming from somewhere. I know monsters breed quickly, even the more humanoid ones, but I can’t imagine a full hunting party like this was the extent of it. If there are this many out looking for food, there has to be more somewhere.”

  Myla nodded, finally getting the worst of the Goblin blood off her face and hands. “Sounds good to me. Could do another patrol or two as a warm-up.”

  “Let’s not get cocky though,” Eres warned, smiling at the blonde and ruffling her hair despite the yellow fluid caked into it. “This was a pretty ideal set-up for us, we won't always be able to choke them and take them a few at a time. Work together, don’t get surrounded, and call for help when needed. Right?”

  Myla blushed at his touch, but deflated a little. “Yeah, you are right. Just felt good to be fighting, especially with the new armour feeling so good. If we see a group like that again, and see them before they see us, we should find a chokepoint or hit them hard before they can react, right?”

  “Seems like a solid plan to me. Freya?” Eres nodded, wiping his now sticky hand on the shirt beneath his new chainmail.

  “Seems like the best plan. Eres and I can cook something up to hit a bunch of them at once if we haven’t been seen. If we get surrounded, go back to back and each handle your side, but we should really try to avoid that happening,” Freya added, spinning her staff a few times as she thought. “Eres, can you concentrate on adding something rather than making it? I was just thinking, my staff helps with gathering Divinity, which is great, but if it had a spearhead, I could probably fight better.”

  Eres grimaced a little as he ran through it in his head. “Maybe? I would need to experiment a lot before I would be confident giving you an answer. Making something as a construct is doable, but I haven’t tried bonding one to something else yet. Once we get back and can rest some, it’s something to look into.

  “For now, though, if you need something more substantial, call for it, and I will make it happen as fast as I can.”

  Freya nodded slowly, still thinking. “Alright, works for now. Let's start trying to find where all these pests are coming from.”

  It didn’t take long after they started walking across the plains to find evidence of the Goblin's path. A few butchered animals and piles of scat and bone dotted the landscape where they had stopped to harvest whatever they had killed. Following the trail back led them the whole way across this section of grassland and back to the edge of the forest. They did see one settlement off in the distance, but it was far from the trail, and they could see people on the walls surrounding it, so they decided it was wiser to keep following the trail.

  “We can always check in on the way back,” Freya had said.

  The trail was just as obvious through the forest, more poorly butchered carcasses and obvious leavings marking a trail through the underbrush full of broken branches and muddy footprints. When it eventually led to a clearing, the trio crouched in the bushes outside, staring in.

  “Well,” Eres whispered, hand braced up against a large tree, “That could be a problem.”

  In the centre of the clearing, rather than a small camp of huts or tents like he had expected to find, was a small hill, with a tunnel carved into the side of it heading down into the earth. There were a few Goblins clustered around the tunnel with small wooden bucklers and spears, seeming to guard the entrance.

  “Looks like the trail heads straight down that tunnel,” Myla said quietly, her face set into a frown. “So either these Goblins decided to take over a mine shaft in the middle of nowhere…”

  “Or these are dungeon monsters,” Freya finished with a sigh. “Considering it’s the middle of nowhere, a random hill in an otherwise flat area, and I don’t see any mining equipment discarded outside, I think it is a fair bet this is a recently formed dungeon. Which means no matter how many we kill, the dungeon will just keep making more.”

  Dungeons themselves were a poorly understood phenomenon. It was a general name given to places of intense natural Mana, Divinity or other power sources that started to spawn monsters from thin air. Some scholars believed that all monsters came from these sources originally, and only later began to proliferate outside of the dungeons. Others believe that the memory of Mana remembered the already existing monsters and started to produce them when enough congregated in one space.

  Some could stretch for hundreds of miles, folding into their own little dimensional spaces, becoming key resources for those who delved into them and plundered their resources. Others were barely more than caves that spawned monsters until their Mana was depleted, though they could grow over time if their monsters and power weren’t culled down.

  “Well, it doesn’t look like much. Hopefully it’s a relatively new dungeon. Let’s head back to Manneck and-” Eres started to say, when he felt the ground shift beneath his feet. His eyes went wide as the dirt underneath him began to fall away, and as he tried to gather Mana from his core, he felt himself begin to fall into the earth, both of his companions screaming with him on the way down.