Chapter 1

  Metallic, Like The Little Button In His Pouch

  Electric-blue light flickered from the stuttering flame of the mana-torches. The rumble shook dust and tiny bits of granite loose from the ceiling. An undesired rain of debris peppered Nik as he failed in his attempt to remain standing. Luckily, the loose pieces of cloth that he called a bed had saved his tail from being bruised when he’d landed on it.

  He waited out the shaking ground and the light that had repeatedly flared and dimmed. Black Tower, the rumble is happening a lot now, he thought as he stood and brushed himself off. He hadn’t even started his day and already it was causing him trouble. It used to only shake the castle once every couple of seasons, but it was happening almost every day now.

  Rubbing the dust from his big crystal-blue eyes, he tied his pouch of shiny things to his belt and set off to start his daily routine of gathering mushrooms to trade with the goblins. Nik was rather experienced in his mushroom hunting career. He would cultivate the small clusters and wait for them to grow before plucking them from the stonework and scattered patches of earth. Some he would eat and others would be saved for the market. The market was the most interesting place in the castle because it was the central meeting point of two separate goblin burrows.

  Nik had never seen the burrows; they were for the goblinfolk and only for them to see. He got to talk to them, though, and that was exciting enough. They weren’t friends with him; he didn’t have one of those, but the goblins did tolerate him, at least.

  Once, at the trading stalls, one of them even gave up a copper coin for a day’s worth of collected mushrooms. His name was Wuttsit, and he was Nik’s favorite goblin. The coin was so beautiful that it fit right in with the contents of his pouch.

  Aside from the coin, he also had an iron button some poor soul had lost. Lastly, he had what was probably the most beautiful thing in the whole castle. On just a normal day out gathering, he stumbled entirely by chance onto a mysterious treasure hoard. It had been left in the small bag he now used for gathering, and sitting in the corner of an empty room. It was a pile of the shiniest little beads that were perfectly round and transparent. Wuttsit said they were called marbles.

  The castle itself wasn’t the largest, according to the goblins, but it seemed big to Nik. There were rooms on the higher floors that he’d never even seen, rooms that might still be unexplored. He saved those kinds of trips for special occasions, though, because the stairs were no laughing matter to climb.

  Today is not a stair-climbing day; it is a mushroom-hunting and saying-hi-to-goblins kind of day, he thought to himself.

  Nik’s face lit up at a familiar clacking sound that was rising in volume. He sped up, and his own clawed feet made scraping sounds on the stone as he walked down the hall. Turning the corner, he almost bumped into the source of the familiar sound.

  “Hey, Bonesy! How’s it going today?” he said excitedly to the skeleton who walked by like he wasn’t there. Skeletons kind of just walked, and did nothing else. They were sort of weird like that.

  He spun around and walked alongside the skeleton while he continued to keep an eye out for fungi. “My day has been alright, just started it, if we’re being honest with each other. Yeah, I’ve got a lot of work to get on with, but I still have a moment or two that I can talk,” Nik said. So, with no protests from Bonesy, he told them about his week and the different types of mushrooms he had found. Bonesy never talked back, but that was okay since they were such a good listener.

  Eventually, Bonesy must have gotten tired of listening, though, because they went up a set of stairs. Now, technically, there was more than one Bonesy, which was mostly due to the fact that skeletons were notoriously difficult to tell apart. It was easier for him to pretend that they were all just the one skeleton. However, that did make it awkward when he had to say hello to two of them at once.

  Nik paused and let his thoughts wander, as he seldom allowed, to his family.

  I wonder what their names were. Were they good at finding shiny things?

  He shook his feathered head and brought himself back to the present. There wasn’t time for those kinds of thoughts. They would only lead to dark emotions and moments spent not gathering any fungi. It was easier said than done, and sometimes that was more true than others.

  He felt a small shiver run down the back of his neck as thoughts entered his mind.

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  Lingering questions that burn with no answers can become a brand on the soul. They haunt the spirit and eat away at the very core of a being. The more focus placed upon them, the hotter they burn, the more they destroy, and the less will remain of the branded. If one cannot accept that the answers were nothing more than vapors and shadows, then the questions would make them into a ghost of what they could have been.

  These thoughts played in Nik’s mind like a memory that was not his own. That happened to him sometimes, but he had no clue where they came from. He did know that it was good advice to not dwell on the past, though. Also, he didn’t think people did very well as ghosts, or at least, ghosts never seemed to be the happy sort from anything he’d ever heard about them.

  Dropping his current contemplations for those centered on gathering mushrooms, Nik resumed his search for some that were tradeworthy. A novice would have already collected some of the ones he passed, but no, they still needed some time to grow. He would come back for those in a few more days. He needed something with some real meat on its stem to equal the price for some of the goblin’s jerky. That was his favorite treat and Wuttsit had told him that they would bring some to the market today.

  Unfortunately, he hadn’t found very much that impressed him so far, and he had already checked along most of the way to where the vendors’ stalls would be set up. He would have to settle for his usual meal of mushroom and more mushroom if he couldn’t find something good soon.

  As he rounded the very last corner, he saw a trio of nice and sizable fungi clinging to the lower portion of the wall. “Score!” he exclaimed. Nik leaned over, deftly harvesting the mushrooms with his claws. Then, just as he was placing them into his bag of shiny things, he noticed an odd scent. It smelled familiar, metallic, like the little button in his pouch.

  Looking to his left, his heart thudded in his chest. The breath dropped out from his lungs. Nik saw something too terrible for any words that he knew. Dark green blood pooled, glistening on the floor beside the bodies of two goblins. By the bricks of the Black Tower, he recognized one of them…

  It was Wuttsit.

  He was a nice goblin, he didn’t deserve to be dead. None of this made any sense. Nik had been too focused on his daily task to notice the sounds of battle that he realized must have filled the hall. It wasn’t a secret that this world was dangerous… But here on the lowest floor of the castle, Nik had never had to see such brutal violence.

  If I hadn’t been so busy or distracted, maybe I could have helped him run. Maybe I could have done something. Anything, he thought.

  It took him a full five breaths to even register the figure steeped in goblin blood that loomed over the newly killed goblins. It was an enormous beast, its ominous frame filling the hall. It had to be five feet tall at least, and it held a large sword and a blood-splattered shield in its giant hands.

  It turned its gaze on Nik.

  The man addressed him in the odd and unintelligible humanoid tongue, but as it spoke—it remained utterly calm… Then, it shifted its body to face him, and started walking.

  Nik began moving back as the human’s steps quickened from a walk to a full sprint. He cried out in a frightened scream, as his bag of shiny things slipped from his hands. The pouch scattered its contents across the granite at his feet, and just as the man neared him, the torchlight began to stutter.

  Dust fell from the ceiling and the ground shook as for the second time in one day the rumble came. Stumbling forward, the huge creature’s blood-coated foot landed with unintended precision onto Nik’s collection of shiny beads. The ground to the left of them fell away as the rumble revealed a great hollow pit beneath the castle.

  The foot of the human slid from beneath it as the beads rolled underfoot, and he tumbled, sliding towards the inky black void that took up the space where the now collapsed floor once was. Screaming, the creature flailed its arms, trying to recover its balance. Its sword flew from its grip and spun into the darkness below.

  Time seemed to slow as Nik moved. Not knowing why, he tried to grab onto the creature. Hands stretched out, he managed to grip his claws onto the edge of the human’s giant shield.

  What are you doing? This thing is terrifying and it will just kill you, even if you do save it! he thought, even as he tried to stop the adventurer from falling all the same.

  He shouted out, “Please don’t kill me, really tall guy!”

  He yanked back with every ounce of his minute level of strength. Nik promptly fell back onto his tail as the creature’s arm slipped from the shield.

  He watched in horror as the adventurer continued to fall into the endless depths… The adventurer vanished, fading from view. His screaming voice echoed in the moments after, until that, too, faded into silence.

  Nik let out another frightened cry, startled as a bell rang loud and painful in his ears. Following the dolorous tolling bell, a mysterious voice sounded in his head. A box filled with text appeared in his face to block his view of the blackness that had just swallowed the terrifying goblin killer.

  Sir BlackDagger has been slain!

  Congratulations!

  You have defeated a LEVEL 1 HUMAN WARRIOR!

  Experience gained 100!

  Level Up!

  You are now a LEVEL 1 KOBOLD TRICKSTER!

  Welcome to the System!