Teleporting to the dungeon would have been easy for Elijah. He knew more or less exactly where it was from the map Shyrain and Mercer showed him, and then his spell had been able to lock onto it. The only problem was that he didn’t want to give himself away if someone was watching the entrance, like he assumed.

  He teleported about half a kilometer away and began working out his plan for infiltration. He’d seen Bitter Root’s debug menu enough to know his entity ID by heart at this point, and modified the menus of Dryad and Bat so that they would become goblins. It wasn’t permanent, and he could either revert it back himself, or re-summon them. He’d planned on modifying his own code to also appear as a goblin, and had even had a minor panic attack before trying it, worried that he wouldn’t be able to revert the changes once he was in goblin form.

  He shouldn’t have worried, and honestly shouldn’t have tried it either. A sharp spike of pain lanced through his brain as he saw an error message that he should have known was coming. He couldn’t modify player menus, even his own, until he reached Celestial-tier. It was days like this that he really hated being so stupid when it came to being a video game player. He would have remembered that if this was one of the games he was coding, or at least he liked to tell himself he would remember these things.

  He slowly focused his mind back on the present after the spike of pain. Three perfect copies of Bitter Root all stared back at him with amused yet dumbfounded expressions.

  “I know, I know,” he grumbled, rubbing a hand over his face, “I did a dumb.”

  All three of them grinned back and snickered. He was tempted to cancel his spell, or even pull his blade out, and send them away so they couldn’t mock him for his dumb mistake. That was a petty thought though, and Elijah knew it. It wasn’t their fault that he’d ignored or forgotten the very first limitation that the game had ever imposed on him.

  “Okay, turning myself into a goblin isn’t an option. So we’re going to go with Plan B. You three are going to lead me into the dungeon as a prisoner.”

  Bitter Root—or at least he thought it was Bitter Root; it was hard to tell when all three of them looked the same—shook his head. “Bad idea. Gobs not recognize us. Make big angry if not recognize gobs enter home.”

  “That’s fine,” Elijah answered, “we aren’t looking to fool them. Just anyone who might be keeping an eye on the entrance. Once we’re inside, we’ll try to sneak our way through most of it, or kill everyone inside.”

  The Bitter Root to the left—Bitter Bat, maybe?—grinned wickedly. “Me get kill dumb dumb goblin?” The one in the center—definitely Bitter Root—punched the one on the left, and the three of them started fighting.

  It was going to be a long day.

  When Elijah finally separated them, he pulled several knives out of his inventory and handed them to the goblins. “This is to sell the illusion that you have me prisoner. If you stab each other, I’m going to take them back.” His warning came just as one of the familiars started making jabbing motions at another.

  They loosely bound Elijah’s hands together with a bit of rope and then started crossing the last few hundred meters to the dungeon. The entrance was rather innocuous, little more than a hole in the side of a cliff face, but signs of the goblin encampment became apparent the closer they got. Bones from livestock, tattered and ripped clothing, and remnants of several carts littered the area. Elijah let the goblins drag him forward, led along like a dog on a leash as he kept his eyes tightly shut.

  High above, his scouts circled, and he kept his sight linked to theirs. It was still disorientating, seeing his own body relayed back to him in perfect sync with the movements he was taking. He wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to that feeling, but it at least didn’t cause him nausea or pain anymore when he did so anymore.

  As far as he could tell, no one was watching the entrance, but he’d grown used to the idea that certain classes had the ability to almost entirely hide their presence from him. He couldn’t trust any of his senses in this game world.

  He cut off his link to the bats as the four of them entered the mouth of the cave. He’d leave one outside, sending it to find some place nice to roost for a while and let the other two return to the writhing mass inside his shadows. Keeping them active didn’t cost him anything, but having them at his disposal made him feel safer.

  The dank, musty cave descended deep down into the earth, its floor being almost dangerously steep in some places. Elijah was wondering if their little charade had even been necessary when a pair of goblins, these ones with a light grey skin unlike Bitter Root and his original clan’s pale green, came around a corner and halted upon seeing them. They levelled their spears at Elijah’s impromptu party.

  “Halt. Me not know you! Who is?” the one in the lead asked.

  Bitter Root stepped forward, weapon still resting on his belt, and spoke quickly. “Me Bitter Root. Come from Broke Prison tribe. Want find new home, bring gift of fresh meat.”

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  The one in the lead looked Elijah over, and for the first time in a while he felt like a piece of meat being exchanged. “Me not try human meat before. Hear taste like ugly pig. Me take prisoner and ugly green gobs leave.”

  “Me no ugly! Ugly grey gob ugly!” Bitter Root yelled angrily.

  Elijah saw this getting out of control quickly if he didn’t step in. “You’re both goblins, there’s no reason to fight, right, guys?”

  Bitter Root rushed forward, pulling his knife from his belt and aiming it for the neck of the lead goblin. “Kill! Kill! Kill!”

  So much for diplomacy.

  Elijah let the bindings around his hands slip away as he summoned the Batwing Blade from his shadows. Two of his familiars were doing well against the lead enemy, but that left only one of them to handle the enemy at the back. He slashed down at the grey goblin but had to divert his swing when his familiar got in the way. His classes hadn’t given him any sword fighting skills, so he had to learn how to fight the old-fashioned way. Through painful trial and error. He wasn’t the worst at it. He’d done some sparring with his friends growing up, but this was the first real instance of having to use those skills in a crowded environment where he had to worry about who he was hitting. In every other battle so far since acquiring his sword, enemies surrounded him, so his swings could be sloppy. This time he had to worry about hitting his familiars, because killing them meant that he’d either be without their aid or he’d have to expend valuable mana to re-summon them.

  The sound of a goblin dying came from behind him. He turned slightly to see the first enemy, the one who had insulted Bitter Root, being impaled on a dagger. He swung his sword and lopped the enemy’s head clean off, killing it instantly. The remaining goblin made him pay for opening himself up like that.

  A spear tip drove into Elijah’s ribs, catching and scraping against the bones. White-hot pain flashed through his body as his free hand reached up to grip the weapon, preventing the goblin from driving it further in, or pulling it out. That was a good measure of his strength now. Back when he’d started he was incapable of even lifting the heavy club that Bitter Root carried around; now he could out-strength this low-level goblin with ease. The enemy goblin dropped the spear and went for a crude knife at his side, but Elijah’s familiars were on him before he could draw it.

  He pulled the spear from his side and did his best to put pressure on the wound. It was far from a dangerous injury and had only done five points of damage, but it still hurt. Meanwhile, the greens tore apart the grey. It was a disturbing sight. They’d given up any semblance of ‘civilized’ fighting and were tearing into the creature with their claws and teeth.

  “Well, that went poorly,” Elijah groaned as he kicked the shredded body of the goblin. “But we’re past the first guards, so we can forget the acting.”

  ”Bitter Root try telling Boss this no work.” One of the three goblins answered. He wasn’t sure if this was Root speaking in the third person, or one of the other two speaking on the real goblin’s behalf.

  He pulled open their debug menus from the corner of his vision and reset their entity IDs, so now at least it should be a little less confusing. His plan hadn’t worked to get them deeper into the dungeon, but hopefully it had done well enough to fool whoever was watching the entrance.

  “Boss need collect spears. These mountain gob made, best quality. Make for yummy sale.” Bitter Root told him, picking up the two spears that the enemy goblins had been wielding. To Elijah they looked like poorly forged iron spears, but it didn’t hurt anything to put them in his inventory on the chance that Bitter Root was right. The goblins hadn’t dropped anything else after all.

  They vanished into Elijah’s inventory, though he thought he caught the goblin smirking at the other familiars.

  He continued down the path deeper into the tunnel, his familiars walking side-by-side with him. “So Bitter Root, what are the differences between the goblins of your old clan and this clan?”

  Bitter Root shrugged his shoulders. “They grey, we green. Green no like grey, grey no like green.”

  “That seems like a dumb reason for your people not to like each other,” Elijah whispered. He started wondering if it was the game’s way of providing social commentary on the society of the real world. How much of the real world actually influenced—

  “Grey also like eat own babies. That pretty messed up.”

  Elijah stopped in his tracks. That was at least one way of making the enemy an enemy with no redeeming qualities. He wondered if this game was messed up enough to actually follow through with the threat of infanticide. Though there was always the chance that Bitter Root was screwing with him, or it was green goblin propaganda against the greys.

  “Come, Boss. Need kill grey gobs. Find tasty crystal.” Bitter Root told him, looking back at him where he’d stopped.

  This was what Elijah wanted after all, lots of enemies to kill, experience to be earned and something to do to keep his mind off of the shitty situation they’d found themselves in.

  Voices echoed down the tunnel from further ahead, and the familiars quieted down. They began creeping along, Elijah following behind them just a few steps behind.

  They peered out from around the corner of the tunnel. There were several dozen greys moving about a large cavern. On the far side was a giant bonfire where even more greys wearing what appeared to be tribal gear danced around it. Bitter Root seemed like he was about to lunge forward and start attacking people, but Elijah gripped him around the shoulder.

  “No,” he hissed at the goblin, “there’s too many of them. We need a plan first.”

  The smell of sulfur invaded his nose as Bitter Bat teleported away. He dropped from the ceiling, plunging his claws into the back of one of the grey shamans dancing around the fire.

  “Well, shit,” Elijah groaned, letting go of Bitter Root and letting him rush forward to join the fray, cudgel swinging around as he screamed murderous words.

  He looked down at the last remaining familiar. “Well, Dryad? Ready to get in there?” The wooden creature was vibrating with excitement, waiting for Elijah’s word.

  “Get after ’em.” He nodded, and the dryad slipped into the ground. He still wondered how these creatures could do such a thing on stone surfaces, but as long as it was working for him, he wouldn’t question it too much.

  His sword formed in his hand, and he took a deep breath. It was time to grind some experience.