NEW QUEST!

  Embrace the Suck

  Goblins have captured your friends and are holding them somewhere underground. What lies beneath? Who knows! Well…maybe Harrison Ford knows, but that’s a different story. You must rescue your friends before something bad happens to them. Goblins are nasty little creatures. I doubt they’ll be hosting a tea party for your friends, so the faster you can get them out of there, the better. If either Kitz or Tabby becomes severely injured or dies, you will fail this quest. If you only rescue one of your friends, you will fail this quest. It’s all or nothing. Good luck!

  I triggered a Dynamic Quest somehow, and this one was, without a doubt, the most important quest I had ever received. If I failed this quest, my friends were as good as dead.

  “Yeah, I’m not going in there,” Delen said.

  I turned sharply to him, keeping my voice down. “Kitz is in there. You’re the closest thing to family that kid has got. You’re going, but don’t worry, you can go last.”

  “This rescue will be complicated,” Ersabet said.

  ”And dangerous,” Val helpfully added.

  “There is no way to know how vast their underground network is,” Ersabet continued. “And there could be more goblins below than what we saw above.”

  “So, we’ll be careful,” I said. “I can use my Enshrouded ability to sneak ahead undetected and make sure the path is clear for you two to follow.”

  “Hmm,” Ersabet pondered my plan. “This has potential. How long can you maintain your shroud?”

  “It lasts thirty seconds, but I can use it three times in a row before I’m out of daily uses.”

  “One and a half minutes isn’t very long,” Ersabet said. “What happens if you run out of time?”

  I shrugged. “We improvise, and if we have to, we fight.”

  “No,” Ersabet said. “If the fight is manageable, we fight. If we are against more than we can safely handle, we flee.”

  “And leave Kitz and Tabby to die?” I hissed.

  “We will leave them for as long as it takes us to come up with a better plan or for your abilities to recharge.”

  I wanted to argue, but I knew she was right. I glanced at Val, and her sympathetic expression showed me her thoughts mirrored Ersabet’s.

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. We’re no good to them dead.” I took a deep breath and tried to steady my heart. I thought of Tabby and little Kitz trapped in the dark and how scared they must be. All manner of terrible things could be happening to them right now. This had to work, and it had to work now.

  “How’s everyone’s night vision?” I asked.

  “Excellent,” Ersabet said.

  “Terrible,” Delen said.

  “Mine’s okay,” I said, regretting skipping the Caver ability from so long ago, which would have let me see better in the dark. “Ersabet, do you have any potions or something that can enhance night vision?”

  “No. I could make a potion with the proper ingredients, but I don’t have any on me.”

  “How many different potions can you make?” I asked, curious.

  “Less than you would like,” she said. “I haven’t gotten that far into the Competency, and as I’m sure you’ve realized, Competencies are a grind. It can take years to master some of them.”

  “We’ll talk later about what you can make,” I said. “It would be helpful to know, and we could help you find ingredients, but that’s for another day. Let’s go rescue our friends.”

  I received nods of agreement, although Delen’s was quick and jittery.

  I reached down and felt for the hatch’s handle. It took me a second of fumbling with it to realize I had to pull it outwards to unlock it. It made a slight noise — nothing of concern — and I lifted it. The hatch was made of a strange material. Not metal. The best I could come up with was clay mixed with some adhesive that hardened it.

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  Below me was a dark shaft. I could see the bottom, but it was a solid fifteen or twenty feet down. Wooden boards had been hammered into the side of the tunnel as a makeshift ladder.

  It looked safe enough, and the fall wasn’t that far anyway, so I looked back to my friends and said, “I’ll throw a rock back this way if the path ahead is clear.”

  Before anyone could back out at the last minute, I lowered myself down the ladder. It held just fine, and when I hit the bottom, I was surprised to find myself standing on a thin sheet of wood, not on dirt or mud. I bet that most of the tunnels had similar flooring. It was a nice touch, I’d give the goblins that.

  Ahead, the darkness was cut by a scattering of small luminescent crystals jutting out of the tunnel wall. I couldn’t tell if they were natural or not, and the light they produced was faint and localized, but it was better than nothing. There was enough light for me to see that the tunnel had unevenly spaced wooden reinforcements to prevent collapse.

  “Can you detect anyone?” I asked Val with a quick thought.

  “I’ve received some faint returns; however, my tracking abilities are severely limited by stone and earth. I know there are some goblins ahead, I just don’t know how many or where.”

  I tried to listen for any sign of the goblins but heard nothing with my weak, human ears. “Could you enhance my hearing like you did before when I was with Prajio? Just for a few seconds.”

  A moment later, I felt a disorientating, vibrating wave pass through my mind, and grimaced as the silence around me vanished.

  I could hear my friends above me whispering to each other and tried my best to tune them out, focusing my attention on the guttural voices echoing through the tunnel. The goblins were here, somewhere, but like Val, I couldn’t make any sense of it. I listened for the sound of a human voice, but heard nothing against the pitchy grunts of the goblins.

  The sound vanished as Val returned my hearing to normal. With no more ideas, I crept deeper into the tunnel. Activating Enshrouded would essentially start a timer on this mission, so I held off, wanting to explore as much as I could while there were no enemies around. Val would be able to detect enemies who were in line of sight, so if a goblin were hiding out down the dark tunnel, she would notify me, and then I would consider activating Enshrouded.

  After about twenty yards, the tunnel appeared to widen and then split into three, but it was hard to tell. There were no goblins around, so I found a rock and chunked it back down the tunnel, signaling for the others to come. Ersabet came down gracefully, and Delen did so awkwardly and unnecessarily slowly.

  I waited for them to come to me.

  Ersabet and Delen sauntered over. Delen marveled at one of the luminescent crystals. He pulled something out of his belt bag, and before I realized what he was doing, he hit the crystal with a small hammer, breaking it free from the earthen tunnel wall.

  I held my arms out in a ‘what the hell are you doing’ gesture.

  “Don’t worry, it’s for…,” he started to speak, but my hand clamped his mouth shut before another word could get out. It took me a bit by surprise when I realized I had been ten feet away from the man when he started speaking. I was getting faster. Leveling up was a slow process, and the improvements to my physicality were minimal, but lately, as I reached the double digits, I began to feel tangible gains in my reaction times, speed, hardiness, and overall strength.

  “Be quiet,” I whispered to Delen. “We aren’t alone in these tunnels.” In truth, I doubted the goblins would hear Delen since we couldn’t hear them, but I wasn’t taking any chances. “From now on, speak only in your softest whisper. Nod if you understand.”

  Delen nodded, and I clapped his cheek. “Thank you for coming down here with me,” I whispered. “You are a brave man, Delen, even if you think otherwise.”

  He looked oddly at me, or, I should say, he was looking more odd than usual at me. “Thank you,” he said in a whisper.

  I held Delen by his shoulder and reached for Ersabet’s hand and drew her close.

  “Okay,” I said softly. “What do you all think? Split up, go as far as we can until it would be unsafe to go further, and then report back here?”

  “My bravery only goes so far,” Delen said. “I’d prefer to stick with one of you. Preferably both.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You stay here with Ersabet, and I’ll scout the tunnels. If any goblins come, just run. You’re faster than them.”

  I walked down to where the tunnel split into three. Without much thought, I took the one on the right, and immediately regretted it. The crystals here were much sparser, and the tunnel was nearly pitch-black. Val kept me updated on any enemy activity, and so far, the coast was clear. After a few minutes of careful travel, I reached a dead end. The tunnel had collapsed. It looked like it had collapsed some time ago, which was a relief.

  I hurried back, reported what I had seen, and went down the left tunnel. There were plenty of crystals here, and from the state of the wooden flooring, this section was well-traveled. The boards had been compressed into the earth so that a thin layer of mud covered them entirely.

  It didn’t slow me down much. Very quickly, I realized I was walking down a steady decline, deeper into the earth.

  “Goblins detected ahead,” Val said quickly. “At least three. They aren’t moving. In fact, data leads me to believe they may be asleep.”

  My hopes rose at the thought of guards sleeping on the job, making this rescue easy as pie, but by now, I had learned not to let my hopes rise too high.

  Still refusing to waste a charge of Enshrouded, I slowly snuck my way closer to the enemy. The further I went, the wider the tunnel grew, and it became apparent that there was a large, open chamber ahead. Along with a few crystals, there were lit torches on the far wall of the chamber, and they provided enough light for me to see most of the room. There were ragged burlap sacks and roughly-hewn blankets scattered about the place. Some hung on a rope, creating a little room for the goblin inhabitants. It smelled like shit and rot and hell.

  This was where they slept, and Val had said there were only three. If she had detected others in this room, she would have told me. That meant nearly all of the goblins were somewhere else, and there was only one more tunnel to explore.

  I feared what I would find at the end of it.