I pulled my hood down, engaging bear detection. There was a dense cluster of something in one direction. It was inconvenient that I couldn’t use a map, but it was useful to know our bearing. Pressing forward, I detected something hazardous. I resolved to press on right through them.
“Uhh, you seem to be doing okay walking blind,” Rulina said, “but I think you should be a little more aware of your surroundings.”
“It’s okay. I’m using detection magic, so I know there aren’t any monsters nearby.”
“There’s magic like that?!”
“But there are a lot more than I expected.”
“More than expected?”
“I think there might be around a hundred?”
“Wait, a hundred! Really? We definitely can’t defeat that many.”
“Why not? That’s just a hundred Deboranays.”
“Are you serious about that?”
“I’m saying it, aren’t I?”
Rulina sighed. “I’ll tell you this now: if things get rough, I’m going to leave you and run, Yuna.”
“I wouldn’t mind.” I could outrun her anyway.
“Ahh, are things really going to be okay?” she said. “Maybe this was a mistake.”
One hour later, we’d killed about twenty goblins as we walked through the wooded foothills of the mountain. All we had left to do was wipe out their nest.
“You called that trick detection magic, right?” said Rulina. “It’s pretty useful to know where the goblins are. It almost feels like cheating. You could pair that with a long-range spell and wipe them out all at once.”
“Make sure you take the mana gems.”
“I know.”
She cut into the goblins collapsed in front of her, pulled out their mana gems, and finished things off by burning the bodies to make sure they wouldn’t attract scavengers—monster or otherwise.
“Looks like the goblin nest is up ahead,” I told her.
I’d learned from WFO that surprise attacks were most effective on groups. You’d slip in under their aggro, attack with the strongest magic you could in one blow, then keep the pressure on with faster, lower-level spells while they were too surprised to do anything.
I figured I needed to keep going forward until I reached a place where I could confirm them by sight, at least.
“Looks like it’s that cave.”
“You’re not telling me we’re going in there, right?”
Even I didn’t want to go into a cave containing a goblin horde. There were about five goblins around the cave entrance—probably the guards.
“I’m going to check on something, so wait here.”
I incanted a wind spell, aimed at the cave mouth, and released. The spell coaxed the wind into every nook and cranny of the cave.
“Confirmed it. That’s the only entrance. I’m going to go over, so wait here.”
“Wait, are you really going?”
Before they could react, I decapitated the guards with an air cutter. After that, I imagined a burning red bear.
“Bear Fire.”
I threw bear-shaped fire into the cave and incanted the next spell.
“Bear Wall.”
A bear-shaped boulder blocked off the cave entrance. Now it was done. All we had to do was wait.
“Yuna, what did you do?”
“I threw a thermobaric blast into the cave and closed off the exit. All the oxygen in there should be burning off, so the goblins that don’t vaporize will probably suffocate.”
“Oxygen? Suffocate?”
Do they not know what oxygen is in this world? I thought.
“To put it simply, there isn’t any air in that cave.”
“Really?”
“When you put a fire in a sealed-up place, the air disappears. So the goblins probably aren’t doing so great without anything to breathe around now. This is easy, right? Or did you want to fight them in the cave?”
Rulina shook her head energetically.
“We’re going to have some time to kill, so after you handle the goblin guards, how about we have lunch?”
“We’re eating here?” she said, seeming unhappy about it.
She probably didn’t want to have a meal in a place where she wouldn’t be able to tell when a goblin could come to attack us, but I was fine as long as I had detection magic.
“We could go back to the village, but it’d be kind of a pain.”
“It would be, but how long do we have to wait?”
“Normally a few minutes, I think? Anyway, I’m planning on using detection magic and waiting until they’re all gone.”
For the time being, I had Rulina take care of the goblin corpses in front of the entrance. Afterwards she sat down with me and pulled out lunch from the bag that was hanging on her hip. So that’s a bottomless bag, I thought.
“How much can fit in that bag?”
“In this? It won’t fit as much as your bear, Yuna. I think it could fit about five wolves.”
If that was the standard, this bear was a deeply OP item. I ate the meal she had prepared, but it wasn’t that great, just dried jerky and lukewarm water. It seemed that time progressed like usual in normal bottomless bags. I should have prepared my own lunch.
After lunch, I pulled my hood back down.
“Huh?” I said.
“What’s wrong?”
“One of them is still alive.”
“One of them…it couldn’t be.”
“What is it?”
“Yuna, you said there were about a hundred goblins in total, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That might be a goblin king.”
“The goblin king…”
A goblin king…the leader of the goblins, and no doubt stronger and smarter. They were early-game bosses in WFO, too.
“Well, it doesn’t seem like it’s going die, so I guess we have to fight it.”
“You can’t! A goblin king is C-class; you’d need an entire C-class party.”
I got where she was coming from, but I figured we could handle a boss with strictly physical attacks. It was dangerous if we got hit, but I didn’t intend to let that happen.
“We should go back to the guild and get reinforcements.”
“Hmm, I think it’ll probably be fine.”
“Yuna, please. Please listen to me on this.”
“In that case, I’ll go into the cave to fight alone. If I don’t come out, get reinforcements from the guild.”
“Are you telling me to let you go to your death?”
“Like I said, it’ll be fine. Okay, I’m moving the rock.”
“Yuna!”
I ignored her shout and made the boulder in the entrance disappear. Hot wind blew out of the cave. I cycled
