When I heard the words he shouted, though, I understood why he seemed so panicked.
As a core, there are some things you don’t want to hear from your kobold miner, and this was one of them.
“Huh? Holy demons’ arses! Dark Lord, Dark Lord, come see Tomlin! Oh no. Oh no!”
CHAPTER 10
Tomlin was in a state of agitation in room three. He was wringing his hands, and he could hardly stay still. Even worse, he looked petrified.
That was what worried me most of all. Along with kobold’s territorial instincts, comes a vicious streak. It is well known across the world of Xynnar that an angry kobold will take on anything. A dozen chimeras, an ice troll, a dragon. It doesn’t matter.
So, for me to see my kobold friend with wide eyes, pacing to and fro…it was worrying.
When he saw me appear, he pointed to the wall he’d been mining.
“This is bad, Dark Lord. Look what Tomlin found! Look! No…don’t look. Be careful. Create a trap. Create a troll. Anything.”
It would be at this point that I would hold up a hand and smile gently, two proven ways of calming people down. Since I lacked the hands and face necessary for that, I took a different tack.
“Pull yourself together. Wow, Tomlin. If your litter mates saw you, they’d be ashamed. The Tomlin in the Soul Bard stories is fearless. He doesn’t scream, doesn’t get worried. Maybe I should rename you.”
He pointed a claw again. “Look! Be careful!”
I really couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Just as I had asked, Tomlin had excavated a ten-foot-long tunnel which opened out into a fourth dungeon room. With no lamps, the room was utterly dark. Luckily, being the core of this particular dungeon, I didn’t need light to see inside it.
So…casting my thoughts to my new room four, I discovered what had agitated Tomlin so much.
I looked at the tunnel, and then at Tomlin, my disbelief growing by the second.
“This can’t be right.”
“Tomlin doesn’t lie to you. You see?”
“Did you dig too far or something? Did you tunnel to the surface by mistake? Tomlin, what the hell did you do?”
“Tomlin didn’t do it. I promise you, Dark Lord. Tomlin was mining when he heard a sound. Like rocks crashing. Then a shout. Then, the weakest part of the wall exploded, and…”
“She fell through it. I’m sorry, Tomlin. Underground places like this are full of weak points and tunnels made by moles and that kind of thing. I shouldn’t have blamed you.”
“What do we do?”
“Tomlin…I have absolutely no idea.”
“It’s coming!”
I heard footsteps coming from the room. I saw her leave the room and walk down the tunnel, and then suddenly, there she was.
Standing in the room with us was a little girl with red hair. She was covered in mud, and she held a spade in one hand, and she had a bag strapped to her back. There was a ridiculous metal basin strapped to her head.
“Oh, hey! Can you tell me the way out?” she said.
Tomlin suddenly leaped into the air.
He wasn’t attacking her, though.
No, he leaped up like a scared cat, his eyes bulging, his claws completely tensed. Then he backed away from her, all the way across the room until he hit the wall.
“Pull yourself together, Tomlin,” I said.
Funnily enough, it was Tomlin’s ridiculous fear that helped me keep a calm head even when the strangest of things had happened.
After all, this was peculiar. A little girl finding her way down into a dungeon? A girl who looked like she’d been digging? A girl who showed not even the slightest fear of seeing a dungeon core and a kobold?
This presented me with a problem. Technically, this girl had voluntarily made her way into the dungeon. She wasn’t a core, nor a monster…which meant she was, under the academy’s definition…a hero.
Yup. I knew the definition of a hero off by heart, and there was no mention of age.
A hero: One who is not a core or monster, and finds their way into the core’s dungeon by their own means, for their own motives.
Well, this girl had her own motive for being down here, and according to Tomlin’s testimony, she had burst through the weakened wall.
As she was technically a hero, then I technically had to…well, I had to destroy her.
Damn technicalities to hell!
I was a core. It was in my nature to destroy intruders in my lair, and I knew what I should do.
As I looked at the young human girl that I had classified as a hero, I began to feel sick. Not imaginary sick, but really sick, like the phantom feelings I sometimes got but in a stronger way.
Could I do this?
Did I even have a choice?
If the overseers were watching this right now, and there was a chance they could be, then refusing to destroy a hero would mean instant decommissioning. My evaluation would be over, and I would face the overseer committee, who might vote to grind me to gem dust.
“Can you talk?” said the girl. “I sense that you are alive. What are you, anyway?”
“Tomlin is a kobold!”
“Not you,” said the girl. “I’ve seen a kobold before. Father took me to Retchrief zoo. They really shouldn’t keep kobolds in captivity like that. I mean the stone. You, Mr. Gem.”
“His name is Dark Lord,” said Tomlin, recovering himself enough to talk, yet still pressed back against the wall, as far as he could get from her.
Where the hell are you territorial instincts? I thought. I mean, I didn’t want Tomlin to attack the little kid, but it’d be nice to know he could.
I decided that given this girl was
