I doze off a time or two for a short while but luckily I don’t fall off of the beam again. As I wake up from my latest doze I see that it is dark and there’s no one in the room with me. I decide to check on Midge and Iptaz so I unlock the door and peek into the room. They are both asleep on the bed so I take that as a good sign.
I activate Unnoticed again and start my new ritual of putting my falcata in my left hand while I open the door with my right. The door swings open silently and I move into the hallway.
My mini map immediately fills out and I can now see all of the rooms that Midge mentioned. It really is a long hallway with a bunch of rooms. They all have doors but none of the ten doors on this side of the hallway are closed.
I don’t see any mobs pop up so I mentally ask Scarlett about that. It’s funny how despite her being in my head I’ve found myself talking to her out loud whenever I can. I’ve always talked out loud when I’m thinking because it helps me think things through for some reason.
You have Basic Pathfinding. Once you are level 50 you will be able to get the Advanced Pathfinding skill and it will show mobs that are not hidden in the area you are in.
“Good to know.”
I decide to quietly walk towards the first room on the left and inside I see fifteen goblins, all asleep. They’re basically in a giant pile of goblins and blankets on the floor and they’re all naked just like the Boss and Consort were. Clearly it isn’t just the elites having their goblin orgies. Once again, I can’t blame them much.
I go to the room across the hall and see a similar situation. This time there are five female and five male goblins. The second room on the left has the same number as the first room on the right. In the fourth room I check there are four females and four males. The third room on the left has three males and six females. Good job boys! The third room on the right doesn’t have any goblins in it and neither does the fourth room on the left. I check the fourth room on the right and see the four females with their babies.
Each of the rooms has doors that open into the room so I decide to quietly shut that door and summon a spear out of my inventory. I put the spear through the ring handle and it appears to be long enough to go fully across the door. Hopefully it’ll stay in place and lock the goblins in that room. I go back and repeat this process with all of the rooms except the first one with fifteen goblins. The odds of me clearing out each room without the other goblins finding out is pretty slim. Unless the females run to the corner and avoid fighting me then Scarlett is going to get her way and I’ll be fighting a lot of goblins all at once.
As I am getting ready to start killing my first goblin I notice some movement in the pile. One of the seven male goblins gets up and sleepily walks out of the room. Somehow he never notices the spears holding doors shut and he walks towards the hallway that cuts everything in half and moves towards the far room on the left side of the hallway.
With the near darkness my gear really blends in. I think you’d have to be looking for me to see me even if I didn’t have Unnoticed activated. My boots are silent as I stalk behind the goblin. I don’t identify him so he doesn’t notice me and after a minute or so he makes it to that far room on the left.
He’s already naked so he doesn’t have any clothes to take off as he begins peeing into one of the round holes that sit in a row by the far wall of the 20’x20’ room.
In what feels like a truly surreal moment I stab him in the back of the neck piercing his spinal column right below his skull. He silently falls forward, partially in the hole. He’s too large to just fall right into it but it doesn’t take me a whole lot of effort to finish putting him in it. Before I do that, I use Identify and see Griobets - Level 21 Goblin crafter. He has some iron scissors on him but nothing else.
I decide this seems like a pretty effective strategy at least for a few more hours. Scarlett told me that the dark cycle would last around ten hours and we still had at least five more hours until it became light.
I went back to the sleeping area and took all the spears off of the doors for now. I’ll put them back on when I’m ready to attack.
About thirty minutes after I killed Griobets I see my second male goblin make his way towards the bathroom and I repeat the same maneuver, killing him almost instantly. I hear a level ding this time and after I identify this one as a level 21 Tailor, who has a needle along with some thread and cloth that I loot. I throw his body down the hole as well and then level up. My 2 free points go into WIS this time around. Not really for any real reason I just don’t want my INT and WIS to fall too far behind. One more level and I’ll get to evolve my class.
During the course of the next three hours, I saw three females who I let go and three males who I killed just like I did with the previous two. That leaves me with nineteen males left to kill for sure. The last three I killed didn’t have anything special on them.
It’s so strange that I don’t actually feel guilty about it even if in my mind I know that what I’m doing is fucked up. This must be what a sociopath feels like. I am pretty sure I need to at least hit level ten and get a class evolution before I try to go up and fight the floor 9 boss. Most of the non boss mobs I’ve been killing are level 20-22 so if I’m going to fight a boss that will be around level twenty-two then I need to get to that level 11, that’ll have me around level 16-17 stats wise with gear.
I am killing sentient beings because I know I need to in order to level up. I suppose I could lie to myself and pretend I think I’m really in a video game or some sort of simulation but in my mind I feel like this is real. I’m not even remotely enjoying myself but this emotional block is really doing its job as far as feeling fear and guilt goes.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
With about two hours left until daylight, I decide I need to make a decision about how I’m going to go about killing the rest of the goblins. I was going to lock them in the rooms and try to kill the males in each room, but if I want to at least try not to kill all of the females that isn’t going to work. My encounter with Midge’s group showed that the females will attack if their group is attacked.
I decide to look around some of the other rooms for a bit and kill any males who I see go to use the toilets. Once it’s about daylight I’ll figure out what my next step is. Honestly, I’m thinking killing them as they go to the bathroom is going to be the easiest thing, even if it’s pretty fucked up.
Aside from the toilet room on the left wing, there are nine more rooms. The first three that I check are full of the detritus of the years that the goblins have spent down here. Scraps of leather and cloth and other similar things.
The next room is just full of small bones. I’m guessing rats or something similar to that. I haven’t seen any rats down here, so the goblins must be catching and eating them.
The next room is much more interesting. It is the only one with a closed door on this wing and when I open it it looks far different from the other rooms. First off, it's clean. It also has wooden shelves stocked with spools of thread and a rough brownish cloth. There’s a pair of scissors and a couple pincushions full of sharp iron needles. This must be another one of the enchanted rooms where items necessary for the goblins to live get magically brought in like the food room in the boss room. I take the scissors and both of the pincushions along with a spool of thread. These all seem like items that could be useful to me.
While I’m in this room, I hear another goblin making his way to the bathroom and I do what I’ve been doing all night. Eighteen more male goblins left. I’ve killed six tonight and I can see my XP bar is about two-thirds full again. It looks like it’ll take me nine or ten kills to hit level 10. If I can expect to hit level 11 just by killing the males, that means I need roughly 50% more XP for each new level.
I dispose of the body like I have with all the others and go back and shut the door to the cloth room. I see two more closed doors as I peer down each hallway. One is in what I’m mentally calling the female hall, since that’s where they’re going to the bathroom. Then one of the rooms closest to the entry hall by the stairs up to the 9th floor.
I go to the “female” hall and when I open this storage room, I see firewood. A fair amount of firewood. The dungeon has had a constant, comfortable temperature the entire time I’ve been down here. I can’t believe it’s really only been twenty-four hours. It feels like a week! I did notice there was a fireplace with soot in the Boss Room but I haven’t seen one in any of the goblin sleeping rooms. This does seem like something to ask Scarlett about though.
“Scarlett, is this dungeon the same temperature all the time? Are all dungeons like this?”
Yes Brandon, this dungeon is always roughly 22 degrees Celsius. No, not all instances will be like this. This is a Dungeon Instance but there will be many different kinds of instances in the world and they will have a variety of settings and climates.
“Goddamnit Scarlett, what did I tell you about your metric system bullshit?”
I apologize Brandon, I did not realize your hatred of the metric system extended to temperature as well.
“I don’t know if you’re giving me lip here or not with that even tone. While I am fully willing to admit the metric measuring system is better than the Imperial system I’m not giving you that for temperature. It’s like 1.6 or 1.8 degrees for every 1 for Fahrenheit?
It is 1.8, but it makes much more sense to have freezing as the Zero point, does it not?
“You know what Scarlett, there is a reason for zero. The dude who made it set zero as the temperature his saltwater solution froze. I’m a history buff and I’m full of what are now even more useless facts here than they were on Earth.
How did he decide on this saltwater solution? Was it the same solution as the ocean?
“Eh, I don’t think so, I’m pretty sure his solution was saltier than the ocean.”
I see. Well then, this number seems arbitrary to me then.
“Whatever, you can clearly translate the number for me so you’re telling me it’s basically what we’d call room temperature here all the time.”
I decide I’ll grab some of the firewood since I have plenty of space available and I might need some once I get out of here. I close the door to the firewood room and make my way down the far hallway to the last storage room. Inside, I find absolutely nothing. It’s clean and has shelves like the other two, but if it gets supplies magically sent in it must not happen every day, so I shut the door and decide to go back and wait by the toilets.
The entire dungeon works just like the boss room, with walls that are about ten feet high and then large wooden rafters that don’t seem to support anything but must have been a design choice by whoever created the dungeon. There is a peaked roof that rises about six feet in the center of the hallways. In the rooms, it’s more like fifteen feet. Once it’s daylight, I will climb up onto one of the beams in the toilet room and get some easy kills that way.
After waiting for another thirty minutes in the corner behind the open door, I’m rewarded with another goblin. This one getting ready to squat over the open hole. I quickly use Unerring Strike with my mace and crush his skull. I have zero desire to watch a goblin take a shit. Seventeen more goblins left to kill.
For the next hour I don’t see anyone and then right at daylight, two goblins come in at once. Luckily, they don’t seem to be worried about a shy bladder and are standing close to each other as they pee. I decide I’ll use my mace and take a good baseball bat style swing at the first one and then use Unerring Strike to make sure I hit the second one nice and solid.
They don’t even see it coming as I tee up on the first one. I hit him on the side of the head, killing him instantly. Gore showered the second goblin, who shrank back in horror. I activated Unerring Strike and then I was left with fifteen more goblins to kill and I got that sweet level up notice.
I managed to get an entire level killing poor goblins who just wanted to go to the bathroom. If I make it out of here, I vow that I will never tell another living soul what I did in here tonight. If I was feeling negative emotions right now, I’d feel like a coward and a real asshole. In video games and literature, I’ve always seen goblins portrayed as sneaky cowards, but I’ve been the sneaky coward in here tonight.
I put thoughts and the ghosts of emotions aside and I click on my level up tab on my UI.
