Goblin Slayer, Vol. 5 Read online

  “…”

  “Just tell me what you can.”

  “…”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “…”

  Perhaps taking Noble Fencer’s silence for agreement, the strange man continued detachedly: How many goblins had she encountered? What was the layout of the nest? What types of goblins were there? Where had she encountered them? What direction?

  She answered without emotion.

  I don’t know. I don’t know. They all looked the same. Near the cave. The north.

  The man only grunted, “Hmm,” adding nothing further.

  Snap. Crackle. The moments of intermittent speech were connected by the muttering of the fire in the hearth.

  The man rose and took a poker in his hand, jabbing it listlessly into the fire. Finally, he spoke, still facing the hearth and just as quietly as before.

  “What did you do?”

  “…Tried to starve them out,” Noble Fencer said, something tugging at the edges of her mouth. It was only a slight gesture, so small that no one but she might have noticed it. But she thought she had smiled. “I was sure it would work.”

  “I see.” She nodded at this dispassionate reply.

  Block off the exits to the cave, wait until the goblins started to starve, then finish them off. She and her friends could do it together, nice and clean. Get some experience, raise their ranks. And then… And then…

  “I was so sure…”

  “I see,” he repeated and nodded. He stirred the fire again and then put aside the poker. There was a rattling of iron as he stood. The floor creaked. “Yes, I understand how that could happen.”

  Noble Fencer looked up at him vacantly. The helmet prevented her from seeing his face. It occurred to her that these were the first comforting words he had said to her.

  Perhaps the man had already lost interest in Noble Fencer, because he strode for the doorway. Before he got there, she called out to him.

  “Hey, wait!”

  “What?”

  Something was coming to her, a dim and ambiguous image from somewhere on the far side of memory.

  That grimy armor. That cheap helmet. That strange sword and round shield. Someone stubborn and strange, with a Silver status tag around his neck. Someone who killed goblins. All just a dim memory.

  But it reminded her of certain lines from a song she had heard somewhere. It brought back memories of long, long ago, when she and her friends were laughing together in town.

  An adventurer known as the kindest man on the frontier.

  “Are you…Goblin Slayer?”

  “……”

  He didn’t respond immediately; there was a moment of silence.

  Then, without turning around, he said, “Yes. Some call me that.”

  His voice, as ever, gave no hint of his emotions, and with that, he left the room.

  There was the sound of the door closing. The poker on the ground was the only sign he had been there.

  Noble Fencer stared up at the ceiling. Someone had cleaned her skin and clothes, and exchanged them for a rough, unadorned outfit. She put a hand to her chest, which rose and fell in time with her breath. Was it that man who had wiped her body clean? Or not? Truthfully, she didn’t care either way.

  There was nothing left for her now. Nothing at all.

  She had abandoned her home, her friends were gone, and her chastity had been stolen. She had no money, no equipment.

  That’s not true.

  She spotted something in a corner of the room, the corner where the man—Goblin Slayer—had first been sitting. Leather armor, battered and gouged, and her item pouch, now dirty.

  The ache in her neck flared up.

  “Goblin Slayer… One who kills goblins.”

  It seemed the goblins hadn’t noticed that Noble Fencer had a false bottom sewn into her item pouch.

  Traditionally, when using a rapier, one carries an object in the opposing hand that aids in defense.

  What she had hidden in the very bottom of her item pouch was a second jeweled blade from her family home. It was an aluminum dagger forged by a lightning-hammer against a red gem.

  §

  “How is she?”

  “Awake.”

  As Goblin Slayer came down the stairs, Priestess questioned him with worry in her voice, but he responded nonchalantly.

  Unlike during their earlier discussion, there were no villagers at the inn now.

  Night had well and truly fallen by the time Goblin Slayer and the others came back. If the goblins were all dead, then there was no need for the villagers to spend the night in fearful vigilance. Their days of being tormented by the dark and the cold and the fear were over.

  The only exception was the village chief. He had the misfortune of welcoming the adventurers and was the first to hear their report.

  “The goblins appear to have built a separate nest.”

  The headman could hardly be blamed for the way his jaw fell open. How was his village, here in the North, supposed to prepare for winter now? They had so little to spare. And now it had come to this. The goblins in the cave had been slain; the adventurers would be within their rights to consider the quest concluded. The villagers would have to go back to the Guild, file another quest, and pay another reward.

  If they didn’t, the village would simply be destroyed.

  Therefore, his relief was immense when Goblin Slayer announced that his party would continue to work on the goblins. But it didn’t resolve the village’s problem with provisions. The table the party sat around had only modest fare, mostly salted vegetables.

  In a free space among the plates, a sheet of lambskin paper lay open. It was the map of the snowy mountain the trapper had given them prior to their attack on the cave. Goblin Slayer had the map arranged so that north was up from where he sat.

  “Hey,” High Elf Archer said from under half-closed eyes. “Should we really be leaving her alone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “How could I know?” Goblin Slayer said, sounding a bit annoyed. He could be curt, and abrupt, and cold. But he almost never shouted. “What should I have said to her? ‘I’m sorry your friends are dead, but at least you survived’?”

  This took the wind out of High Elf Archer’s sails. “Well… Well…” She opened her mouth, then closed it again, before finally saying, “There’s such a thing as the sensitive way to say things.”

  Goblin Slayer’s reply was brief: “It doesn’t change what they mean.”

  Come to think of it…

  Priestess bit her lip gently. He had not tried to comfort her in her own case, either. Nor when they had rescued the injured elf adventurer from the ruins. He was always just…

  The faint taste of blood was so bitter it almost brought tears to her eyes.

  She glanced in Goblin Slayer’s direction, but he didn’t appear to notice.

  “How is your injury? Does it affect your movement at all?”

  High Elf Archer pursed her lips. Such bald changes of subject were a specialty of his. Then again, he was worried about her (even if his concern was mostly about slaying goblins!), and she couldn’t complain about that.

  “…It’s fine. Even if it still hurts a little. I’ve gotten treatment for it.”

  “I see.” A nod. His helmet rattled with the motion. “In that case, moving on to the provisioning of equipment. How are things going?”

  “Mm.” Lizard Priest nodded somberly and patted the hempen bag sitting beside him. His chair, around which he had somehow managed to wrap his entire tail, creaked. “I have managed to obtain provisions—although they came rather dear, as I had to ask the villagers to draw from their own stockpiles.”

  “There go our profits…again,” High Elf Archer said with a sigh. She was trying to sound frustrated, but a smile tugged at the corners of her lips. They had been together for close to a year now, and she had grown used to this. Although her resolve to t
ake him on a real adventure had only strengthened as well.

  “What’s this, then? Worried about money, Long-Ears? You’re not usually the type.” Dwarf Shaman laughed uproariously, whether or not he understood what High Elf Archer was really thinking. Not content with just the wine he used as a catalyst, he had gotten another cup to see him through this conversation. It was a tasteless, odorless, and strong spirit; the bottle had been buried in the snow and made into mead. Dwarf Shaman gulped it down.

  High Elf Archer thought she would get a hangover just watching him. “Of course I am,” she said, glaring at the dwarf. “The rewards for killing goblins are measly!”

  “Then again, we did manage to rescue an adventurer this time around,” Lizard Priest said.

  “Well, it’s not every day you see five or six Silver-ranked adventurers out slaying goblins, is it?” Dwarf Shaman said.

  “Er… I’m only Obsidian,” Priestess murmured, and smiled ambiguously.

  She knew what it was like to be the only survivor of an annihilated party. She wanted to believe that she wasn’t forcing the interpretation—but she couldn’t help wondering how different she really was from that Noble Fencer.

  She didn’t know if it was fate or chance… But each time she thought of the invisible dice rolled by the gods, she felt something like dregs accumulate in her heart.

  “Say, I managed to get us some medicine,” Dwarf Shaman said. He drained his cup, poured, then drank again.

  “That girl’s older sister…” Goblin Slayer paused for a second. “The medicine woman. We were told she’s inexperienced.”

  “Maybe she can’t make us potions, but she said she would give us all the herbs we wanted,” Dwarf Shaman said with a broad grin. Then he stroked his beard. “Don’t you think she’s just the type for you? She’d make a nice little wife.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Um…,” Priestess burst out, unable to contain herself.

  Dwarf Shaman and Goblin Slayer, their conversation interrupted, looked at her, and Lizard Priest and High Elf Archer shortly followed.

  “Um, well…” She squirmed under their collective gaze. “I just…wonder what we’re going to do next,” she ended lamely.

  “Kill the goblins, of course.” Goblin Slayer’s answer was as cold as ever. He leaned over the table, eyeing the cups and plates that hemmed in his map. “Move the dishes.”

  “You got it,” Dwarf Shaman said as if suddenly coming to himself; he grabbed a steamed potato off one of the plates and took a bite.

  “Hey!” said High Elf Archer, who’d thought she had dibs on that food. She cleared the plates away looking very ill-used.

  Worried that his liquor might be collected along with the rest of the dishes, Dwarf Shaman pulled his cup and bottle toward himself protectively.

  Lizard Priest judged the sight of both of them to be “most amusing,” sticking out his tongue and pouring more wine into his empty cup.

  “……”

  When all was done, Priestess silently wiped the table down.

  “Good,” Goblin Slayer said, nodding and rearranging the map on the tabletop. Then he took a writing utensil—just a piece of charcoal attached to a piece of wood—out of his item pouch and marked the location of the cave with an X.

  “It’s obvious that cave was not their living quarters.”

  “Yeah, it was definitely a chapel or something,” High Elf Archer said, sipping a bit of grape wine. “Although I still can’t quite believe it.”

  “Believable or not, fact it appears to be. I think we must recognize as much. Still…” Lizard Priest gave a hissing sigh, closing his eyes. A second later, he opened one of them and looked at Priestess. She met his eyes and trembled. “…I wonder what our honored cleric thinks.”

  “Oh! Uh… Um, yes…” Priestess quickly straightened up in her chair, gripping her sounding staff, which lay across her knees. It was clear that he was trying to show some consideration for her.

  I have to respond.

  She took a loud gulp of wine, licked her now-moist lips. “I agree with Goblin Slayer. It was…thirty?”

  “Thirty-six,” Goblin Slayer put in. “That’s how many of them we slew.”

  “I don’t think thirty-six of them could possibly all sleep there.”

  “True, the place didn’t seem to have much in the way of food or wine or any of their other favorite things,” Dwarf Shaman said.

  The word goblin was practically synonymous with the word stupid, but that didn’t mean they had no brains at all. The reason they had no technology for creating anything was because they tended to consider looting enough to meet their needs. But the same could not be said of the caves they lived in. If they had stolen a house, or some ruins, some preexisting structure, that might have been a different matter. But a cave…

  Goblins, in their own nasty way, would prepare storehouses, sleeping places, and trash heaps. At the very least, one would have expected to find the scraps of one of their great feasts lying around, but the adventurers had discovered no such remains. They had found only that stone altar, a place that seemed like a chapel, and a woman about to be offered up…

  “This suggests that their main habitation is elsewhere,” Goblin Slayer said, circling on the map a hilltop beyond the mountains. “According to the locals, there are some old ruins at some point higher than where we climbed.”

  “Chances are very strong that the goblins are based there.” Lizard Priest nodded. “Do you have any sense what kind of ruins they are?”

  “A dwarven fortress.”

  “Hmm,” Dwarf Shaman murmured at this mention of his race; he took another mouthful of mead. “One of my people’s fortresses from the Age of the Gods, is it? That means a frontal assault would risk life and limb, Beard-cutter. Shall we try fire?”

  “I have a small amount of gasoline,” Goblin Slayer said, withdrawing a bottle filled with black liquid from his bag. “But I presume the fortress is made of stone. A fire attack from the outside would not set it alight.”

  “From the outside…,” Priestess repeated, tapping a finger against her lip. “What about from the inside, then?”

  “A fine plan,” Lizard Priest said immediately, opening his jaws and nodding. He ran a claw along the sheepskin map, tracing their marching route carefully. “Castles infiltrated by the enemy are and have always been vulnerable.”

  “But how are we going to get inside? I’m sure we can’t just walk in the front door,” Priestess said with a sound of distress.

  At that, though, High Elf Archer’s ears stood straight up, and she leaned well forward. “So you want to sneak into a fortress!” She looked positively giddy. She kept murmuring, “Right, right,” to herself, her ears bouncing in time to her contemplations. “Right! This is almost starting to feel like a real adventure. Great!”

  “Th-this is…an adventure?”

  “Sure is,” High Elf Archer said in her bright, cheerful way. She was naturally upbeat, although it was possible she was putting on an encouraging front. Nothing said you had to act depressed just because you were in a depressing situation.

  “Ancient mountains deep in the wilderness! A towering fortress controlled by some powerful ringleader! And we sneak in and take him out!”

  If that isn’t adventure, what is it?

  High Elf Archer offered this explanation with much waving and gesturing, then looked pointedly at Goblin Slayer.

  “I guess we’re not exactly fighting a Demon Lord or anything…but it’s not classic goblin slaying for sure.”

  “It’s not quite infiltration, either,” Goblin Slayer muttered. “The enemy will know there are adventurers around. We must approach cautiously.”

  “You have a plan?” Dwarf Shaman asked.

  “I just thought of one.” Goblin Slayer looked at them. His expression was masked by his helmet, but he seemed to be looking at his two clerics.

  “Are disguises against your religion?”

  “Hmmm. I wonder,” Lizard P
riest said, his eyes rolling in his head. Then his reptilian eyes fixed on Priestess and glinted mischievously. She took his meaning and smiled gently herself.

  I can’t just let everyone baby me all the time.

  “I—I think it depends on the time and the situation.”

  “All right.” Goblin Slayer fished in his item pouch and, at length, pulled something out. It rolled across the table, over the map, and then toppled.

  It was the brand bearing the sign of the evil eye.

  “Since they were so kind as to leave us a clue, I could hardly refuse to pursue it.”

  “Ha-ha. Very clever,” Lizard Priest said with a clap of his scaled hands. He seemed to understand what was going on. “Become a member of the Evil Sect. Mm, very well.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am a lizardman who serves the Dark God. My disciple is a warrior, and we are accompanied by a dwarven mercenary…”

  “I guess that makes me a dark elf!” High Elf Archer said with a catlike grin. Then she turned to Priestess. “I’ll have to color my body with ink. Hey, maybe you could put on some false ears! We could be twins!”

  “Huh? Oh—huh? Will I—will I have to color myself, too?”

  Suddenly Priestess didn’t know where to look. High Elf Archer zipped around her, all smiles.

  “It’s better than goblin gore, right?”

  “I don’t think that’s saying much…!”

  Given the freedom to choose, she wouldn’t have picked either of those things. But if it came down to it…

  Goblin Slayer glanced at the two chattering girls, then turned back to the other men. Lizard Priest narrowed his eyes ever so slightly.

  “They are two fine young women.”

  “Yes,” Goblin Slayer said with a nod, “I know.”

  If he had to do something outrageous or unbelievable to achieve victory, he would. If he had to become depressed or serious in order to fight effectively, he would do it.

  But the reality was different. Laughter and cheer: the whole party recognized how important those things were.

  “Now then, I suppose we must decide what we will do in the manner of disguise,” Lizard Priest said.