Chapter 12 The Way Of Fire

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No dungeon core today, I had a family thing come up and simply don't have the time to finish it. Had this ready so will upload this. Also this story is now 33k words long so not that short any more. I think this one will be the next one to be added to the regular upload schedule but I am not certain how many would enjoy this story.

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After my sleep, I continued to hunt. What was certain was that in the future I would need a skill to help me find my enemies. While usually monsters were quite aggressive and attacked you on sight in any map, there were also quite a few exceptions to this rule, especially with more timid creatures.

Oh, they would still be fully focused on you, but they would sneak close and wait for the perfect opportunity to attack. As I walked around, I was quite certain that there were a few already around me, and I was more than certain that Greg, whom I had sent to walk the other way, already had quite a few around him as well.

For him, it wouldn't be any more dangerous no matter the numbers around him, but for me, I could still get overwhelmed, and I wasn’t completely safe from every attack, even from these kinds of monsters. So, I decided to rush in one direction, not entirely sure if there were any goblins there.

It seems that I was close enough as one of them got scared, and I finally managed to see it. What followed next I didn’t expect, as basically all around where I used to stand, many goblins made themselves visible. There were way more than I expected, so I contemplated running, but Greg would have a large group of goblins around himself as well.

Using my skill to make the tips of my staff burn, I attacked the goblin that got scared by my rush. I managed to kill it fast enough, but it actually managed to dodge my first attack, so I only struck the ground. Fortunately, I was starting to get used to this weapon, and even if you missed, you could use that momentum to quickly attack again.

I managed to turn around quickly enough to defend against the two strikes from two different opponents aimed at my legs. I needed to move backwards quite fast while defending, as I didn’t want to get surrounded. Unfortunately, there were so many of them that some of them could move to the sides without having to engage, which meant they could move quite fast.

I was briefly distracted by the fact that there was smoke. When I looked behind the goblins, I saw that a few of my missed strikes had caught the grass on fire, or more specifically, the undergrowth made of dead grass, probably from the last season of whatever snapshot this map was from.

It was still hard to keep track of the number of opponents, but I think there were about 15 around me. I decided to stop defending and started running with one tip of my staff on the ground so it would spread the fire. It took me a moment to accelerate and get away from the goblins, which meant that I took two strikes to my back. They did hurt, but it wasn’t too bad.

Instead of running straight away from them, I started to curve around. They chased me for about two minutes before I met back up with the point where I first started to run. There was already a wall of fire in front of me, so after connecting the two ends, I rushed inwards, and the goblins followed. Now we were all trapped inside the ring of fire that was slowly burning inwards and outwards.

I didn’t stop running and continued to spread the fire until I started to hear goblins, swearing, and yelping from pain. When I turned around, they seemed to be suffering from the heat. When I turned around, they were a bit surprised, but now I had the field advantage.

I stepped in and attacked, killing two before jumping into a line of fire, moving on it, and then attacking a few other goblins from a different angle. I noticed the problem almost immediately—it was getting hard to breathe. So even though the heat wasn’t bothering me, the lack of oxygen was. I simply rushed out of the ring of fire, catching my breath and watching the goblins struggling even more.

Now I wasn’t certain if I would get the experience from killing them like this, so I jumped back in, holding my breath, killing a few, and then rushing back out. When only a few were left inside the burning ring that was now almost fully engulfed in flames, I, instead of going in to end them, started to put out the flames that were moving away from the ring of fire.

When the goblins finally died inside the ring of fire, I did feel myself getting some experience, so it still counted as me killing them—or perhaps just being close enough was plenty. The way experience worked was quite weird.

Sometimes all you needed to do was be close by when something died, yet other times, if you hadn't done anything, you'd simply get nothing. And sometimes, when you use methods that were too indirect, you might not get anything.

The smoke didn’t seem to bring other goblins here, which was good news as during the fight, I didn’t think that far ahead. This just showed me that no matter how much I read, I would still need experience to survive. Perhaps it’s a good idea to do these kinds of maps for a longer period of time than I was expecting to do them for.

One thing that seemed to be quite unfortunate was that the loot was also burnt up in the fire. Yeah, that was a problem. So I sat back and tried to think this problem through.

The main issue was that the goblins weren’t attacking me immediately. This meant that as I continued to move while keeping my guard up—which obviously wasn't enough to locate them—their numbers continued to increase until they actually got dangerous.

As I was sitting and thinking about the problem, I got images from Greg. The goblins had started attacking him. Once again, he tried to step on them, but they were too fast. I guess his memory wasn’t the best, so I once again told him what to do. It worked perfectly fine this time as well. So I got up and started to move towards him to collect the loot.

As I was moving, I got an idea and immediately tested it out. I stopped being on guard and relaxed myself, even while still keeping an eye out. It only took three steps before two goblins tried to attack me. I had to jump away so their attacks would miss, but immediately I sprang back up, activated my Flame Tips skill, and after a few strikes, ended both goblins.

After I collected the loot—a couple of yellow and cracked nails—I was smiling. First of all, it was nice to have loot that was so small. Second, just in case, I tested this out, and after having walked about three dozen steps completely relaxed, a singular goblin attacked me.

So this worked—they would attack me when they thought I wasn’t paying attention, and they weren’t good enough to realise that I was faking it.

After that, the walk to Greg was quite pleasant, although I did purposely allow a few more goblins to accumulate each time before I relaxed myself, which made them attack. Killing one or two was way too easy, and I was still practising, so I needed a little bit more of a challenge. It was going to be a long day of hunting.

I wasn’t completely certain if I had killed all the goblins, but my 24 hours was soon going to be up, so it was time to leave. After getting out of the portal, I collected the map stone to see some cracks in it, but it was still good for a couple more tries. Yet before I could pick a direction, I realised I didn’t actually know where to sell alchemy ingredients.

Perhaps Felwan will know. While he mainly only dealt with wood and horn-type monster loot, he should still have some connections. I knew that he was a good merchant, so he should know other good merchants willing to buy the kind of loot I was trying to sell this time.