I arrived back in the previous timeline around an hour before we’d gotten the Bond Rank and decided to split up. Though, of course, the Bond Rank still stuck around, and as such, so did Ainash’s memories.
She fell to the ground the moment I arrived back in time, which surprised me. I hurriedly bent down to help her back up. “Hey, you alright? What happened?”
Erani started, too, except she started glancing around, looking for enemies that might’ve attacked her to make her fall over like that, which I obviously knew wasn’t the situation.
A moment passed where Ainash didn’t respond, just staring at the ground and breathing heavily. Had something bad happened? Something to permanently change her across timelines? Was there even anything that could do that?
Then she turned to face me, wide-eyed in a look that seemingly portrayed both horror and excitement. “Father! I died!”
“Wait,” Erani turned back to face us. “Time Loop? And…I guess another Bond Rank? Is that what Ainash is talking about?”
“Oh, uh, yeah,” I said, looking back at her. “Sorry, didn’t mention that.”
“What happened? How’d she die?”
“No idea,” I said. “We split up. Uh, Ainash, you died? Was it the Goblins?”
“Yes, they were very mean and tricky! Was worried when was fighting, but then remembered that you can bring me back to life! So decided to not fight hard and instead try to talk to bad monsters. Asked them questions while they kill me.”I raised my eyebrows. “You talked to them?”
“Yes, used empathy ability to let them feel what I feel, and so I use that to tell them feelings, and then I feel how they feel about feelings I let them feel to see what they think about my feelings.”
“...What? Okay, so, what’d they say, then?”
“I let them feel that I am going to go and attack in a certain direction! So that way, when they think I am going to search the forest in one area, if they know there is nothing important in that area, they will feel relaxed. But if there is something important in that area, they will be scared! So I found the area they think is important. It is probably their home! I know what direction it is in!”
“Oh, well shit. That’s great!”
“Did you find bad monsters too?”
“Arlan, what happened?” Erani cut into our conversation once Ainash told her story.
“Right, yeah, let me fill you both in. So, Ainash, I assume it must’ve happened when you died, but while we were moving, we both got a notification saying the Bond got ‘severed’ and we were losing our buffs. Erani, you collapsed, and the moment you did, the Goblins attacked. So what I’m assuming happened was that they were following us, and waiting for something to happen before they attacked. I’d guess they were hoping we’d fall into one of their traps, but when we kept avoiding them, they just decided they’d strike at any moment of weakness. So they took your collapsing as their moment.”
She nodded. “Okay. So we lost the fight once they attacked?”
“Yeah, didn’t go well. With the element of surprise on their side, us both dealing with lost Stats, and us not even knowing how many of our enemies there were, we fell to them pretty easily. But I doubt they’d only just started following us. They’d almost certainly been trailing us for hours, waiting for something to happen. So that does pose a problem. Ainash, had they been following you?”
“Probably yes. Attacked me when I fell in a big hole.” She looked embarrassed to admit that last part. “Was not paying attention.”
“Yeah, exactly. I’m willing to bet they’re monitoring the entrance to this forest, or something. Maybe they have teams of Goblins trawling the whole place in search of their next hit. We’ve only entered around now, right Erani?”
She laughed. “Am I going to have to be the one who keeps track of what has actually happened in the ‘true’ timeline or something? Yes, I think we entered around ten, maybe fifteen minutes ago.”
“Alright. So ideally, we aren’t being trailed yet. I mean, the trees are still sparse, so I doubt they’d have the ability to hide around here if they tried. In that case, we should be able to take advantage of what we know here.”
“How’s that?”
Erani, Ainash, and I walked down a trail through the familiar woods. It was one of the trails we’d gone down in the previous timeline, so I remembered where most of the traps were, and we easily avoided them—and Index made dodging the ones I’d forgotten about trivial. However, despite knowing the direction the Goblins’ main outpost was located in, we were not going that way. In fact, I’d deliberately chosen a path that took us far away from that area.
We waited a few hours, wandering the woods like we would normally, going down dead ends and having unimportant verbal conversations—though our mental conversations were anything but unimportant.
After wandering the forest for the correct amount of time off in that random location that the Goblins were sure to find unimportant, according to Ainash, I sent them a message telling them to get ready to enact our plan.
“Three, two, one…go.”
Ainash wandered off, leaving the trail and going to look at some random feature of the terrain, around twenty paces to the side. I thought I heard some movement when she did so, which was good; it was probably whatever Goblins had been hiding in that location running off to go somewhere else. And then, in a way I’d had Erani practice a few times before to ensure she did it in the exact same way she’d done in the previous timeline, Erani collapsed to the ground as though she’d lost the Stats from her Bond.
There was a slight delay—a little longer than I remembered it taking before, though that was probably because of Ainash—but just on schedule, one of the Goblins shot an arrow right into my back.
You have been pierced. 19 damage.
Your Health is 551.
We instantly sprung into motion when they revealed themselves. Erani got back up to her feet with unnatural speed due to me having preemptively boosted all of us with Expedite, and Ainash used her position naturally flanking many of the Goblins to move right in and hunt down the ones nearby. She had the uncanny ability to know exactly where they were hiding, which, of course, was because of a combination of my informing her the general types of locations they’d been around in the previous timeline, and her empathy ability helping her to zero in on their locations once she had that basic idea.
At the same time, I held out my hand and shot as many Goblins as possible with Ray of Frost, hitting each with precisely three rays. Since the Goblin in the previous timeline had killed me, that built up a decent bit of the ‘Familiarity’ Index needed to give me information on them. And what Index had told me was that, for the most part, Goblins wouldn’t take more than three well-aimed Rays of Frost to kill. And Erani could kill them with a single Firebolt, as long as it was a direct hit.
You have been pierced. 23 damage.
Your Health is 528.
You have slain Level 4 Goblin.
You have earned 23 XP. Your XP is 997.
I shot at every one I saw popping up to take their shots at us, missing some shots and still taking some hits, but overall we were the ones that had the drop on our opponents here, and their numbers thinned quickly.
The Goblins seemed to recognize this, and I spotted a couple trying to run off and avoid our counterattack. If they escaped and warned the others, it’d probably become near-impossible to exterminate the Goblins in this forest for the next while, since they’d all know to go into hiding. So instantly, I dashed off in pursuit.
We’d already thinned out their numbers pretty heavily in our counterattack, and Ainash had the other side of the road covered, so I went off to the side the Goblins were retreating into, eager to catch them before they could hide themselves in the thick maze of trees.
One was running off to the left, so I held out my hand and shot it three times in the head. The other two were escaping alongside each other, and I was about to just hit them both with a Crippling Chill, but then I realized that, if we could capture a couple of these things alive, we could probably use Ainash’s method of basic communication with them to pinpoint the exact location of their base. We had a general idea of the direction it was in, but if we could find precisely where it was—and maybe even get an idea of the types of traps within, or even more—that’d be perfect.
So I cast another stack of Expedite on myself to rush forward, and tackled the two Goblins to the ground. I hurriedly stripped their bows, arrows, and the belts they had around their waists away from them, not very eager to see retaliation from them. Without their bombs and weapons, though, they were mostly helpless. Not that they didn’t try to escape, of course. I quickly situated them below my body, their tiny frames easily squished beneath my knees, but they clawed and bit at my body, my decent pool of Health slowly chipping away. Not very dangerous, but annoying.
I just ignored them and stayed where I was, shooting Rays of Frost at any other Goblins that attempted to escape in my direction, and using my wide perspective of the battlefield to communicate with Ainash, warning her about any threats she didn’t see—and asking her to warn Erani, too.
And then, after fifteen seconds passed, I hit the two Goblins I had captive with Sanguine Bond, triggering Hypnotic Bond and disabling them for the next ten seconds. Once they were inert, I quickly got off of them and bent down to use some rope they had in their belts to tie them up and against a tree trunk, ensuring they wouldn’t be going anywhere. Once the ten seconds had passed and they came to, I stepped back and watched them try their best to escape their bonds, but with their hands and legs tied and their necks fixated to the trunk, as I suspected, they couldn’t do much.
From there, I turned around and returned to the battlefield to assist Erani and Ainash in cleaning up the remainder of our enemies.
It only took around another minute before the Goblins were all dead. In total, there’d been something like thirty surrounding us. The things certainly liked traveling in large numbers, we’d learned. Though, even if none of them gave much XP individually, the massive pack dying pushed us all a good ways to our next Level. Counting the fight in the previous timeline, I’d gotten a total of around 500, moving me up to 1.26k/3k—about two thirds from my own killing, and the other third from the Bond with Ainash. That thing was mainly nice because of the Stats it gave, but the little bits and pieces of XP provided were slowly adding up, too.
Speaking of…
“Erani, how much XP did you get from this?”
“Not totally sure,” she chuckled, “I don’t have a little invisible helper that keeps track of every single point of XP I get. But, considering where I was previously at…maybe around eight, nine hundred?”
“After that and what you got from the Gloomspurs, doesn’t that mean you should be halfway there to another Level?”
“More than that, actually. I’m up to a little over 2000 out of my needed 3000.”
I whistled. “Well damn. You’re back to being past me. I thought Time Loop would push me way past you, but I guess an extra twenty percent of all of Ainash’s kills is quite a lot, huh?”
“Well, slightly more now, actually.”
My eyes went wide. “The Bond’s Ranked even more? What is it, Rank 40 now? Something ridiculous like that?”
“No, no. But it got a couple when we were in the city. I guess what they say about distance making the heart grow fonder or whatever is true,” she laughed. “I certainly felt it.”
“Shit, and I thought I was catching up with you.”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s not a contest, you know.”
“Anything with numbers on it can be made into a contest,” I joked. Then I smiled and walked over to give a side hug to Ainash, who leaned against my shoulder and wrapped her arm around me, too. “But yeah, yeah, I get what you mean. Though I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. Kind of makes me feel weird, knowing the System’s objective opinion seems to think you have such a better relationship with her.”
“It might just be one of those things,” Erani shrugged. “You don’t have to understand every little aspect of everything in your life. I mean, there’s also, y’know, first impressions and all that. Sometimes people can’t fully forgive and forget slights from when they first met you.”
I pursed my lips, remembering how I’d been pretty mean in my thoughts toward our surrogate daughter when we first started caring for her. “Maybe.”
“It is okay,” Ainash offered with an awkward pat on my head that made me laugh. “I just think mother is very pretty and very cool and very nice. And I think you are sort of pretty and sort of cool and sort of nice. Still think you are all of those things!”
Erani laughed. “So it’s just blatant favoritism, then.”
“At least I’m pretty,” I said with a shrug.
A garbled shout came from behind me, reminding me that we still had prisoners. We turned and walked over, and I explained what my plan had been when I’d captured them in the first place.
“Yes,” Erani nodded, “might be a good idea to get a more exact idea of what we’re up against. Ainash, you think you could get more information if you had some time to work on them?”
“Yeah, it’d be great if you could also get stuff like how many more Goblins there are, what more traps they have around the forest or in their base, whether there are any higher-Level species around here that might be dangerous to us, that sort of thing.”
“Do not know if that will be possible. Can only communicate feeling, so will be very hard. But will try my best!”
“Yeah, just let us know if there’s anything you need.”
We waited around for a few minutes for Ainash to work her magic. It was pretty funny to watch, as the whole thing basically just looked like her staring at them and making different facial expressions while they glanced around, obviously weirded out by everything.
Ainash’s two-way empathy effectively had inverse relationship between the strength of the feelings it could transfer and the intelligence of the being—according to her, it was because conscious thoughts could muck up the signal, or whatever—but evidently these Goblins were low-intelligence enough for the thing to at least have some effectiveness on them. From what I could tell, the more animalistic monsters, like Stripeks or Wood Wraiths, would fully take on the emotions of Ainash, the somewhat intelligent monsters, like Goblins or Infernals, would be able to feel her emotions, but not be influenced themselves, and then the completely sapient monsters, like Humans and Dragons, would have trouble being able to identify them at all.
Now, Ainash could still sense the emotions of pretty much all of these species—though it’d be much easier for her with the lower-intelligence ones. And also, her familiarity with the species would also influence the strength of everything going on. Thankfully, being around so many Goblins in both timelines, even if it’d only been for a short while, seemed to be enough for her to at least be able to transmit some sort of a signal both ways. So ideally, we could get some information here.
Once she was done, turning around and walking back to where Erani and I had been resting, she gave us the news.
“Did not get much. But got some stuff!”
“What did they tell you?”
“Know more specifically where the bad monster home is. But could not understand anything else from them.”
“Damn. Not even anything about traps? That’d be really useful to know.”
“Not very much. Could understand about traps when only talking about nearby. When I thought about going into specific parts of road, could feel the bad monsters getting happy and excited for me to go there if there was trap, and could feel them not care if there was not trap. But when there is no specific area they can see, can not feel anything from them.”
“Hm.” I frowned.
“Should kill them now?” Ainash asked.
“Wait,” Erani said, looking between us. “Why not just take them along?”
“Take them along?” I asked. “We can’t do that, what if they escape? Or call for help? I mean, what if another fight breaks out, and they’re able to attack us? That sounds like way too big of a risk.”
“Is it really more of a risk than going through here without guides? Sure, Index can find most traps, but if we’re trying to actively fight our way through some massive Goblin complex, running through halls that’ve been absolutely laden with tripwires and false floorboards, there’s no way it’ll catch them all.”
“That is true,” Index admitted. “I know you can’t see me, but I am still a physical being, essentially. Just one that can phase through solid objects. So yes, I can look around underground, but I’m still limited in my speed by the simple fact that I have to move from point A to point B while I look around. If you’re actively moving through an area, I might not be able to warn you about everything.”
I sighed and stood up, walking over to the Goblins where they were tied up against the tree trunk, and I crouched down to look at them at eye-level. They stared back with rage in their beady eyes, warted skin twisting as they struggled against their bonds. Already, they had blisters and rope burns around the areas I’d tied them with how much they’d relentlessly pulled and yanked, seemingly not caring about how it hurt them.
“I just don’t see how we’d prevent them from escaping,” I said. “Or from trying to trigger traps on themselves and get us killed alongside them. Wouldn’t put it past the little bastards.”
“We can figure something out,” Erani said. “I mean, you have your Hypnotic Bond, right? Just knock them out and we can re-tie them even tighter, and maybe make some sort of leash that keeps them close to us while not forcing us to lug them around.”
“But that still creates the problem of having at least semi-free-moving enemies around if a fight breaks out. I really think we’re better off just killing them here. I can’t see a compelling reason not to.”
Suddenly, a garbled voice yelled at me, and I looked back to see it was one of the Goblins. It shouted again, and I realized it wasn’t nonsense.
“You stinky!” it choked out. “You stinky!”
I took a step back. “...Uh, you guys are hearing that too, right?”
“Yes,” Erani said with a frown. “Do they just have some phrase in their language that sounds like ours?”
“You stinky!” it repeated once more.
I looked around, then back at the Goblin. “Are you…talking to me?”
“You stinky if you kill us!” it shouted.
Yeah, that settled it. It was absolutely speaking Human right now.
I stood and looked back at Erani. “Why in the hells did the fact that Goblins can speak our language not come up in any of the conversations we had about them?!”