NOVEL WEB Chapter 19 – The colony
Morning came and went as I continued to try, and fail, to cast my first spell when Val started to shift in her sleep. I set aside my bow and gave up on it for now as Val woke up and looked around, still a bit sleepy. Val wiped the sleep from her eyes before looking around again and asking me ‘Why was I sleeping on your lap?’
‘Well, last night we talked so much that you ended up falling asleep on me and I didn’t want to wake you.’ I replied, mostly truthfully but I didn’t add that I thought she looked cute and liked watching her sleep as I was worried how she would take it ‘I had gotten enough rest by that point so I didn’t mind keeping watch.’
‘Oh, ok’ Val answered while blushing a little ‘As long as you don’t mind then I guess its ok’
‘I meant what I said’ I replied, before having a thought that caused a sly smile to appear on my face, ‘in fact, if you ever want to borrow my lap again, either to sleep on or just for some rest, all you have to do is ask and I will happily give it to you.’
Val was too flustered to answer so she just turned away and started to walk off. Our camp just had a couple of sleeping bags and a blanket so I quickly packed it into my backpack before catching up to her. As I did this I quietly chuckled to myself as I thought to myself ‘I do have to admit making someone I find cute flustered really is fun.’
We walked for about thirty minutes before we came across our first standard squad of the day. Now that Val was able to effectively fight I wanted to see what she could do so I stepped back and watched from the side-lines, ready with an arrow in my hands if anything went sideways.
The fight started with her gathering some mana in her staff, causing it to glow red, before a small ball of fire shot out at the archer goblin. It was about the size of my thumb and it was stretched into a thin line by the air pulling back on it. Even though it seemed small the effect was huge, it struck the goblins chest before exploding, caving its chest in and killing the archer.
The spell hadn’t exactly been covert so all three remaining goblins turned in Val’s direction before charging her. Despite this Val remained calm as she channelled her next spell, this time the mana glowed a light blue before being shot out at one of the two club goblins. The goblin was too slow to dodge it and so was struck on the side, instantly being engulfed in ice which I assumed killed it.
By my estimates Val only had enough time to cast one more spell before the goblins reached her, seeing this I was about to step in when I saw that Val was still calm so I decided to see what she was going to do. I could tell that Val was concentrating on something but I couldn’t see any mana emanating from the staff. The goblins were about to reach her and were raising their weapons to strike her down when all of a sudden they stopped moving.
I was confused for a second until the goblins fell to the floor as they were both cut in two. Val must have used a wind spell as spells attuned to the wind element were typically incredibly hard to see, which is why they tend to be the favourite spells for assassins. Seeing that the fight was over I walked up to Val ‘Well done, that was a good fight’ I clapped Val on the back in congratulations before continuing ‘How do you feel?’
Val took a second to take in her surroundings before turning to me and saying, ‘That felt great, I never thought I would be able to do something like this but now I can protect the people that I care about.’ She then started gathering the loot like I would while continuing ‘Just a couple of weeks ago I was running away from them scared for my life and now I feel like I could take on another two squads separately before needing to rest.’
‘That’s great to hear’ I replied with a smile on my face ‘Now we can fight side by side better than before and even take on bigger threats that we previously would have had to run away from. We might even be able to go on quests together some day if I can extend my tether enough.’
We continued chatting and fighting more goblins as the day went on, and I even got to see some of Val’s spells. It turned out that she got [Minor elemental magic], which gave her an easier time channelling her mana into any spell that had one of the main four elements as its attribute. Nero uses the typical four elements of fire, wind, water and earth. These types can be turned into more advanced types but that is something that we won’t have to deal with for a very long time.
The class had also given her the knowledge of how to cast eight spells, two for each basic element, one strong that required a lot of mana and one weak that could be spammed. Some of these spells were purely utility spells and so couldn’t be used in a fight but they were still good so she was happy with them.
The reason I hadn’t received any spells when I received [Minor nature Magic] was because I was still unable to cast any spells so the system couldn’t teach me them. Once I managed to figure it out I would also get the spells that I should have gotten with my job.
Thanks to Val being able to fight we were going through each encounter much faster than before and progressing even further. This meant that we were running into more of the Hobgoblin squads as these were more likely the colony guards rather than scouts so would stick closer to their home. These factors came to a head when, as we were about to turn around and start heading back home for the night, we finally came across the colony.
The colony was much bigger than what I was expecting, when I had started our training I expected it to be a small group of around a hundred goblins but as we had gotten closer I slowly increased that estimate due to the amount of hobgoblins we had been facing. Even my current estimate was blown out of the water though as I stared down at enough huts to house thousands of goblins.
It was made worse by the fact that the colony was around a cave that went into a hill so there could be double the amount I was seeing right now hidden just underneath the surface. The way monsters worked was that, unless they were created in a dungeon, they would only follow the command of another monster that had enough mana to influence them.
This mana has to be evenly distributed to all of its minions for it to keep control and anything that had enough mana to control what was potentially tens of thousands of monsters was far above anything I could deal with at the moment. In fact I had a feeling that even a party of level 50 adventurers would struggle with it, so I had to return to The Adventurer’s Guild and report this right away.
Ever since I was told about the malnourished wolves that had attacked my first delvers I had wondered what was making the forest’s ecosystem be out of balance and I had a feeling I had just found it. Monsters didn’t just attack sapient people, they would attack anything that moved, so they must have been killing all the prey animals and leaving nothing for the wolves to hunt.
With this in mind we ran back to the dungeon and reported it to the guild before resting for that night. Unfortunately it would take a while for enough adventurers to turn up to take on the goblins so we went back to our training. Over the next week we continued training and Val had managed to catch up to me as we hit level 8 at around the same time.
During that week we had been reaching the colony more often than not until one day we heard some sort of commotion at the edge of the colony and went to investigate. We couldn’t understand what they were saying but I could tell a little of what was going on as the hobgoblin kept on gesturing to the forest while the lookout looked more and more nervous.
They must have started to notice that the squads we had killed weren’t returning and were starting to get frustrated that they couldn’t figure out why as we hadn’t let any goblins escape to report back to their boss. This was confirmed throughout the day as we didn’t see a single standard squad leave the village and even saw a single squad with a couple of hobgoblins and what looked like a spellcaster.
This new squad looked very strong so we gave them a wide berth. Seeing this we both realised that if we came back again we might be found out and wouldn’t be able to escape so we decided to find somewhere safe to sleep for the night, have one day of fighting as many squads as we could before returning to the dungeon and waiting for the adventurers to come for the emergency quest.
Throughout the day we didn’t see a single standard squad and even the hobgoblin squads were starting to be less common, luckily none of the squads with a spellcaster found us and we made our way home around noon. On our way back I thought about how much we had progressed over the past month, both of us had gotten our Jobs, we were easily three or four times as strong as before.
A few days ago I had finally figured out how to cast spells so we had both unlocked our mana-wells, luckily it wasn’t a loud spell like Val’s first one was, instead it had attached to my arrow and when it landed at the target it created a vine that tried to snare anything that was near it. As this happened knowledge entered my brain in a way that was similar to when I got to this world, except I was conscious this time, and I now knew three new spells.
One would let me heal myself or an ally, the next would let me speak with flora or fauna and the final one was a snaring arrow that had been my breakthrough. I had also gathered more than enough materials to be able to summon my own goblins, getting it during our second week of training and even upgrading it into the warrior and archer versions a few days ago. I had also gathered enough materials for the hobgoblin pattern but I only got the base, unspecialised, version of it.
Most importantly though I had gotten much closer to Val, to the point that I considered us close friends now. When we left it had felt like she was only answering my questions out of an obligation and wouldn’t ask any questions in return but by this point we could have hour long conversations without feeling awkward or forced at all.
We arrived back home just as the sun was setting, we were both tired from a day of fighting and walking so we quickly said goodnight to each other before heading to our rooms. As I was laying on my bed I opened up my stat screen to properly see the progress I had made over the past month.
Seeing how much DP I had made me realise two things firstly, Simmonds wasn’t lying when he said that making a contract with the guild would greatly accelerate my growth. Secondly, I had way more DP than I would need for the next four floors combined so I told the system to hide both how much I had and how much I was generating for now. I could always check on how much I had if I started to run low and I could always bring it back.
With that out of the way I looked at my stats, it seemed like all of my points had gone into my physical attributes which was a bit disappointing even if it did make sense. Attributes would grow faster when you use them and since I wasn’t using any magic until a few days ago I had been forced to mostly use my physical attributes. I wasn’t too dismayed as I would be able to start focusing on my mental attributes from now on and the points that I had gained up to now wouldn’t be wasted.
All in all I was quite happy with how I was progressing, I could now do feats that, just a month ago, I could never have done, let alone in my old life.
