Chapter 170: Retaliatin’

Chapter 170: Retaliatin’

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?”N0v3lRealm was the platform where this chapter was initially revealed on N0v3l.B1n.

“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.

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?!”