---Third POV---
"They're not far behind; they should arrive soon! You can meet him in person!"
LootGoblin's expression didn't seem like he was lying.
Viktor shook his head.
"No need. Anyone who knows The Watchers and my name and is still willing to join deserves a warm welcome."
"Let's stick to the original plan—let Alyanne handle the captives."
A dwarf blacksmith who got captured by goblins probably didn't have much combat ability. Even if he had ulterior motives, she alone would be enough to control him.
Hearing her name, Alyanne nodded solemnly.
"Rest assured!" She would complete the mission perfectly!
Then, Viktor looked at LootGoblin and pointed toward the center of the giant pit.
"I have other things to take care of. What about you? Want to come with me?"
If he wanted to, Viktor could take him along.
LootGoblin scratched his head awkwardly.
"Hehe, I need to go back to Honeyvale Town and save my progress first, so I'll pass."
Viktor nodded in understanding.
He took out his black staff, and tapped it lightly. In the blink of an eye, he disappeared in front of them.
---
Through the shattered roof, firelight and moonlight spilled in. Hassan trembled as he crawled out from the ruins. Hunched over, covered in blood, his cloudy eyes burned with deep-seated hatred.
Gritting his teeth, he growled:
"Traitor! Human!!"
Staggering toward the broken magic array, he stared at the debris-covered ground, his gaze filled with unwillingness and fury.
He suddenly bit his fingertip, and blood dripped down.
The ground trembled. Faint glowing patterns emerged, revealing a magic array with an eerie and ominous presence. Beneath the sacrificial array, another magic array had been hidden!
His eyes filled with fanatical madness.
"You must all die!" he roared.
A massive blood-red light engulfed the goblins in the chamber and spread outward at an alarming rate! Every creature caught in it—goblin or otherwise—let out agonizing screams.
The red light surged to the surface, covering the entire crater ruins.
The players caught within immediately sensed something was wrong.
"Why am I slowing down?"
"This red light has a debuff!"
"Where the hell did this massive AoE come from?"
"Is this another magic world specialty spell?"
"No way! Didn't LootGoblin say he had already taken care of both magic arrays?"
"We have to conserve mana just to open a teleport circle—how does a goblin magician have the power for such a massive AoE attack?"
As the other players rushed toward the plaza, the Lucky Strike Squad didn't hurry to kill goblins for XP. Instead, they headed to another intact ruin.
LootGoblin had been vague on the forums. He mentioned there were over a dozen captives, too many to take at once, and asked them to check if they could bring them along while finishing up.
Rescuing captives was one of the highest-reward objectives in the main quest. Of course, they had to do it.
A few goblins still put up desperate resistance in the hallway.
Hedgehog kicked one straight in the chest, sending it stumbling back. Then, with a quick reverse stab, he finished off another goblin trying to ambush him from behind.
"Nice try!"
He casually adjusted his collar. After fighting these freaks at high intensity for over ten days, he could already tell what kind of fart they were about to let out just by the way they lifted their butts.
And they still wanted to ambush him?
Hedgehog shouted toward the back, "The right corridor is clear, no danger for now!"
"Same up front. Garble, what about you?" NeverShowOff asked.
"I think I found the place LootGoblin mentioned." As he spoke, he stopped in front of a wooden door.
From the corridor, faint voices could be heard from inside.
This should be the location LootGoblin mentioned—the troublesome prisoners.
Bang!
Garble kicked open the wooden door. Just as he was about to step in, he froze in place as he looked up.
NeverShowOff, who had just caught up, tilted his head in confusion. "What's wrong? No one inside?"
Once he got a clear view of the room, another wooden statue seemed to have appeared at the door.
Hedgehog, coming up from behind, asked in confusion.
"Why are you all just standing at the door?"
Luckily, the entrance to the Inner Circle Ruins was wide enough. Hedgehog circled around and saw the room's interior as well.
Clatter!
His eyes widened, and his machete slipped from his grasp.
"Holy sh—!"
Inside, the room was filled with goblin infants. Some had a dark green tint, others had soft pink skin still stuck together, looking like newborns… They were stacked in layers, covering the entire room.
The sight of these goblin babies didn't evoke any sympathy for the weak. Instead, it felt like they had stumbled into the egg sac of some massive insect or spider. Those thin limbs and sharp teeth sent shivers down their spines.
Hedgehog swallowed hard.
"So this is what LootGoblin meant by the old, weak… and disabled?"
No wonder the number of goblins reported was far higher than the actual combatants they had encountered.
Turned out, most of them were infants!
Just this one room had too many to count—who knew how many more there were elsewhere?
"Looks like goblins have a pretty high infant mortality rate," Garble observed, scanning the room.
NeverShowOff nodded grimly. "With their level of civilization, it'd be a miracle if even 10% of these made it to adulthood."
Suppressing his discomfort, he searched the room. Weren't prisoners supposed to be held here? Did they get the wrong place?
His gaze landed on a certain spot in the room.
"Look—doesn't that look like a human hand?"
The three carefully avoided the goblin infants' sharp claws and instinctive attacks.
They found a human woman with a swollen belly among them.
She appeared much older than the three girls they had rescued before—around thirty years old. Her body was severely emaciated, as if all her nourishment had been consumed by the bulging mass in her abdomen. Her arms were so thin that they almost looked no different from the goblin infants beside her.
NeverShowOff had to look several times before he even noticed her. The three of them fell silent as they stared at her.
After a long pause... Hedgehog was the first to speak. "Isn't this game a bit too… extreme?"
"Agreed!"
Ever since they encountered goblins, their gaming experience had taken a turn into the 18+ category with no way back. When goblins got excited, they didn't even care if they were in the middle of a battlefield—they would start humping the very players trying to kill them.
It was basically cyber harassment.
Sometimes they even suspected that the game developers had some kind of… peculiar fetish.
One thing was certain, for a long while after they returned, they wouldn't be touching that kind of content ever again.
"Ugh—yah!" A goblin infant, its eyes still shut, accurately bit at their legs.
NeverShowOff reacted quickly, kicking it away. He shook off the sticky residue on his shoe.
"Enough talk. What do we do about this prisoner?"
She looked so fragile, it felt like even the slightest movement might break her. No wonder LootGoblin had been so vague—he simply said she wouldn't be easy to take.
"Um..." NeverShowOff's brows furrowed in thought as he murmured, pausing for a moment. "Why don't we ask her opinion?"
The three exchanged glances.
Though it seemed a bit impolite, they decided to wake up the "mother" nestled among the "sons."
However, no matter how hard they tried, the woman remained unresponsive, her eyes tightly shut.
Garble frowned deeply. "A vegetative state?"
"Possible," Hedgehog muttered.
He bent down to check her breathing, his face turning grave.
"She's alive, but her breath is frighteningly faint. It's almost like..."
A room full of infants and a mother left to be drained dry... He shuddered, trying to shake away the horrific images in his mind.
"It could be that she doesn't want to wake up, or maybe all her nutrients were used up for childbirth, and her body shut down to protect itself."
Finally, he averted his eyes and softly suggested, "Maybe… we shouldn't save her?"
To be honest, seeing the room full of "children," he was seriously worried about her mental state if she woke up. Perhaps, death might be a release instead.
The other two also looked visibly shaken. It wasn't a hard decision to make, but just as they were about to give up and leave, a dazzling red light engulfed the entire room in an instant.
The three immediately felt an overwhelming discomfort, as if an invisible force gripped their throats.
NeverShowOff staggered, leaning against the wall, struggling to speak. "This… is this..." the boss unleashing its ultimate move?
Before he could finish, the once-quiet goblin infants erupted in harrowing wails. Rolling and screaming, their agonized cries drowned out his words.
The goblins writhed on the ground like four-limbed worms or some grotesque hive creature.
Hedgehog clasped his hands over his ears and shouted, "What the hell is happening?"
"No idea!" NeverShowOff shouted back, his voice hoarse.
It seemed the red light affected the goblins far more than it did them. His gaze locked on the source of the red glow.
Something must have happened in the square!
The hellish screams didn't last long. The goblins' struggles slowly subsided. In the end, they became motionless bodies, their faces frozen in a purple-red grimace of agony.
Garble stared blankly for a moment before cautiously checking the goblins for any signs of life.
"… All dead."
The three fell into a heavy silence, a sense of foreboding growing in their hearts.
NeverShowOff knelt down, suddenly realizing something, and checked the woman's state again.
"She's dead too."
He slowly pulled his hand away from her nose, then stood up. The room was dead silent.
In just a few minutes, they had witnessed an entire room of sanity-shattering creatures die in bizarre circumstances. It was surreal and cruel.
Too eerie.
Hedgehog moved to the door and picked up a broadleaf machete lying on the ground. His sharp gaze fixed on the source of the red light in the central square.
"I'm going to check it out."
Garble stepped forward to stand by his side. "I'll go too."
NeverShowOff followed close behind. "Count me in!"
If all the rooms marked on the map were like this, searching further would be pointless.
Instead, they needed to figure out what caused the red light in the center. The three figures darted forward like arrows loosed from a bow.
At the edge of the gaping hole in the central square, players who had noticed something wrong gathered one after another.
They were shocked by the grim scene below.
Normal goblins, great goblins, even elite goblins—all lay in pools of blood.
The blood streamed across the ground, forming a complex and sinister pattern like a frozen sea of crimson. It sent chills down everyone's spine.
"What the hell?! Did the mobs just go for mutual destruction on their own?"
"Is the game so desperate to avoid giving us loot that it resorted to this?"
"Yo, healer, I'm getting dizzy from all this red. Help me out!"
"Shut up!"
The players were in disbelief, chattering as they peered into the pit. Just then, a figure slowly rose from the blood-soaked ground—it was the goblin shaman.
His aged hands gripped a staff tightly, his eyes gleaming with a strange light.
"You will all die!"
As his words fell, the red light beneath him seemed to gain a sinister vitality, condensing into a viscous liquid that exuded a bone-chilling aura.
Sharp-eyed players spotted the source of the sound and pointed it out.
"Look! There's still one alive over there!"
Players shivered as they rubbed their arms, their skin crawling.
"What's he yelling about?"
"Judging by the stick he's holding, that's probably the goblin shaman from the storyline, right?"
"This old guy? No way he's the final boss!"
Skepticism spread among the crowd.
The goblin shaman stretched his bony arms skyward, his body rising several inches off the ground. The blood beneath him spiraled upward, coating his limbs in crimson armor.
"Who's gonna take this one?" someone called out.
Hedgehog leapt down into the pit. "I'll shut this old freak up!"
He charged forward, swinging his weapon in a wide arc. The machete connected with Hassan's blood shield—and stuck there, the blood enveloping it like quicksand.
"What the—" He yanked frantically but couldn't free his weapon.
Hassan's laughter echoed through the chamber as three blood tendrils shot from his armor, whipping toward the player. Hedgehog ducked under the first two but the third caught him across the chest, sending him flying back into the wall.
"Status effect!" he shouted, his health bar dropping rapidly. "Bleeding damage! Someone heal me!"
Lux watched from above, analyzing the situation. "He's using blood magic," she called out. "We need elemental damage—fire or holy light!"
She raised her hand, focusing her mana. A beam of golden light shot downward, striking Hassan's shoulder. The shaman howled as the blood armor sizzled and steamed where the light hit.
"That's it!" NeverShowOff shouted. "Mages, focus fire! Physical attackers, distract him!"
Players began coordinating, the melee fighters darting in and out to draw Hassan's attention while spellcasters rained attacks from above. But the shaman was craftier than they expected.
He slammed his staff into the ground, sending a wave of blood outward that knocked back the closest fighters. Then he began chanting, his eyes rolling back to show only whites.
The temperature in the chamber plummeted. Frost formed on weapons and armor. Each player's breath became visible in the suddenly frigid air.
Hassan's voice changed, becoming deeper, echoing as if multiple voices spoke at once. "Behold the power of despair!"
A pulse of energy erupted outward. When it hit Lux, the world around her vanished.
Around her, other players were trapped in their own nightmares. Some swung weapons at invisible enemies, others curled into fetal positions, whimpering. A few clawed at their own faces, trying to escape whatever horrors they were seeing.
But Lux, through the haze of terror, remembered something. The dispelling potions! With trembling hands, she fumbled through her inventory, her fingers passing through several items before finding a small vial.
She uncorked the vial and swallowed its contents.
The falling sensation wavered.
"It's an illusion!" she shouted, though her voice shook. "Use the dispelling potions!"
A few players heard her through their terror. Soon, five, then ten, then twenty players were breaking free of the illusion.
Hassan roared in frustration, intensifying his assault. The blood around him formed into spikes that shot outward, forcing players to dodge or block.
NeverShowOff rolled under a blood spike and came up behind Garble, who had raised his machete to block another attack. "I've got an idea," he said. "We need to disrupt his concentration!"
He pointed to the ceiling, where several large stalactites hung precariously. "If we hit those just right..."
Garble nodded, understanding immediately. "Hey!" he called to a nearby player. "Think you can hit those rocks up there?"
The player looked up, measuring the distance. "Easy," he said, preparing his wind magic. "Just say when."
While this was happening, Hedgehog had been circling around the chamber, looking for a blind spot in Hassan's defenses. The blood armor covered the shaman completely, but it seemed thinner at the back where he couldn't easily focus his attention.
"Lux!" Hedgehog called. "Can you hit him with another Holy Light? Right at his back!"
Lux, still shaking from the aftereffects of the illusion, steadied herself against a pillar. "I'll try!" she called back, gathering her mana again.
The golden beam struck Hassan from behind just as the player with wind magic hit the stalactite. With a tremendous crack, the stone broke free and plummeted toward the shaman. Distracted by the pain of Lux's holy magic, Hassan looked up too late. The massive rock crashed through his blood shield and pinned him to the ground.
The blood armor splashed outward, losing its cohesion. Players surged forward, weapons raised.
"Wait!" Lux shouted. "Something's not right!"
Hassan's eyes were glowing brighter than ever, his mouth stretched in a rictus grin despite being crushed under the stone.
"Fools," he gasped, blood bubbling from his lips.
He raised one trembling hand and snapped his fingers. The blood covering the floor began to glow with an unholy light.
A wave of dread unlike anything they'd felt before surged forth, freezing everyone in place.
---
What the hell is happening?! Lux's eyes widened, her mouth unable to move.
She tried silently invoking her Holy Light skill, but it did nothing to change the situation.
No physical injury?
A massive level gap?
Psychological impact?
Various possibilities ran through her mind, but she couldn't pinpoint a cause. In theory, extreme fear like this should have been filtered out by the game mechanics.
Why wasn't it?
She poured all her strength into her throat, but not a single sound escaped. For the first time, she felt bone-deep terror in a game.
As she began falling through the void again, she saw the monsters below with horrifying clarity—writhing masses of tentacles, and gaping maws filled with needle-like teeth.
She fell faster, the wind tearing at her clothes, her hair. The ground rushed up to meet her. The creatures reached for her with clawed hands, chitinous limbs, and barbed appendages. They caught her, their touch burning like acid, their grip crushing.
She couldn't even scream as they began to tear her apart. She felt her arm rip from its socket, felt teeth sink into her abdomen, felt something burrow into her eye. The agony was unbearable—she wanted to die, needed to die, but death wouldn't come.
And then she was falling again, her body somehow whole, the same fate awaiting her below. Over and over the cycle repeated. Each time she landed among the monsters, they found new ways to torture her. They peeled back her skin, they broke her bones one by one, they pulled out her organs while she watched.
And each time she died, she regained a bit of he mobility.
Some part of her mind knew this wasn't real, but the pain, the terror—it felt more real than anything she'd ever experienced. Each time she tried to remind herself it was just a game, the illusion would intensify, as if responding to her resistance.
A fear that felt omnipresent, inescapable, and unshakable... It was as if an unseen force whispered endlessly in her ears, urging her to give up, to bow to the unknown power, to offer everything she had—even her life.
Unconsciously, she tightened her grip on her machete, raising it toward her wrist.
Slowly, inching closer...
Smack!
At the last moment, she snapped out of it, throwing the blade to the ground with all her might.
"What the hell kind of brainwashing cult is this? Even the boss does mass hypnosis?!"
Her outburst rang sharp and clear in the eerie silence. She wasn't the only one. The sound of objects being thrown to the ground echoed around her.
Clang! Bang!
Someone muttered, still shaken, "Damn, this is some hardcore horror-game level fear!"
Another voice, thrilled, shouted, "This is awesome! They can push this since the game isn't live yet!"
The oppressive atmosphere lifted slightly.
Seeing this, Hasan's twisted grin froze. His eyes widened in disbelief at the scene before him.
He had sacrificed half his tribe—even himself—to forge a desperate ritual. How could it have no effect on these humans?!
What was going on?!!!!
---
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50 advance chapters!
p@treon.com/Malphegor