The process of donning the dead was a uniquely grim affair. It wasn't merely a matter of wearing their filthy, stiff leather and crude iron scraps. That was the easy part, a simple act of overcoming the gag reflex as the cold, greasy hide, still retaining a faint, corpse-like chill, settled against my skin. The stench was a physical presence, a miasma of stale sweat, old blood, and a general, all-pervading goblin-funk that clung to the material like a curse. It was a smell that bypassed the nose and seemed to soak directly into the back of the throat.
The hard part was the lie.
I stood in the dappled, sickly green light of the forest, my eyes closed, and focused my will. The Minor Illusion skill, since my advancement, felt different. It was no longer a simple parlour trick of sound and light. It was a deeper, more complex weaving. I had to draw on my mana, a cool, deep well within me now, and pull the threads of it into the world. It felt like painting, but my brush was my mind, my canvas was reality itself, and my paint was pure, shimmering power.
I had to build the illusion from the ground up. First, the general shape. I pictured the hunched, wiry frame of the goblin we'd killed, the way its shoulders stooped and its arms hung low. I wrapped the illusion around myself like a cloak, a shimmering, heat-haze distortion that blurred my human silhouette into something smaller, something meaner. Then came the details. The sallow, mottled green of the skin, the flat, broad nose, the pointed, twitching ears. I couldn't create a perfect, solid image. That was beyond me. What I could create was a suggestion, a convincing mirage that would fool a casual glance, especially in the dim, smoky light of the goblin camp. It was a low-resolution goblin, a cheap knock-off, but it would have to be good enough.
The mana drain was immediate, a slow, constant siphon. A quiet hum started in the back of my skull, the hum of an engine running, an engine that I would have to keep fueled for hours.
Then I turned and did the same for Elara. She stood perfectly still, her face a mask of stone, as I wrapped the greasy, shimmering lie of a goblin form around her. It was an absurd juxtaposition: her coiled, lethal grace hidden beneath the illusion of a scrawny, pathetic creature. She looked like a razor blade disguised as a rusty nail. When I was done, two shimmering, vaguely goblin-shaped heat-hazes stood in the gloom, smelling faintly of the dead.
"Ready?" I projected the thought along our mental link, the connection feeling strange and intimate in the quiet woods.
A pulse of pure, cold resolve came back. Ready.
We moved. Stepping out of the relative cover of the deep woods and into the cleared, churned mud surrounding the goblin camp felt like stepping onto a stage. Every sense screamed in protest. The stench intensified tenfold, a physical wall of filth that made my eyes water. The sounds were a cacophony of misery: the crackle of the central fire, the wet snarling of goblins fighting over scraps, the rhythmic, dull thump-thump of some unseen drum, and, worst of all, a faint, high-pitched sound of weeping coming from the direction of the chieftain's hut.
My illusionary goblin skin prickled. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic prisoner trying to escape its cage. This was, without a doubt, the single most stupid, suicidal thing I had ever done. The Scholar's mind, the part of me that calculated odds, was screaming that our probability of survival was hovering somewhere in the low single digits.
Elara's presence beside me was the only anchor. Her illusion shimmered with the same pathetic weakness as mine, but beneath it, I could feel her calm. She was a predator, and she was walking into a den of lesser, stupider predators. She wasn't afraid. She was hunting.
We shuffled forward, mimicking the clumsy, lurching gait of the goblins we'd killed. We kept our heads down. We made ourselves look small, pathetic, and entirely unimportant. The key to invisibility, I realised, wasn't to be unseen. It was to be so utterly beneath notice that no one bothered to look at you in the first place.
Goblins milled about, their beady, black eyes passing over us without a flicker of recognition. They were too concerned with their own petty squabbles, their own pathetic struggles for dominance. A big, brutish-looking goblin with a notched ear kicked a smaller one out of its way, sending it sprawling into the mud. The smaller one just whimpered and scrambled away. No one intervened. This was the law of the jungle, and the jungle was a stinking, miserable slum.
Our target was not the center of the camp. The center was where the power was, where the chieftain and his hulking guards lounged by the main fire, gnawing on roasted bones. To go there would be to invite scrutiny, and our cheap illusions wouldn't stand up to that. No, we needed the fringes. The periphery. The place where the weak were pushed, where the outcasts and the failures gathered.
We found them huddled around a miserable, sputtering fire on the far side of the camp, near the refuse pile. It was a pathetic little circle of goblin misery, a gang of the lowest order. There were ten of them in total, all smaller and scrawnier than the brutes in the center of the camp. Their gear was a collection of broken spears, cracked leather scraps, and shields that were little more than splintered planks. Their faces were a collection of scars, missing teeth, and the dull, hopeless expressions of the perpetually downtrodden. My analysis skill, working quietly in the background, confirmed my observation. They were all Level 2 or 3. The bottom of the barrel. The Guttersnipes.
A hulking brute, one of the chieftain's favored 'Bully Boys' from the main fire, swaggered over. He was a Level 5 Warrior, a giant among his kind, with thick, muscular arms and a sneer that seemed permanently etched onto his ugly face. He kicked their pathetic little fire, sending sparks and embers scattering into the mud.
"Muck-sifters!" the Bully Boy snarled, the word a gob of spit. "You burn wood? Wood is for the war-fire! You burn dung, like the worms you are!"
The leader of the little group, a goblin with a scarred face and a single, cunning eye, looked up. He was the biggest of the ten, but he was still dwarfed by the Bully Boy. He didn't speak. He just stared, his one good eye filled with a cold, ancient hatred.
The Bully Boy laughed, a harsh, grating sound. He saw the small, half-roasted rodent they had been cooking, impaled on a stick over their now-scattered fire. He snatched it up, sniffed it, and then, with a look of profound disgust, threw it into the refuse pile.
"Filth eat filth," he grunted, before turning and swaggering back to the main fire, leaving the ten goblins in the cold, their meager meal gone.
The one-eyed goblin, who I mentally dubbed Gnar, watched him go. His hand was clenched into a white-knuckled fist. He didn't say a word. He just radiated a silent, impotent fury. A smaller goblin beside him, a truly pathetic specimen who couldn't have been more than three feet tall, began to whimper softly. Gnar reached out and cuffed him lightly on the back of the head, a gesture that was surprisingly gentle, for a goblin. The whimper subsided into a sniffle.
This was our moment. This was our in.
"Stay here," I projected to Elara. "Let me handle this."
I felt a pulse of questioning caution from her, but she didn't object. She simply melted back into the shadows between two of the hovels, becoming just another patch of darkness.
I took a deep breath, steeled my nerves, and shuffled forward into the dim, flickering light of the scattered embers. I made myself look even more pathetic than my illusion already did. I hunched my shoulders, dragged my feet, and held my hands out in a gesture of empty-handed supplication.
The ten goblins looked up, their faces a mixture of suspicion and contempt. Another piece of filth had wandered into their corner of misery. Gnar's one good eye narrowed, his hand creeping towards the hilt of a crude, saw-toothed knife tucked into his belt.
"What do you want, stray?" Gnar's voice was a low, gravelly rasp.
I didn't answer with words. I just pointed a trembling, shimmering, illusionary finger towards the main fire, towards the Bully Boy who was now laughing with his cronies. Then I pointed to the refuse pile where their meal had been thrown. And then, I looked back at Gnar, and I let my own exhaustion, my own fear, my own genuine misery show on my disguised face. I was a scholar, but I was also a damn fine actor when I needed to be.
Gnar's eye flickered with a glimmer of understanding. He saw me not as a threat, but as a kindred spirit. Another piece of shit kicked to the curb by the camp's bullies.
But suspicion was a goblin's natural state. He and his crew were still tense, their hands on their weapons. They were a pack of beaten dogs, ready to bite at any perceived threat.
This was the critical moment. I closed my eyes, shutting out the squalor of the camp, and focused inward. I reached for my power, for the subtle, insidious tool that was rapidly becoming my greatest weapon.
Activating Skill: Subtle Influence (Tier 2)
The mana drain was sharp, a noticeable dip in my reserves. The hum in my skull intensified. I gathered the threads of my will, not into a single word, but into a complex, tailored concept. This wasn't about brute force. It was about resonance. I had to plant a thought that would harmonize with their own bitter, resentful worldview.
I focused on Gnar, the leader, the one whose mind was the strongest, the most resistant. I didn't push trust. Trust was a human concept, a foreign language to these creatures. I pushed something they would understand.
This one is like us. Scum. Hates the big ones. Two more blades are better than none. Useful scum.
It wasn't a command. It was a seed of pragmatic self-interest. I felt the faint, psychic resistance of Gnar's mind, a wall of stubborn, paranoid hatred. I didn't try to break it. I seeped through the cracks, letting the suggestion settle not as an order, but as one of his own cunning, opportunistic thoughts.
I felt the subtle give, the moment of acceptance. The resistance didn't vanish; it just… relaxed.
I opened my eyes. Gnar was still staring at me, his one eye narrowed. But the hand on his knife had loosened. He looked me up and down, then looked at the empty space where Elara was hiding.
"You and the other one," he grunted. "You can sit. But you touch our scraps, and we cut your throat while you sleep."
It was the most welcoming invitation I had ever received.
I gave a pathetic, grateful nod and shuffled over to the edge of their miserable circle, sitting down in the mud. A moment later, Elara's shimmering, goblin-shaped form detached itself from the shadows and sat down beside me. Her presence was a silent, deadly promise. We were in.
The next few hours were a masterclass in misery. We just sat there, trying to be as unnoticeable as possible. The Guttersnipes, as I'd named them, ignored us, which was the best we could hope for. They spoke in low, bitter grunts, complaining about the chieftain, the Bully Boys, the lack of food, the cold, the damp, the sheer, unrelenting shittiness of their existence.
And as I sat there, a silent, disguised observer in this circle of goblin despair, something began to shift within me.
I had come here seeing goblins as a monolithic entity. A pest to be exterminated. A resource to be farmed for experience points. The ones we'd fought had been vicious, cruel, and deserved to die. The chieftain and his cronies were monsters who practiced cannibalism and rape as a matter of course.
But these goblins… they were different.
I watched Gnar, the one-eyed leader. After a while, he got up and rummaged in the refuse pile, eventually finding the burnt, dirt-covered rodent the Bully Boy had thrown away. He brought it back to the fire and, with his own knife, carefully scraped off the worst of the filth. He then broke the meager morsel into ten tiny pieces, giving a piece to each of his crew, keeping the smallest, most burnt piece for himself. It was an act of leadership, of shared hardship, that I would not have thought possible.
I watched Pip, the smallest goblin, who huddled close to the embers, his thin shoulders shaking not just from the cold, but from a constant, low-level fear. He wasn't a monster. He was a terrified child trapped in a brutal, unforgiving society.
I looked at their stats again, my Analysis skill digging deeper.
[Target: Gnar, Goblin Scrounger (Level 3)]
[Attributes: STR 7, DEX 8, VIT 7, INT 6, WIL 8]
[Notes: Possesses unusually high Willpower for his species. Exhibits protective instincts towards his designated pack. Harbors deep resentment towards current tribal leadership.][ Confidence: 77% ]
[Target: Pip, Goblin Runt (Level 2)]
[Attributes: STR 4, DEX 7, VIT 5, INT 5, WIL 3]
[Notes: Malnourished. Chronically terrified. Unlikely to survive to adulthood under current conditions.][ Confidence: 89% ]
They weren't just goblins. They were Gnar and Pip. They had stats, just like me. They had motivations. They had fears. They were trapped at the bottom of a system every bit as cruel and unforgiving as the one that had dropped me into this world. They were suffering under the boot of the same chieftain who was, at this very moment, tormenting a helpless human woman in his hut.
The enemy wasn't goblins. The enemy was the chieftain. The enemy was the brutal, violent hierarchy he had created. The Guttersnipes weren't the problem. They were the solution.
My plan, the one I had so carefully crafted in my journal, felt small now. Pathetic. Surgical assassination? Killing the chieftain and his guards and then sneaking away, leaving the camp to descend into chaos? That was a coward's plan. It was a plan that left the fundamental problem unsolved. A new, bigger, meaner goblin would just take the old one's place, and the cycle of misery would continue.
No.
A new plan began to form in my mind, a plan so audacious, so utterly insane, that it made my first plan look like a model of cautious restraint.
I wasn't here to perform a quiet assassination. I wasn't here to just rescue the humans. That was thinking too small. That was the thinking of a survivor. I was a Leader now. And a leader didn't just solve the immediate problem. A leader reshaped the entire board.
I looked at Gnar, at his one cunning, hateful eye. I looked at his pathetic, loyal crew of ten miserable runts. This wasn't just a gang of outcasts. This was the nucleus of an army. This was the foundation of a new regime.
The plan was no longer to start a fire and slip away in the confusion.
The problem, as always, was the how. How do you talk a pack of beaten, paranoid dogs into trying to take down the bear that rules their forest?
My gaze fell on the dying embers. Fire. The first tool. The first comfort. The first weapon. And theirs was pathetic.
I nudged the small, whimpering goblin, Pip, with my foot. He flinched, curling into a tighter ball. I didn't push him. I just pointed a shimmering, illusionary finger at the scattered coals.
My voice, when I spoke, was a guttural rasp, a clumsy imitation of their harsh, barking language. My Scholar ability translated the meaning, but the music was all wrong. I sounded like a man with a mouthful of gravel trying to order a coffee.
"Fire… bad," I grunted.
The one-eyed leader, Gnar, turned his head, his single eye narrowing with suspicion. He had allowed us into his circle, a decision likely nudged along by the subtle grease of my mental influence, but the welcome was as cold as the mud we sat in.
"Fire is fire," he rasped back, a statement of profound, nihilistic truth. "Goes out. Always."
"No," I said, shaking my head. I shuffled forward on my knees, an act of submission, of making myself smaller. I began to gather the scattered embers with my hands, ignoring the faint heat. I arranged them in a tight, compact pile. Then I looked at their pathetic stack of damp, mossy twigs. I pointed at it. "Bad wood. Wet."
I then pointed towards the refuse pile, a stinking mound of bones, scraps, and filth. Specifically, I pointed at the discarded pile of dried animal dung the Bully Boy had commanded them to use.
"That… good," I grunted. It felt absurd to be giving a lecture on the combustible properties of dried feces, but this was the world I lived in now.
Gnar watched me, his expression unreadable. He thought I was insane. But a spark of curiosity, or perhaps just a desperate desire for a little more warmth, flickered in his eye. He gave a curt nod to one of his crew, a lanky goblin with a missing ear. The goblin scurried over to the refuse pile and, with a look of profound disgust, gathered a few dry, greyish cakes of dung.
He brought them back and dropped them at my feet. I took one, broke it into smaller pieces, and carefully arranged it over the glowing embers. Then, I began to blow. Gently, steadily. It was a technique I'd read about in a historical text on ancient survival methods, a footnote in a book I'd consumed for a forgotten anthropology credit. I had never imagined it would be the first step in fomenting a goblin revolution.
For a moment, nothing happened. The embers just glowed sullenly. One of the Guttersnipes snickered, a wet, ugly sound. Then, a tiny, hesitant flame licked up from the dung. It was a weak, blueish thing, but it was fire. I kept blowing, and the flame grew, catching on the other pieces. The fire didn't roar, but it burned with a steady, surprisingly intense heat. It was a small, stinking, but undeniably effective fire.
The circle of goblins leaned in, their faces illuminated by the new, stronger light. The warmth washed over them, a small, temporary reprieve from the constant misery of their existence. The snickering stopped.
Gnar looked from the fire to me. His one eye held a new expression. It wasn't trust. It wasn't friendship. It was the look of a creature recognizing a tool. I wasn't just scum. I was useful scum.
"You know fire," he stated. It was a profound compliment.
"I know things," I replied, my voice still a clumsy rasp. I settled back into my spot, letting the silence stretch. I had made my opening move. Now, it was his turn.
He poked the new fire with a stick, his brow furrowed in thought. "Why you here?" he finally asked, his eye pinning me. "Not from this tribe. You smell… wrong."
My heart skipped a beat. The illusion was just that—an illusion. It couldn't mask everything.
"Tribe is dead," I lied, the story coming easily to my lips. I gestured vaguely to the east. "Orcs. Came in the night. We ran. Only two left." I pointed from myself to Elara's silent, shimmering form.
Gnar grunted. It was a common enough story. Tribes rose and fell. The world was a meat grinder. He seemed to accept it.
"This tribe… next," he muttered, more to himself than to me. He spat into the mud. "Chief Grul is a fat worm. Gets soft. The Bully Boys are his grubs. Fat, too. They take the meat. They take the good-dirt by the war-fire. We get scraps. We get the cold mud."
This was it. The shared grievance. The foundation of all alliances.
"We saw," I said, my voice dripping with pathetic sympathy. "The Bulry Boy. Took your food."
"Gruk!" The curse was a stone thrown into the quiet. It came from Pip, the smallest goblin. He was staring at the main fire with an expression of pure, childish hatred. "Hate Bully Boys! Hate Grul!"
Gnar cuffed him again, but this time there was no gentleness in it. It was a sharp, silencing blow. "Quiet, runt! You want your tongue cut out?"
Pip whimpered and fell silent, but the sentiment hung in the air. The seed of rebellion wasn't mine to plant. It was already here, buried in the cold mud of their resentment. All I had to do was water it.
I leaned forward, my voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Grul… he has new things. Bigskins." I used their crude term for humans.
Gnar's eye flashed. "Saw them. More food for the fat ones. We will get the bones, maybe. If we are lucky."
"One… is for breeding," I said, the words tasting like poison in my mouth.
A wave of disgust, so potent it was almost a physical force, radiated from the circle of goblins. It was a shocking, revelatory moment. I had assumed that rape and brutality were just part of their culture. But here, on the fringes, among the downtrodden, there was a line. A taboo. I assume that rape wasn't a natural part of their culture, but very much could be, If this continued.
"That is bad-sky," Gnar growled, his voice a low rumble of genuine revulsion. "Grul is weak. A weak chief steals strength from others. A strong chief makes the tribe strong. Grul… he makes the tribe weak. He makes us… filth."
He was a leader. Trapped in the body of a goblin, ruling over a kingdom of mud and refuse, but a leader nonetheless. He understood the fundamental principle that his chieftain had forgotten: that a leader's strength is a reflection of his people's strength.
The time was right. I activated Subtle Influence again, the hum in my head growing louder, the drain on my mana more pronounced. I didn't push a command. I pushed a question. A dangerous, seductive question that I wrapped in the logic of his own ambition.
A weak chief can be replaced. The tribe needs a strong chief. One who knows fire. One who feeds his crew. One who would not steal from his own.
I felt his mind seize on the thought. It wasn't my thought anymore. It was his. The idea resonated with every bitter, resentful fiber of his being. I could feel the wall of his paranoia, the lifetime of ingrained caution, warring with the sudden, brilliant flare of ambition.
He looked at me, his one eye seeming to pierce right through my shimmering illusion, right through my skull, and into the calculating, manipulative mind within.
"You are not just scum," he whispered, his voice a strange mixture of awe and suspicion. "You have a snake's tongue. You speak of… dangerous things."
"The world is dangerous," I whispered back. "To be weak is to be dead. Grul is weak. He makes you weak."
Gnar was silent for a long time. He stared into the flames of our small, stinking fire, the light dancing in his single eye. I could almost see the battle raging within him. The fear against the hope. The caution against the ambition.
Finally, he spoke. "Words are wind. Grul has fifty spears. His Bully Boys have iron. We have broken sticks and empty bellies. Your words are good. But the math is bad."
He was right. And he was testing me. He was asking for a plan. He was asking me to show him that I was more than just a snake-tongued wanderer.
This was the moment of truth. The moment the alliance would be forged or broken.
I leaned in so close that our illusionary heads were almost touching. I could smell his foul, meaty breath. I looked at the ten pathetic, hopeful, terrified faces around the fire. Then I looked at Gnar.
"The math is not fifty against ten," I whispered, my voice barely audible over the crackle of the fire. I pointed a shimmering finger towards the cage where the two human men were being held. "The Bigskins. They are not livestock. They are weapons."
Gnar stared at me, his mind struggling to comprehend the paradigm shift I was proposing. To him, humans were food. Or slaves. Or, in the case of the chieftain, breeding stock. They were things. Objects.
"And there is another," I continued, my voice a hypnotic, insistent murmur. I pointed towards the chieftain's hut. "The female. She is not for breeding. She is an assassin, waiting for a door to be opened." I was lying, of course. She was a terrified Level 1 transfer. But in the world of plans and stories, she could be whatever I wanted her to be.
I felt a sharp pulse of alarm from Elara through our mental link. What are you doing? This wasn't the plan.
The plan changed, I sent back, a simple, absolute statement.
I turned my full attention back to Gnar. His one eye was wide now, the pupil a black hole of dawning, terrifying understanding. He was beginning to see the world not as it was, but as it could be. He was beginning to see the pieces on the board.
"The math is not fifty against ten," I repeated, my voice like the hiss of a serpent. "It is fifty against thirteen. And one of them… is a ghost who can walk through walls. And another…" I let my gaze drift to Elara's silent, deadly form, "…is a butcher who can kill five of them before they can scream."
I let the words hang in the air, a tapestry of lies and half-truths woven into a beautiful, compelling picture of hope. I had offered him a new kind of idea. The idea of a rebellion.
Gnar stared at me, his breath coming in short, sharp hisses. The fear was still there, a deep, primal instinct. But for the first time, it was overshadowed by something else. A wild, dangerous, exhilarating glimmer of possibility.
He looked at his crew, at their pathetic, hopeful faces. He looked at the main fire, at the fat, arrogant Bully Boys who tormented him. He looked at the chieftain's hut, the source of his tribe's decay. Then he looked back at me.
He didn't speak. He just gave a single, slow, deliberate nod.
The pact was made.