Chapter 8: Chapter 8: Caves, and goblins, and dragons, oh my!

After being "blessed" I continued moving for a few days. I developed a sort of routine. Travel along the river until I tire, set up camp a ways away, eat some combination of fish and produce, then sleep. I've had to deal with a few monsters along the way, but with a combination of my game knowledge and lightning magic I managed to dispatch them easily. Hell sometimes the monsters made for a good meal. I'm not the best at dismantling the corpses though so I probably wasted a lot of valuable materials. Of course leaving a litteral trail of corpses would cause me problems, so I either burned the leftovers with magic or buried them if they were fire resistant.

Eventually I stumbled on an important landmark. It was a cave. In the game this cave was an optional dungeon. In reality, at least on the island of Esu, there are no traditional fantasy dungeons. You know the ones from your average iseaki, that make loot and monsters out of mana and constantly refil. Supposedly those exsist on mainland as there is an adventurers guild, but on Esu we have the monster slaying guild. They act like pest exterminators. Its common knowledge among those guys to not step into caves like these, unless you want to be slaughtered in an embarrassing fashion with little to no chance to fight back. The reason for your terrible end would be goblins.

Keeping with the trend that all typical fantasy creatures have some form of regional variant, goblins are very different. Instead of a very common and weak mook, goblins in Esu are basically vampires that only got the negative traits. Hell they even look like nosferatu. 

Legend has it in this world, that the island of Esu was once long ago over run with goblins. If you took a few steps out of town you'd get jumped by a few. Of course they were hilariously weak and ineffective. Even a child waving a stick could drive them off. This weakness didn't stop the goblins from trying though. They would jump almost any and everything as long as it wasn't a goblin.

 One day a very powerful wizard got jumped ten times by goblins in the span of a day. This got him so fed up, that in a blind rage he devised a powerful curse that he later forgot, and cursed every single goblin on the island. The curse made the goblins reproduce much slower, made them die if touched by sunlight, and made it so they could only survive off goblin blood. 

Due to sunlight being reflected off the moon, the goblins were forced to hide in caves even at night, where they would take turns feasting off each other's blood. There was also a benefit this curse applied to the goblins. It made them smarter. It is theorized that the intent behind this effect was to make the goblins recognize when their out matched, and it works if that was the case. This did back fired however, as the now smarter goblins devised various nefarious traps and poisons to booby trap their caves with. Of course they aren't smart enough to know that making peace is an option unfortunately.

In the game there were many caves like the one in front of me, that all contained numerous goblins. They were real nasty buggers, who would dodge all your attacks with high evasion and give you every kind of debuff and negative effect possible. Of course even an unarmed level one character could kill them in a single hit if they landed it though. This made these optional side dungeons INCREDIBLY resource intensive to clear. There were three silver linings to these. The first is if you made it through to the end, you'd find the goblin's hoard that was filled with good loot and get tons of exp. The second is that as you killed more and more goblins the encounter rate would get lower and lower, as they realized they can't beat you. The third is if you highly out level the recommended level of the cave, the goblins would immediately recognize they can't win and leave you alone. While the loot hoard is large enough to make a D&D dragon blush, I'm not touching the inside of this cave with a 100 meter pole. As I'm a eleven year old girl I'm not very threatening and I don't have the resources to fight my way through yet. I'm just gonna use it as a landmark so I can get my barings and move on.

Speaking of dragons, they could provide some knowledge that would be useful to me. In this world dragons are pretty much extinct. All that's left are species of sub-dragons like the quotal and one actual dragon that's an optional post-game supper boss. Dragons were basically the dinosaurs here. Masive hulking lizards that would be terrifying if they were alive today. The only evidence they exsisted other than the boss are fossils rarely found deep underground. Dragons are no joke. Even their fossilized remains have enough magic in them to power a mana bomb capable of destroying a large city. Scholars in this world don't know a lot about dragons. The only thing they can use to get clues about dragons are incredibly rare and are often quickly used up to power powerful artifacts.

The post-game boss is found frozen in a massive block of ice, and when released goes berserk. Its implied dragons have a completely different magic language than humans because the spells in game that the dragon uses are all in a different language than the rest of the game, no matter which language you play in.

This language is the useful piece of info. Basically the only way to win the fight was to keep a temporary buff that reflects magic damage up at all times, and hope you don't get smashed to a bloody pulp by its physical attacks. That's how strong the spells were. Judging by the fact the dragon went berserk, its likely the magic the dragon was using was used off instinct. This has terrifying implications as spells get stronger the more focus you put into them. The dragon's magic language is likely several magnitudes more powerful than the magic I can use currently. If I could use even just one of those spells, the power I could wield would be devastating enough to easilycrush the organization. Its a gamble however because the spells are likely very costly. I wasn't really able to try out those spells as they'd likely blow up the whole mansion, if they succeeded, me included. Now that I'm several days out from any civilization on the other hand. . . 

"KukukuhaHaHaAhHAHAHAHA" I couldn't help but cackle at the thought.

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Cornelius pov

While searching, the team found an anomaly. There was an abnormal amount of dead fish in the river. The cause of death is currently unknown. Right now the running theory is that some kind of poison is the reason, but we have no concrete evidence. After some test we've found no poison left in the river. Really weird. Some are worried about what this means for the young lady.

 The organization might need to pivot to plan B...

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