CHAPTER 3 — “The Goblin’s Tax”
The dungeon entrance smells like wet dog and broken dreams.
I crouch at the trapdoor, fingers tracing symbols I carved two hundred years ago, and my stomach does something complicated. Not quite fear. Not quite excitement. Something in between that tastes like copper and feels like standing at the edge of a very tall cliff.
Jump or don’t jump. Live or don’t live.
Story of my existence, apparently.
The seal pulses warm under my palm—recognition, welcome, finally you’re home—and the trapdoor swings open on hinges that shouldn’t work after two centuries but somehow do. Stone steps spiral down into nothing. Darkness so complete it looks solid.
I could walk away.
The thought bubbles up uninvited, tempting. I could turn around, leave the village to its slow death, find somewhere else to be pathetic and alone. Somewhere without dungeons. Somewhere without memories carved into architecture.
Somewhere without hope.
My hand tightens on the trapdoor frame. The wood creaks.
No.
I didn’t survive betrayal and death and two hundred years of nothing to run away from goblins. I didn’t claw my way back into existence to be a coward. I was many things in my past life—arrogant, obsessive, apparently blind to my wife fucking my best friend—but I was never a coward.
I’m not starting now.
I take the first step down.
The tunnels swallow me whole.
Every footfall echoes wrong, bouncing off walls I can barely see, returning as whispers that sound almost like words.
The bioluminescent moss patches are sparse down here, casting pools of sickly green light separated by stretches of absolute dark.
I move through them like a swimmer coming up for air—brief moments of visibility before plunging back under.
My stick feels stupid in my hands. Just wood. Just dead tree. The kind of weapon a child would carry while playing adventurer.
I used to conjure blades of crystallized lightning. I used to weave shields from pure mathematical certainty. I used to—
Stop.
I force the memories down, lock them in a box somewhere deep. That was then. This is now. And right now, I have a stick and twelve mana points and a body that’s already starting to ache from walking down stairs.
Forty-two years old in my last life. Unknown age in this one—Edrin’s body looks young, maybe early twenties, but it moves like something that was never properly maintained.
Joints pop when they shouldn’t. Muscles protest basic movement.
There’s a wheeze in my lungs that suggests the mana sickness did more damage than just killing him.
I inherited a fixer-upper.
The first goblin finds me while I’m distracted by my own self-pity.
The shriek comes from above.
I don’t think. Don’t plan. Two hundred years of combat instinct takes over before my conscious mind catches up, and I’m diving sideways, rolling across stone that scrapes my palms bloody, coming up in a crouch with my stick raised like it’s going to do anything useful.
The goblin lands where I was standing. Three feet of mottled green skin, yellow eyes, teeth like broken glass. It’s wearing something that might have been clothing once, carrying something that might have been a knife once, and it’s looking at me like I’m dinner.
“Hey there,” I say, because apparently I talk to things that want to eat me. “Nice night for it.”
It screams and lunges.
I swing the stick.
The impact jars my arm all the way to the shoulder, sends vibrations through my teeth, but the goblin staggers back with a new dent in its skull. Not dead. Not even close. Just pissed off.
It comes again. Faster this time, learning, that crude knife leading. I twist aside—too slow, the blade catches my forearm, pain blooms hot and immediate—and bring the stick down on its back.
Again.
Again.
The goblin drops. Twitches. Goes still.
I stand over it, breathing like I just ran a marathon, blood dripping from my arm onto stone that’s already stained with older, darker things. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat.
One goblin. Level 2, maybe Level 3. And I’m shaking like a leaf.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐│ COMBAT RESOLVED │├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤│ Enemy defeated: Goblin Scout (Level 2) ││ XP gained: 15 ││ Method: Blunt force trauma (repeated) ││ ││ Damage taken: 13 HP ││ Current HP: 32/45 ││ ││ "You beat a goblin to death with a stick.
││ Your ancestors would be so proud. If you ││ had any.
Which you don't. Anymore." │└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
I sink to my knees next to the corpse.
Not from exhaustion. Not entirely. It’s something else—something that claws up from my chest and lodges in my throat, making it hard to breathe. The goblin’s eyes are still open, glassy and empty, and I remember—
I remember Dario’s eyes. Right before the blade went in.
You understand, don’t you? You were always the understanding one.
My fist hits the stone before I realize I’m moving. Pain lances up my arm, sharp and clean, and it’s almost a relief. Something physical. Something real. Something that isn’t the memory of my best friend killing me with my own enchanted sword.
“Get it together,” I mutter. “Get it together, get it together, get it—”
I use [Basic Bandaging] on my arm. Watch the wound close slowly, flesh knitting in a way that would’ve been instantaneous with proper healing magic. Two mana gone. Ten left.
The goblin stares at nothing.
I close its eyes, and I don’t know why I bother. It’s a goblin. A monster. A dungeon spawn that exists only to die and respawn and die again.
But it was alive, and now it’s not, and I’m the reason.
Welcome back to adventuring.
The next hour teaches me things I’d forgotten.
Pain, for instance. I’d forgotten how much it helps you focus.
Every cut, every bruise, every screaming muscle fiber—they all add up to a single crystalline point of now.
No room for memories. No space for grief.
Just the next step, the next breath, the next swing of a stick that’s getting slick with things I don’t want to think about.
I fight three more goblins before I stop counting.
The second pair catches me in a narrow tunnel, nowhere to run, and I learn that [Herb Sense] can identify stingweed growing in the cracks between stones.
I learn that stingweed causes blistering contact dermatitis in most humanoid species.
I learn that goblins are very much included in “most humanoid species.”
The screaming is awful. I do it anyway.
The third goblin—alone, smaller, maybe a juvenile—runs when it sees me coming. I let it go. I tell myself it’s because I’m conserving energy, because chasing isn’t worth the HP cost, because strategic thinking matters more than kill counts.
I tell myself a lot of things.
My hands are still shaking when I reach the end of the tunnel system. Still covered in blood that’s mostly not mine. I look down at them—at the calluses forming, at the scratches and scrapes, at the green-brown stains that won’t come off—and I don’t recognize them.
These aren’t the hands of an Archmage.
These are the hands of someone surviving.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that has to be enough.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐│ SKILL SYNERGY DETECTED │├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤│ \[Herb Sense\] + \[Basic Bandaging\] ││ ││ Interaction identified: Herbal application ││ during wound treatment ││ ││ NEW SKILL AVAILABLE: \[Poultice Crafting\] ││ ││ Accept?
\[Y/N\] ││ ││ "Look at you, accidentally discovering ││ things.
Like a baby finding its toes." │└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
I stare at the notification.
Skill synergies. The System has skill synergies now. Two hundred years of development and they finally implemented the feature I suggested back when I was on the original design committee—
Wait.
Wait wait wait.
I was on the original design committee. When the System first appeared, chaotic and unfinished, a handful of the most powerful mages were pulled in to help stabilize it. To patch the bugs. To suggest improvements.
I was one of them.
I helped build this thing.
And if the synergy system works the way I theorized it should…
[Y]
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐│ NEW SKILL UNLOCKED!
││ \[Poultice Crafting\] Lv.1 │├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤│ Tree: Healer (2/10) ││ ││ EFFECT: Combine gathered herbs with bandaging ││ techniques to create enhanced healing items. ││ ││ SYNERGY BONUS: +15% XP (First Discovery) ││ ││ "Nobody else bothered combining trash skills.
││ Because nobody else has trash skills.
││ Funny how that works out." │└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
A laugh bubbles up from somewhere deep—raw and rusty, like machinery that hasn’t been used in too long.
Nobody bothers leveling [Herb Sense] and [Basic Bandaging].
Nobody plays Healer as a main class unless they have a party to heal.
Nobody discovers the synergies because nobody’s desperate enough to try.
I’m desperate.
I’m also the person who suggested this system in the first place.
The universe has a sense of humor. A terrible, vicious sense of humor that I’m choosing to appreciate because the alternative is screaming.
The boss room.
I smell it before I see it—cooking meat, woodsmoke, something rancid underneath. The tunnel opens into a cavern, and I press myself against the wall, edging forward until I can peek around the corner.
Firelight flickers across rough stone walls. Shadows dance. And there, in the center of the space, arranged around a central fire pit like some nightmare version of a campsite, are more goblins than I’ve seen in one place.
I count them. Slowly. Carefully.
Twelve. Maybe fourteen—some are moving, overlapping, hard to distinguish.
Plus the big one.