The goblin sneered at the shocked look on Elijah's face.
It took pleasure from his suffering, particularly the thought that Elijah regretted the mercy he had given.
When the arrow was pulled out, blood spewed forth like a geyser but quickly dropped in pressure.
The blood flow slowed down to a tiny leak and then stopped entirely.
His eyes twitched.
That was when the goblin felt like something was out of place.
Rage crept into Elijah's eyes.
Afraid, the goblin fell back and screamed.
[You have killed a goblin!]
***
Inside the living room of a castle, the Goddess of Fortune laid on a chaise lounge on her side and supported her head with her elbow.
There was a chandelier with glass candle tubes. Instead of lighted candles, there were balls of light of colors blue, green, purple, yellow, red, orange, and white.
They were not spirits of light as that was unethical and uneconomical. These balls of light were the product of the spell [Illuminate]. Although the white "illumin" ball is created from the original spell whereas the other colored lights were made from 6 modified versions of the same spell.
Demon Lord Rowan created the six spells.
It wasn't difficult to make derivatives of a tier 1 spell, but no mage would waste time researching something useless. Genuine mages were obsessed with learning offensive spells and delving into the abyss of magic.
That was even more true for the Demon Lord. It baffled Fortuna when she found out that he was the creator of these spell models.
The illumin balls in the chandelier were one thing in her castle that she showed off to guests.
Sitting on one end of the lounge chair was her right-hand maid who was massaging her feet. They both watched a projection of Elijah in the cave dungeon.
Fortuna could use magic perception to "see" through her blindfold, but she only used her blindfold outside the home and when meeting others. She preferred seeing with her eyes.
"Why do I have the Troll King's clotting factor? Am I… normal?" Muttered Elijah.
'Relax man. It's just a skill name. Just like the Goddess of Fortune's blessing. It's not like she's actually real-'.
Fortuna's glowing white eyes turned red for an instant.
"Ow!"
"Hmph."
Bad luck made the tiny probability of a piece of stone in the ceiling fall on Elijah come true. It reduced the steepness of the gradient in luck thanks to that.
Fortuna is a manipulator of luck, but she cannot create luck. To increase someone's good luck, bad luck had to happen elsewhere to balance it out. She could not increase the total of good luck and bad luck in the world.
Whenever she would shift good luck in the surrounding area to one person, there would be a higher ratio of bad luck outside that central point. This produces a region of concentrated good luck and a region of concentrated bad luck. The steeper the gradient between the two regions, the higher the pressure at their borders.
Good luck wants to spread out from the region it's confined to and bad luck wants to chase after good luck. The law of entropy can simply explain this movement and is like the Brownian motion of solute particles in water and magnetism.
The higher the pressure, the more magic power that is required to keep the regions separate. Even the Goddess of Fortune cannot maintain that barrier even if she had an infinitely high magic regeneration rate unless she had infinite magic capacity.
The magic power consumption of the barrier increases exponentially and limitlessly, eventually, the magic power required in one instant would be greater than her magic cap.
So she had often let go of the barrier. What she did was let the bad luck enter steady amounts. So Elijah will often get into fights with monsters but as long as he could handle it, it was good for him. He needed to get stronger to defend himself.
This way she was "stocking up" the good luck for him when he urgently needed it.
They both saw the goblin stab, Elijah, in the throat with an arrow.
Her maid felt the muscles in Fortuna's feet tense up. She stopped the massage of Fortuna's feet when the latter sat up.
"Even if you remember the person, you wanted to come home to. Will you still be the person who she remembers?"
She wasn't worried if he would survive in his second life. She was concerned if the boy which she doted on would return as himself after all this.
***
[You have killed a goblin!]
[You have killed a goblin!]
[You have killed a goblin!]
[You have leveled up!]
There were three goblins stabbed in the throats with little resistance. One goblin had several stab wounds in its abdomen and chest. Unlike the others, it had died with a pained expression on its face.
Elijah was standing over them staring into space as if he was a catatonic Michael Myers. There was blood all over his uniform and fresh blood dripped from his knife. Of course, he was looking at his status screen.
Elijah already had much vitality, and he didn't find any use for charisma, so he put in 2 points in each of the other attributes and the rest went into strength.
After seeing the damage that his kick did to the goblins, he found this attribute to be the most reliable.
His ears twitched when he heard someone running towards him. It came from an adjacent passage. Elijah was inside the left cave passage where he fought the goblins. He came out and blocked the center passage.
In front of him was a human being, a young woman who was so shocked by his sudden appearance that she nearly tripped.
She took a martial artist's stance. It filled her eyes with hostility.
"Whoa, hey! I'm a human!" Elijah said with his hands in front of him.
She glanced at the bloodied knife he was holding. It glistened red with fresh blood.
The light spirit was dazzling, she had mistaken it for the cave exit when she was fleeing.
"I see. How long have you been working for them, you traitor!"