After being forced to watch an endless loop of the same training videos for two days I finally caught the little guy practicing kicks. We were in the basement and I was currently working out with wall squats while he was recovering by the artifact. Out of the corner of my eye I catch this guy doing the ugliest spinning heel kick that I had ever seen and hits the floor.
Kids being made fun of in videos on the internet could pull off a better stunt than that!
Despite how downright dissatisfying at was to see the culmination of two days of videos in such a form, I hurried through the rest of my one-legged sets so I could pick up my phone. His sales post was updated with the line 'has officially begun formal training at the time of the edit tag'. Then I gave him a quick check by forcing him to do some awkward stretches.
Now that the goblin was trying to replicate what it was watching, it not only showed its interest in learning to fight but also its ability to retain enough information to… fall. With this important flag having been raised, it was my time to actively teach it these things. Not only to make sure it learns the proper methods and techniques for health reasons down the road but also to continually reassert the dominance of humans.
Standing the goblin's current tablet up in his chair, I make it loop the initial basics video and help walk it through the much simpler punches and kicks. The goblin that already had some extent of combat experience was quick to pick up proper extensions and balance. The goblin itself could not actually understand the explanations, so I had to show it in more depth.
After only an hour of this down, it could properly perform each punch and mostly properly perform each kick in the basic video. One at a time. Doing them in sequence or in time with the video was still a long way off.
Lucinda had continued to loosen up more and get over what happened, but she would start getting mad if I hung out around the kitchen too much and distracted her. She was also less tired from her business trip, now, and had more time to spend at home. On top of that, I would catch her watching the goblin watching videos every now and then.
I would not be able to associate the word 'cute' with a creature like this as much as I would use the word 'interesting', but women would probably outright call a young goblin with a tablet a cute modern child. I once proved this by remarking about how we could sneak him into a group of real kids on their phones at the mall if we dress him up right."
Her immediate response was a dryly sarcastic, "Oh, yeah, we'll do it at Christmas and see if Santa even notices when a goblin sits on his lap and grunts 'food'."
The goblin's sale post became pretty active after I invited people to actually talk. At first it was the basic food and training questions, which I answered honestly for the most part. I fed the thing lean ground beef and made it run with fifty pounds of weight for extended periods of time, what more do they need?
Some people were interested in its personality for some unknown reason. I outright told them that its personality blooms as brightly as a smudged flower on wallpaper as soon as you put a screened device in its hands. Some people asked about its health and adjusting to Earth, to which I proudly replied with its Bureau evaluation and the clockwork-like timing of its bowel movements.
Accompanied by a picture of giant goblin poo in an equally large litter box.
The goblin's post went pretty quiet after that, much like the marketplaces, but after a few more days of exercising and training the goblin it could perform the entire combined set of basic punches and kicks in the video. Repetition was all it needed, lots and lots of repetition. Now came the part where he ground the actions into his muscles, repeating the combined set at the end of the first video again and again until he could do it in time with the video.
I did, however, take a video of the goblin in shorts performing an entire basic combined set while watching the video on the living room TV screen so the goblin and video could be compared. In just ten minutes the goblin's value doubled to twelve pounds of D grade MP scrap steel. Twenty minutes later, the person who previously offered a poniard nearly got the goblin again.
Not only did they up the scrap value to fifteen pounds but they also added the better offer of a D grade morning star weighing the same as the scrap offer. Then, as I was sitting there thinking about a way to keep the ball rolling a small bidding war actually broke out and repeatedly made the app refresh. By the time it was over, the scrap value had been raised to twenty-three pounds and the current best offer was a D grade snakehead core.
Snakeheads were a big humanoid monster that were questionably reptiles or fish in origin, any dungeon containing them were no lower than D even if it only contained one snakehead. Their cores had few individual purposes that I was aware of, but it was still an impressive offer. If they killed the beast themselves, then they were my senpai for sure.
There were some offers I did not want to refuse, though, like an offer of future discounts on material trades with one of the marketplace's bigger names. However, there was one 'sales request' that had nothing to do with the actual goblin. They wanted to know how much it would cost in cash for me to capture a goblin and give it a three-week crash course. I had to stop and consider this request very seriously.
When I asked Lucinda, they said I could do it once I got rid of this one or if I decided to keep this goblin and train it to train others. She also said that if I was going to start a side hustle like this, I could not have more than one goblin in training at. As well as the fact that I could not get out of bed for something like this in her house for less than fifty thousand a head.
When I posted the words of 'my legal guardian and homeowner', there were a few minutes of slow replies talking about how that made sense while it was not my home or that I should move out somewhere I could train goblins by numbers. However, the only reply that mattered was the response of the man who asked me to try taking up goblin training to begin with because they sent me their contact information with a short message to contact them as soon as the service is open.
Because I had received an offer of profits I could not keep to myself, I messaged their number asking if they were interested in any goblins from the same brood and then messaged Ms. Gwyn to see who all still had their goblins. Ms. Gwyn replied swiftly and even mentioned having been called about taking over a recently opened portal but I was still grounded and could only miraculously do one more portal run this month.
After explaining the recent offers for my goblin she understood why I wanted to continue doing subhuman portals for a little while. She said she and the team would take this portal without me and contact me the next time she finds something with goblins or the like. I thanked her and then started spreading the word about my goblin offers and where to find my sales post.
Despite the amount of interest the others suddenly had, it turned out that tings would be different for them. Unlike me who was raising the goblin on the internet to mostly wordless martial arts videos after it showed the ability to retain information, their goblins were still on the educational video phase. Instead of switching subject to preserve the little brainpower the goblins had, they just let them do whatever they wanted while keeping them.
Even though our goblins were from the same brood, the difference in temperaments and activities was vastly different. So, to, were the prices. After accidentally finding a group of bad parents to compare myself to, not only did the value of my goblin go up to twenty-five pounds of D scrap someone offered sixty grand to take priority on my next goblin. I could only inform them that there would not be any line jumping and the value of the service will still start at fifty thousand.
If I actually decided to start training goblins.
While the other three members of the party who still had goblins started cracking down on how they were raised. Even though their goblins knew how to recognize a few words and speak even more, being a parrot was all they could do. My goblin could only say things like 'food' and 'water' and 'sifu', which was Chinese or Cantonese for 'master' and was what he said when he wanted to watch training videos, but he was almost keeping perfect pace with the basics video.
There were only like five punches, three kicks, and two blocking techniques in the basics video but they were pretty universal moves for nearly any situation. Considering goblins only had combat experience instead of training, having a set of practiced moves their bodies could maintain balance through combat with would already be making them stronger, faster, and generally more capable than a wild goblin. Up against one of his siblings who might as well have been a born a week before mine, he would probably dominate even at this beginner level.
With those comparisons in mind, I could not help but wonder if my goblin was not just uniquely inclined or naturally better than 'the average goblin'. So, the next day, instead of having the goblin do more weighted running I showed him how to put on some large arm and leg weights. Then, I spent more than three hours helping him go through the motions of the basics video again and again and again while only having to perform some light corrections every one in a while.
Since the goblin was wearing twenty pounds on either arms and thirty pounds on either leg, this was exactly probably just as exhausting as running on the treadmill. For me, wearing thirty-pound weights on all four limbs, I could keep going but I did not want to. Even though we took our time to make the training session last longer, every punch was pretty much equal to a one-handed swing of my big sword.
Having weights around my shins was not much of a big deal so my kicks were only a little slowed by the weights. However, the cardio involved in spending more than three hours wearing one hundred and twenty pounds of weight was almost intense even more me. Something like this was what I should probably replace my weighted running with.
Martial cardio like this completely wore the little goblin out but there was something odd about the lift of his relaxed and sagging frog face that looked like he was happy. Enjoying himself was probably too HUMAN of a word, but he definitely gave off the aura of somebody who was satisfied. Goblins were intelligent enough to make and use tools and higher evolutions were capable of construction and cattle rearing to some degree, maybe the little guy was actually… having fun!
"Poniard," I say suddenly while looking in the goblin's direction, causing it to open its eyes and raise its head at me. Pointing at the goblin, now, I say, "Poniard." Then, pointing at myself I say, "Sifu… Malcolm." To make sure this point got across, I pointed back and forth while saying our names for a few times.
The goblin actually pointed at itself and breathlessly said, "Ponyerd. Sifu... Malco," he added a few seconds later, pointing over at me.
I immediately took out my phone and informed all of Poniard's potential buyers that Poniard had been named and was no longer for sale but that I would buy the D grade poniard that was earlier offered for thirty thousand and a discount on the third place queue. Half an hour later, the poniard was en route to my front door.
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