My team for the assignment ended up being two groups who came together, which made me the third wheel. There ended up being three tankers, a pair of fire and wind mages, a healer who came with the tankers, and an archer who came with the mages. The archer was also our team leader. This was not a very well balanced team, but I had already talked to the leader about my role in the mission because of my goal in the portal.
The portal itself led to a rare environment for E grade and for goblins, a swampy region where two 'small' groups of goblins and spiders were cohabiting. Both species lived in large cypress type trees in an area of the swamp over a mile away from the portal. Even though the spiders were all estimated at F grade, the goblins were still E and the spiders were still the size of large dogs.
For a team with only one real melee fighter despite an immense front line, these enemies would not be that much to deal with. There were more than sixty bodies overall with six confirmed hobgoblins. On top of this, they all lived IN the trees away from the water in residences of old web and old wood while we had a fire mage.
Since I would be bringing Poniard around new people, I decided to spend the days leading up to this assignment teaching him to say hello whenever he makes eye contact with strangers. The one word under simple circumstances was a little hard to get across to him, but once he understood the first half of saying hello on eye contact he had it in the bag. Teaching him to only do it the first time, though, took help from friends of Lucinda and about an hour every day of effort.
When not learning some social behavior, Poniard spent his time practicing staff and spear techniques with weights and I. Even though he was more than capable on facing a fellow goblin head-on, there would be greater numbers and thus much more going on than his first portal trip with me. If he had to fight, I wanted him to be able to manipulate the opposite end of the reach spectrum.
On the day of the assignment, the two of us arrived at the paint supply warehouse in which the portal formed to be greeted by agents as usual. When he was measured, Poniard came out over one-twenty in MP and I came out at just over one-ninety. When the guy measuring me started giving his device a funny look, I say, "The meter isn't wrong, my profile is just on standby for updating because I got that slime surgery."
"One hundred and thirty points with surgery?" The man asks incredulously, drawing the attention of some of the others. "How much did it cost you?"
"Three bags of trash," I reply with the best poker face I could manage, daring the man to consider the implications of my words while I levelly met his gaze.
To avoid my gaze, the man actually looked at Poniard for the first time and my goblin briefly hissed, "Hello."
Something about this must have unnerved the man because he quietly started writing and walked away. Which was honestly pretty rude but Poniard had no way of knowing that. Regardless, the maturing goblin still flashed its teeth at the man's back as if unsatisfied with the lack of interaction.
After this event we started meeting the other teammates and, like a good goblin, Poniard said hello to whoever met his gaze or said hello first. Both of which surprised the others in the party and made them ask questions about him and his training. Which, of course, led to goblin poo.
Honestly, Poniard was wearing a leather tunic closed with the continuation of woven padding and a matching pair of loose leather trousers all plated with bands of ivory segments which made him look like a tutorial boss. At either hip he carried a pair of thickened C grade poniards and worn across his back by a leather strap across his front was a four-foot spear of fused, pointy pentagonal spinal disks printed out as ivory.
At the end of this spear was a five-pound blade made of a matching printed troll ivory and the tapering blade was about fifteen inches in length. Not unlike a poniard, but the spear's blade was thicker and started from two inches wide at the base before tapering down to a slightly rounded but thin point that was a quarter of an inch broad. A poniard's blade tapers to a thin and needling triangular point.
People took a few pictures with the infamous goblin poo and made social media posts about how they were going to help catch goblins. I would have preferred to remain low-key, but it could be potential advertising for once I finished the property. So the only thing I could really do was grin and bear it while trying to explain to everyone that I just got really lucky with this goblin.
Inside the portal the world was actually at roughly the same time zone as the one we left but the world was still dim from the thick canopy of trees growing in the knee-deep water that surrounded us for as far as the eye could see. The trees here towered a couple hundred feet up into the air with branches that competed in length with those heights. The leaves were all a dark teal-like color and the bark was orange and smooth but densely fibrous.
Mosses of different types grew from the tree branches like vines as well as all over the trees in thick clumps. Every now and then I could see or hear the faint traces of creatures living in the canopy. There was no telling what they were, but if they did not come down then they were not a concern.
What was now knee deep for me was about waist deep for Poniard, but he was wearing a miniature two-layer proto-suit and his armor was treated with the good stuff. The only issue I could foresee was in fighting, but the reach of his spear should more than make up for that. Even if he still had trouble, his job was to stick by the ranged fighters.
The general plan was to sneak up on the tree base and just set the entire place on fire, then the tankers would use themselves as bait to draw in those who escaped the fire. These tankers were equipped with smaller round shields that were only about two feet in diameter for dealing with enemies on a more personal level. Paired with simple but effective square-faced hammers, I was confident in their ability to survive.
The wind mage, whose element was pretty much invisible, and the archer would then begin picking off the outer enemies from behind cover while the fire mage, and now Poniard, handled security. My job was to guard the healer who would be hiding within range of both other parties. Even though my goal was to capture some goblins, I would not be playing a very active role.
Unless of course I saw a valid young goblin that would not cost the healer too much energy to save.
Because this dungeon was a swamp, I wore only the C grade combat suit and helmet that the director had given me the day he almost got knocked out, my ivory swords, and my revolvers. This left plenty of room for me to wear a coil of light rope around my torso in place of my big sword or rifle. So, as soon as I saw a decent goblin I just had to run out and grab it and come back.
I had more than a little trouble early on keeping pace with the others because I would constantly break traveling formation and leave them behind. My current top speed was only thirty miles per hour right now because my treadmill peaked at that speed. I would need a real speed gun and a long stretch of road to find my new top speed.
After a few minutes of being distracted by the young and cute healer who seemed to be the mascot for the tankers, though, I got used to slowing down for other people. It was enough to make me wonder what I looked like to Lucinda when I was hurrying between floors. Sadly, this was the other side of a portal and not at home.
As the same kind of responsible leader that Ms. Gwyn was turning out to be, the archer and wind mage had already done their own scouting. When we had halved the distance, the archer raised a closed fist hand sign for everyone to stop before we took up our proper formations. This was the point of no return and the last opportunity for an equipment check.
The water got vaguely deeper here and the tree roots got larger to compensate, which only increased my worries for Poniard. Of course, this meant it would only be easier to catch and kill goblins once their homes were destroyed. Unless I accidentally drowned one while tying it up, but there was not much to be done about that.
We could see the trees the homes were made in in the distance twelve minutes of slowly creeping forward later. These trees were bigger and grew closer together, allowing layers of old and new webbing alike to form bridges with logs and branches connecting the innermost trees that were the closest together. Underneath these trees was one giant spike trap of tree roots rising up from the water to breathe.
Considering that our plan was to set the goblins and everything else on fire, there probably was not a better location anywhere around. If the goblins and spiders fell from their homes, they fell to their deaths. Only some form of divine intervention or some hellacious luck could help them survive falling among all of those roots.
Finding different areas to hide in that were close to both each other and the goblin web settlement were not that easy. There was little besides trees and their roots in the area to use for cover, maybe parts of branches sticking up out of the water and the like but that was all. Nothing that could really help us out.
After a couple of minutes of silently surveying the area without finding anywhere that could appropriately hide the tankers, we decided to simply set them further back from us and ave them move forward once the fire starts while making noise. The goblins will at least think it was them and make moves based on that misdirection.
Poniard barely even had to hide, the brackish water that reached over his navel here was plenty to just hunker down low in so that only his nose, eyes, and the top of his ears and head were visible and he blended in… swimmingly. The others were not as fond of trying to use the surrounding stagnant water to hide in, leading the archer and mages to go back and collect branches to make a small blind with.
When everybody was finally done complaining about how hard it was to hide in the dark swamp turned out and were in the positions, I played the go between for the tankers and archers by receiving a nod from the tankers further away and then nodding to our team leader. When he received by affirmation that the tankers were ready, the archer passed the queue along and a few moments later there were streams of bright orange flames rushing up into the web-strung community.
Just as planned, the flames swiftly ate away large areas of old webbing while drying out the new and spreading outward. Over a dozen arrow like lines of fire were shot all around the middle tree covered in the most webbing and just that dozen was plenty to start spreading to the old wood making up floors and walls as well at searing into the bark of the tree itself.
*