Rargnes woke up around noon, feeling tired.
"Man, last night was something!" he said.
"Yesterday was great!"!" replied Sengrar – the one who had tried magic at the beginning of the apocalypse.
It had been two weeks since he started drinking, and he felt alive! A weight seemed to have lifted off his shoulders, although stress still flowed daily – his memories reminded him to be cautious.
He felt the weight of his gun in his jacket.
"Maybe I just hallucinated that night. There were so many things... false memories exist too."
His lie helped him lower the stress that gnawed at him.
He played cards, laughing with his friends in a circle, ignoring the growing discontent of the other two groups. He would then see them to extract information.
That's when a scream echoed in the supermarket.
A scream coming from his group! He ran to their location, at the supermarket entrance, and saw panicked people fleeing behind him.
Goblins stood at the supermarket door. A quick glance from left to right showed him about a dozen, all armed with big knives – even the two archers behind them had them at their belts. They wore armor of multiple layers of leather or another material that made their figures look bigger.
Should he shoot? Reveal his gun?
He frantically searched for his small group of acquaintances but didn't see them. He decided to run back, zigzagging through every turn of the supermarket before reaching the bathrooms.
He tried the handle, but it remained stuck.
"Get lost!" someone told him.
"Damn it, open up! There are goblins!"
"Find another place! Beat it!"
Rargnes pounded brutally on the door, then looked at the entrance of the restrooms, not seeing any goblins. He immediately pulled out his firearm and ran.
The group was gathered in another corner of the supermarket, with no goblins around. He realized. A dozen against a hundred, even if the goblins were better equipped, their size made them naturally weaker.
No, probably, they just wanted to observe the number of humans to call their masters.
Hardly any goblin was emancipated where one version of him had been. But, like the eunuchs in history, they filled essential functions in society, from magicians to ministers, which made them even more hated.
Rargnes inspected the terrified group and slipped past the group he liked. A group of six people, three he really liked – Sengrar, Ecrof, and Herz – three he had to think about to remember their names.
"We were worried about you," said Herz, trembling. "Where did you go?"
For a moment, Rargnes wondered, a legacy of his old habits, whether he should tell them or not, even though it was positive. That meant strengthening the relationship.
"I ran towards you when I heard the noise. I thought you were at the front door, drunk from last night's party."
He read a face of recognition. Sengrar, to his right, put his big hand on his shoulder and thanked him, tears in his eyes. The colossus was quite tall, measuring a good head taller than him and with a muscular, broad body.
He would have made a perfect warrior had he chosen that class. Maybe he wanted to do both.
Lost in thought during his discussions with the group members, he noticed that he felt energy forming around him, and an idea came to him – couldn't he notice when he was in combat by using this internal energy feedback?
If he decided to tire himself out in sports and felt this energy, it meant there was combat preparation. If it worked like that.
He took out a notebook and scribbled down his thoughts in the middle of the conversation. Then he asked, "What do you want to do?"
They looked at the group. Someone was sitting on a crate of products, a knife in hand, trying to get others to fight.
Someone contradicted him, saying that the goblins had firearms. The other replied:
"We're not going to let our civilization be destroyed like this!"
The words weighed on Sengrar's face. He felt from him an even stronger force than his body.
Even Rargnes felt something, his mind hurriedly telling him he was not a tool. He could help in many ways but never in blood.
Sengrar looked at each one of them and proposed that they join him.
"I'm in," said Rargnes immediately, without hesitation. Ecrof joined, too, as well as another group member, a friend of Sengrar whose name he had already forgotten.
Sengrar walked ahead of them, pushing people with his physique, and shouted at the man that they were ready to follow him, drawing his knife.
"It's fight or die!"
'Or flee, or be enslaved,' thought Rargnes.