Backyard Goblins 2

Alphonse Fisk, Virgil Knightley

Copyright © 2024, Virgil Knightley

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Contents

1. Chapter 1

2. Chapter 2

3. Chapter 3

4. Chapter 4

5. Chapter 5

6. Chapter 6

7. Chapter 7

8. Chapter 8

9. Chapter 9

10. Chapter 10

11. Chapter 11

12. Chapter 12

13. Chapter 13

14. Chapter 14

15. Chapter 15

16. Chapter 16

17. Chapter 17

18. Chapter 18

19. Chapter 19

20. Chapter 20

21. Links to Follow

Chapter 1

It’s strange how a month or two can change so much. I don’t think people really give it enough thought, but in a very brief span of time, the world around you can go from sweltering hot to complete winter stillness. In Wisconsin, this is especially true anywhere near a body of water. Lake Michigan is the biggest example of that, but it happens around every little lake you come across in the state.

But because it happens every year, over and over, it’s just a fact of life. It usually takes something outside of that continuous cycle to give you an appreciation for what can happen in such a short time. You know, like goblin girls from another world stumbling through a magic portal and declaring you as their new king and husband. That sort of thing.

I wasn’t the kind of guy to give creatures like goblins and elves a lot of thought in my day-to-day life. I hadn’t had a lot of time on my hands to game or read since I was in college—certainly not after I became a teacher and then ultimately a homesteader.

I’d had my nose to the grindstone for so long that I’d almost forgotten there was anything else. But I wasn’t ignorant of fantasy tropes. When the three goblins popped up in my backyard, I knew what I was dealing with pretty much right off the bat. Or, so I thought.

Some of the general stereotypes still apply, of course. They were rambunctious, violent bundles of chaos the way you might expect. But they were also constantly horny, in search of approval, and with a genuine desire to be useful and part of something. Their natures as whirlwinds of destruction could get the best of them sometimes, but in their hearts, they just wanted to be safe, loved, and needed. Even when it came to each other, they had difficulty expressing their mutual fondness.

You should have seen how crazy things got just a couple weeks ago when Koko went into heat, triggering the other two to do the same. Hydration had been the name of the game, and we didn’t get many chores done during that stretch of time—thankfully I had someone else around to help pick up the slack and also wrangle the goblin’s libidos.

If it had just been me, it would have been too much. But there was more. Susie Quickly, a friend I’d been having sex with off and on for years, confessed her undying love for me just before all that madness, and I reciprocated. She loved the “little green fuckdolls” as she sometimes called them, too. She’d taken to them like a duck to water, and they had come around to her at different points. It helped that she was every bit the sexual degenerate that they were. Sometimes, they mused that she had been a goblin, like them, in a past life.

I went from using my shipping container retreat in the wilderness for solitary peace to reshaping the land to accommodate the needs of the four women in my life. I went from sleeping on a bedroll in the corner to a giant bed to fit all of us comfortably. I went from spending my days working the land to delegating many of my tasks while I focused my efforts on building things up. Walls, fruit cellars, trampoline, jungle gym—you name it, I built it. I’d even installed a series of security cameras and alarms to keep the perimeter protected and the property private. My blood ran cold just thinking about what could happen to the trio of “little green women” if the government got a hold of them. That fear became a reality when Agent Boulder inserted himself into our lives.

I still didn’t know why he went as far as he did. I don’t know why he went from suspecting me of some illicit drug running or bomb manufacturing scheme to attacking Susie and Koko in Susie’s apartment that day. I’d arrived just in time to prevent whatever sick, deranged thing he had in store for her. Perhaps he found out what was happening on the property. Maybe he got a look at some of the sweaty orgies we were having and wanted a piece for himself. Maybe he didn’t see them as people at all after that. I don’t know. I figured I’d never know because he was dead now. I’d always hoped that if I was thrust into a situation again where it was up to me to protect others, I would be able to act and succeed. I did, but somehow it didn’t feel better.

Don’t get me wrong, it was preferable to the myriad of terrible alternatives. For a while, that was what got me through. But the fact that I’d taken a man’s life never settled. It was like tainted fast food. I just couldn’t fully digest it. There were times when I swore I could see him out of the corner of my eye. Where I thought he was at the front gate again. I was seeing him in my sleep. I could hear his voice trying to tell me to calm down. I would go between fury and panic at times like that. The anxiety was almost as overwhelming as the episodes I had when recalling the shooting from my teaching days.

And then there was Katanika, the Hobgoblin. I’d taken to calling her Kate, and she didn’t seem to mind it. Unlike goblins, I didn’t have any preconceptions about hobgoblins. I thought maybe they were just bigger goblins, but that was about it. Turns out, they were related, but only distantly. What got called a goblin wasn’t usually up to the people under that umbrella. The way she explained it, the other races of their world—Elyndor— were the ones that assigned such classifications.

Koko, Poppi, and Moppi had been less than pleased with Kate’s appearance. It revealed the fact that I had been sneaking off through the portal behind their backs, going on hunts for supernatural creatures in the forest on the other side to strengthen whatever metaphysical power resided within me. Every kill of such savage, aggressive creatures garnered a soul that my body somehow metabolized. The goblins referred to me as a “Special,” while Kate used the term “Zintari” and seemed to have a slightly better understanding of it than the trio, though not by much. For them, the concept was just a reality that they’d had very little influence over.

Not only did the power have an effect on me—granting me superhuman strength, speed, reflexes, and durability—but it gave me the ability to enhance the goblins as well. Later, I realized it allowed me to do it to Kate too after she’d sworn herself to me. Near as any of us could tell, it applied only to those bound to me in some way—who came from Elyndor.

Poppi was the first I’d enhanced, much to the chagrin of the other two. I’d given her the ability to speak more eloquently in my own language, which they called the common tongue. She’d been the one to speak their frustrations when Kate arrived while the other two gnawed on my legs like a couple of pissy chihuahuas.

“You lied to us!” Poppi had said, her little balled fists planted firmly on her curvaceous hips. “You said that you would never go back!”

“Eh, I’m not sure those were my exact words,” I quibbled, holding my hands up defensively. I winced a few times at the feeling of sharp goblin teeth grinding on my legs. To my surprise, it was Susie that came to my rescue.

“Let’s calm down, alright?” she suggested, still rattled from the standoff in her apartment. “Considering everything that’s happened, maybe it’s not such a terrible thing he was juicing in Elyndor.”

“Come on,” I said incredulously. “Juicing?”

Susie offered me an exaggerated shrug. “Do you prefer the term ‘Power-leveling’ instead?”

“Power Level—?” I paused, recalling the term from my MMO days. “Oh, right. Maybe?”

“My point is,” she continued, adjusting her thick-rimmed glasses. “That if you hadn’t done that, things with Boulder could have gone very differently—possibly much worse.”

“Oh,” I grunted, the biting around my legs ceasing. Even the angry goblins understood what she was talking about. Koko had been there, having accidentally stowed away in Susie’s car the day before. She was the reason I’d been there in the first place.

Combined with the revelation of how Kate had managed to follow me back to our world in the first place, we were all re-examining Elyndor and the abilities I possessed. She’d used the smallest piece of fabric from my shoe that she’d found on a thorn. For all the care and attention I’d taken in not leaving anything behind, including shell casings and spent rounds buried in monster flesh, it had all been for nothing. Even the most insignificant piece of something from our world could be used to activate the portal and find a way back. She could have found an eyelash and used that, for all we knew. Whatever damage I had told myself I was preventing had already been done. The cat was out of the bag.

We’d toyed with the idea of collapsing the cave with explosives, going so far as to begin rigging it up for exactly that. The fear was of something else—something worse than horny goblins—coming through. The danger was there, but the benefits of my hunts were undeniable. It was a discussion that was far from settled.

Things calmed down for a little while after that. We had a few visits from the local police looking to follow up on the details of the incident with Boulder, but not much else. It made me uncomfortable, but they were just doing their jobs. As far as they were concerned, the whole thing had been pretty clear-cut. They had him on camera dragging Susie back to her place; they had testimony from witnesses and more. The only thing they didn’t have were the shots he fired. They couldn’t explain where those bullets were, and it was the main thing they kept coming back to. Then, they stopped coming back entirely.

There was no way to reasonably explain how I was still vertical after taking three to the chest. I’d dug the bullets out right after, and between my own supernatural regeneration and the healing properties of goblin spit, there’d been no way to tell I’d been shot only minutes before. Without that crucial fact, there was no way to piece the rest of it together.

Next came the matter of spending the power I’d acquired during my various forays. I’d only “upgraded” two goblins, and each of them only once. Moppi still needed one for herself, and then there was the matter of Kate.

Upgrades are a strange process because they can only happen when I sleep. I find myself in a black void with the silhouette of the girls wreathed in a vibrant, crimson glow. With an effort of will, the choice is made as to which one I will work with. Then, I’m presented with three more options, all of which are taken from the needs and desires of the individual. I merely supply the power to make it a reality.

With Poppi, I found a desire to improve her intellect and education, while Koko’s focus was on all things related to sex and breeding. Unsurprisingly, Moppi’s desires had more to do with fighting and physical conditioning. Of the three, she was the scrappiest.

I wasn’t inclined to give her sharper teeth or rugged claws, so that’s how she ended up with the increased durability. I wanted to emphasize a talent that was distinctly more defensive and had less of a chance of being used on the others when tempers were high. Now, it was harder to penetrate her skin with edged and pointed weapons and more difficult to bruise her. She would have the confidence to take certain risks to protect others, knowing that she would be able to follow through. I held off on any other upgrades until I could see how this one played out.

We gathered around the fire that night for our typical evening meal. Kate had settled into an administrative role after gradually winning over the others, acting as a sort of assistant manager to keep the trio on task. I couldn’t have my eyes on them at all times, so it made sense for her to handle what she could when I wasn’t looking. Poppi and she got along rather well and were the two responsible for hunting the meal we were enjoying that evening.

“Is good meat,” Koko observed as she tore into another piece of the venison. I’d even started experimenting with new spices given the extra time I had on my hands lately. “Kate is good hunter.”

Poppi pursed her green lips indignantly. “I helped, you know.”

“Poppi good hunter too,” Koko corrected herself, not looking to slight anyone. She was quite content as she kicked her legs back and forth from her seat on a picnic bench.

“Thank you, Koko,” Kate responded with a little smirk, offering Poppi a sideways glance. Sometimes, Kate was difficult for me to read, but it seemed like she was expressing pride in their work. Kate had a tendency to fret and catastrophize, but she’d relaxed in the days since sitting on my face and declaring her loyalty to “the Goblin King,” as I’d come to be known.

“More next time,” Moppi remarked as she tossed a bone onto her plate and ripped one of the fattest burps I’d ever heard. “Deer skinny.”

I held a hand up before anyone decided to take the bait. “They’re like that this time of year. They still need a little time to fatten up.”

“Sure, sure,” Moppi teased. Luckily my intervention kept Poppi from arguing the point. Her expression looked more relaxed, absolved of responsibility for the size of the deer they’d brought down.

I glanced at Susie as she pushed some of the potatoes around on her plate. She didn’t look like she had much of an appetite, and she’d hardly had anything to say the whole time we’d been gathered by the fire. Something was bothering her, but she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. I considered pressing the issue, but knowing all that we’d been through recently, I decided against it. She knew she could talk to me, and she’d say something when she was ready. “What do you think?”

“Hm?” Susie grunted, looking up at me and glancing around the table briefly. “Oh, right. Yeah, it’s good. I just don’t have much of an appetite right now. Venison’s better as a stew, I think.”

“We still got a little left over, I could use the meat for a stew,” I suggested. She shrugged, not particularly interested in whether or not she got stew out of her comment. She was just trying to add to the conversation so as not to seem lost in her thoughts, I figured.

“So I’ve been thinking about the portal,” I began, earning a groan from everyone at the table but Kate. Though she recognized the danger that it presented, she didn’t object to the idea of going back through so long as it wasn’t by herself.

“Why?” Poppi grumbled, eyeing me critically. “There are no more government men. There are no more threats. You still haven’t used everything from your last time.”

I held a hand up defensively. “I know. This wouldn’t be for hunting. Instead, I’ve been considering the safety of things from the other side. Maybe it’s time we do more to make sure the other side is protected, hidden, and secured.”

“What do you mean?” Poppi’s ears twitched curiously.

I set my plate aside and leaned in a little closer, unable to contain my excitement on the subject. Even Susie couldn’t remain uninterested. “So if all it takes is the smallest thing from my world to activate the portal back here, and we’re not ready to destroy the cave, we should do something to conceal the cave. If we can hide the damn thing, it doesn’t matter how many pennies or pieces of shoe someone is carrying, they’d never make it through.”

Moppi shrugged, pursing her lips. “Possibly. Not bad idea.”

“We’d need to go through, do a little scouting of the area, get some materials from that side so as not to seem out of place, but I think we could do it,” I concluded. “I’d have you guys with me for it, so there’s safety in numbers.”

I nudged Susie playfully with an elbow. “You too.”

“Me?” Susie straightened up at the suggestion. “You want me to go to Elyndor?”

“Why not?” I countered. “We make a great team, and there’s no one I trust more. Who knows, maybe you’re a Zintari, like me!”

“I sort of doubt it,” Susie laughed dismissively. “I think I would have figured that out by now.”

“Well, I didn’t know until I’d domed an owlbear, and, last time I checked, you haven’t done that yet,” I countered. “But so what if you’re not? If we can create a little foothold there, I think you’d really enjoy it.”

Susie frowned and shook her head, causing the brunette’s pigtails to whip around her face gently. “Eh, I don’t know.”

Her apathy and disinterest were starting to concern me. Reaching over, I placed a hand on her knee so that her gaze would meet with mine. “It’s important we get a handle on this, no matter what we choose to do in the future. I need you with me on this.”

A smile finally found its way onto her beautiful face. “Alright, alright. You’ve convinced me. When do you want to go?”

I was tempted to say tonight or right now, but decided that didn’t give anyone any time to get their shit together or for us to make a plan. The trio was still skittish about the idea, even if I was going to be right there with them. Koko was less concerned than the other two, having personally seen the outcome of my strength unleashed on someone, but even she had her reservations. I’d give them a little time.

“Couple days,” I answered casually. “That should give us time to get our supplies together and stuff.”

“Supplies?” Kate perked up curiously. “Why would we need supplies? I thought you preferred traveling light?”

“I do,” I replied. “But I also want this to be done right. So that means taking measurements, writing things down, cleaning up after ourselves—the whole deal.”

“Oh,” Kate intoned briefly. “We could make a map, mark down where everything is.”

I pointed at her with a smirk. “Good idea. And everyone. If there are factions and people lingering around over there, I want to mark down where they are.”

Kate glanced at the other three, and they nodded, silently exchanging information between them. The trio had a rough idea of where the other goblins were, and Kate had been wandering alone in the forest for some time before I’d found her; they were likely to have a lot of information that would be useful.

“Alright,” I laughed, clapping my hands together with a smile, elated that we were all finally on the same page. “This’ll be great! Nothing to worry about.”

Chapter 2

(Jackie Heins)

The buzz of activity in the crowded baggage claim area rolled right off of Jacqueline Heins as she scrolled through the messages on her phone. Numerous co-workers expressed their concern over her suddenly cashing in her vacation time. It was no secret that she’d been distraught over the incident with Boulder, but most had assumed that she would get over it fairly quickly. After all, she had believed the same thing. The relationship between them had been mostly one-way in that he was much fonder of her than she was of him. To her, he had been an occasionally useful asset to retain after his retirement, to look into things she couldn’t always act on openly.

Jackie, as she was known to her friends, was puzzled by her own actions. She’d been quick to take the time off and to “get her head on straight,” as she’d said to her supervisor. As she scrolled through the messages, her eyes hardly registering more than three or four words per message, she kept asking herself why the fuck she was in Milwaukee chasing ghosts. Why was she chasing Boulder’s ghost?

By all accounts, the man had gone completely off the reservation. His habit of sinking his teeth in and never letting go had caught up with him yet again, so when the report came across her desk that he was dead because of it, she shouldn’t have been surprised. But the case he’d been working on felt like little more than a milk run. All he had to do was observe and report as to what strange shit these homesteading cosplayers were up to out in the boonies. Yet he ended up lying cold in the guy’s girlfriend’s apartment.

“Ma’am?” someone interrupted her scrolling. She looked up to see a middle-aged man leaning a little too close to her. “Is this your bag?”

The man lifted up a piece of expensive luggage that looked like it had been stuffed to the brim. She shook her head, realizing that it was likely a ploy to get her attention and speak to her. “No, that’s not mine. Thank you, though.”

Before her eyes could return to her phone, the man continued. “It’s just, I could have sworn an elegant beauty such as yourself would be the only one to handle such a fine piece.”

That was a new one. Obviously he wasn’t referring to the luggage but she feigned ignorance with a smile on her face. “I’m afraid not.”

“Oh, thank you!” A senior woman with frizzy white hair called as she shuffled over to the comparatively younger man. “I don’t think I could have been able to get it off the carousel by myself! So nice to have a strong young man helping out a helpless old woman.”

The man’s mustache twitched almost indignantly, reminding Jackie of a cartoon walrus in the process. She took the opportunity to lean over and snatch her baggage off the carousel—a ratty old thing she’d had since college with a few broken straps— and shot a wink the man’s way as she departed. Behind her, she could hear him being roped into carrying the old woman’s baggage out to a car that was waiting for her.

There was something about the older set of men that took a shine to her. She was told that she had a sort of classical sort of beauty. She often reminded the older guys in the office of old detective and spy movies and the women they would cast in them as arm candy. The young woman didn’t resent the comparison, knowing full well that her immaculate make-up, long legs, creamy skin, and perfectly styled hair had put her in good company. It was only when it pulled the attention of strangers to interrupt her train of thought that it annoyed her.

She swiped over to the ride-sharing app to see when her ride would arrive and was surprised to see that it was already there waiting for her. Jackie tossed her single piece of luggage in the backseat before getting in, adjusting her black blazer once she was seated. She could feel the eyes of the driver on her through the mirror, keenly aware of how the belt accentuated the swell of her bust. She adjusted her sunglasses, ignoring the driver entirely as she stared out the window.

“Fucking Milwaukee,” she muttered quietly to herself.

“Excuse me?” The driver asked as he pulled away from the curb. “I didn’t hear you.”

“It’s nothing,” Jackie responded with a wave of her hand. “Just talking to myself.”

“How was your flight?” The driver asked, seizing the opportunity to make small talk with her as he expertly navigated the airport traffic. She couldn’t imagine why it was so busy, but he seemed to be used to it.

“It was fine,” she remarked disinterestedly. “How far to Wa-Pa Lake?”

“With traffic?” The driver glanced at the GPS display of his phone mounted on the dashboard. “Couple hours, give or take twenty minutes.”

“Alright, I’m going to see if I can get a nap in. Let me know when we’re close,” Jackie said, shutting down any further attempts at small talk. Leaning back into her seat, she closed her eyes and let her mind wander back to the facts of the case.

The case. Officially there was no case, not really. Everything she was doing now was completely off book and she had to be careful about what toes she stepped on. She was taking after the old man while investigating the circumstances of his death. Nothing about it felt right to her, but the reality was that the local PD had been content with the fact that the four rounds fired from Boulder’s gun had never been recovered. It struck her as more than a little strange. They did follow-ups, of course, and searched the place from top to bottom.

The gun showed that four rounds had been fired, and they even had the casings, but the fact that they hadn’t recovered any of the rounds from the apartment was a little strange. Based on everything that had been recounted, they should have been easy to locate in the wall directly behind this Barnes character he’d opened fire on. Eventually they did find a bullet hole in the ceiling, so there was that.

Then there was the circumstances of the shooting. The circumstances of the death. Why would Boulder have taken the young woman hostage? Why would he need to? Jackie had never known him to panic like that, even at the worst of times, but some of the older guys in the office didn’t seem all that surprised. How did he miss three shots at close range? How did Barnes end up pounding poor Boulder’s skull into pudding the way he had? Adrenaline only got you so far. A skull was still a skull, and every finger in the man’s hand should have been broken. It didn’t add up, and the police didn’t seem bothered by the discrepancies in the least. Had Boulder ruffled too many feathers around town for anyone to give him the time of day?

“About ten minutes, ma’am,” the driver said, jarring her awake.

“W-what?” she muttered, wiping at the corner of her mouth in case she had started to drool. “Ten minutes for what?”

“Our destination,” the driver clarified. “You said to wake you when we got close.”

“Already?” She grunted, adjusting her sunglasses and taking in the surroundings of Wa-Pa Lake. It didn’t look like a particularly remarkable place. It looked like a typical Midwestern town. Boulder had liked the idea of settling down in such a place, but Jackie didn’t get it. “I guess I was more tired than I thought.”

“Happens all the time,” the driver chuckled. “Especially on these long drives. They have the smaller regional airports but I don’t think they’re for commercial flights.”

“No, and it adds a lot of extra money to the ticket,” Jackie remarked before shifting gears. “Do you know anything about this area? I heard there’s a lot of people coming out here to set up private homesteads with gates and walls.”

“Oh yeah,” the driver answered with a vague nod while changing lanes. “Very popular out here lately. I thought it was a little weird at first, but I guess I see the appeal from a rich person’s point of view.”

“Rich person?” Jackie asked, adjusting her clothes to sit more comfortably on her frame. She’d gotten a little sweaty during her unexpectedly long nap.

The driver nodded again, glancing at her in the mirror over his glasses. “Most of them I’ve heard about have a lot of money. They come out and pay for new construction from the ground up in most cases. Entire compounds springing up overnight.”

“Strange,” Jackie muttered. She’d been aware of it to an extent; it was essentially what Boulder had been looking into, after all, but now that she was there, it felt much stranger. “Why here?”

“Maybe the city finally got to them,” the driver suggested, though clearly it was nothing more than a guess. It was going to be much more difficult for her to get the answer she was looking for than just asking her driver.

Boulder’s place would have looked like any other in the neighborhood had it not been for the overgrown grass and pile of mail on the front porch. She adjusted the tip for the driver on the app on her phone before stepping out of the car and bidding him farewell. She had considered getting a cheap room nearby, but until she had something to justify her unorthodox approach, she didn’t want anyone tracking her down. The plane ticket was bad enough, and anyone with half a brain already looking at her would know precisely what she was up to. The only advantage she had was that no one had reason to be looking at her just yet. Well, not anymore. She recently went through a breakup.

The wood of the porch offered a forlorn creak as she climbed the stairs. She pushed the pile of old mail and newspapers aside with the toe of her shoe as she opened the screen door. Boulder never left the door unlocked but the police had seen fit to bust the door open when they’d come to check his residence for further evidence of his unhinged nature. The door came right open for her as if inviting her to lay down in the grave beside the man who’d previously owned the home.

The living room reeked of old cigarette smoke and something else. Death, perhaps. This hadn’t been where Boulder had died, of course, but he had been in the beginning stages of death for quite some time—he just hadn’t known it. Jackie tossed her luggage onto the old, worn couch and took a moment to open the curtains. A little bit of daylight did wonders in banishing the specter of Boulder’s inadequacies back into the shadows.

Glancing around at the dated decor and tired old pictures from days long past, Jackie shook her head. “What am I even doing here?”

Continuing further into the house, she was able to see where the police had rummaged through things. They hadn’t given much care to being tidy, especially considering there were no obvious family members or next of kin that would be able to raise a stink about the condition of the place if they weren’t. Still, she could tell the difference between the state of disarray they had created and that which was of Boulder’s creation long beforehand. She scanned the kitchen, bathroom, and back porch before making her way up the narrow carpeted stairs that twisted back around on themselves before reaching the second floor. His bedroom had its own bathroom, which was surprisingly nice, all things considered. It had a standing shower separate from a nice tub with jets that looked like it hadn’t been used since the man had retired. The vanity had two sinks for a hypothetical couple, one of which was filled with random toiletries and discarded junk. The other was stained with—what looked like—months of old toothpaste.

“Christ, Boulder,” she groaned in disgust before stepping back out into his bedroom. He had a king-size bed that sat well off the floor, with heaps of old blankets and pillows in the same state he’d left them on his last day on Earth. Jackie frowned briefly, brushing a loose wisp of raven-black hair from her face. She’d been to a lot of crime scenes and homes of the deceased back when she was a proper cop, but never to one of someone she had known. Somehow, it had never struck her how surreal it was for someone to leave their home one day, not knowing that they would never come back, and how everything they left behind was as identifiable as a fingerprint to them if you knew where to look.

Down the hall, she passed another bathroom, a room that could charitably be described as storage, and finally, his office. Boulder’s desk was ancient but still sturdy. One thing she and he had agreed on was how things were built sturdier back in the day. Despite the punishment it had endured from his laziness and inattention, it was still going strong. She could see outlines of things that had once occupied its surface, taken as evidence by the police when they’d done their search. She had hoped they would have left the rickety old laptop he’d had for years but wasn’t surprised to find it had been taken as well.

Glancing around the darkened room, she could practically feel the old man still sitting there in his office chair, puffing on a cigarette. Again, she threw the curtains open and banished the phantom unease back to the shadows. Taking her hands from the curtains, she clapped them together to clear her fingers of dust before freezing in place. Her brow furrowed as she glanced around the room again, realizing that whatever search the police had done had been sloppy at best. The curtains hadn’t been opened, they hadn’t been touched since Boulder had been there, she suspected. They’d taken the most obvious things as evidence from the desk and only given the boxes of old case files a cursory glance. And they did it in the dark, probably only using their flashlights.

That was something she could work with. Dick Boulder was paranoid of many things, but nothing so much as technology. Whatever he had on the case he had been working on would have printouts and hard copies for him to pore over, like a scene from the old detective movies he liked so much. But also, he just never much liked the idea that all his work could be swiped by pure happenstance during a break-in or wiped by a poorly placed magnet. Never mind that a house fire or burst pipe would have the same effect on analog records; that was just how Boulder thought. He’d been a relic even during his time at Homeland, but it looked like his paranoia was about to pay off.

Jackie spent the next few hours going over the files she found in his office, many of them completely unrelated to the case at hand. She was a much faster reader than most, so she was able to cover most of what he had gathered there. All of it was exemplary police work. Despite the inattentive and sometimes slovenly nature of his surroundings, the man was meticulous with his research and investigations. It only made the circumstances of his death seem all the more strange to her.

He’d had his eye on a few things in town. Things he regarded as strange and inexplicable. At first glance, they didn’t seem like anything more than unrelated crimes and weirdos acting up at gas stations, but the more of it she read, the more she began to see it through his eyes. These were things that popped out to him, sticking out like a sore thumb but flying under the radar for everyone else. By the time it was time for dinner, she was engrossed in his most recent cases. She’d known of only a handful, which was why she had kicked his last case over to him. Strange phenomena and seemingly disconnected events were his bread and butter, often to his detriment.

Jackie took a brief break to rummage through Boulder’s fridge, finding nothing useful and throwing out nearly everything inside. She ordered some Chinese food the way they used to when they were partners and got back to work. She was halfway through her lo mein when she shoved a box across the floor toward the desk. It struck the desk harder than she had intended, causing something to thunk inside one of the drawers.

The woman got to her feet and went to the desk, opening the drawer in question to find that it had possessed a hidden compartment. Inside it had been an old pocket file that Boulder used to store more sensitive materials—namely pictures of naked ladies caught in the act of cheating on spouses. It hadn’t been glamorous when he’d started out but it had paid the bills. She flopped down into the office chair and rifled through the pockets for anything related to his current cases or that he might have taken in the last few months.

She stopped dead on a few recently printed photos. She glanced around the room quickly for the printer or the camera that had produced them but already knew she wouldn’t find them. Her eyes fell to the pictures again as she pulled them slowly out onto the desk’s surface.

In the photos, a man she recognized as Daryl Barnes was involved in vigorous sexual activity with a woman she recognized as Susan Quickly—and three other individuals. Each of the other three was shorter and greener than she would have expected, with almost bat-like ears protruding from their heads and mouths full of vicious-looking teeth. Each appeared to be adults, judging by the fullness of their anatomy, but not at all human. There was no way. The more she stared at the stunningly clear photos, the more sure she was that they were something else entirely.

“What in the hell did you find out here, Boulder?”

Chapter 3

It didn’t take long for us to finish up the cellar and move on to the cave with the portal. We decided it would be best to keep the explosives around in case we had to do something drastic, but we moved them while we built the staging area.

“What for?” Koko asked as I finished sawing another two-by-four down to the length I needed.

Wiping the sweat of my brow on the back of my work gloves I looked up at the busty goblin and offered her a smile. “For the deck,” I answered simply. “Inside the cave.”

“Why need deck?” Koko asked quizzically.

I shrugged. “Technically, we don’t need it, but all of the staging helps us have equipment on hand, conceal the explosives, and know the exact dimensions of the portal without it being constantly active. I’m also hoping to have a few more safeguards in place—maybe some locks— so we don’t have to resort to explosions immediately.”

“Oh,” she mumbled, twirling some of her hair around one finger. “Take break soon?”

I looked up at her again with a raised brow, realizing she wasn’t interested exactly in what I was doing, she was just trying to make idle conversation until she could get to that specific point. “In a little while. Why?”

“Oh, no reason,” Koko said, bobbing her head from one side to the other in a display remarkably akin to the valley girls of old. We can call the 90s old now, right?

“She want fuck,” Moppi scoffed, picking up an armful of the cut wood to bring back to the cave. “Always want fuck.”

“So do you!” Koko screeched indignantly. “Don’t lie.”

“Not lie,” Moppi grunted, hoisting the wood up onto her shoulder with a smirk. “But also not lazy. Do work, fuck later.”

“I hate to say it,” I interrupted. “But Moppi has a point here. Everyone seems to be pitching in to help with this except for you.”

“No go through portal,” Koko protested. “No want husband go. Much danger.”

“I understand there’s a lot of danger,” I responded. “But it’s more about securing both ends of what could be a dangerous portal for everyone. If we’re not as worried about what we leave behind, then I should be able to bring more firepower with me next time.”

“Firepower?” Moppi asked, adjusting the load.

“Uh, a term we use mostly when talking about guns and how much damage they can do,” I explained awkwardly. I had considered teaching them how to handle such weapons, but none of them was of a height that would make it easy. Moppi might have had the strength, but her size would make anything but the smallest handguns unwieldy and awkward. “Don’t worry about it right now. Bring that stuff over to Suze and Poppi; they should be ready for it now.”

Moppi grunted her assent and left with the wood. I looked up at Koko, who still looked ambivalent about pitching in. After a moment of pointed staring, she huffed and followed after Moppi. My enhanced stamina and strength from the hunts I’d already been on made me the best suited for the grind of cutting wood for the time being. I glanced over what was left and surprised myself with how close I was to being finished.

Glancing up at the sun, it was well past noon, with the sun on the downward track. We’d stopped for lunch earlier, but besides that, I’d been at it nearly non-stop since we woke up that morning. I was only just starting to feel the exertion of it.

Once I had the rest of the wood cut, Moppi and I hauled it back to the cave where Susie had been hard at work with Kate and Poppi. The three of them had managed to talk Koko into helping out by the looks of it, though Susie hadn’t been ready to hand her a power drill yet. It was a good call, honestly. With how often the three would get into scraps with each other, throwing all caution to the wind, the last thing we wanted was to see a creative use of power tools in such a situation.

“How’s it look?” Susie asked brightly, glancing at the deck and the framing around the portal. Through a series of trial and error, we’d determined exactly where the boundaries of the entryway were. It was impressive how much they had managed to get done. If I worked a little later than the rest, I was pretty sure I could get everything else finished off.

“Looks great,” I responded, setting my stack of wood down next to Moppi’s. “What color should we stain it?”

Susie’s brows furrowed. “You want to know what color to make it?”

“Sure,” I chuckled. “Why not? I have to stain it anyway to protect against the damp, might as well make it look nice while we’re at it.”

“What is stain?” Koko asked with a frown.

“Like painting,” Poppi clarified for her. “But paint that also helps with protection.”

“Oh!” Koko’s goblinoid features lit up. “I want to paint!”

“Alright, finally, something for you to do that you won’t complain about,” Kate muttered, earning a growl from all three of the goblins. Despite how intimidating of a display it was, the hobgoblin seemed unmoved.

“There’ll be plenty of work for everyone,” I interjected, hoping to avoid another goblin-brawl before it got started. “And then once we’re finished, we’ll get everything ready to bring through and begin work there. That’ll go a little slower.”

“Why would it be slower?” Poppi asked nervously. In her mind, the less time they had to spend back in Elyndor, the better.

“We won’t all be able to work at the same time,” I explained. “Some of us will be on the lookout to make sure it’s safe. At the first sign of trouble, everyone else will escape through the portal. Try not to leave anything behind.”

“Okay,” she agreed, chewing her lip doubtfully. Having given it some thought, I had decided it would do everyone some good to see how well I handled myself on the other side, especially now that the gloves were off.

“It’ll be alright,” Susie assured her. “He can just club anything nasty with his fat cock and knock it out cold.”

Susie and the goblins all had a nice round of tittering giggles at the thought while I stood indignantly motionless. Rather than dignify anything with a response, I got to work on setting the last few boards in place.

“Don’t you want to have dinner soon?” Kate asked with an arched brow. “You’ve been working all day.”

I shrugged as I got my drill and screws ready. “I don’t need to rest or eat as much as I used to. Things like this just don’t take it out of me anymore, but if you’re all hungry, I can put something together for you.”

Susie jumped to her feet with surprising quickness, “Oh! No need. I can take care of that for you.”

“O-oh, alright,” I stuttered, caught a little off-guard by her sudden outburst. “If you don’t mind, of course.”

“It’s no problem, really!” Susie assured me, though there was something off about the tone of her voice that I couldn’t quite place. I shrugged and let her get on with it. The goblins were gluttonous as always. Kate, despite not being the same variety of goblinoid as them, seemed to share the same ravenous appetite, only barely managing to retain more dignity about it.

While they all withdrew to the shipping container serving as our home to prepare food around an open fire, I stayed behind to fasten screws in rapid succession to secure the last portions of the deck in place. At some point, I looked up from my work long enough to flip a few of the lanterns on before getting right back to it. When I finally finished, the sun had long gone down, and the lanterns had begun casting dancing shadows along the cave walls.

I glanced briefly at the wall where the portal was concealed and considered taking a peek on the other side. It was late though, and I was almost certain I had not only missed dinner but also everyone settling in for the night. If I took off now, how would that look?

“Thinking of sneaking off?” Susie asked from the entrance of the cave. I looked up to see her approaching with a spare plate of chicken she’d made. It wasn’t one of my chickens, she had picked it up during a supply run to help ease the burden on our livestock. Koko had done enough damage with her tantrums around the chickens already. The smell of tangy barbeque sauce hit my nostrils, earning a reaction from my stomach immediately.

“I was considering it, honestly,” I admitted as she handed me the plate and sat down on the deck beside me with a smirk. “I sort of lost myself in the work. I thought you might all be asleep already.”

Susie shrugged, adjusting the glasses resting on her cute nose. “The goblins are, but I’m still getting adjusted to crashing so early.”

“Early?” I laughed, taking a bite from a drumstick and savoring that unique flavor that only came from cooking meat over an open flame. “You think we go to sleep too early?”

“I think I used to go to sleep too late,” she responded with a chuckle. “But that’ll come with time, I guess.”

I watched her for a moment in silence as I chewed my food. The longer I did, the more uncomfortable she seemed to become. It was strange to see her like that. I couldn’t remember a time, even when we were kids, that she’d behaved in such a way. “Is that why you’ve been acting so weird? Is the change in sleep schedule getting to you?”

“What?” she asked, suddenly surprised. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you,” I continued as I dropped a stripped bone onto the plate and moved onto the corncob that sat next to it. “You’ve been acting weird lately. I’ve been trying not to call attention to it but it’s been hard to ignore once I noticed it.”

“Tch,” she replied irritably. “No. I’m just having trouble figuring things out.”

I stripped the corn from its cob in mere moments before setting the withered remains back on the plate beside me. “What things?”

“My place in all this,” she responded, gesturing vaguely with both arms around her. “We’ve got this weird polycule commune thing going, which is kinda cool, but everyone seems to have a place where they fit—except for me.”

“What are you talking about?” I chuckled incredulously. “You more than pull your weight around here. You made a delicious dinner. You’re up with us every morning for the chores. You built the shit out of this deck. Hell, I think you did more of the work than I did.”

“It’s not the same,” she huffed, crossing her arms over the delicious swell of her breasts. “I don’t know how to explain it, I guess. It just feels like I don’t quite fit in the grand scheme of things. I feel like a third wheel or a, uh,” she paused to count the people up for a moment. “Sixth wheel?”

“I mean, a sixth wheel would make things more stable…” I suggested, only to have the suggestion shot down with a quick glare. I held my hands up defensively to show I wasn’t looking for a fight on the semantics of wheels in her metaphor.

Pushing my plate aside, I got to my feet and offered her a hand. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

Without question, she took my hand and let me lift her to her feet. Even with her doubts, her trust in me was as strong as ever. Keeping a firm grip on her hand, I turned to the portal and walked us through, using an innocuous looking twig as the key. She began to protest only as I entered the threshold of the magical doorway and found herself pulled through before she could get the words out entirely.

On the other side of the portal was a cave not unlike the one we had just left. It wasn’t quite as shallow, but it was similarly barren and unoccupied. I glanced at Susie for a moment, amused by the bug-eyed expression on her face. “The first time is the weirdest.”

Susie’s lips pressed together in a thin line as I guided her out of the cave. Unlike the one on my land, this one was higher up, set within the foothills of some mountains I didn’t know the name of. Hell, I didn’t even know if they even had a name, considering how little civilization I had seen during my trips to Elyndor.

As breathtaking as the nighttime landscape was stretching out before us, complete with a dense forest of vast, twisted trees unlike anything that existed in our world, I glanced up toward the sky and gestured for Susie to do the same.

Without the light pollution of any nearby cities, the starry night of Elyndor was unlike anything in Wisconsin—even in the remote part I had settled in. I didn’t recognize any of the constellations amid the dense smear of milky starlight, but the alien nature of their arrangement was nothing compared to the two moons that hung in the night sky.

Susie’s gentle gasp told me she felt the same way. It’s hard to describe how heavily a sight like that hits you the first time you see it. Different trees and stars in different arrangements were, in theory, something you could find on Earth in another hemisphere. There’s a portion of your mind that recognizes that, even if only a little. But something about another moon hanging in the sky is—well, profound. It’s much more compelling. It makes the experience much more intense than I can accurately describe.

“There’s two,” she whispered in awe. “You never said there were two.”

“Nah,” I laughed a little. “I wouldn’t want to rob you of the experience. It’s wild, right?”

“That’s a word for it,” she remarked absently with a nod. “It’s beautiful.”

“And there’s two of them,” I added pointedly. “On Earth, there’s the one and that’s fine. But for a place like this, two are needed. A partnership, of sorts.”

Susie gave me a sideways glance, pursing her lips a little. “You must think you’re pretty clever with this shit, huh? How long have you been keeping this in your back pocket?”

“Came up with it on the spot, actually,” I argued with a smirk. “But I’m serious, too. As much as I seem to be in charge of this growing coterie of ours, I couldn’t imagine doing it without you. I don’t need you to become some specialist or get some sort of RPG character class, I just need you at my side as my partner.”

“That’s disgustingly sweet of you,” Susie chuckled, a slight blush forming on her cheeks under the moonlight. “You’ve made your point.”

“Have I?” I pressed playfully. “Because I could go on with how you handle a shotgun. Pretty sure that’s a skill that’s going to come in handy eventually. Can’t really hand it to one of the goblins, the kick would send them flying.”

“Might be funny though,” Susie laughed with a little shrug. “But yeah, I guess there are certain weapons only Kate, you, and I will be able to use. Though, I’m still not sold on the idea of blasting monsters with—.”

A strange, bellowing roar reverberated through the mountains from the forest below as a violent thrashing shook the canopy itself. Something very large had just found its dinner and was either signaling its triumph, a warning, or to other members of its kind to join in the feast. So far, I hadn’t had much luck learning anything about the habits of the creatures while prioritizing keeping myself alive.

“Alright, maybe I am,” she admitted, now visibly a little paler. It was another experience that you just couldn’t prepare yourself for. Being aware of something that much larger than you changes the way you see yourself in the grand scheme of things, and she was being forced to do it without the benefit of strange powers at her disposal like me. I wondered briefly if everyone from our world possessed the same abilities I did, but I didn’t want to throw Susie into the deep end merely to satisfy my curiosity on the matter.

“So we’re starting tomorrow on this side?” Susie asked, attempting to change the subject away from the unsettling creature lurking beyond our sight in the forest below. “How active is everything during the day?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I actually spend much more time here at night than I do during the day, so I want to take it slow at first while we get our bearings. I figure we can start with concealing the entrance to the cave to give us an extra layer of assurance while we work.”

“Yeah.” Susie nodded enthusiastically. “I definitely agree with that. We’ll look around to see what nature has to offer us before trying to cook up anything phony.”

“Good idea,” I responded, heartened by her eagerness to get to the task so quickly.

“Then after,” she continued, “We’ll have just enough privacy to christen this cave for ourselves.”

I stared for a moment at her before breaking into a fit of laughter. She regarded me with a twinkle of mischievous amusement in her eye, but she was dead serious. She had every intention of getting dicked down right there in the cave once she could be sure a monster wouldn’t ambush us in the middle of it. Either that, or she might elect to take a ride on the bologna pony to assert a little dominance over the new world. I was suddenly eager to find out which it would be.

Chapter 4

The next morning, I checked the video feeds while everyone went about the regular chores. There hadn’t been anything interesting on them in a while and it looked like that night hadn’t been an exception. Cameras monitored various parts of the property outside the fence I’d built around it. I’d started doing it when Boulder had started snooping around but it had always been something that would need to happen given the nature of the otherworldly guests I had.

“What’s this?” Poppi asked me as I ran through the recording from the various feeds at a much higher speed. If anything popped up I could pause it and rewind it.

“This is the video from the cameras last night,” I answered with a little smirk, shifting in my seat to allow her a better line of sight.

“Scrying?” she asked, her ears twitching curiously. “More human magic?”

“Not magic precisely, but they say that any technology sufficiently advanced enough is indistinguishable from magic, so sure,” I laughed. “It just lets me know if anyone is skulking around that shouldn’t be.”

“Can you show me how to do it?” Poppi asked before being suddenly interrupted by Koko tugging her ears from behind.

“No, me!” Koko yelled. The bustier goblin didn’t even know what she was asking, all she knew was that she wanted to be the one I gave my attention to.

The goblins yelled and screeched at one another as they tumbled backward, slapping and shoving at each other in place of the usual clawing and biting. I’d expressed my disapproval of such things often enough that they’d taken to trying something else, interpreting my instructions to the T in an effort to get around my admonishments.

“Alright, alright, that’s enough!” I said with a raised voice. “I can teach both of you, if you’re genuinely interested. There’s no need to fight. That is, of course, if your chores are all done.”

The goblins exchanged guilty glances on the topic of their chores. I chuckled and motioned for them to pay attention to what I was doing all the same. Everything ran through my laptop, which was powerful enough to handle all the feeds and then some. I have a tendency to get my laptops overbuilt from my days of gaming in college. I found out pretty quickly it helped future-proof them to a degree and reduce the number of times I had to go out and get a replacement.

Both goblins followed along reasonably well with the basics, understanding how to work the mouse, what the controls were, and what various functions were for. Terminology differed here and there, but overall it went well.

“What that?” Koko asked as the video on one of the cameras by the front distorted and pixelated.

“That happens sometimes,” I explained. “Either the connection isn’t good at the time or one of various other issues. It clears up pretty quickly.”

“Why just that camera?” Poppi wondered curiously, correctly noting that the other three feeds on screen at the time seemed unbothered.

“Well, maybe it’s because—” I began to explain before the distortion ceased on one feed and started on another. My brows furrowed in confusion as I clicked the button to slow the feed down and watch. Amid the distortion, there appeared to be a vague shadow that moved across the frame. It was subtle enough that I rewound the feed a few seconds just to be sure I was seeing it correctly. Sure enough, the strange shadow passed across the frame’s edge along the bottom.

The distortion stopped soon after, only to resume on yet another feed. I realized after another replay that it was roughly timed with how long it would take a person to walk from one camera to the next if they were along the perimeter.

“Strange,” I muttered as I leaned closer and set the next feed to full screen. Again, the distortion began as something crept into the edge of the frame and passed along the bottom.

“Is it an animal?” Poppi wondered.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. If there was an animal, it would be outside the fence, and the shadow being cast would be going the other way. An animal inside wouldn’t cast a shadow the camera could see and, again, it would be in the other direction.”

The three of us leaned a little closer, squinting as we searched for any sign of the shadow’s source. I rewound the feed several times so we could search every corner of the frame but found nothing. It quickly turned into twenty minutes of me frantically pacing around the grounds looking for signs of any disturbance, but there was none, and the goblins girls, who had some tracking ability, were able to confirm as much.

“What are you doing?” Susie interrupted us with a raised voice, clearly attempting to get the reaction of surprise and shock out of us that she got. With our hearts racing, we all turned to face Susie, whose ear-to-ear grin could be described as nothing less than shit-eating.

“You motherfucker!” I laughed as Poppi threw herself at Susie, who caught her by the forehead with one hand to hold her at bay. It was a classic trick from our grade-school days to any shorter kid that got uppity. Poppi swung her arms wildly, but she didn’t have the reach to do anything to the much taller woman.

Susie laughed like a supervillain, going so far as to hold her hand up dramatically as she did. “Fools! You shouldn’t make it so easy for me if you don’t like getting the shit scared out of you!”

“I’m gonna fart on your pillow,” I promised insincerely.

“So it’s biological warfare, then?” Susie asked, adjusting her glasses dramatically. “I don’t think that’s something you want to start with me.”

I held up both hands in immediate surrender as I got to my feet. “You’re right. I don’t even want to know. We got shit to do today anyway.”

With a wave of my hand, I shooed the goblins outside, following right behind. Moppi, Koko, and Kate were still hard at work on their tasks, with Koko showing impressive restraint with the chickens. They’d begun to warm up to her, and with much less pecking going on, she was able to enjoy the birds’ feeding frenzy. Once she was done, I got her to help me with moving things to the platform by the portal. I wanted to get as much moved as I could before it got too hot.

When everything was in place, we each grabbed what we could, joined hands, and stepped through. For a moment I thought Moppi was going to jump back through the moment we arrived, but seeing nothing waiting for us caused her to hesitate long enough that she thought better of it.

“Kate,” I said, glancing over at the hobgoblin. “I want you to take Susie and scout around the area for something that might work to conceal the entrance of the cave.”

“Very well,” she acknowledged, and the two departed. Susie shot me an ambivalent look before passing out of view, but I pretended not to see it. It was more for my sake than hers. I went about unpacking things, setting up a little workbench area, and making sure we had what we needed to get started. Hiding the cave had to come first. I escorted the trio of goblins out into the open air while we waited for the others to return.

Everything looked quite different in the light of day, though it didn’t seem to make any difference to the goblins, who all groaned and complained under their breath.

“Hate it here,” Moppi glowered as if the forest would pull up its roots and fuck off because she’d shot it a dirty look.

I reached into my pack and slapped a pair of binoculars against her chest with a smirk. “Here, why don’t you make your glaring useful? Tell me if you see anything creeping up this way.”

Moppi looked at the binoculars, confused for a moment before Poppi showed her how to hold them and where to look. The sour expression on the goblin’s face vanished as soon as she got a good view of the forest below. “Ohhh!”

“Anything that tries to come up this way will be spotted well before it reaches us,” I said to Moppi as she continued to scan around with the binoculars glued to her face. I glanced up the hillside to see if I could catch sight of Kate and Susie but didn’t see them anywhere. With how many rock outcroppings and low twisted trees dotted the area, that wasn’t an indicator of anything, but it still made me uncomfortable.

I got things ready for an early lunch to distract myself. Deciding a fire wouldn’t be a good idea just yet, I’d packed everything we needed for sandwiches instead. Though I had cold cuts to appeal to the goblins, I’d also brought some peanut butter and jelly along in the hopes one would want to try it.

“What that?” Koko asked around a mouthful of ham sandwich as I took a bite of my PB&J.

“You want a bite?” I asked without explaining. I held the sandwich out to her. Eager to get a leg up on the others, no matter how abstract a form it took, Koko took a tentative nibble of the sandwich.

“MMM!” She exclaimed, moving to take another bite before I quickly pulled it away. “Want!”

The ears of the other two goblins perked up curiously. If Koko wanted it so much, then it was definitely something they were interested in. I should have been discouraging such behavior, but sometimes, it was easier to use it to my advantage. If they developed a taste for peanut butter and jelly, I’d be able to feed them for much less than the cold cuts would run, and the peanut butter kept for much longer. True, I wasn’t exactly strapped for cash, but you don’t stay rich by being frivolous with money.

“Is good?” Moppi asked, adjusting the binoculars in her lap. “Can eat? Give eat.”

“I have more,” I said, motioning to the bag. “But asking politely would go a long way.”

“May we try one?” Poppi responded, understanding the phrasing I was going for. I didn’t want every little thing to be a tantrum or goblin battle. They needed to understand that they could just ask for things, especially with me, and it would be much more effective.

“Of course,” I said with a smile, earning Poppi a look of approval from the other two. Not only had she asked for herself, but she’d been sure to include them as well. Considering that the others used to gang up on her and beat her to within an inch of her life for being selfish, I considered this growth.

I reached into the bag and took out a sandwich, dividing it into two halves before distributing it to Moppi and Poppi before giving the half of mine Koko had taken a bite out of to her.

The sandwiches barely lasted a few seconds. Goblin appetites were another excellent reason to eat as cheaply as possible. They immediately called for more, and this time, I gave them each a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. They lasted slightly longer than the previous round, but not much. I kept my eye on the hillside below and the surrounding mountains as I served up another round of sandwiches. When we were all done, I burned all our trash with a lighter.

Susie and Kate joined us a short time later, grabbing a few of the sandwiches for themselves before settling in alongside us.

“Not much to work with,” Susie reported around a big bite of ham and cheese. “Mostly just rocks, trees, and shrubs.”

“Could we dig up any of the shrubs and plant them here for cover?” I asked. Susie and Kate exchanged looks before offering me a couple of nods.

“That could work,” the hobgoblin answered. “With your strength, you may be able to move some of the boulders as well. With a few of those and the shrubs, it could be enough.”

It sounded like a decent enough plan to me. We just needed a few more shovels, and we’d be in business. “Did you see anything else while you were up there?”

“Ogre tracks,” Kate responded as she ate. “Old, but worth noting.”

“Some kind of game trail,” Susie continued. “Winds up the hill over to the other side, but we didn’t go that far. Felt too risky. Great view, though.”

“Blegh!” Moppi spat. “View not good. View terrible.”

“Bullshit!” Susie countered, sweeping an arm out to indicate the seemingly idyllic countryside below. “This is absolutely gorgeous.”

“For now,” Poppi corrected as she drew her legs in closer to her chest. “But it doesn’t last.”

“It’ll be alright,” I assured them. “I won’t let anything happen to you. But to do that, we need to get back to work.”

Koko groaned in protest even as everyone else got to their feet. I put Moppi on lookout duty, as she seemed pretty pleased with the job. Kate remained with her, bow at the ready to send up a signal in case she spotted anything. When Susie returned from the other side of the portal with some shovels, the rest of us started back up the hillside.

It only took us about ten minutes to find the game trail Susie had mentioned and follow it further up the hill. We found several shrubs bushy enough to offer cover and even more boulders that could be moved.

“Think you could lift one of those, Fat Dick?” Susie asked, gesturing toward the boulder nearest to the path. The thing was half the size of a car and well beyond a normal person’s ability to push much less lift.

I gave her a brief look of disapproval at the use of the nickname she loved so much and set my things down to approach the boulder. It became immediately evident to me that handholds were going to be an issue. Placing a hand on the surface, I gave it a few trial shoves and was actually surprised to find it didn’t budge. It was a little too optimistic to think it would be that easy, I suppose.

Positioning myself on the far side of the boulder, I planted my feet and leaned into it with both arms extended. This time, the boulder moved. It was slow at first, but I realized more because of how awkward the thing’s weight distribution was more than anything. After pushing it back and forth to get a feeling for it, I experimented with ways to get my arms underneath but didn’t find anything that felt safe enough to try. I had the raw strength, but I didn’t have the size or mass to make it work to my advantage.

Abandoning the boulder, I stepped back around to rejoin the others. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get this—.”

The whole group stood frozen in place, staring at the hulking form of a human-shaped creature looming further up the hillside along the trail. It was nearly twice as tall as I was, with gray, mottled skin and greasy black hair clinging feebly to its skull. I could make out various sores and blisters running down its arms and up along its neck. It looked roughly male in size and build, and he looked between each of us with a puzzled look on his face, tightly clutching the massive club at his side.

“Easy, big guy,” I said calmly as I stepped out around the boulder. “We’re not looking for any trouble.”

“Daryl,” Susie muttered in a shaky voice. “What do we do?”

“Slowly step back toward me,” I replied, keeping my eyes on the confused creature staring back at us. I had to assume this was the ogre that made the tracks that had been mentioned earlier. It certainly had a very ogreish way about it, anyway. As soon as he noticed the small group moving toward me, he sneered, exposing a crooked, incomplete set of yellowed teeth.

I held my hands up slowly. “Easy,” I repeated calmly, but it didn’t seem to make a difference to the ogre. He adjusted his grip on his club as he readied it.

“Fuck,” I muttered, my hand flashing down to my Glock 19 and drawing it. “Run, run!”

As the girls dispersed down the path, I brought the ogre into my sights and squeezed off a few rounds. The weapon's kick hardly registered, the strength in my arms negating the recoil entirely. My grouping was great, but the ogre’s flesh was especially dense. Even the blood from the wounds appeared to be unusually thick.

The ogre charged at me, bringing his club down at me with surprising speed. I leaped to the side as the ground where I’d stood a moment before split into several pieces. I swept one of the ogre’s legs out from under him with my foot and unloaded a few more shots into his back as he stumbled forward. I felt like I was shooting him with a BB gun.

Before I could reposition myself, the ogre spun around and caught me with the back of his free hand, taking me off my feet and sending me several feet backward. My heart beat like a drum in my ears as the intensity of the situation heightened.

“Alright, let’s see how you like—.” I don’t even know what the rest of the threat was going to be. The ogre placed his palm on the boulder and squeezed, sinking his fingers right into it before whipping it around like an oversized basketball. I threw both my hands up out of reflex to catch the boulder, knowing it was a stupid thing to do even as I did it.

I was as surprised as the ogre was when I stopped the boulder, sliding a foot or so backward before it fell back to the ground in front of me. The ogre stared at me dumbfounded before I let out a triumphant whooping noise and shoved the boulder forward with all my might, rolling it back down the hill toward the ogre.

As the ogre knocked the boulder to one side with his club like a baseball bat, I picked up my weapon and took aim once again. At first, I considered a headshot, but it wouldn’t have been the first time that I went for one and found that a creature in this world had a skull too thick for the handgun to penetrate. Instead, I lowered my aim and went for something I couldn’t imagine being very armored.

“Sorry, pal,” I murmured as I blasted the ogre’s junk clean off through the ragged mess of hides and furs serving as its loincloth. It was the kind of thing you never wanted to resort to, but when it came to protecting those under my charge, my pride wasn’t a factor.

The ogre went still for a moment before folding like a lawn chair. With how much pain he was in, he abandoned all other worldly concerns outside, cradling his crushed walnuts between his legs. I let out a low breath as I walked toward the ogre, holstering my weapon in favor of picking up his club.

“I know, buddy,” I said as I tested the heft of the club in both hands. “But I didn’t want a fight this time. This one’s on you.”

With a resigned sigh, I lifted the massive club high over my head before letting my inner Gallagher out and bringing the club down on the ogre’s melon.

Chapter 5

“Geez, what did you do? Club it with your fat cock?” Susie remarked as they gathered around the dead ogre with the smashed skull. “What the hell is this thing?”

“Ogre,” Poppi responded with a disapproving sniff. “Nasty things. Kill, ravage, and eat and not always in that order.”

“Eugh,” Susie sneered before looking up at me. “Are you alright?”

I nodded, finally being able to catch my breath. Tossing boulders around with an ogre had given me an unexpected workout. “Yeah. You?”

“Great,” she responded, spreading her arms open. “Not a scratch.”

“How you do this?” Koko asked as she looked over the grisly sight of the ogre’s remains with a mixture of disgust and awe. “Ogre skulls thick.”

“That’s what I keep telling you,” I laughed, lifting the oversized club over my shoulder. “I’m a lot tougher than I look. You don’t need to worry so much for your safety now.”

I was even stronger still. In the time it had taken them to scramble back up to my position, I’d absorbed yet another monstrous soul from the ogre. This one, being larger and tougher, had provided me with a noticeable shift in power that I could feel deep inside. But it came with something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on, something that left me feeling a little queasy.

“Where did these come from, do you think?” I asked, gesturing to the strange sores and blisters.

Susie crouched beside the ogre’s remains, adjusting her glasses as she examined it closer. “They almost look like radiation burns.”

“Radiation?” I repeated, unable to conceal my genuine surprise. “You mean like nukes?”

“Well, except for the fact that they can’t be, right?” Susie stood and gestured to our surroundings. There hadn’t been any sign of technology since I’d first stepped into Elyndor and our guests were constantly surprised and amazed by even the smallest gadgets and gizmos we possessed. There was no indication that something nuclear could be lying around nearby.

“Maybe it’s naturally occurring somehow?” I suggested, even as I shuddered at the thought. A naturally occurring source of radiation would put an immense damper on exploration.

“What is nuke?” Koko puzzled, glancing between me and Poppi.

Poppi shrugged her tiny shoulders. “Maybe it’s their word for the miasma?”

I held up a hand to get Poppi’s immediate attention. “Miasma? What miasma?”

“It’s like a poison fog that you can’t see,” Poppi explained, trying to use terminology that would be suitable in what they called the common tongue. She pointed to the ogre’s ravaged arms. “It causes these.”

“Sonuva bitch,” I muttered as I shot Susie a glance before pressing Poppi a little more. “Is it common? Have you encountered it before?”

“Not around here,” Poppi said, pointing back toward the forest. “Too green. If it was here, it wouldn’t be nearly as green. That’s why so many things try to make their homes here.”

Even if the miasma and radiation weren’t the same thing, they were similar enough to be a challenge I didn’t have an answer for. I’d thought about diseases and viruses passing between the worlds but assumed that if I held back on some of the upgrades for the goblins, I could use them to stave off any illness that reared its head. With my constitution, I doubted there was much that could so much as give me the sniffles, but radiation was another story. I knew a little about how it worked, but I was in no position to treat exposure or provide resistance to it.

“Well that’s a silver lining,” Susie confidently declared. “If we can see the effects of it easily like that, we know where not to go.”

I shrugged a little in agreement. As dangerous as it was, she was right. “If we can find somewhere to give us a longer view of the surrounding landscape, we should be able to see where our danger zones are.”

“Did you just say—?” Susie grinned wickedly.

“Don’t!” I warned, but it was too late.

“Danger Zone!” Susie repeated in a high-pitched voice, evoking the line from the Kenny Loggins song. Each of the goblins clapped their hands over their large ears as they shot Susie offended scowls.

“Ugh!” I groaned, throwing my hands up in surrender. “Can we just get back to work?”

“What if more ogres!?” Koko protested, wiggling around like she might crawl out of her skin. “Ogres eat goblins!”

“Ogres eat everything, actually,” Poppi muttered, correcting her. Eating everything seemed to be a common trait across the various species of Elyndor that I’d encountered.

I held both hands up to calm Koko down. “Take it easy. If anything comes, we can handle it. But I think if there was anything nearby, they would have heard the gunshots and either run off or come to investigate already.”

“Oh,” Koko acknowledged with a begrudging pout. “Okay.”

We spent the rest of the day scouting the mountainside, finding boulders that would suit our needs and digging up shrubs. After a few hours, we managed to find the peak to have a look around, but it only helped us marginally without the binoculars we’d left with Moppi back at camp. Still, we identified easier ways to reach the peak again later, along with a few more game trails that would go around the other side of the mountain. From what I could see, there were no obvious areas of heavy radiation, but there were several taller mountains surrounding us that obstructed my view.

“What’s that over there?” Susie pointed toward what looked like a dense cluster of debris wedged into a crack in a nearby mountain.

“That goblin town,” Koko answered grimly. “Where we leave behind.”

“Ah, I see,” I commented, staring at it through squinting eyes in the hopes I might be able to make out more detail. For all the enhancements I’d received from collecting monster souls, improved eyesight wasn’t among them. At least not to that degree. “Well, we know where not to go, I guess.”

Poppi and Koko offered me relieved looks, obviously fearing that my curiosity would compel me to go check it out. There was a part of me that wanted to, but not for the reasons they might have suspected. Though the goblin town wasn’t exactly next door, it was close enough that roving bands could become an issue. Knowing what they were capable of and what sort of defenses they had would need to be addressed sooner or later.

“Alright, back to work,” I said, turning my attention away from the breathtaking view atop our little mountain to descend once again.

Copying an idea from the ogre, I created notches in the boulders that allowed me to lift them or move them in controlled rolls. I was also able to use the club in a few different ways to provide leverage or guide the movement of the boulders once they got going. The girls did a lot of the digging of shrubs they thought would work, but when it came to pulling them up out of the ground, roots and all, the job fell to me once again. By the time the sun sank low on the horizon, the concealment of the cave was looking promising despite only being able to move a few boulders and shrubs.

“Done?” Susie asked, clapping her hands together to free them of some of the dirt. “Finally? Can we fuck now?”

“W-what!?” Koko exclaimed in disbelief, a look of utter betrayal on her face. “No! Koko first!”

“Look,” Susie grumbled a warning. “If I don’t get a love sausage up in my guts in about five minutes, I’m gonna make you eat me out to completion. Which do you prefer?”

The blushing of Koko’s face spread all the way to the tips of her ears as she stared in stunned silence back at the taller woman. The two other goblins and hobgoblin exchanged glances with one another, unsure of what to make of the so-called threat.

“Alright, take it easy,” I chuckled, ignoring the way penis pummeled the lip of my jorts like a prize fighter. I glanced back at the Elyndor twilight on the horizon. “I did sort of tell Susie yesterday that we could.”

The goblins let out a collective groan of despair as Susie managed to discard every scrap of clothing she wore faster than I’d ever seen her do. As ridiculous as it was, her nude body was a welcome sight after such a long day. Every sensual, subtle curve of her deceptively hid the energetic libido contained within the woman. Once she got going, they became deadly weapons of erotic warfare. The tips of her breasts had already perked up in the cool evening air, signaling that she was seconds from asserting herself on me if I didn’t go along with it. I knew better than to offer any protest as she approached me to pull my clothing off.

She was nearly as quick with my clothes as she had been with her own, pulling my shirt up over my head and tossing it aside before dropping my pants and underwear around my ankles in a single deft maneuver. The length of my cock sprang into view, much to the delight of everyone watching the lewd display of public sex. It felt weird at first, being so out in the open with that sort of thing. We’d fucked outside back home, but there had been a reasonable assurance of privacy that didn’t exist here in the wilderness of Elyndor.

It didn’t seem to bother Susie in the least as she dove head-first into devouring my cock. For all her talk of needing it inside her, you would think she didn’t mean her mouth.

Experience told me that when she said she needed it, she didn’t care how she got it because it was never going to be just the one thing. She took me to the base until the glans of my dick prodded the back of her throat. Susie didn’t gag in the slightest. Either she had never had a gag reflex or had trained it out of herself some other way because I’d never known her to have one unless I got carried away and throat fucked her too hard. Something which she always seemed to enjoy.

Her lips and tongue glided along the length of my shaft with practiced ease, sliding back and forth with impressive speed while maintaining the perfect amount of suction and pressure. I glanced down at her to see one hand working furiously between her legs, finger fucking herself with reckless abandon. We were both ready to go, but she wanted the complete experience.

Not far from where I stood, the goblins whimpered like chained animals having a juicy steak dangled in front of them. Each of them shifted uncomfortably as they tried to keep themselves from giving in to the urge to masturbate out in open territory. Even Kate, who was marginally more composed than them, showed visual signs of conflict.

Before I realized what was happening, Susie got to her feet and pushed me up against the wall of the cave entrance. “Pick me up.”

“What?” I asked, confused as I stood reeling from the sudden absence of her warm mouth around my cock.

“Pick me up,” she repeated with a smirk. “Should be easy for you now. I want them to see everything.”

“You’re such an exhibitionist,” I chuckled, lifting her off the ground like she didn’t weigh a thing. She wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist before taking a second to line my erection up with her drooling cunt. Once she had it, she let herself sink onto it slightly before I responded with a powerful upward thrust of my hips.

“Oh, fuck!” She gasped, excited by the swift impalement. Her nipples brushed against my chest, hard enough to cut diamonds with how horny she was.

There was no denying how into it she got me, nor how exciting putting her on display for the other girls was fast becoming. It wasn’t a position I’d ever been particularly good at, but I hadn’t tried it since my recent boost in strength. I could work her up and down my cock as easily as I would one of the goblins, a fact they seemed keenly aware of as they looked on unblinkingly.

Koko had discarded all pretense of restraint and had pulled off what little clothing she was wearing to do the five-knuckle shuffle between her legs with one hand while the other squeezed and milked one of her large, full breasts.

“Yesyesyes!” Susie cried joyously as I brought a little more of my strength to bear, hammering her hungry pussy as fast as I possibly could. It didn’t take long for her to reach orgasm at that rate, bowing and bending as she thrust her soft pale breasts against my chest. I leaned down to capture one of them with my mouth, sucking the nipple generously as she rode out the rest of her climax on my meat. “Holy fuck!”

I hadn’t cum yet. There was a part of my mind preoccupied with not dropping her that kept me from committing to it, despite how strong I’d become. To remedy that, I sank to my feet and leaned back against the stone wall of the cave. She forced herself to begin bouncing on me, despite how mind-blowing her orgasm had just been. Grabbing her by the hips, I brought her to a stop.

“What the fuck?” She protested, her face scrunched up in confusion.

“You wanted them to watch, right?” I asked calmly. Her face split into a characteristically impish grin as she rose enough to turn and sit in a reverse cowgirl position. Before she could assert her own pace and rhythm, I took over again, spreading her legs open as I punished her pussy from below. At that angle, everyone could see the point of penetration, how stretched out she was, and how violently my balls swung and slapped against her.

“O-ohh! Oh, shit!” She groaned whorishly, my arms wrapping around her to grab tightly at her tits. She’d never been unsatisfied with how I fucked her. On the contrary, she’d always been nothing but pleased with my performance. But she was right about the current state of my physique. If I could push a little further with her to give her the time of her life, why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I do the same with all of them?

The wet sounds of her tight, slippery pussy being crushed by my cock echoed off the walls of the cave, providing a nice percussive tempo for the chorus of moaning that came not only from her but the remainder of the goblins finger fucking themselves. There was going to be a riot if I stopped after finishing Susie off.

“I’m-I’m gonna cum again!” Susie cried happily as I kneaded heavily at her tits, spreading them wide before crushing them back together again. The pace of my hips stayed surprisingly consistent, hardly faltering in the devastation of the woman in my lap. “I’m close!”

Her proclamation seemed to remind my body of the reason for the change in position, and all of a sudden I found myself at the brink as well. I tried to hold out, but only for a moment or two until I was certain she’d gotten off. “Me too,” I grunted through my teeth.

“Do it, baby!” She pleaded, her head lolling back as she surrendered herself entirely to my desires. “Cum inside me!”

Look, I’m not one of those macho alpha male assholes. I don’t have some sort of preconceived notion about what makes a man or what is or is not masculine. But there’s something about when a woman begs you to finish inside her that holds a primal carnality that I couldn’t begin to explain to you. The words were like magic, spoken with such sincerity as to elicit an immediate response from me.

I didn’t freeze right away as I spilled inside of her. Spilled isn’t the right word for how pent-up I evidently was. It felt like a torrent of cum erupting from me, rushing to fill every last crevice. She felt how much there was as clearly as I did and immediately began to flex and clench down around me to give it everything she had, even in her lust-drunk state. She milked me until there was nothing left and continued some more just for good measure.

Once she was sure she’d done all she could, even in her relatively prone state, she slipped off me languidly like a cat ready to stretch out in the sun. She was satisfied for now, but there was still more work to be done. Looking between the almost entirely nude audience, I had to decide who would be next. Orgies were great, but I was feeling particularly up to the challenge of taking each one in turn in a sort of reverse train. Whatever fatigue I’d felt from the day’s work had completely evaporated, and my body was on the prowl for a new kind to replace it with.

“Kate,” I said, motioning to her with one hand. “You’re next.”

The goblins watched in stunned horror as the hobgoblin sprang to her feet and approached me at a brisk walk before climbing into my lap. She and I hadn’t had many encounters alone together, and I suppose this didn’t technically count, but not having to balance her needs with those of others, even for a brief period, was a welcome change of pace for her. She sank onto my dick with all the fervor of someone who struggled to keep it in check throughout the day.

“Mmm!” She groaned as she chewed her lip. “Still so hard.”

“Better not waste it, then,” I responded playfully. The hobgoblin brushed her hair aside and leaned back to give me a prime view of her body as she rose and fell on my cock. She’d been more waifish when we’d first met due to the food insecurity she’d suffered through, but a little time with regular meals had filled her out nicely. Even her breasts appeared to have grown in size.

“Is it to your liking, master?” She asked as the bouncing of her hips quickened. “Do I please you?”

My hands rested on her hips to help her along, though she clearly didn’t need any of my help. “It’s fantastic,” I assured her.

Her pace quickened as her blue breasts bounced vigorously in time with every excited move of her hips. Despite how quick her movements became, she never broke eye contact with me. “Good. Because I want you to cum inside me, too, just like the goblin queen.”

“Well,” I responded, glancing briefly at the others. “If I must.”

Chapter 6

(Jackie Heins)

A welcome breeze ran through Jackie’s hair as she sat in the driver’s seat of the Tesla she’d rented that morning. She didn’t have particularly strong feelings about electric versus combustion on ideological levels, but she liked how quiet electric cars were on jobs like this. Using Boulder’s notes, she had determined the best position to observe the Barnes compound was from a nearby hill that the road ran past. None of the cameras were pointed at it; it was slightly elevated and close enough to get a decent view without sticking out. But the heat in the car, even with all of the windows down, was oppressive.

Jackie adjusted her sunglasses and cracked another bottle of water, remembering to stay hydrated while sitting out in the heat. She glanced at the files in the passenger seat, which she’d gone over time and again since arriving. Most of the contents had been committed to memory already, but she held onto them anyway like a safety blanket.

It had been hours of sitting and watching with nothing to report. There’d been a little activity early in the morning before the summer heat really kicked in, but she hadn’t seen any movement since then. One might have assumed everyone was indoors, waiting out the heat, but with the upkeep required of the compound, she didn’t see how that was possible.

The only upside was that she had caught a glimpse of the group as they moved toward the rear of the property. The telescopic lens on the camera had given her a clear, unobstructed view of three small green women and a taller blue one. Barnes and Quickly were easy to pick out due to how strange they stood out among the colors, which was an absurd observation for Jackie to make on its face.

Jackie sighed, grabbed the monocular off the dash, and threw the driver’s side door open to step out of the car for some air. She’d dressed for the summer heat with a simple tank top, shorts, and hiking boots, but it felt like it hardly made a difference. Spending as much time in the office as she did, her skin was still quite fair, and this hadn’t been the way she’d wanted to finally work on her tan. Slathering herself in sunscreen as she had that morning wasn’t likely to make a huge difference, either.

Placing the sunglasses atop her head, Jackie brought the monocular up to one eye and had another look at Barnes’s compound. She scanned everything she could see with the fence in her way but saw nothing. No movement. “Where the fuck did you all go?” She muttered to herself.

Taking another drink from her water, she thought back to the layout of the property. There weren’t any particularly interesting features to it aside from its lake access, shady trees, and steep hills toward the back of the property. She didn’t know of any secondary form of egress and he didn’t have a dock, much less a watercraft to tie to it. So what the hell had they gone off to do that they still hadn’t returned from?

Originally, she had set Boulder on the case because of the strange seismic activity in the area. She hadn’t realized at the time how out of place that activity was or how featureless and boring everything out there was. If he’d been setting off some kind of ordinance, it would have been pretty easy to tell from where she stood. The damage would have been obvious. Again, she had no answer as to what had caused something to register seismically like that.

“Fuck this,” she grumbled, placing her shades back on and descending the hill toward the compound. Maybe if she was able to just knock on the door and act like she was having car trouble or needed a place to piddle, it might stir some movement inside. It only took her a few minutes to cover the distance between the hill and the front gate. There, she noted a device with a buzzer to use in place of a doorbell. She leaned forward and pushed the button, patiently waiting for a response.

Above her, the blinking red dot of the camera facing the gate indicated that the security system was still operational. Her face had been recorded, but she didn’t care. There was no reason for anyone to think her suspicious or up to anything. She’d left her sidearm in the car and wasn’t carrying a badge.

After an awkward reply of no response, she buzzed again. If they genuinely weren’t there, where had they gone?

“Hello?” She called loudly. “Is anyone here?”

Above her, the red recording light of the camera blinked irregularly and vanished. The speaker of the intercom just below the buzzer came on, crackling with an unusual amount of static for a modern device. Leaning closer, she listened carefully for any indication of someone on the other end. Nothing. Only the crackling of static.

“Is someone there?” Jackie asked again, this time closer to the speaker in case it was having trouble picking up her voice. The only response was a long, drawn-out exhale of someone breathing. “Hello?”

“Leave,” a voice responded after another long pause, garbled by some electronic interference. Something about the voice felt strangely familiar to her.

Jackie licked her lips nervously before continuing. “Hey, look, I’m sorry, but I’m having a little car trouble right now, and I was wondering if you could help me out?”

Again, silence. Not just on the intercom, but all around her. She’d become so used to the sounds of insects in the summer heat that she’d eventually tuned them out. Now, they had genuinely gone silent and their absence was unsettling. The speaker crackled as the intercom remained on, but there was little else.

“Please, I just need to—!”

“Jackie,” Boulder’s voice interrupted her, sending chills down her spine as she stumbled backward away from the gate.

“W-what the fuck!?” Jackie gasped in surprised horror. How was that possible? Was she losing her goddamn mind? There was no way that it could have been him on the other end. She’d seen the body. It was well-documented.

“Leave,” the voice said again, this time unmistakably Boulder’s. Her mouth fell open, and her breath quickened. It felt oddly cold all of a sudden, as though the sun had passed behind a dark cloud, and the seasons had begun to shift right then and there. “Jackie. Leave.”

Jackie turned and ran with all the energy and fervor she’d possessed running track back in school. It didn’t matter that the terrain was uneven or that she was running uphill; she pushed herself as hard as she possibly could. There was no way it could be him. It wasn’t fucking possible. As she reached the door of the Tesla, she threw it open and slid right into the driver’s seat. Reaching for the ignition button, she hesitated, her mind desperately trying to catch up with whatever had just happened.

It was possible, but Jackie was well-acquainted with how the man’s voice sounded. Perhaps Barnes had some kind of software that allowed him to manipulate Boulder’s voice? It wouldn’t have been hard to record him over the phone or even in person. With the shoddy quality of the audio from the intercom, such a recording wouldn’t even have to be very good. That had to be what was happening.

“Fucking asshole,” Jackie snarled, but her gut told her she had it wrong. Another part of her mind, as if arguing with the first, also reasoned that Barnes would have had to know who she was for such a stunt to work. Maybe he’d done research on her? But why? She was removed enough from the situation back then that there would have been no reason to look at her; everything had been done through unofficial channels. Perhaps he used Boulder’s voice for everything to intimidate people? No, that was a stupid idea. She was grasping at straws now.

The alternative explanation she had was that it really was Boulder, somehow. Jackie gripped the steering wheel as she stared off into space, trying to find some other possibility, but came up with none. She hadn’t eaten in a few hours, it was hot, and she needed time to process. Then she would be able to pose another rational explanation. She jabbed the ignition button, put the car into gear, and pulled onto the road. The more distance she put between herself and that fucking place for today, the better.

Jackie didn’t entertain a single thought about Barnes and his stupid compound until she was back at Boulder’s place with a bag full of fast food and a massive sugary soda she could have drowned a donkey in. Kicking out one of the chairs from Boulder’s nearly unused kitchen table, she had a seat and fished the food from the bag.

Greasy burgers weren’t really her thing most of the time, but today felt like a good day to say “fuck it” and do whatever. A double bacon cheeseburger with extra pickles was exactly what she needed to get her mind right. She chowed down like it had been days since she’d eaten, pausing only to shove a few fries in her mouth or take a pull from the straw in her bathtub of soda.

Jackie didn’t stop until the burger was nothing more than a memory, sitting back in her chair to stare out the window as the sun cooked Wisconsin outside. Her ears focused on some kids playing out of view across the street—water guns by the sound of it. Taking another pull from her soda, she decided she wasn’t going to bother finishing it. It tasted like it came from one of those mixer machines everyone was using now. She didn’t know why they always tasted so much worse than something dedicated to a single flavor, but they did. Maybe it was too many syrups mixing together from one nozzle. Maybe the syrup-to-fizzy water ratio wasn’t supposed to be the same across every flavor? Either way, it tasted like shit. But it was nice to be thinking about a different mystery, even if it was for a short time. It was a reprieve.

Grabbing her phone, she decided to scroll through some social media. It was a nice mindless activity that would set her brain in neutral and allow her subconscious to process the information. Sometimes, it was the best way to work a problem. Stepping back and digesting the information before coming back to it was all it took to see things clearly, at least from the right headspace.

“When are you coming back?” A message at the bottom right of her screen asked. She tapped the notification and opened the direct message with Ava, one of her colleagues from the office. Jackie had received numerous messages with the same question and not bothered to answer any of them, but seeing as she was already killing time in the app, she might as well.

“Not sure,” Jackie messaged back, “Everything is still up in the air right now.”

Three dots blinked at the bottom of the message window, indicating she was responding. “How are you doing?”

Jackie exhaled deeply, unsure of how to even answer such a question. “Hanging in there. You?”

“I didn’t know him very well,” Ava’s response read. “But I wanted to check in on you, just in case. Everyone was getting nervous. They thought you’d ghosted them or something.”

Jackie’s eyes lingered on the message for a moment, focused on the word “ghost”. Her mind clicked into gear, having digested the information and been given a little something extra to give it a kick in the ass.

“Thanks, I have to get going,” Jackie quickly messaged back. “Talk soon.”

Pushing the chair away from the table, Jackie sprung to her feet and moved swiftly from the kitchen and up the stairs to Boulder’s office. She had done a little organizing as she went through the old boxes of case files, but not enough to know exactly where to find what she was looking for. She had to admit that while the idea tickling her brain was an absurd one, it was one that had to be taken in the context of strange occurrences and little green women. She had to start looking outside of what was conventionally rational and start operating with a slightly altered set of rules.

It took her roughly twenty minutes to find the first of the files she was looking for. It was a fairly mundane case for a woman on the far side of town who’d been convinced that her ex-husband had been stalking her. Boulder had photos from a stake out and inside the house of some damage to the property. Jackie rifled through them quickly before stopping on a photo Boulder had taken where a reflection of him could be seen in the window. It had been difficult to see, but there was also a second individual either reflected in the glass or standing on the other side; it was hard to tell. It was most definitely the aforementioned ex-husband.

Jackie checked the time stamp of the picture and then the time of death of the husband’s apparent suicide, which hadn’t come to Boulder’s attention until a few days later. The time of death was half a week before Boulder’s picture had been taken.

“Fuck me,” Jackie muttered to herself, dumping out the nearest box and setting the file into it. If she found more evidence of strange shit, that was going to be the box where she kept it. Jackie felt like a blindfold had been removed and that information that was plain as day was now available to her within those files.

More files came, each of them with some small discrepancy that one could easily overlook if they weren’t specifically hunting for it. Some of them Boulder caught but couldn’t connect to anything substantive. Worse were the times when he made a connection that wasn’t there, and it just happened to work out, reinforcing an explanation that wasn’t correct. It wasn’t every file, of course, but enough to be concerning. Enough to fill half the box in no time.

Most of it, Jackie didn’t know how to explain. She just knew that it wasn’t right and that it was something fucked. She could feel it somewhere in her gut that she was onto something more here and that Barnes was attached to it somehow.

“Ah, there you are,” Jackie laughed, finally stumbling across the last file she felt she needed for the moment. It was a case of a missing child that had never been found. Boulder attributed his failure on the case to a psychic who frequented the town—or a crackpot, as the detective had labeled her. The client eventually decided they wanted to go with the psychic’s assistance rather than that of a detective, much to Boulder’s chagrin. In his frustration, he’d tossed the file into a box to be forgotten.

The details of the case were odd, but Boulder hadn’t been given the opportunity to really dig into them. It wasn’t the case itself that Jackie wanted to find, but rather the name of the psychic and supposed medium who spoke with spirits and did some other weird new-age shit. If she was going to be looking into the possibility—no matter how remote—that Boulder’s ghost was wandering around looking for intercoms to chat people up, she would need to consult with someone who might be familiar with that sort of thing. Wa-pa wasn’t a tiny town, but it wasn’t a big city, either. The number of people working in the occult and mysticism circles had to be pretty small. If the psychic in the file didn’t have anything useful to tell her, she might be able to needle names of other kooks out of her instead.

Jackie plugged the psychic’s business address from the file into the GPS on her phone and set it on the desk, deciding she needed to shower first. Boulder’s bathroom had been a disaster zone worthy of FEMA when she’d first arrived, but it was looking much better after she’d taken some time to tidy it up. Tossing her laundry into the hamper, she hopped into the shower and rinsed off the thin film of dry sweat that had accumulated from hours on the hill.

When she got out, she redid her hair and chose some clothes that looked a little more impressive—vaguely official, even. People like this were either paranoid of the government looking in on them or desperate for a chance to prove their legitimacy to someone in an official capacity, so Jackie decided she might be able to play to that. Once she was dressed and looking like she was about to head into the office, she grabbed her gun and hurried back out to the rental in the driveway.

Jackie checked her gear, strapped her sidearm on under her black blazer, and took a moment to remind herself not to think of these people as kooks and crackpots the way Boulder had. Even if the vast majority of them were, having it as her default mindset would cause her to overlook vital information the way her former partner had. He was a good detective with excellent instincts, but he’d allowed his preconceptions and dour outlook to get in his way. Jackie had to come at it with different eyes, or Barnes was going to continue flying under the radar with whatever shit he was up to behind those gates.

At the same time, she told herself not to believe everything too readily. Getting suckered into some make-believe nonsense would waste valuable time and muddy the waters. Jackie didn’t know if there was a proper procedure or protocol for sifting through mountains of occult nonsense to find the grains of truth, but she could tell that she was going to make up a lot of it as she went. She had to know if this ghost stuff was real, and if it was, she had to know why Boulder’s would be hanging around the Barnes compound trying to scare her off.

Chapter 7

When we finally got back home, I was wiped. It was a nice feeling, even nicer considering how I got to that point. I ended up carrying Koko and Poppi back through the portal when we called it a night.

“I think tomorrow we can start the platform,” I said as Susie emerged from the portal.

Susie stepped aside so Kate didn’t stumble over her when she came through. “Are you sure? Do you think the gate is concealed enough?”

“Yeah, so long as we don’t light it,” I answered. “Should be fine.”

Once Moppi was through, we stepped out of the cave and made our way across the property as a group under a clear, starry night.

“It’s nice out,” Susie remarked as she looked up at the sky. She hadn’t bothered to get fully dressed after the impromptu reverse train they ran on me. As beautiful as she was at all times, there was something special about a topless Susie staring up at the sky by starlight. If I was even slightly skilled with a paintbrush, I would have been inspired to paint it.

“It’s beautiful,” I responded, though I wasn’t really thinking in terms of the sky. Just her.

“You’re such a dork,” she countered, but I could tell even in that light that she was blushing. It was weird to think that there may have been a timeline where the two of us didn’t find our way to each other in a more romantic capacity. Don’t get me wrong, the sex was always great, and she’s a terrific friend, but we had tapped into something deeper.

“You like it,” I laughed as we approached the shipping container that served as our home. Slowing my pace, I noticed that the front door was ajar. I put my arm out to stop Susie before she got any closer.

“Did you forget to lock the door?” Susie asked, but her tone said she knew the answer to the question. I didn’t forget things like that even before we had a reason to become more cautious.

I set the goblins I was carrying gently down on the grass and looked back at Moppi and Kate with a finger over my lips. Both immediately recognized that there was something up and got low without needing to be told.

Moppi bared her teeth. Kate pulled the bow from her shoulder and strung it with practiced ease. I didn’t want a fight, but being ready for one was preferable to being caught completely off-guard. I motioned with one hand to Moppi to go left and Kate to take the right where she would have a better line of sight. Glancing at Susie, I motioned to the goblins in the grass, instructing her to wake them up and keep them out of the way.

I pulled my Glock and moved slowly to the front door, pushing it open as quietly as I possibly could. Inside, the place was trashed. My concern had been that someone else had come to snoop around and hopped the fence to rifle through things, but it looked more like a wild animal had gotten in and gone, well, wild. Most of the mess centered around where the food was kept. Still, I remained cautious. A wild animal was still dangerous enough not to be taken lightly. Especially if it was a bear.

I crept around inside for a few minutes but only found scattered cereal, various spills, and torn boxes of other staple foods I kept around. Every sugary snack I kept for Susie had been sniffed out and demolished. “Oh, she’s not gonna like that,” I whispered to myself.

Once I was sure whatever had made the mess was no longer inside, I crept back outside and signaled to Susie. Koko and Poppi were awake and looked nervous as they searched the night around them for any signs of danger.

“Psst,” Kate hissed from her position. When I looked over, she motioned to the ground and then off toward the storage cellar I had just built.

“Ah, fuck,” I groaned, noticing the trail of food debris that led off in that direction. Whatever it was had a huge appetite and was probably clearing out the cellar at that very moment.

“Let’s go,” I said quietly and moved off at a brisk walk. If I could manage to save any of what was already in the cellar, I had to try. Sustainability was one of my main goals for the property. I wanted to go into town as few times as I possibly could, and everything I did at home was in pursuit of that goal.

Kate kept excellent pace with me, keeping an arrow nocked and ready the whole way. As we approached, a figure emerged from the cellar carrying armfuls of jars filled with preserved fruits and vegetables.

“Alright, not a bear,” I said as I aimed my weapon. There was no mistaking the feminine shape, even with how dark it was. “Stop right there!”

The figure froze in place, startled by my shouting. Susie shined a light from behind me to illuminate the intruder. None of us were prepared for what we saw.

She was roughly the same height as Kate but had dull olive-colored skin with long, black hair that trailed down past her ass and was braided in places. Her eyes were yellow atop odd black sclera, and her mouth appeared to have two tusk-like protrusions extending from her jaw that slightly obscured her upper lip. She was far more toned than any woman I’d seen and wore almost as little as the goblins when they’d first arrived. A loin cloth was all that kept us from seeing everything between her legs, and a strip of ragged fabric that kept her ample breasts contained. It would have made for a great view if it wasn’t for the growl she gave us.

I noted the pointed ears which were narrower than a goblin’s, but looked similar to Kate’s. “Is she one of yours?”

“Uhm,” Kate shook her head, visibly confused. “No. Not a hobgoblin at all.”

“What is she?” Susie asked, glancing at each of the goblins. Each of them shrugged.

“Alright, take it easy,” I said toward the stranger, motioning with one hand palm-down. “Just put everything down and step away. How did you get here?”

The stranger complied with the dropping of things in the worst possible way, shattering multiple jars in the process. It seemed more incidental than an actual compliance with what I said. She snarled and said something back to me in a language I didn’t recognize. Glancing at the others from Elyndor, they didn’t recognize it either.

“How did she get here?” Susie asked from over my shoulder.

I shrugged, keeping my weapon trained on her. “Must have wandered in from the—.”

Glancing back at Susie, I finally realized what she meant by the question. We’d occupied the cave for the portal on the Elyndor side all day. There was no way to have gotten to it without going through us. Yet, here she was. Susie’s brows went up as if to ask “Well?”

“Okay, alright,” I muttered and took a step forward. “Put your hands up and turn around.”

“You a cop now?” Susie snorted. “I better see you in the uniform later, baby.”

“Sh. Shh!” I said back to her. The stranger had no idea what I was saying, and the cross-talk was making it worse; she was visibly agitated.

Poppi stepped forward, holding her hands up toward me to step back as she approached the stranger. No one was working with me on this. I guess I should have been used to it already. Poppi spoke in goblinoid, hoping that the stranger would recognize the language but seemed to have no luck. She continued to approach the stranger, hands up, speaking slower and motioning to herself and the rest of us.

The stranger didn’t understand, but she grew visibly calmer with Poppi’s attempt, giving her a chance to look lost and confused instead. Once she looked like that, I lowered my weapon and motioned for Kate to do the same. The hobgoblin was hesitant but eventually complied. We stood back and let Poppi do what she could.

After several minutes, Poppi rejoined us with a confused look. “I’ve got her to calm down. I’m going to see if we can get her cleaned up.”

“Any idea what she is or how she got here?” I asked.

“Maybe an Orc?” Poppi suggested with a confused look.

Glancing at the stranger, I could see why she would come to that conclusion, with the skin tone and the tusk-like protrusions, but I had fought a few orcs in Elyndor already, and none of them looked like that. She had a distinctly human shape with feminine curves, while the ones I’d fought moved almost like gorillas with more piggish faces. The tusks were also much larger. “Are you sure?”

“No,” the goblin admitted truthfully before glancing at the other two. Moppi and Koko seemed skeptical as well, and Kate shook her head. Still, it was the best guess we had without the ability to speak to her directly.

“Alright,” I sighed, holstering my weapon before motioning vaguely toward the lake. “Get her cleaned up, and I’ll see what the damage is in the cellar.”

The three goblins escorted the maybe-orc stranger off to the lake while Susie and I stepped into the cellar. I sent Kate off to begin tidying up the house, though I knew she’d need help eventually.

“Christ,” Susie grumbled. The cellar had been as brutally ransacked as the kitchen had, with the added effect of shattered glass everywhere. “This is going to be a bitch to clean up.”

“Hey,” I grunted, picking up a discarded sword with a distinct curve to the blade up from the corner of the room. “Check this out, though.”

We both took a moment to examine the weapon. Though it showed visible damage along the blade, it was still in excellent condition. The hilt and cross-guard were intricately crafted and set with a solitary onyx. “I think this is the first sword I’ve seen from the other side of the portal.”

“Yeah, but where the fuck is that now?” Susie wondered impatiently. “Has this ever happened before?”

“No, this is a first,” I responded, giving the sword a few practice swings. I liked the weight of it much more than my axe and the ogre’s club I’d been forced to use earlier that day. I told myself not to get attached to it, though. It didn’t seem likely the maybe-orc would be interested in a trade.

Susie continued to examine the shelves with her flashlight. “So, is the portal going to lead us back to where she came from now instead of Elyndor?”

“No,” I said with unusual confidence in my knowledge of metaphysical doorways to other worlds. “The portal is keyed to objects. Stuff from here allows us to come here. Stuff from Elyndor allows us to go to Elyndor.”

“What did the goblins use to get here?” she asked, looking back over at me.

“A penny, originally,” I laughed and stopped swinging the sword like a little boy with a new stick he just found.

Susie’s lips pressed together in a thin line as the gears in her head turned. “So where did that penny originally come from? If you can only get there with something from there, how did someone get there to drop the penny?”

It was a thought that had occurred to me before, but it felt much more significant the way she’d phrased it. “That’s… a good question, actually. I don’t know.”

“You’re sure that portal wasn’t there before the quake that night?” Susie pressed. “Like, you’re absolutely sure?”

“Positive,” I replied with certainty. I’d gotten to know every square foot of the property after moving out to the country. It was one of the few things I was that confident about. “It wasn’t there until the quake.”

“So, then there have to be other portals,” Susie concluded with a concerned look on her face. “Someone, somewhere, from Earth went to Elyndor before you long enough to drop a penny. And if they’ve got spare change on them, it probably wasn’t recently.”

“What?” I asked her, a little confused on the last point.

“No one carries change anymore,” she scoffed, correctly guessing the part I got stuck on.

“You don’t?” I asked, planting the tip of the sword on the ground and leaning on it like a cane.

“You don’t!” She laughed, pointing at me. “I’ve been in and out of those pants so many times, I think I would have noticed change jingling around in there. So, don’t give me that shit!”

I shrugged and waved her off. “I don’t have any use for it out here. But if I still lived in the city, yeah. I would definitely be carrying cash around.”

“Bullshit,” she countered. “Mr. Minimalist is walking around town with a fistful of dollars?”

“Well, I’d have a wallet,” I argued.

Susie waved her hands around frantically. “It doesn’t matter, we’re getting away from the point. Someone from here has definitely been to Elyndor before and left something behind. Maybe a lot of somethings. Should we even bother protecting our portal if it doesn’t even fucking matter!?”

I sighed and took my weight off the sword, stepping closer to her as I shook my head. “It still matters because it’s our portal, and I have people here I need to protect.”

“But someone came through from somewhere else entirely while we were right there,” Susie objected, waving an arm dramatically back toward the house. “This could have gone a lot worse! What if it was someone armed and hostile?”

I sucked some air in through my teeth as her point sank in. She wasn’t wrong, but I was confident there was a way to deal with the situation. “Alright, point taken. I’ll handle it.”

“What do you mean you’ll handle it?” She laughed, crossing her arms over her bare chest. I couldn’t help but notice how good the swell of her breasts looked with even the slightest bit of pressure put on it.

“I’ll handle it,” I repeated. “Just let me sleep on it. I’ll think of something.”

“Fine,” she grumbled. Her posture relaxed, relatively satisfied with my answer. “But let’s clean this shit up tomorrow. I’m tired.”

I nodded in agreement and followed her out of the cellar, keeping the sword with me in case the stranger got any murderous ideas in her head. Settling in for the night was much more of an ordeal than I’d hoped, considering how much had to be cleaned up in the house before we could even get to bed.

After hours of attempting to communicate, I put a spot together for the stranger near the door to sleep in, made of various pillows and blankets I had lying around. The rest of us bedded down as usual. She seemed extremely surprised by the token of hospitality. So were the goblins.

“She orc,” Moppi muttered. “Probably orc. It really smart give her bed?”

Kate seemed to concur. “I’ll remind you that I was chased by orcs leading up to my arrival here,” she said. “I was actually chased by them semi-regularly. I don’t feel great about this.”

“But she’s not an orc from Elyndor,” I pointed out. “She doesn’t seem hostile. She seems standoffish, sure, but mostly just…lost.” I tried not to look in her direction, not wanting her to realize we were talking about her.

More importantly, there was something else. Call it a sixth sense maybe, or a…protective instinct. Somehow I just felt it in my bones that she needed my help. I decided to trust the impulse, but remain wary just in case.

Still ambivalent about us, the stranger remained awake for a while. In turn, I remained awake, pretending like I was asleep but listening to see if she tried anything. While I waited, I tried to cook up some ideas to help secure the portal, but my tension kept my train of thought from even leaving the station. Eventually, when the sound of her snoring cut through the breathing of the pile of goblins and Susie on me, I allowed myself to relax and drift off.

I realized I was drifting in the black void that I’d been to many times before. This was where the modifications and upgrades happened, contained solely within my mind, evidently. Any of the unusual women from Elyndor that had pledged themselves to me, could be perceived in there as auras of wispy, smoky energy that drifted in the void. All I had to do was think about them, and they would be presented to me along with three possible alterations that could be made to them based on their own personal desires.

This was likely to be the easiest and most effective way to up the security around the portal until I could think of something better. Some of the abilities I had been presented with in the past defied conventional logic. Poppi had suddenly been able to speak perfect English after a single night, Koko had been granted bodacious lactating titties, and Moppi was physically tougher. But the fact remained that I didn’t have an easy answer for Susie, who had brought her concerns to me in the first place.

Just then, I was presented with the shape of Susie wreathed in the smoky energy I was so familiar with. I stared for a moment in shock, utterly flabbergasted by what I saw.

“W-what the fuck?” My voice echoed in the void. Had she always been able to be modified like this and I just hadn’t noticed? Or had something changed recently to make it possible? Though confused, I couldn’t help but feel excited and hopeful. Now, there was no one under my protection that I couldn’t give the tools to defend themselves and thrive out in the country with me.

I had sat on a lot of the power I’d accumulated, unsure of what to do with it. Now, I had the dilemma of how much I was going to use. I had no idea how many times I could modify or upgrade someone in a single sitting. I had no idea if pushing it too far would hurt them.

It was best to stick with one thing at a time and keep it slow until I had evidence that it was okay to proceed further. I smirked a little bit and mentally selected Susie’s silhouette, eager to see what wild options would be presented to me for her.

Chapter 8

I kept a close eye on Susie the next day to see what her reaction would be. The options she’d presented the night before had been a little eclectic and took some time for me to decide on. I was hoping the decision I’d made would be useful for her, but there was also a part of me that was looking forward to the comedic potential of it as well.

We set about our morning routines as usual, and I took some time to check the feeds from the previous day while we’d been out. Around noon that day, the video started to distort, and eventually, all the feeds went down.

“Suppose that explains why the files were so small,” I muttered, scrubbing back through the video to see if there were any clues as to the cause. There was nothing that I could see. I restarted the feeds, and they came on without trouble. I decided to go through and check the connections from top to bottom to make sure nothing was loose. I even checked the generator to see if it was running low, and there had been some kind of hiccup. It was on the low side but not enough to be of concern just yet. I would need to make a trip into town for fuel in a few days. The whole security system was eating up more power than I’d anticipated, and I hadn’t thought of an effective way to manage it yet.

“What’s going on, Fat Cock?” Susie said as I poked around the generator.

I sighed and looked over at her impassively. “Checking all the power connections. All the video feeds went down yesterday.”

“What time?” she asked.

It took me a moment to remember the time stamp. “Around noon?”

“Maybe it was the heat?” She suggested. “It was pretty hot out yesterday while we were gone. Are they able to sit out in the sun like that for so long?”

I stared into space, realizing how obvious of an explanation that could be and how much time I’d wasted going over every wire. I couldn’t help but laugh. “That must be it. I guess I’ll need to look that information up somewhere. I never even thought of it.”

“All the blood going to that dick must be taking it away from your brain,” Susie responded smugly. “Good thing you’ve got me here.”

“If you weren’t always trying to do your best sword swallower routine with it all the time, I’d have more to spare,” I countered, taking her completely off-guard. I’d like to say that I thought of it on the spot, but really, I’d cooked it up about an hour after the last time she’d made a similar comment and kept it in my back pocket until she inevitably repeated the wisecrack. What mattered was that it looked like I’d plucked it out of the blue, and I sold it fairly well.

She broke down into laughter after the initial shock of the comment wore off. “I’d say I could stop but we both know I wouldn’t mean it.”

“Not even a little,” I agreed as I pulled her into a hug. “How’s everything going with the others? Where’s our new arrival?”

Susie’s eyes drifted to one side briefly before answering. “Poppi is checking the traps. Kate is trying to break up a fight between Moppi and Koko by the chicken coop. And Shantaka is keeping an eye on us from a distance from the hill over there.”

“Shantaka?” I asked, surprised at just how effective the alteration I’d made had been. Susie seemed equally surprised with her precise knowledge of where everyone was and what they were doing.

“Uh,” she murmured, taking a step back from me as she scratched her head. “That’s the orc’s name. Though I can’t say how I even know that. It just popped into my head when I thought of her. I also know she’s definitely an orc, but not the kind from Elyndor.”

I placed a hand over my mouth to try and hide the smile that was creeping onto my face, but it was no good.

“What are you grinning about!?” Susie pouted defiantly. “I swear to fucking God it’s true!”

“No, no,” I said quietly, motioning for her to calm down with both hands. “I know. I did a little modification on you last night.”

“W-what?” Susie stammered indignantly. “Have you always been able to do that? Why didn’t you say anything?”

I shook my head and shrugged. “No, I don’t think so. It came to me in my sleep last night and I just went with it to see what would happen.”

“So I just know useless trivia about people now?” Susie groaned. “You couldn’t come up with something useful like a bigger pair of tits?”

“First of all,” I objected. “How is a bigger pair of tits more useful? Second, the options given are based on the things you want, not me. So if bigger tits didn’t come up, that’s on you.”

Susie frowned irately. “You’re telling me I wanted trivia as my first superpower?”

“Uh,” I coughed, continuously amused with her assessment of the situation. “No, it’s not trivia. It’s more like monster detection. I don’t know how far it extends, but when they get close, you’re just supposed to know it. I guess the closer or more familiar you are with them, the more details you get?”

“Monster detection,” she repeated, considering the utility of the power and deciding it was actually very useful. The fact that the others were goblins and other creatures from strange fantasy worlds lumped them into the category of monsters as far as the ability was concerned. “That would cut down on the number of times we get jumped, that’s for sure. What were the other options?”

“Radiation resistance and some kind of weird light that only we can see,” I answered.

Susie’s brows shot up. “Radiation resistance? Really?”

“I guess the ogre’s condition really made an impression on you,” I chuckled. “It’s not a bad idea, really. Your whole thing seems to be about being prepared and not being caught off-guard.”

“Probably because I kick ass,” Susie remarked smugly. “Tonight, I want you to do the weird light thing and then maybe the radiation thing after that, depending on what other stuff comes up.”

I chuckled a little in disbelief. “Getting a little pushy, don’t you think? I still have the others to worry about, you know.”

“Psh!” Susie waved a hand dismissively. “I want my superpowers, dammit. And the only way I’m going to get the cool ones is if we get all the base-level abilities out of the way.”

I quirked a brow at her curiously. “Got it all figured out already, huh?”

“Fuckin’ right I do,” Susie confirmed, puffing her beautiful chest out in the process. It was a nice rack already, I noted. I couldn’t understand wanting a bigger one, but I suppose if it came up at some point in the selection, I could throw her a bone.

“So,” I began. “Shantaka.”

“Shantaka,” Susie echoed with a huff. “Different species of orc. She didn’t try to kill us in our sleep, but she’s still not very trusting of us. I’m not sure what to do about that if we can’t even talk to her.”

“Me either,” I admitted. “But if she’s from another world separate from Elyndor, it might be worth looking into what it’s like.”

Susie looked at me with a level of concern in her eyes. “And what if there are even more worlds? How are we going to keep their people from just popping in to pay us a visit?”

I snapped my fingers and pointed at her with a cheesy grin. “Well, Susie, I’m glad you asked!”

“Don’t be a dork about it,” she objected, giving my shoulder a soft punch that wouldn’t have hurt even before scarfing down monster souls. “Just tell me.”

“We’re going to slap a door on it,” I said triumphantly. “Right over the portal itself, maybe a quarter of an inch or less from the surface of the stone. That way, if someone tries to come through, they just run into a locked door. The portal slows momentum when you go through it, so it’d take a hell of a lot of force to break it down.”

“A door,” she murmured, her head bobbing from side to side as she considered the idea. “I guess that would work, yeah. What are we going to make it out of?”

“Right now, all I have is wood,” I answered as we began to walk over toward the chicken coop. What remained of the squabble between the goblins was wrapping up with them licking their wounds and begrudgingly apologizing to one another. “But I’d like to get my hands on something sturdier when I have the chance. I want to run a few tests once we have the door put up. Stress test it a little bit.”

“What about a garage door?” Susie suggested. “We could put the tracks along the top of the cave above the portal, pull it up when we need to use it, have some kind of lock on it when we’re not.”

I nodded in agreement. It would definitely be easier to manage than a big wooden door with all the fittings, especially with the limited amount of space we had to work with. Of course, I would have to ensure that it was made of something sturdier than a standard garage door. Something more like what they used in warehouses would probably be better. “Yeah, I’ll see what I can get ordered out here.”

“Morning,” Kate grumbled as we approached, irritated with the two goblins licking their wounds. “I’m growing tired of constantly keeping these wretches under control.”

“It can be exhausting, I know,” I admitted. “But I appreciate you doing it for us. Have you had any luck with Shantaka?”

“Who?” Kate asked, her brows knitting in confusion.

“The orc,” Susie clarified for me.

The hobgoblin shook her head. “No. She’s moodier than Moppi is.”

“HEY!” Moppi snarled in objection. I jabbed my finger in her direction to get her to relax and sit down. I didn’t want another brawl breaking out so soon after the last one.

“The best we can do for now is just try to include her in things as the day goes on,” I suggested. “Maybe then she’ll warm up to us a little bit. Maybe when she does, we can have her pitch in around here.”

“Doing what?” Kate wondered curiously, clearly eager to occupy herself with something.

I laid out my thoughts on new crops, adding more structures, and repairing the damage to the cellar. It was possible we’d get more visitors and if they weren’t hostile, I’d like to have somewhere to put them before they decided to go back home. Or somewhere to put them if they didn’t, for that matter. It was becoming increasingly clear to me how difficult it was going to be to keep everything secret from the outside world with the limited setup I had. There was also the matter of scouting the area around the other side of the portal in the new world Shantaka hailed from. Without being able to ask her about it, we had no idea how much of a danger it posed until the door was installed.

Kate nodded in understanding. “I can do the scouting.”

My brows went up in surprise. “Are you sure? I don’t think I like the idea of you going through on your own.”

“I am the obvious choice for this job,” Kate scoffed. “I may not have been well-fed when you found me, but I had managed to get around relatively unnoticed in unfamiliar lands for quite a while. I’m also more than capable of defending myself.”

“How will we know if you’re in trouble?” Susie wondered, a note of genuine concern in her voice.

Kate shrugged her shoulders. “If I fail to check in by sundown, then I am in trouble.”

I looked between Susie and Kate pensively before making up my mind. “Alright, but I don’t want you venturing too far. Just get a basic lay of the land and come back. We can get a more detailed look later. I just want to know if there is an immediate threat on the other side that we need to drop what we’re doing to deal with.”

“Very well,” Kate responded, squaring her shoulders proudly. “I won’t let you down.”

I was tempted to offer her a salute to dismiss her formally but decided she probably wouldn’t get the joke. She left to retrieve her bow, leaving me with Moppi and Koko. I checked over their work quickly to see if they’d at least completed their tasks before bickering with each other. The chickens were all fed, and the garden was watered. I had Moppi go to a storage shed to retrieve a few more tires I brought back from my last trip to the junkyard and explained to Koko how we were going to plant some new crops with the spare seeds I had left over.

“Ugh,” Koko groaned lazily. “Always plant, no fuck. Want bounce on dick.”

“Girl after my own heart,” Susie remarked under her breath. I elbowed her quickly, knowing damn well that large goblin ears weren’t just for show.

Poppi returned with a meager catch from her traps, which was to be expected this time of year with how aggressive we’d been with hunting and trapping. I decided to put Poppi on the garden expansion for a while to keep her occupied and her spirits up. I assured her that having a small catch was alright but she didn’t seem convinced.

I went back to the shipping container, placed orders for things that we needed to keep building, and looked into the options I had for expanding our living situation. More shipping containers was the obvious route to go, but I wasn’t sure if it was the way I wanted to do it now that it was more than just me. I could combine several of them together, but at that point, I might as well build an actual house. The whole point of the shipping container was that it was meant just to house me while requiring as little effort on my part as possible.

Another option was to use a mobile home of some kind. I could do several smaller ones or get one of the ridiculously big ones that strained the concept of “mobile.” I scrolled through the search and decided I would come back to it if I couldn’t come up with something better. The prices were a bit steep for my tastes.

Temporarily giving up on the expansion of living space, I went out to the old bus to make sure the back was cleared out. If I was going to make a run into town for supplies I wanted to fit as much as I possibly could in the bus so I wouldn’t be forced to go back anytime soon. As I reached the bus, I glanced in the direction of the lake and had a brief epiphany.

I hadn’t been tapping the resources of the lake nearly enough. I had done some fishing out of it before and got some decent catches, but if we had a decent boat to take out on the water, I was willing to bet that it would be much better. I would need a dock to tie it to and a few other things, but it wouldn’t be hard to manage. Fishing could replace some of the hunting and trapping, and to be honest, I liked the idea of just going out on a boat and relaxing once a bunch of the work was done. I decided to take a detour around the shore to decide on a spot to put the dock.

Shantaka sat down by the water amid some of the overgrown grass along the bank. Seeing my approach, she readied herself to get to her feet. I held my hands up defensively to signal that I meant no harm. “I come in peace.”

The orc woman offered me a puzzled frown but said nothing. She had absolutely no idea what I was saying, but she seemed convinced I didn’t pose a danger to her. I went about my business like she wasn’t there but kept catching glimpses of her watching me out of the corner of my eye. I picked up a relatively smooth, flat stone and chucked it out across the water, skipping it for what had to have been a personal record. I underestimated how much distance my improved strength would give me.

Shantaka exclaimed before reaching down to pick up a stone of her own. She lobbed the rock in at a steep angle, causing it to splash loudly and sink. Her look of delight instantly became one of frustration. I resisted the urge to laugh in case she might take it the wrong way.

I held both hands up again, then bent over to pick up another stone. I held it up to show it to her, then motioned for her to come closer. She came off her perch on the bank hesitantly and approached. I turned the stone over a few times, running a finger along the edges and surface to demonstrate the properties we were looking for. Seeming to understand, she stepped into the water about ankle deep and retrieved a small stone that suited our purposes. I offered a nod of encouragement.

Shantaka smiled, the tusks from her lower jaw giving the gesture an oddly charming quality. Then, I bent my knees and leaned back and to the side, slowly demonstrating the sideways throw needed in order to skip the stone across the surface. I repeated it a few times, allowing her to examine the motions before finally letting loose. Again, the stone went sailing across the water, this time striking a small wave at a strange angle that sent it skittering off to the left with more pronounced arcs.

The orc adjusted her posture and imitated the throw. Her angle was a little off, and the stone failed to skip, offering only a “kerplunk” sound in response to her efforts. Shantaka went ballistic. I would have been impressed with the rage she was able to conjure over something so trivial if it weren’t for the fact that there was seemingly nothing I could do to calm her.

I held both hands up, ready to demonstrate the technique again, but she slapped both my hands out of the air and screamed in frustration. What followed was an animated tirade in a language I didn’t understand. She gestured to me, to the water, to the sky, and a few other things in quick succession that didn’t make any sense to me. The fact I didn’t understand what she was talking about was demonstrated plainly on my face, judging by her reaction.

Yelling something at me with a hint of finality to it, she turned and stormed away from the water back toward the shipping container. I pursed my lips and decided it was probably best to let her cool off and resume my scouting mission. I picked a couple of promising spots before returning to the bus, clearing out the few odd items that had been left in the back. Once I was done, I went to go find Susie to see if there was anything she needed in town. I decided that I might as well make the trip now while I still felt motivated to deal with driving.

I found Shantaka waiting for me, instead, with her sword in hand. She’d managed to sniff it out somehow and had decided to wait for me to return from the lake. Her chest heaved as she pointed it at me and shouted. Again, I had no idea what she was talking about but it felt like she was challenging me to something. I glanced around as the others gathered, though Kate was noticeably missing. I realized she must have already departed through the portal.

Shantaka pointed at her neck, made a throwing motion, and followed with a series of other gestures I didn’t understand. I realized that a necklace of bones and beads she had been wearing when we first saw her was missing. Did she think we’d stolen it? Had Kate used it as the means to get back to the orc’s world? I couldn’t ask clarifying questions, and I couldn’t ask Kate. Instead, I had a furious orc slipping into a fighting stance, ready to lop my head off for some perceived slight or offense.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Alright, fine, whatever. Let’s get this shit out of the way, I guess.”

Chapter 9

It’s worth mentioning that just because I was stronger, faster, and more durable than I’d ever been, I didn’t suddenly become Neo. I didn’t know Kung Fu. My ability to fight was still limited by my actual knowledge of how to fight. I had some basic self-defense skills, and I knew how to shoot, but when put up against a seasoned warrior who’d lived a life of conflict and combat, it was obvious I didn’t know a whole lot.

Shantaka came at me with astonishing speed, swinging the blade with enough power to take a limb if I got sloppy. Jumping back, I was anything but graceful looking, but the enhanced strength and speed made it so I didn’t have to be. So long as I wasn’t where the sword was, I was happy. She continued to swing, placing each strike with precise expertise, the blade whistling through the air in its search for blood. I swerved and bent like a cartoon character, staying one step ahead of her as she pressed her attack.

She over-committed to one strike, briefly exposing her back to me. If I had a weapon of my own, I would have had the perfect opportunity to end it then and there. Instead, I gave her a little backhanded slap across the back to let her know how close she could have been to death. It was a little harder than I intended, nearly sending her sprawling forward but not hard enough to do any real damage. She turned to face me, eyes wide and wild with rage.

“Ah, shit,” I grumbled, realizing only then that I might appear to be mocking or humiliating her. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

Even if she could have understood me, I doubt my apology would have meant anything to her. Redoubling her efforts, she threw herself at me, ferociously swinging the blade at me as the others looked on, worried. My heel caught an uneven part of the ground as I stepped back, causing me to stumble.

Shantaka saw her opening and brought the blade in a swift horizontal stroke across my midsection. My previous momentum was enough to keep it from being deep, but the thin line of crimson that had formed caused the girls to gasp in horror while Shantaka’s face split into a vicious grin of triumph.

“Goddamit,” I growled, looking down at my ruined shirt. It wasn’t anything special, just a basic plain blue T-shirt, but it was one less basic plain blue T-shirt I had available to me now. It was the principle of it, really. “Are you serious with this?”

Thinking she had me on the ropes, the orc stepped forward to thrust the blade into my belly. I stepped to the side and slapped the sword out of her hand easily with my palm. Her grip wasn’t weak by any means, but the force I could put into a simple slap was surprising even to me. Rather than chase after her fallen weapon in the grass several feet away, she turned to face me with her hands balled into fists.

Moppi did the same and took a few steps toward us. I held a hand up to keep her from coming any closer. “No, I can handle this.”

The goblin frowned but did as she was told and held back. Shantaka launched herself at me, hurling a series of highly trained strikes into my midsection before finishing with a devastating haymaker across the side of my skull. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t feel the blows; it was more like a child was trying to box me. It didn’t matter how well-trained she was, there was no getting around the supernatural durability I possessed.

She stared at me in utter disbelief, her fist still firmly planted against the side of my head. I’d hardly moved an inch from her blow. She stepped back slowly, glancing at the others before deciding to give it another try. This time, her strikes were less precise but held a great deal more strength and speed. I let every blow connect, noting that a few actually hurt a little, depending on where they landed. If nothing else, it was a good way to test the limits of my durability when it came to things like joints and other weak points of my anatomy.

I also noticed that the more I endured the blows, the more accustomed to them I became. It wasn’t like they hurt less than they already had, but they were easier for me to track. I could actually predict where the blow was going to land, even in her chaotic, frenzied state.

“Okay, that’s enough,” I announced, catching her fist in my left hand. Astonished at my speed and strength, the orc tried to take her fist back. I held it firmly in place. Then, she suddenly shifted her strategy. She stepped forward, twisted my arm around, and came up behind me as she kicked my knee out from under me. Forced to one knee she wrapped her arms up around my neck for a sleeper hold. I reached up and, slowly but surely, pulled her arms open from around my neck. I could feel her shake and strain against it, but there was nothing she could do.

“Enough,” I repeated as I released her and turned. There was a desperate look in her eyes as she threw another punch into my face. I caught the blow by the wrist, stopping it half of an inch from my nose. With a twist, I pulled her arm to the side and held it there, batting her strike with the other hand aside with my free hand. “STOP!”

Shantaka froze as my words finally cut through her battle frenzy. Her eyes searched mine, looking for any possible sign that I might try to hurt her and finding none. I released her arm but didn’t move, regarding her in silence. We both remained that way for a minute or so as she caught her breath. Finally, she offered me a slight nod before standing and stepping away from me. I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, but it felt like whatever the quarrel was about was resolved.

The orc picked up her sword and walked away without looking back. Susie waited until she was out of earshot to speak. “Are you alright?”

I nodded, glancing down at the cut shirt and the wound beneath it that had already closed. “I’ve cut myself worse cutting tomatoes.”

“That’s because you hold the knife wrong,” Susie countered as she pulled the shirt up to have a look at my abdomen. As I said, everything was fine. If it hadn’t been for the blood smeared across my skin, you would have never known there’d been an injury in the first place.

“Thanks, chef,” I muttered. “I’ll remember that.”

Susie dropped my shirt and sighed before staring me in the eyes. “What the hell did you say to her to set her off like that?”

“No fucking idea,” I said, holding my hands up defensively. “I swear. I was showing her how to skip rocks on the water then she flipped out. But I don’t know if that was enough to make her want to fight me.”

“Maybe we should push her back through the portal and tell her not to come back,” Susie said, then paused mid-thought. “What do you think she has that allowed her to come here anyway? She needs to have something that is linked to this destination right?”

“Oh, I’ll go ask her,” I said sarcastically, giving her a pointed look.

“Someone’s crabby,” she chuckled a little bit, patting the side of my face condescendingly. “You need a snack, champ? Maybe a juice box? Who’s mommy’s big boy?”

“Okay, alright,” I said, waving her off. “That’s enough of that.”

It wasn’t until around dinner time that Kate returned, looking no worse for wear. With the exception of Shantaka, we’d all gathered around the fire pit to enjoy our meal. Poppi and Koko had been engaged in a slap fight when the hobgoblin emerged from the darkness.

“Just in time for dinner,” I noted casually. Susie dished up some of the stew I’d put together with some of our leftovers. “What’d you find?”

“Not much,” Kate responded, taking the bowl from Susie and having a seat on one of the logs. The tone of her voice told me she wasn’t pleased about the fact. “The portal is underground in a large cave complex. I found others like her, but they were all dead. Whatever killed them was savage.”

“How many?” I asked quietly, just in case Shantaka suddenly understood English and was listening in.

“Two tens plus five,” the hobgoblin answered before taking a large spoonful of the stew. Her eyes closed halfway to savor it. She hadn’t been without food for some time now, but she hadn’t lost her appreciation for it after having it readily available to her.

“Twenty-five,” I clarified. Kate nodded her acknowledgment. I’d learned at some point in passing that goblinoids didn’t have words for a lot of numbers. Anything over ten but less than a hundred was just multiples of ten and then another number for the remainder. Culturally, I didn’t know what that meant, but teaching them some of the words we had for other numbers would be useful if they wanted to read and count in our language.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the silhouette of Shantaka approaching. I got to my feet slowly to greet her, hoping that what had happened earlier was all water under the bridge. I was surprised to see her nude as she stepped into the firelight, carrying the sword at her side as she met my gaze.

“Shantaka,” I said, holding a hand up. I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be a fight or something friendlier, and her nude state was throwing me off even more. The orc woman was incredibly fit, without an ounce of fat on her, excluding the large, full breasts that hung freely in the warm light of the fire.

“Daryl,” she responded awkwardly before going down to her knees. Bowing her head, she held the sword up in both palms, presenting it as a sort of peace offering. I glanced at the others, all looking on with a mixture of surprise and curiosity. Accepting the offering seemed like the most prudent course of action, especially because we didn’t have much else in the way of communication. I took the sword solemnly, hoping I was giving the gesture the proper amount of respect.

To my surprise, the orc came forward on her knees and reached for the waist of my pants to pull them down.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I laughed, trying to step away. Her grip on my pants remained firm as she looked up at me, perplexed. “What are you doing?”

“Mate,” she said simply, tugging at the pants brutishly to get them free. The zipper and the button didn’t stand a chance against her strength. Her eyes went wide at the bulge in my underwear before fishing my already erect meat from inside.

“Mate?” I repeated in a murmur, glancing over at Susie. She gave me an enthusiastic thumbs-up while the goblins salivated and nodded. “What the hell?”

Before I could offer any more objection, I felt the orc’s tongue along the tip of my dick. A sudden apprehensiveness about the tusks protruding from her jaw ran through me but I decided her intent wasn’t to maul me, so she must have known at least a little of how to maneuver with them. Still, I couldn’t help but eyeball them as she took me into her mouth and swallowed my cock to the hilt.

“Ohh!” I groaned, unable to hide my surprise at how swiftly and proficiently she seemed to handle it. There was no way of asking if she’d done it before, but if she hadn’t, she must have done something to know so much about what to do.

“Damn, she takes that shit like a champ!” Susie laughed, spooning some stew into her mouth like it was dinner and a show.

“Not bad,” Koko muttered, feigning disinterest even while unable to take her eyes off the display. The other goblins, however, were watching with looks of pure confusion. Shantaka placed her hands on my legs to brace herself and worked her head back and forth, silken tongue sliding along the shaft with ease while her lips protected me from her teeth.

Her efforts quickly crossed the line of a blowjob and passed into the realm of fucking me with her mouth. It’s a distinct difference you only come to know after you’ve experienced it. Susie could do it, having placed a great deal of emphasis on giving me the maximum effort she could muster. But other than that, it was a very uncommon talent. The suction was perfect, the pacing impeccable, and the power formidable.

I couldn’t help but drop the sword into the grass and place my hands atop the orc’s head, my mind only vaguely aware of the absurdity of the situation I’d found myself in. It hadn’t been long ago that I had occupied the land alone, without someone to speak with for miles. Now, I had a veritable embarrassment of riches in the form of horny, otherworldly women tripping over each other to get on my dick. Without the benefits of my abilities, I wouldn’t have a prayer in hell of keeping up with them.

I let out a shallow breath and began to buck into the orc woman’s mouth, feeling the end of my dick sliding into her throat without resistance before pulling back. She took it gratefully, as though she were receiving a blessing at communion. Her eyes looked up at me, gauging my approval as I thrust my hips more wildly. Now that I was properly engaged with the act, the rest of the women gathered began to cheer us on like it was a local sporting event. Even Koko, who had tried to seem disinterested, was caught up in the energy of the moment. Without much to say on the matter, I simply focused on Shantaka, and within a few more minutes, the sultry heat of her brought me to climax.

My body shuddered as I gasped, unable to hide the thrill and excitement of filling her belly with some baby batter. Her lips held a firm seal around the hard flesh of my cock for a moment longer as she made sure to swallow every drop that I’d bestowed her with. Then, rising from her place on the ground, she turned and bent over the nearest log next to Susie as if she wasn’t even there.

As the slippery slit of her cunt came into view, I readied myself to make entry. I was surprised when she pulled the supple curve of her ass to one side, exposing her tight asshole to me. Looking over her shoulder, she bid me to take her without uttering a word.

“She’s fucking kinky, eh?” Susie laughed, reaching out to take hold of the other ass cheek and spread it open. Shantaka glanced at her but seemed relieved to know that Susie was helping things along rather than getting in the way. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

Realizing that sucking me off had probably been for the purpose of getting me good and lubed, I decided not to offer an objection. I brought the tip of my cock to her ass and pushed slowly. There was no way of knowing if it was her first anal, but if it had been, going in too hard was likely to rob her of any enjoyment. Susie and I had done butt-stuff enough times that I’d gotten the technique down. I went slow at first and waited for the give, which came more readily than I had anticipated. Once the give came, the ass had a way of sucking me up into it, which it immediately did.

I let out an appreciative groan at the warmth that swallowed me up. Anal wasn’t preferable to vaginal by any stretch, but comparing the experiences wasn’t a one-to-one kind of thing anyway. Pussy has a way of enveloping you from end to end, hugging and squeezing while you move in and out. Anal was more like fucking a warm donut with a small hole in its center and a soft, warm recess awaiting you on the other side.

Shantaka let out an almost primal groan as she brought her hips forward before slamming them back toward me. I was buried to the hilt in an instant. The orc slapped her own ass, encouraging me to be rough with her. In a warrior culture, maybe that was how things were done.

Again, I had experience in this area thanks to Susie and knew how much effort to give the whole thing. In fact, the little tussle we’d had earlier prepared me for how much I needed to control my strength when it came to slapping her rear.

I gave each flank a firm slap before bucking hard and wild deep into her ass. She let out a savage moan, bracing herself against the log as she looked across the fire at Poppi and Koko staring back at her slack-jawed. Moppi had abandoned all pretense of finishing her meal and had stripped down to masturbate at the incredibly carnal act before her. Susie’s eyes flashed with lustful hunger, but she made no move to satisfy herself or otherwise participate.

“F-fuck!” I grunted, marveling at how tight the orc had made her hole as she bounced along my shaft. She responded with a growl of pleasure, redoubling her efforts and increasing her pace. She spared a hand to move underneath her, where she began to furiously finger her unusually engorged clit.

“More,” Shantaka growled, seeming to know just enough English to navigate this precious moment. Her carnal desire allowed her to let down her defenses and surrender herself to me entirely. I realized that she wasn’t just asking me for more of the same; she wanted more of my strength. The orc didn’t want to be fucked. She wanted to be broken.

It had to be some warrior culture shit, but I didn’t care anymore. I gave her ass a firmer slap and allowed myself to become a little more reckless with the thrusts and bucks of my hips. Soon, it felt like I was close to splitting her in half like firewood, but her flesh held firm and responded to me in kind. She squeezed and bounced as best as she could manage while I ravaged her from behind. I lost all sense of time and space for a moment, my head getting a little lighter as I was engulfed in the heat of our bodies colliding by the firelight.

Then, I hit my peak and released everything I had inside her, my sack contracting and squeezing in rugged spasms to ensure the depths of her ass received every drop of seed I had to offer her.

It was an orgasm of pure lust without pretense of breeding or affection. She wanted cock in her ass, and so I gave it to her. Her back arched as her body went still and rigid, hitting her orgasm when she heard my carnal grunting and moaning behind her. The orc’s body twisted around under the immense strain of her climax before releasing it all at once, allowing her to collapse on the log in front of her.

Panting, I pulled myself from inside her, leaving her dark star twitching with the echoes of her excited arousal. I wiped a bit of the sweat from my brow and glanced around for something to wipe the rest of myself with, settling on the ruined shirt from earlier. I was going to toss it out anyway, so why not?

“I think I speak for everyone,” Susie said, awestruck. “When I say I’d like some of that, too!”

Tossing her glasses aside and pulling her hair free of the hair ties, she ripped open her shirt like a superhero about to spring into action.

Chapter 10

Moppi was impressed with my performance not only during the fireside fuck, but with the fight earlier that day. While reviewing the upgrades available, Susie’s was essentially what I expected to see and I selected the light ability as requested. Moppi’s had changed, however. Instead of claws and teeth, her desires had shifted toward enhancements of strength and speed. I’d enhanced her durability once already, giving her a slight edge in biting matches with the other two goblins, but she hadn’t had a chance to really test it. As a result, the option remained, though presented as an upgrade to an upgrade instead of the more standard modification.

I selected a strength modification for her, which would serve her well in a fight as well as the daily duties I tended to hand to her. Even without the modification, she’d started to build muscle faster than the others, so I expected the difference to be noticed by her as soon as she got up the next day.

Moving on to the others, I gave Kate a softer, longer stride that allowed her to move with much less sound while leaving only light tracks in the most porous terrain. Poppi’s options featured an upgrade to her speech as well as the speed reading before, but the option for her claws and teeth had vanished, replaced by a spectral image of her building something. Now that she’d had some time and experience helping me with other projects, she seemed to desire an increased proficiency with construction. Before deciding on anything, I turned my attention to Shantaka to see if options had been presented to her.

As with the others, I was presented with three spectral forms of Shantaka, each engaged in a different activity. One was very plainly the means to skip a stone across water, which amused me. The second was larger tusks, which didn’t make much sense to me. I supposed it was possible that they were a status symbol among her people. The final option was similar to Poppi’s desire to speak my language, albeit with the orc in place of the goblin. Her desires were very simple compared to some of the others, so I decided the best way to allow them to evolve was to give her the means to communicate with us as her first upgrade. Without her language barrier posing a challenge, I bounced back over to the apparition of Poppi in my mind and provided her with the construction upgrade.

Finally came Koko, whose desires had not wavered at any point. Every time I looked at them, they remained focused exclusively on sex and breeding. The baby cannon enhancement was still present, shown as an illusory demonstration of her belly swelling and shooting out little goblin babies from between her legs. I still wasn’t ready to grapple with that one, so I moved on to the next one. Again, it was a repeat: the pussy vice. She wanted the means to control the inside of her uterus to clamp down tight around me and hold on until I had nothing left to give. If she’d shown any growth regarding self-restraint or patience, I might have considered this a fun one, but the last thing I needed was her turning a quickie into a longer engagement or a group thing into being all about her.

The final option stood in stark contrast to the first two, giving me a glimmer of hope for Koko’s personal growth. Though still focused on sex, the option was presented as her emitting a delightful aura that inspired a mood for lovemaking. Sure, it was another way for her to get what she wanted, but it included others as well, which was a step in the right direction. I went with that option, deciding that a little reward might encourage more of the same from her.

I woke shortly after with all the upgrades in place and decided that instead of another foray into the portal after chores, we could spend the day relaxing. A short hike in the woods nearby sounded like a nice diversion, allowing the girls to do a little exploring and get the excess energy out of their system without putting them in a position of looking over their shoulders every five seconds.

Shantaka’s act of submission to me seemed to be enough for my powers to take her on as a vassal, allowing me to enhance her. She realized pretty quickly, and with no shortage of surprise, that she was able to understand everything we were saying, though it didn’t make her much more talkative. I explained to her the need for chores and how we needed to keep everything running smoothly. It was something she detested.

“I’m a warrior,” she growled, squaring her shoulders proudly. “I don’t do farmer’s work. Now that we are mates, my skills are meant to protect you against your enemies.”

“But what do you do the rest of the time?” I wondered aloud. “Because it’s not often I have enemies rolling up to my front gate looking for a fight. When we go to Elyndor, sure… but not here.”

Shantaka frowned, her tusks making her look far more miserable than she would have without them. “My people’s warriors do not learn to farm. When we are not battling, we are training. Perhaps I should train.”

The orc wasn’t understanding what I was getting at, but she had also inadvertently given me an idea. “What about guard duty?”

She raised a brow and nodded slowly. “This I could do. But your wall will not hold me.”

I glanced at the fence running along the property and laughed a little. “No, not there.” I pointed toward the cave. “There.”

“Why?” She asked with genuine curiosity.

“You and the others aren’t from the same place,” I explained. “Which you already know. But what we don’t know is what else might come through from your world or even if there are entirely different worlds that something could come from. You came through while we were in Elyndor, completely without our knowledge. I don’t want anything with the intent to kill getting the drop on us like that.”

“Ah,” the orc grunted. “That makes sense. If something comes through, I shall slay it.”

“Only if it’s dangerous,” I added quickly. “And it’s not a job you’ll have for long. Soon, I’ll have all the materials I need to put a door over the portal, so give some thought to something else you may want to do around here, or I’ll have to give you something to do that you might end up hating.”

“I understand,” she agreed amiably. “I will consider it. Until then, I have guard duty.”

After the orc was on her way I turned my attention to the others, reviewing their work as well as the upgrades I had provided them. Koko had become aware of hers very quickly, possessing the means to turn it on and off at will. It was a pleasant scent, vaguely floral with a touch of vanilla, but it wasn’t the same for all of us. Each person had a slightly different perception of what the exotic perfume smelled like.

Koko was able to complete her work a little faster, lugging buckets of chicken feed and other things in a fraction of the time she had before. Moppi wrapped up watering the plants around the same time.

“Hey!” I yelled from the other side of the enclosure, pointing at Moppi. “Don’t punch the chicken coop, you’re gonna break it!”

Moppi froze, not realizing that I’d been standing there to see what she’d been doing. I made a mental note to get her a punching bag or something else to beat on now that she would be looking to test her strength. She went back to inspecting the plants as if nothing had happened, doing her best to look innocent in the process.

Kate had noticed how quickly she moved with her longer stride and how light her footfalls felt, so she spent some of her time sprinting around the yard to get a feel for the new ability. As good as it was just to tumble around and cover large distances faster than she ever had, she was eager to see how stealthy she could be around unsuspecting individuals.

“No messing around, please,” I cautioned her. “At least, not yet. I don’t want to knock you out because I threw a punch on reflex.”

“You would do that?” Kate asked me, genuinely confused. “To me?”

“Not to you specifically,” I assured her. “But I’ve been through enough that when something takes me by surprise, I have a tendency to throw hands and ask questions later. Understand?”

The hobgoblin nodded, a little dejected, before turning her attention to the others. “What about them?”

“I still think you’d be taking your life into your own hands, but if you want to risk it, be my guest.”

The only ones who could not immediately test their abilities were Susie and Poppi, who were forced to wait until later. Light wasn’t useful in the middle of the day, and with a day of leisure ahead of us, Poppi would have to wait until she could flex her building muscles.

With all the chores done, I announced the casual day ahead of us, earning me a chorus of pleased replies. Susie and I gathered some things up, stuffed some packs with supplies for a hike and a picnic, and we were off. Knowing that the summer heat had yet to kick into full gear, I provided each of the girls with a bottle of water I warned them would not hold up to biting. We stopped by the cave to let Shantaka know where we would be when she got hungry and went on our way. For her part, the orc seemed disinterested in what we were doing and was looking forward to the chance to do battle with whatever strange entity stepped out of the portal.

“This was a good idea,” Susie said, grinning at me from behind a large pair of sunglasses. Koko shot past us, screaming something in goblinoid as Poppi gave chase, tackling her a few feet ahead of us before the pair rolled through the dry grass for several feet. The laughter between them let me know it wasn’t a squabble but a genuine bit of horseplay they were both enjoying. With that in mind, I didn’t bother to reprimand them until they started to fall behind.

“Come on!” I called back to them. “Or you’re going to get left behind.”

Like a couple of children, the two sprang to their feet and raced to see which would reach us first, waving their arms over their heads and screaming for the sake of making noise the whole way. “You’re going to wear yourselves out before we even get to the woods,” I laughed.

I hadn’t taken a walk in the woods since I’d first set up the fence around the property. It had been a bitch to manage with the trees, but I’d managed to clear enough space on either side to get it set up. I remembered there were still piles of branches and chopped wood that I had to retrieve and stack in the woodshed for winter. It could wait for later, though. This time, I intended to enjoy my time with the others as we strolled through the shady forest floor.

I’d stayed on top of clearing old dead brush and things out of the area since I bought it. The whole area had been neglected for quite a while, and I didn’t want to have any more kindling available for wildfires than was strictly necessary. As a result, the forest floor looked pretty tidy, with a lot of smaller shrubs sprouting up in newly cleared areas to fill things out nicely. Sunlight danced across all of it each time the slightest breeze blew through the branches overhead, giving it a magical quality not unlike Elyndor at times.

“This forest is much more to my liking than the ones back home,” Kate noted, taking in a deep breath to savor the sweetness of the summer breeze. “Much more peaceful.”

“Imagine my surprise when I set foot in an Elyndor forest for the first time,” I chuckled, recalling how insanely intimidating the eldritch growth of the trees alone had been.

“Not as exciting,” Moppi remarked with a dissatisfied grunt. She’d been relatively quiet the whole walk up to the woods, now that I thought of it. I frowned slightly, recalling how she had also stressed the dangers of Elyndor as well as a desire never to go back, yet there she was, hungering for excitement. It seemed a little strange to me.

“Maybe we can find a nice thick tree for you to punch,” I joked, earning a small hint of a smirk from the disgruntled goblin.

“I can think of a thick tree I’d like to punch my womb,” Susie laughed, elbowing me playfully in the ribs. “Eh? Eh?”

I tried to feign disinterest, but the goofy delivery cut right through my facade, and I started snorting. It happens every time something hilarious catches me totally by surprise. The stupider the joke, the better. She knew it, too. She’d always liked getting the snort out of me since we were young.

We found a spot around noon to throw down a blanket and have a little picnic. Though the sandwiches were nearly the exact same spread as those we’d last had in Elyndor, the overall mood was much brighter. Kate kicked back and snoozed against a tree after putting a couple of sandwiches away while Koko and Poppi coaxed Moppi into demonstrating various feats of strength, not least of which was lifting them both up and practically juggling them.

Once the goblins started getting truly restless, I knew it was time to move on. Susie and I packed everything up, woke Kate from her siesta, and continued our long hike through the woods.

“In all the trips I’ve made out here in the past, I don’t think we’ve ever come up this way,” Susie observed, glancing around the denser portion of the woods we’d wandered into. “It’s bigger than I realized. What are you going to do with all of it?”

“Do?” I chuckled. “I don’t need to do anything with it. I come back here to clear some brush, but other than that, I’m content to just leave it be. Works better as a buffer against civilization that way.”

“Sure,” Susie acknowledged, gesturing toward the trees around us. “I just see so much potential here, you know? There’s so many good spots for treehouses.”

“Treehouses,” I repeated as I realized what she was talking about. “Like the one that kid down the street from you had? What was his name?”

“Phil,” she answered promptly. “Phil Pruitt. He had a crush on me, you know.”

I squinted at her, looking unimpressed. “Didn’t everyone call him PeePee?”

“They were just jealous he had a PlayStation in his treehouse,” Susie argued.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It was a pretty sweet setup he had. I think he’s the only person I ever knew who was still using a treehouse all through high school.”

“It was huge!” Susie exclaimed while throwing her arms open. “And built like a fucking tank.”

“Spend a lot of time up there with him, did you?” I teased.

Susie rolled her eyes, her hips swaying from side to side. “A little, maybe, but most of it was alone without his knowledge.”

“You didn’t get up to anything weird up there, did you?” I asked, knowing what the likely answer would be.

“I didn’t have any privacy at home, dammit!” She objected defensively. “Where else was I supposed to flick my bean?”

I broke into another snorting fit of laughter, this time getting the attention of the others with how raucous it got. “So you want me to build you a treehouse out here in the woods so you can relive the masturbatory fantasies of your youth!?”

“I mean,” Susie stammered a little. “It sounds stupid when you say it like that.”

Poppi’s ears twitched in anticipation. “I could do it!”

Susie held her hands up defensively. “No, you don’t have to do that. It was just a—.”

“No, really!” Poppi chirped, motioning to Moppi and Koko. “Many goblin tribes live in trees. It keeps them away from predators. Koko’s used to do it all the time until they were conquered by the Goblin King. Then they were forced into the caves with us.”

“Huh,” I muttered, genuinely surprised at how interesting of a tidbit it was. In fact, there was a lot about their tribes in Elyndor that I didn’t know. Nor did I know much about the goblin king they often derided. “That makes a lot of sense. The getting off the ground and away from predators part, I mean.”

“Goblin houses much nicer than elven treehouses,” Koko announced a little smugly.

“How come we haven’t seen anything elven from Elyndor?” Susie wondered, glancing between Poppi and Kate, knowing they might be better suited to a long-winded explanation.

Poppi exchanged glances with the hobgoblin before offering us an uncertain shrug. “Not sure. Most think they died off during the cataclysm.”

My brows shot up in surprise. “This is the first time I’ve heard about a cataclysm.”

“It happened a long time ago,” Kate clarified. “A lot of the societies and cultures of that time were wiped out. Creatures that did well underground or were smaller lived through it without many side effects. Anything that didn’t die became tainted. Like the ogre.”

I held a hand up, motioning for her to back things up a little. “You’re saying the cataclysm is what caused the miasma?”

“Mhm,” Poppi responded with a quick nod of her head. “It was a lot worse back then, though. And it was everywhere.”

“And what was the cataclysm?” I asked ambivalently.

Kate and Poppi blew some air through their lips as they tried to think of a way to explain it. Even with the benefits of shared language, there were certain terms that the various goblin races used that didn’t have a perfect translation. “Old magic that the Specials used.”

“The Zintari,” Kate clarified. “They all had powers, like you. Legend says they went to war with one another and called the sun down upon the lands, burning themselves from the face of Elyndor just to kill their rivals.”

“Does that sound to you what it sounds like to me?” Susie wondered, slightly horrified by the description.

“Yeah,” I responded in a raspy voice. Given the way they described it, the nature of the sun, and what seemed like radiation exposure on the ogre I’d fought, it didn’t sound like a standard war. It didn’t even sound like a bunch of wizards slinging spells at one another from towers in a magic war.

It sounded like a nuclear war.

Chapter 11

I couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about the conclusion Susie and I had come to earlier that day. The girls had no way of knowing what we were talking about, so we considered bringing some information up on our phones but decided against it. Unless they actively wanted to explore the concept, we saw little point in exposing it to them at the time. If the cataclysm had been a nuclear war, it had happened so long ago that only fleeting stories of what it was or what it was about seemed to exist. That was among the goblins, anyway.

It got me thinking about the state of their world and its relationship with our own. Half-formed thoughts buffeted my consciousness like a whirlwind, preventing me from reaching that delicate mental state that allowed me to slip into a dream state. Lying there, staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, I suddenly smelled something distinctly out of place: cigarette smoke.

Neither Susie nor I smoked, so there was absolutely no reason I could think of that I’d be smelling it at all. For a moment, I thought I had slipped into sleep without realizing it and was experiencing some strange dream. I turned my head and carefully picked my way out of the pile of naked goblins and stepped over the sleeping orc that had inched a little closer to the cuddle puddle sometime in the night. I sniffed a few times to confirm I was detecting what I thought I was and attempted to follow it. It wasn’t the kind of smell left behind on a smoker’s jacket that you could sometimes detect when standing too close. This was the smell of a lit cigarette someone was taking active drags on.

I stepped out the front door, grabbing my handgun on the way to be on the safe side, and my brow furrowed as I looked around the darkened landscape of the yard. My eyes settled on a shadowy figure seated at the picnic table, the subtle glow of a lit cigarette telling me I’d found my person.

“This is private property,” I warned as I cautiously approached, my hand settling on my weapon.

The figure’s only response was to take another drag on the cigarette before blowing a cloud of smoke into the cool night air.

“How did you even get in—” my words trailed off as the glow of the cigarette illuminated an impossibly familiar face. “Boulder?”

The face of the grizzled former detective looked up at me, acknowledging my presence with a slight upward nod. There was no mistaking that this was the man I had confronted in Susie’s apartment, but even with the limited light available, there was something not right about his complexion. His eyes lacked a certain spark of life that’s difficult to explain until you’ve seen it for yourself. They were like a doll’s eyes.

“Barnes,” he responded casually. “You’re up late.”

“What the fuck?” I muttered, glancing around before letting my gaze settle upon him once again. “This can’t be real. It’s impossible.”

“Yeah,” he responded dryly. “That’s what I thought too. But considering this bullshit with you and the goblin bitches and magical fucking portals, maybe we hang up the concept of impossible for a little bit.”

“I killed you,” I argued with a bit of a snarl in my voice. “That’s a whole different kind of impossible, I’d say.”

Boulder shrugged briefly as he took another drag on his cigarette, gazing up at the stars above. “Suit yourself.”

“Listen here, asshole,” I growled as I snatched at the arm holding the cigarette, only for my hand to pass through it entirely. A cold, unsettling feeling, like that of late autumn swampland, ran up my arm and down my spine. “Oh, fuck.”

“’Fraid you’re not gonna be able to bash my brains in again,” Boulder laughed, flicking his cigarette off into the night. It faded from sight entirely after just a few feet. I took a step back as the apparition got to his feet.

“You’re a ghost,” I surmised aloud as I stared back at him bug-eyed. “Ghosts are real.”

“Yeah,” Boulder confirmed, sliding his hands into the pockets of his long jacket. “Though I seem to be different from the other ones, it seems.”

“What other ones?” I asked, looking around desperately as though a bunch of them would reveal themselves to me at that very moment.

“You can’t see them,” Boulder assured me. “Even if they wanted to be seen, I gather it’s a little beyond them to be able to pull off. There aren’t many out here, but I’m willing to bet there’d be a lot more if we went into town.”

“We?” I scoffed. “What’s this ‘we’ shit?”

Pulling a hand from his pocket, he gestured vaguely between us. “We’re connected now. Ever since you crushed my melon, I can’t go too far from you. I’m stuck listening to you all day, every day—I’ve lost all sense of my body’s former urges, though, so I never even bother to watch the fucked up porno that is your life.”

I was suddenly a little self-conscious of the last few days of sexual activity between me and the girls. I wasn’t ashamed of what I’d done, but the thought of the older man sitting around watching from the sidelines was a little disturbing. Thankfully, apparently that hadn’t been an issue. “You’re around all the time?”

“Yeah,” he responded, clearing his throat with a little cough. “Shit in the day isn’t as bad though. I experience it more like a dream than anything. Like if you’re trying to sleep through your roommate making noise in the other room because you got work in the mornin’.”

“What about the other ghosts?” I asked, gesturing with one hand to the expanse of my land. “Do they just watch people all the time, too?”

Boulder pursed his lips, shaking his head as he looked out into the night. “Nah. Most of ‘em don’t pay much attention to the living anymore. Either lost the means or the interest. Sometimes they notice you when you’re doing stuff relevant to their past lives, but other than that, they just go about their business.”

“Relevant?” I repeated, unable to contain my curiosity despite who I was talking to. “Like what?”

“Your little homesteading routine,” he answered, making a little circular motion with one hand. “Most of the dead out here were pioneers or hunters and whatnot. So when you engage in that stuff, they sometimes notice and look on. Outside of that, you fade from their perception. But for me, I see you and your crew all the time.”

His mention of the others soured my curiosity. “Alright, so what the fuck do you want, then? You have unfinished business or something?”

“Dunno,” Boulder admitted with another shrug of his broad shoulders. “I couldn’t tell ya. I don’t know how it works. Everything I’ve learned so far is through observation and when the others see fit to speak about it. There’s no orientation period. I was in the apartment one minute with you coming at me, and then next, I was here.”

“You had Susie,” I snapped back, ignoring everything but the part about him in the apartment. “She said you were trying to rape her.”

“Yeah, I figured that’s what you thought,” he nodded, unphased by the accusation. “Can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same thing in your position.”

I squared my shoulders as though the man had just insulted my honor. “Are you trying to tell me you weren’t?”

“I think you already know I wasn’t,” Boulder responded. “Somewhere deep down, I think you know I wasn’t going to rape Quickly. It’s why it’s been giving you such a hard time, sticking in your craw the way it has.”

“Bullshit,” I snapped again, my temper beginning to get the best of me.

Boulder’s dead eyes looked at me incredulously for a moment. I realized that unless he had to imitate a particular gesture or expression, his body didn’t move with the subtle motions that came with the act of breathing. There was no sound, no motion at all from him. “Whatever you want to believe, Barnes. It’s no skin off my sack.”

“Alright, so why the fuck are we talking?” I asked impatiently. “What’s the point of this?”

“I thought it might be nice to warn you,” he explained with a sigh. “You’re being surveilled.”

My anger turned to surprise before congealing into a vague sense of disquiet. “Police? Government?”

“Former friend of mine, Jacqueline Heins,” Boulder answered. “I don’t know why, but she came around the other day sniffing around at the gate. Took everything I had to scare her off.”

I blinked several times at how loaded with information the simple explanation was. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Seeing the baffled expression on my face, he continued. “She’s got a bee in her bonnet over you. She’s been watching you and the others frolic and farm from that hill across the way. You were in Elyndor when she came to the gate, so I did what I could to tell her to fuck off, but interacting with electronics is even harder than regular objects. Which is to say, super fucking hard.”

“The cameras,” I muttered. “That’s what happened to them? That was you?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I thought if she was scared off and it looked like a glitch, the two of you would never have to cross paths. But I saw her up there again today, snapping pictures with that telephoto lens of hers.”

“She’s taking pictures!?” I exclaimed as a dense pit took shape in my gut.

“That’s kinda how it’s done, Barnes,” he chuckled, glancing toward the hill he’d mentioned. “She’s got better gear than me because she’s still at Homeland, so she doesn’t have to get as close as I did.”

I felt a sudden wave of vertigo hit me, and I decided to take a seat before I passed out. Someone from Homeland Security was watching the property and taking pictures. I couldn’t even begin to form a proper plan of action to respond with. “Shit.”

“Hence,” Boulder said, spreading his hands. “Why I thought it might be good to warn you.”

“W-what?” I stammered, managing to latch back onto the conversation. “Why? Why would you want to warn me? You’re dead because of me.”

“That depends on how you look at it,” he countered. “Like I said, I would have done the same thing in your position with the information that you had. Shit, the whole reason I was there was because I was acting off of incomplete information. We both fucked the pooch on that one, and it got me killed. But, at the end of the day, if I’d handled things differently you never would have been in that position. There’s plenty of blame to go around.”

It was a sobering explanation and a surprisingly unbiased one, considering it came from the ghost of the man I killed. Perhaps being dead offered people a chance at a kind of introspection you just didn’t get in life. “That doesn’t explain why you’d want to help me, though.”

“I know Jackie,” Boulder grunted. “Once she gets her teeth in, she ain’t gonna let go. Unlike me, she’s good people and good at what she does. The world, as a whole, benefits from her being in it. If she goes off half-cocked like I did and sets off that temper of yours, she’s going to end up right here with me. I can’t have that.”

“Temper?” I interjected, my nostrils flaring. “You—!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Boulder cut me off. “I know. You thought I was going to put it to your old lady. Still, you don’t think skull-crushing is a bit much?”

“What was I supposed to think?! You had a gun to Susie’s head, Koko was unconscious, and I…” I paused, my words trailing off again as I considered what he’d said. It wouldn’t have been hard to pull my punches on a regular person if I’d wanted to. I could have disabled him handily and left him to deal with the cops, who struck me as the types eager for an excuse to be rid of him. But I hadn’t wanted any of that. I’d snapped and let my rage get the best of me. In the heat of the moment, all I’d wanted to do was end him—to protect my girls. And I’d succeeded, hadn’t I? I frowned. “I may have gone off the handle, but you fucked up first. That much I can say without a doubt.”

“Fair enough,” the old man responded. “Not that I’m upset about it, mind you. I’d pretty much hit the end of the road, anyway. Dying on a case was pretty much always in the cards for me. But it’s always the hit you don’t see comin’ that ends up being the one to put you down. Maybe keep that in mind going forward, hm?”

“Hold on,” I said, waving my hands. “If you’re supposed to be bound to me, how were you here to see her when I was gone?”

“The property,” he responded, pointing down at the ground. “You’ve put enough of yourself into it that it’s like an anchoring point. I can go anywhere on the property that I want, even if you’re not here.”

“Have you followed me through the portal to Elyndor?” I wondered.

Boulder shook his head. “No. Working myself up to it, though. Every part of my existence is something I’m relearning, so I’m pacing myself.”

“What do you suggest I do about your partner?” I groaned, leaning back against the table. I felt a headache coming on in the figurative and literal sense.

Boulder stared quietly into the distance for a while without answering before finally shaking his head. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to come up with ideas, but it’s been difficult to think of anything beyond a certain point. It gets easier the more I try to do it, but it’s exhausting. Maybe try to just talk to her before things get out of hand.”

“Will she listen to me?” I asked skeptically.

“No,” Boulder answered honestly. “But do it anyway. Keep trying if it doesn’t work. I’m not overselling it when I say she’s good people. She’s a good cop. Well, former cop. Agent.”

I tilted my head to one side, the surreal experience of chatting with a ghost escaping me for a minute. “Were you two a thing? Were you more than partners?”

“Shit, Barnes,” Boulder snorted with amusement. “We’re not all so lucky as you to be drowning in pussy, you know? No, we weren’t a thing. I took her under my wing when I was at Homeland, but I don’t think she ever really needed it. Maybe she was humoring me. I dunno. But someone like her wouldn’t be caught dead with someone like me.”

“Alright,” I acknowledged, leaving it alone. I sensed something in his voice I couldn’t quite describe. It felt like regret at first, but that didn’t feel like an accurate description. “What do we do about you?”

“Fuck if I know,” Boulder muttered. “This ghost shit just seems to go on and on. Talked to a native fella’ the other day who’s done everything under the sun to reach the higher hunting ground or whatever the fuck. No luck, though.”

I offered him a short, quick shake of my head as if it would cleanse my mind of what I’d just heard. I don’t know a lot about Native Americans, but something about how he’d said it just made it feel a little on the bigoted side. “So you’re stuck.”

“Guess so,” he agreed with another rolling shrug of his shoulders. “If I were you, I’d worry more about Jackie and that fucking portal in your backyard.”

“I’m working on it,” I muttered, glancing in the direction of the cave. “The stuff I ordered should be here in the next day or so. Then, I’ll set a door up over it so random wanderers can’t come through.”

“That’s a start,” he remarked with a nod of approval. “Considering how many other worlds there could be, securing this side might be the best move. Still, I’d see if there’s a way to get a handle on just how many you’re dealing with.”

I rolled my eyes at how much of an expert the dead man had become on the portal in such a short time. But then again, all he had was time to think about stuff. “Easier said than done. I need to have an object from that world for the portal to send me there, like a key.”

Boulder jammed his hands into his pockets, tilting his head thoughtfully. “What about the runes?”

“What runes?” I asked, looking over at him.

“The runes around the gate,” he answered like I was an idiot for not knowing exactly what he was talking about.

“There are no runes around the gate,” I argued a little bitterly. “If there were runes around the gate, I would have noticed it by now. Hell, I would have jotted them down and tried to do a little research on it before taking any more trips to Elyndor.”

“Look,” he growled impatiently. “I’m telling you, there are runes around the gate on either side; line up nice and neat. They even glow. I guess you can’t see them.”

“But you can,” I murmured, pursing my lips as I looked in the direction of the portal again. “Could you transcribe them?”

Boulder sucked his teeth doubtfully. “I can try. Moving shit is still difficult. Writing is still a ways off, I suspect. But the next time someone goes through, I can see if they do anything special and let you know.”

“Better than nothing,” I sighed, resigning myself to the idea that a lot more exploration was in order. Somehow, I would have to cover ground on the other side of the gateway while also constructing everything we needed to make it safer on this end.

As powerful as I’d become, I still couldn’t be in two places at once. I wasn’t comfortable with sending out others to do the work for me. Kate had been stretching the limits of what I was comfortable with already. Shantaka could probably handle herself, but if she fled her world, there was probably a good reason. I would have to talk to her about what had chased her away.

“Can everyone see you, or is it just me?” I asked, glancing sideways at Boulder’s ghost.

“That depends,” Boulder answered. “It’s a different process, from what I understand, to appear to one person versus everyone. I’m almost certain the only reason I can do it with you is because of the connection. Other than that, I don’t think I can.”

“Alright, well, don’t try,” I said with a note of finality. “The last thing I need is everyone freaking out about the ghost of the man who seemed to try and rape my girlfriend. Everyone’s on edge as it is.”

“Fair enough,” he agreed without resistance. The effort it took didn’t seem worth it to him by the way it sounded. “What are you going to say to Quickly?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted dejectedly. I had been thoroughly convinced this man had revealed a fiendish side to him when he’d tried to force himself on her. Susie had been even more convinced. I couldn’t say why I believed his explanation, but I doubted that she would be as quick to accept that it was all some kind of big misunderstanding. Broaching the subject was going to be like kicking a hornet’s nest, no matter what I did. If things were getting as dangerous as it seemed, it didn’t feel prudent to have her angry with me. We couldn’t afford to be fighting each other at a time like that. “I’ll figure something out. I just need a little time.”

I looked over to see if he had any suggestions to offer, only to see that he had vanished. I looked around for where he’d gone and realized that the slight chill I’d chalked up to it being so late was gone. It was markedly warmer where I was sitting, and I had the distinct sense that he was truly gone. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to keep the conversation up for long. It was just another thing I would have to look into.

I stared up at the sky as I listened to the sound of crickets beginning to chirp in the absence of the unnatural presence of the ghost. There was a deep undercurrent of silence that laid beneath it that only enhanced the tranquility of it. It was precisely the serenity I’d sought when I first staked my claim, but it only served as a temporary balm for the conflict that raged within me. There was so much that had to get done, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was somehow running out of time.

Chapter 12

I spent the next week doing as much as I could to get everything built out. As the materials I ordered poured in, I put them to immediate use, with Moppi and Poppi helping me haul and construct everything. When the two weren’t bickering with each other, they worked well as a team. Now that I knew what to look for, I spotted Jackie up on the hill a few times, no doubt drawn by the increase in deliveries over the last few days.

I saw to the door over the portal first, taking Boulder’s concern to heart and making it a priority. I rigged up a hand crank system that anyone could use, and tested it out from the other side of the portal. Sure enough, it worked. Attempting to move through the portal resulted in a weird sensation, like poking my fingers an inch or so deep into a thick puddle of mud. I could touch the surface of the metal door on the other side, but there was no way to exert much force against it or lift it from the Elyndor side.

A rumble of thunder in the distance caught my attention. I stepped out of the cave to take a look and was met by a vast storm wall of menacingly dark clouds coming over the mountains. Flashes of sickly yellow lightning from within caused an unsettling chill to run down my spine.

“We should go,” Poppi said uneasily as she tugged gently on my arm.

“It’s just a rainstorm,” I chuckled slightly. “Nothing to be worried about.”

“No,” Poppi argued with a frantic shake of her head. “It’s a miasma storm.”

“Mias—?” I stared at her, confused for a moment, before realizing the implication. Looking back out across the valley below, I tried to imagine what something like a radiation storm would do to it. Would it be safe to come through the portal again? “Do these happen often?”

“Only this time of the year,” Poppi explained, pointing out across the peaks in the distance. “Out there, the land is poisoned. When the weather changes, it brings the Miasma with it in the rain with bolts of sickness.”

“What happens to everything else down there?” I wondered, knowing there was nothing I could do to help either way.

“Most of it is fine,” Poppi responded. “It survives. Many creatures do, but some don’t. Goblins get sick. If the lightning hits nearby, it’s much worse.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “Probably time to go then.”

Kate had been instructed to open the door after a few minutes, allowing us to go back home. We closed it behind us and got to addressing everything else that needed to be taken care of. We expanded the garden, cleaned out the cellar, restocked it, and had another shipping container brought in to expand. Poppi had scribbled some plans down, and seeing her work with the portal door, I was confident in giving it a try. If nothing else, it would be a good starting point for me to work from.

Next came some gifts I got for the girls. In addition to fun little distractions, stuffed animals, clothes, and custom bedding for their own spaces in the upcoming expansion of our home, I also provided weapons. Rather than try to figure out the process of training them with size-appropriate firearms, I found some sites online that produced functional “survival” versions of medieval weapons using modern materials. The fact they were made from our world created a sense of confidence that I hadn’t anticipated. Now, when traveling through the portal, they felt like they were walking around with superior protection than before.

Kate was particularly pleased with hers, marveling over the construction of a compound bow. With the additional pulleys in its construction, she would be able to draw faster and easier with additional force added to every shot. It gave me immense peace of mind for whatever the next scouting excursion would be in the future. Moppi, Poppi, and Koko each received survival spears with reinforced handles and stainless steel blades. Of the three, Moppi was the most excited, but all three were familiar with how to use the weapons from their time in Elyndor.

“Giving me some flashbacks,” Susie muttered, offering me a quick glance. When they’d first encountered Susie, they’d suspected her of attacking me and held her at the points of improvised spears until she confessed her crimes. I snickered a little at the memory, much to Susie’s chagrin.

“I figure it would be better for them to have something they know how to use right out of the package,” I explained apologetically. “I got you something, too.”

Susie shifted her weight from one leg to the other before giving in to her curiosity. “What’d you get me?”

I knew she had a thing for my shotgun. She liked the kick and power it provided without having to be some kind of marksman. But mine was beginning to show its age, having been in my possession since God knows when. “Now, if something like an ogre pops up unexpectedly, you can unload.”

Her eyes met with mine, fighting the urge to make a joke about unloading. I sighed and motioned with my hand, “Go ahead, let it out, or else it’s going to kill you.”

“I know something else I’d like to see unload—!” She giggled.

“There it is,” I laughed, handing her the weapon with two hands. “Try not to blow your face off with all the snickering.”

Shantaka was the only one not to receive a weapon, considering she had arrived with one of her own. Instead, I made sure she got some clothes and other necessities that helped her feel more at home. She accepted them dutifully, the way a soldier would, but it was clear by the look in her eyes that it was an emotional moment for her.

“We don’t have much where I’m from,” she admitted to me. “Everything has to be ready to move for when the demons come.”

I frowned. “What are these demons like? What do they want with your people?”

“Nothing good,” she answered. “Some eat, some just kill, others torture, some take their pleasure from us in other ways.”

I nodded solemnly, understanding what she meant by the final part of what she said. “Alright, well, we shouldn’t have to worry about them here. But if we do run into any, remember that I’m here with you. We all are. I know it’s hard integrating sometimes, but remember that we’re…sort of our own tribe here. A family. Anything that messes with one of us messes with all of us.”

“Hm,” Moppi grunted, looking up from fawning over her weapon before offering a nod to the orc. “Daryl right. Goblin King Daryl is good King. Moppi fight too.”

“Thank you,” Shantaka said quietly, struggling against the tears forming in her eyes. “That means a lot to me.”

I kept most of the weapon gifting out of sight, but I knew if Boulder’s old partner was monitoring me, she was probably keeping a close eye on all my credit card purchases. There wasn’t much I would be able to do to keep that sort of information a secret from anyone who knew where to look. Still, I didn’t want to give her any photo opportunities.

I tried to focus on the build of the second shipping container. Poppi had imagined it as an expansion of the home, based on the division of homes in ancient goblin settlements. It wasn’t that different from human homes, but she made a point to let me know that goblin settlements weren’t like this anymore.

“They are much more cramped, communal spaces, with very little privacy,” she explained. “Very dirty. Only the King and those close to him are allowed to have individual spaces to themselves. Sometimes they have several rooms just for themselves while whole extended families have just one.”

The more I heard about this Goblin King of Elyndor, the less I liked him. I swallowed my urge to march out and put him in his place and focused on the work right in front of me.

The upgrade I’d given Poppi gave her a supernatural understanding of how to put things together, even if she’d never seen the materials before. I added an additional upgrade in the middle of the week that enhanced it even further, making it easier for her to use the proper measurements rather than rely on improvisation. With the work divided between all of us, the second container was outfitted, attached, and ready to go in no time. We had a proper living room now, with a little pit in the center for us to relax in.

Moppi, however, grew increasingly restless as the week went on. Despite all of the physical labor she’d done both in work and in bed, there was something nagging at her.

“What’s going on with you?” I asked as we finished hauling in another shipment of materials. “You’ve been distracted and snappy.”

“Hrm,” Moppi growled, brushing her hair from her face. She was never one to talk about her feelings but whatever she was experiencing was nagging at her fiercely enough that she seemed ready to spill. “Not sure.”

“I think you are,” I coaxed. “You know you can tell me this stuff. If there’s something wrong, I would like to help.”

Moppi regarded me hesitantly for a moment before finally deciding to open up. “Ever since you fight Shantaka, I want fight. Need battle. Want get hands dirty. Show I good warrior too.”

“Really?” I responded, my brows shooting up. “I thought you guys all wanted to avoid that sort of danger. The only reason I’m even arming you is so that you can feel safer in case something happens. You want to get into a fight?”

“Goblins are…” Moppi struggled to think of the word she was looking for in English. “Scrappy. Fight not only for warriors. Fight for dominance, fight for exercise, fight for pride.”

“Well, if that’s the case, we could do a little sparring,” I suggested with a smirk, setting one of the stacks of wood against the side of the house. It felt weird to call it a house now, but the more it expanded, the less it was just a shipping container. “What do you say?”

“You want fight me?” Moppi asked, hovering at the edge of excitement. My nod sent her over, causing her to squeal in triumph as she skipped around the yard. No one else had any idea what she was so happy about, but the sight of one of the more dour members of our little group frolicking around like a giddy little girl caught everyone’s attention.

We went out past the yard together toward the trees. I pulled my shirt and shoes off, tossing them to one side. She did the same, mistaking it for a custom rather than an attempt to keep cool on my part. I didn’t object. A free show of some goblin tits before getting into it was more than welcome.

“Ready!” She shouted, throwing herself at me suddenly. I didn’t realize it was a statement rather than a question until it was too late. She caught me at the waist with a reckless tackle that nearly bowled me over. The difference between being ready and not ready for that sort of thing was substantial. I managed to maintain my footing while resisting the urge to put her into a pro-wrestling powerbomb and instead tossed her to the side, where she rolled through the grass.

Moppi laughed savagely, kicking off the ground and hurling herself at me once again. This time I met her halfway, knocking her over mid-stride. The enhanced durability she’d been upgraded with made it so that her body bouncing off the ground had absolutely no effect on her. She sprung back to her feet, seized my leg, and pulled it right out from under me. Her enhanced strength caught me by surprise again, sending me face-first into the grass.

I flipped onto my back just in time to catch the goblin as she leaped on top of me. Rolling several times through the grass, I attempted to pin her down, surprised at how easily she wiggled free of my grasp before I could get the proper leverage.

We went back and forth like that for longer than I anticipated. I remember roughhousing when I was a kid, but things usually came to a grinding halt when someone got carried away or someone got poked in the eye. The two of us had a pretty good understanding of what was too much, but even when she got a little on the rougher side, I was able to take it.

I kept myself from going all out with her but had to use more of my strength than I would have guessed. If not for her smaller size, giving me an advantage in leverage, I think it would have been a closer wrestling match between us. As it stood, I was pretty convinced she could have taken Shantaka in a fight.

It ended with me finally pinning her down, her little goblin chest heaving with excitement as she looked up at me.

“Fuck me,” she said rather suddenly. “Claim me.”

Amped up on the adrenaline and excitement of the moment, I did precisely as she asked. I realized only after the fact that we might have been visible to prying eyes, but in the passion of the moment, I didn’t care. We ripped the pants off of each other before I penetrated her fiercely.

She made a token attempt to get away from me solely so I would pin her down again. She groaned with pleasure as I ravaged her, the two of us like a couple of savage beasts rutting in the summer heat. I couldn’t help but feel a little of my own inner goblin come out as I pounded her little goblin cunt mercilessly in the grass.

Having found that sort of equilibrium of roughness and sensuality with Moppi, she seemed much better afterward. Her restlessness had abated by quite a bit, and the snappy tone she’d been taking with the others drastically reduced. I wondered if perhaps the increase in her durability and stamina had perhaps exacerbated some underlying issue. Of course, that was a problem for later with how much the rabid goblin demanded my attention at the time. After I’d had my way with her, I let her have a little of the same, rolling on top of me and riding me vigorously with a look of utter satisfaction on her face.

We washed up after and sat down for dinner with the others, all of whom were waiting to see if they would be able to cash in on a little of the hormonal rush that I was experiencing. Glancing between them, all eagerly watching me like starving dogs at mealtime, I couldn’t help but laugh a little.

“You’re all ridiculous,” I commented before serving them something to eat. Even Moppi, who had been the prime beneficiary of that day’s activities, was looking at me like she was ready for another round.

It wasn’t until Saturday that I decided to have a look at Elyndor. Poppi had cautioned me against going through too soon, as some of the Miasma storms were known to last a couple of days. I brought Kate and Shantaka with me, just in case we had to worry about something wandering too close to the base camp on the other side.

“This is where you’re from?” Shantaka asked Kate as she stood at the mouth of the cave. “It’s beautiful.”

Kate nodded absently, carefully scrutinizing our surroundings for any sign of danger. I kept my attention on the forest below, trying to determine if anything had changed wildly since the storm. There didn’t appear to be any evidence of lightning strikes blowing up any trees, but things seemed to have a strange stillness to them that had me on edge. The plant life was flourishing more than ever after receiving a bit of fresh rain.

“What’s over there?” Shantaka pointed toward the goblin settlement nestled in the narrow split in the mountains.

“That’s where the goblins are from,” I explained, pulling out a monocular to have a closer look. I always liked monoculars for their portability, and I’d stocked up on them since they were small enough for the goblins to handle and didn’t depend on their IPD to work like some binoculars did.

As I looked through it, I noticed something wasn’t right almost immediately, and the other two could tell by the frown on my face that I didn’t like what I saw.

“What’s wrong?” Kate asked, a note of tension in her voice.

“I’m not sure,” I answered, searching for any signs of life. The last time I had looked in that direction, I’d caught the distant shapes of moving figures, goblin guards, beasts of burden, campfires, that sort of thing. Now, everything seemed to have gone still. I considered the possibility that perhaps the settlement had been attacked by some kind of monster, but with how haphazard the construction was, it was impossible to know for sure. “Something isn’t right, though. I don’t see any signs of activity.”

The hobgoblin pulled out her own monocular to have a look, examining the settlement in silence while I turned my sight back to the forest below. The trees weren’t always bustling with the activity of wildlife, but it was often enough that you knew not to wander too far into it. Now, things seemed too quiet.

“Never thought I would be bothered by a lack of sound,” Kate muttered, handing the monocular to Shantaka, who wanted to have a look as well.

The orc stared for a while at the settlement before looking in the same direction as me. “Demons?”

“I don’t know if they have demons here,” I remarked, glancing over at Kate.

“If there are, I’ve never seen one,” Kate admitted. “But there are plenty of other terrible things that could sack a village on their own.”

“It is the stillness of death,” Shantaka added, glancing between us with a distinct look of concern. “Something stalks this valley now. Something that wasn’t here before.”

I pursed my lips in thought as I glanced up and down the hillside. If there was such a terrible creature, there were no signs that it had passed close to the cave. Still, it only convinced me that some more work had to be done to conceal it from casual observation. “Maybe it was the storm?”

“A miasma storm?” Kate responded apprehensively. “There are stories of creatures that travel with such storms. They say a Zintari calling itself the Balor of Back Bay uses them to herald his coming.”

I held a hand up, stunned by the bit of information. “Excuse me, what?”

“The Balor of Back Bay,” Kate repeated a little more uncertainly. “Does this name mean something to you?”

“Other than it being very human-sounding, for some reason, no,” I admitted. “But knowing there is a possible other Zintari wandering around the area is definitely cause for concern. What sort of reputation does this Zintari have?”

“A formidable warrior with a formidable army,” Kate answered. “He is said to be from the other side of the wastes, though I don’t know how that could be true. Crossing the wastes is perilous, very few ever survive it. To even have a chance, you would have to do it in winter when the temperature is lower and the weather calmer.”

I motioned toward the mountains where Poppi and I had seen the storm brewing earlier that week. “The Wastes are that way?”

Kate nodded in the affirmative as Shantaka stared at me apprehensively. Frowning, I shook my head and motioned for them to head up the hillside. “Let’s finish what we came here to do and get the hell out of here before anyone sees us.”

“It is the silence of death,” Shantaka repeated as she hoisted her pack over her shoulder to follow after Kate who took the lead.

I glanced back out toward the valley. If my own abilities were any indication, running into a possibly hostile Zintari was pretty high up on the list of things I would like to avoid. Especially if the guy was going around with such an intimidating—or at least confusing—moniker as the Balor of Back Bay.

Chapter 13

(Susie Quickly)

“What have you got?” Susie whispered toward the hobgoblin as she approached her through the dark. At least, it was dark to everyone but them. Whatever Daryl had done to her with his ability to upgrade people, he had given her the means to shed light only visible to herself and the others. Scouting the forest nearest the portal entrance in Elyndor was much easier in the dead of night with such an advantage in hand.

“More bodies,” Kate answered, shaking her head as she lowered the bow Daryl had given her. “Several days cold now.”

Frowning, Susie squeezed the button of the walkie in her head before speaking into it quietly. “We’ve got a few more down here. None alive.”

“Alright,” Daryl came back after a bit of clicking on the radio. “Keep looking. We’re almost done on our end, then we’ll come join you.”

“Copy,” Susie answered, resisting the urge to use the crude call sign of “Fat Dick” she’d used earlier before everything got too real.

“Some of them were wounded,” Kate added once Susie set the walkie aside. “But the wounds weren’t serious enough to have died from. Maybe miasma got them.”

Susie glanced around nervously. Every time the subject of the miasma came up, she felt her skin crawl just a little as if the radiation was seconds away from peeling it right off her bones. There were few things quite as unsettling as radiation in her mind. Ever since she’d learned of the concept when she was younger, it served as a particularly potent sense of horror in any media she consumed. Fun when it was just a matter of fiction but utterly terrifying when made real. “You’re sure it’s passed?”

Kate nodded, motioning to a nearby tree with voluminous, colorful blooms on every branch. “Yes. This tree consumes miasma. It blooms like springtime after doing so. There are a lot of them here.”

“Mmm,” Susie grunted flatly. “Wish I had a Geiger counter or something.”

“What’s a Geiger counter?” Kate asked, her ear twitching curiously as she leaned a little closer. “Why does it count?”

Susie laughed a little, always finding the goblin and hobgoblin curiosity and unfamiliarity with human things to be quite endearing. “It’s a device we have at home. It’s used to measure how bad radiation in the environment is.”

“Miasma,” Kate clarified, just to be sure.

“Right,” Susie agreed, pressing further into the woods with her shotgun at the ready. She and the hobgoblin had taken one direction while Daryl and Moppi had taken another. Shantaka was keeping watch at the portal while Koko remained on the other side. The walkies didn’t work through the portal unless it was active, but for everyone else on this side, they had an impressive range.

“Do you need to use them a lot in your world?” Kate asked, following after her. The hobgoblin remained on high alert, keeping her head on a swivel with every step they took.

“No,” Susie answered quietly. “Almost never. Radiation like that isn’t common for us. It’s a very niche tool. Several decades ago, at the end of World War II, there was a weapon that was used that introduced everyone to the general concept. The weapons aren’t typically used now because of how dangerous they are, and sometimes, the technology is used to generate power. But it’s all still pretty rare for regular people to even have to think about.”

“You had two world wars?” Kate marveled. “And yet your people survived?”

Susie chuckled a little at which part of her explanation Kate had latched onto. “Uh, yeah.”

“Interesting,” the hobgoblin remarked with a vague nod of her head. She motioned with one hand ahead of them as they approached a clearing. Here was where she had found the bodies. Moving closer, Susie was able to see what she had found as well. Half a dozen little goblin bodies were scattered around the clearing.

They picked their way quietly through the underbrush, approaching the corpses with the utmost care. “Did you move any of them?” Susie asked curiously, noting the strange arrangement of each body. The scene looked almost staged.

“No,” Kate answered, shaking her head. “Might be dangerous.”

Susie nodded in agreement. Kate didn’t always know specifically what to look for, but her instincts for dangerous situations were perhaps some of the most finely honed in the group. She seemed to know when to keep her distance, even if she didn’t know why. “Good.”

“What’s wrong?” the hobgoblin asked, keeping an arrow nocked as a safety precaution.

“This doesn’t look right,” Susie answered, indicating the general arrangement of the bodies with a sweeping motion of one hand. Despite how gruesome it all was, it seemed a little on the neat side. “Where’s all the blood from their wounds? Why isn’t the grass tamped down here?”

Kate’s eyes searched the clearing, much more alert than before. Now that Susie had pointed it out to her, it seemed as plain as day. Her attention turned upward toward the vast treetops overhead and the innumerable branches therein. “Dropped?”

“I think so,” Susie muttered, bringing her shotgun up a little more. “Set out as bait.”

“Should we call Daryl?” Kate whispered at the edge of panic.

Susie shook her head. Not only did she want to avoid crying wolf every time something looked out of place in a world of things that looked out of place, but she didn’t want to lure Daryl to the same possible trap they had stepped into. He knew generally where they were and was set to meet up with them soon, anyway. Susie wanted to show that she could handle herself. She didn’t always need the big, strong man to come and save her. She needed to show that she could pull her own weight on the team. “No, we’re okay.”

“How do you know?” the hobgoblin wondered.

“If it were a monster ready to spring on us, we’d know it by now,” Susie muttered back, carefully scanning the forest around them. Thanks to Daryl, she had a strangely honed sense for the presence of things around them. It was a sort of unseen sight that gave her the precise location of those she knew within its range and a slightly less precise sense of where every other monster was within the vicinity.

“So, why leave bait if the trap is not monitored?” Kate asked, taking a few steps ahead of Susie, confident now that they weren’t about to be ambushed.

“The bodies themselves are probably booby-trapped,” Susie remarked as they stepped out of the clearing opposite the side they’d entered. “Do goblins bury their dead?”

“They do,” the hobgoblin answered, understanding Susie’s line of thinking. If the bodies were rigged, any goblin coming along to bury them would be caught in whatever was set to go off. Neither of them could prove it, but if it was true, it had a few implications. The most important being that there were likely survivors hiding in the forest that someone, or something, was trying to lure out. Whatever was on the hunt was intelligent and ruthless.

They pressed on with their sweep while remaining on high alert. Daryl was concerned with how these unsettling changes to Elyndor were suddenly on their front doorstep, and Susie was finally beginning to see why. They’d taken another day to ensure the portal was hidden, but it wasn’t enough to sit and hope for the best. The concern now was that a Zintari like Daryl had moved into the area.

Susie was curious to meet another human from their own world like him, but the overwhelming fear from the goblins made it clear that it would be best for it to happen on their terms rather than the other person’s. The stories the goblins told of the Zintari also seemed to indicate that Daryl was something of an exception among their kind—much nicer.

Susie noted, as Daryl had when they’d first arrived, that the forest was unnaturally quiet. Even the small wooded area back home had more going on in it than this place did and this one was gigantic by comparison. There was nothing scampering through the bushes, no birdsong, no mystical animals roaring in the distance—nothing. It was unsettling even for her, and she had…limited experience out here. Daryl had assured her that every time he’d gone on an excursion in the area, it was much more active—at least before he got ambushed by one thing or another.

Her footsteps slowed as they neared what appeared to be the eviscerated corpse of some kind of large beast. “What is that?”

“Dracolisk,” Kate answered, moving closer with supernatural silence. As Susie circled around it, she was able to see that it had been badly wounded before being impaled on the trunk of a snapped tree. If the sight of the dead creature’s spilled entrails wasn’t enough to make her nauseous, the smell certainly was.

“What the fuck,” she choked quietly, clapping a hand over her nose and mouth to guard against the smell. The area showed signs of the struggle leading up to the creature’s death, but it was impossible for her to tell much about it beyond the fact that a fight had taken place.

“A monster didn’t do this,” the hobgoblin noted with a grave expression.

“No shit,” Susie answered behind her hand. “Otherwise, it would have eaten some of it, right?”

Kate nodded in agreement, scanning their surroundings for any sign of what might have done it. The fact that the body showed no signs of predation after death was similarly concerning. “But why?”

“You’re guess is as good as—” Susie trailed off, motioning wildly for Kate to get down as an unknown entity “pinged” off of her proximity sense. They both retreated into the bushes nearby on either side of the creature as Susie made a few final gestures with her hand to indicate the direction the creature was coming from.

They had only been hidden for a few seconds before an immense creature with a thick, hairy hide lumbered out from the trees. It carried a large axe that would have been difficult for Susie to lift, much less swing. It looked over the remains of the dracolisk but didn’t show much interest. It spared a glance around the area, sniffing heavily at the air, before proceeding quickly back in the direction of the clearing.

Susie’s eyes darted over to Kate, who hadn’t moved a muscle, though she had an arrow trained on the creature in case it doubled back. It only went a few paces from the corpse before it sniffed again, furrowing its large brow that reminded Susie of a caveman from the old insurance commercials. Its ears looked a little goblinoid, ragged as they were from damage taken from long-past fights. It was much taller than a goblin, too, taller even than Daryl and perhaps twice as wide. Its skin, covered with thick black hair as it was, still managed to look like day-old split pea soup.

The creature growled as it slowly returned, looking much more agitated than before. “You think yourself clever,” it said in a rough-hewn voice that immediately put Susie on edge. “Hiding near the stench of a corpse so that I won’t know your passing, hobgoblin? I know your smell too well. But I don’t recognize the creature with you. It is no goblin.”

Neither of the two said a word. It took Susie a moment to remember that despite being able to see the creature as plain as day, it was still pitch black in the forest from his point of view. His sight line was too high to catch even a glimpse of them in the dark, as though he didn’t expect them to be so low to the ground.

“Come out,” the creature demanded. “I will make your death quick.”

He listened carefully, the ragged edges of his once-pointed ears twitching as he tried to pick out any hint of a response. Without warning, he swung the axe out in a wide arc, mowing down several bushes and saplings in the process. “Do not make me chase you. I have other business this night. If you force me to waste time, I will make sure you suffer for it.”

Again, Susie and Kate didn’t make a sound, though they did exchange panicked glances from opposite sides of the creature. It swung once again, this time catching a few thicker trees in the process and severing them cleanly in half. It was suddenly quite clear to Susie what had been responsible for the dracolisk’s death. The creature’s might was well beyond anything else she had ever seen. As the trees fell around them, he paid close attention to any movement or sound. The moment Susie had to leap out of the way of a falling tree, his gaze snapped to her, and his mouth split into a sharp, sadistic grin of triumph.

“A human!” The creature exclaimed, genuinely pleased with his discovery. “No wonder I didn’t recognize your scent. It’s been too long since I encountered one outside of my lord’s retinue.”

The creature continued to swing, clearing the neighborhood around himself and Susie of any places for her to scurry off to. “I’ve always wondered what female human tastes like.”

An arrow lodged itself in the shoulder of the creature, causing him to wince slightly before looking back in Kate’s direction. “Hobgoblin girls I’ve had, but not in a while. I’ll eat you after.”

Susie scrambled to her feet, leveled the shotgun with the creature’s torso, and fired. The thunder of the weapon caught the creature by surprise, almost distracting him from the shallow wound in his chest. He stared at the human woman in front of him in complete surprise, dumbfounded for a moment, before raising his axe high above his head with a furious roar.

Susie ejected the spent shell and fired again, catching the creature just below the arm as he reared up to strike. Seeing that the creature was hardly slowed by the second shot, she continued to pump round after round into him, while Kate peppered his back with arrows.

It was like watching a video struggle to buffer, stuttering during playback, and then slowing down to a crawl. The axe slipped free of the creature’s grasp and fell to the ground behind it as the pair advanced, pouring everything they had into the creature as quickly as they could. One shot at such close range should have been enough to end a person, Susie thought.

She blew through every round she had in the weapon before the creature was forced to take a knee. There, she spared a moment to lift the shotgun up to her shoulder to feed it a few more shells before resuming her assault. This time, she made sure to unload into the thing’s face. The effect was considerably more pronounced and immediate.

“Susie?” Daryl’s voice came frantically over the walkie. The creature, face pulped from the shots to the face, fell lifelessly to one side as she reached for the walkie with a shaky hand. “Susie!? What’s going on!?”

“It’s alright,” she answered in a quavering voice. “We got it. It’s dead.”

“What the fuck was it?” Daryl exclaimed, clearly distraught. It must have sounded terrifying from wherever he was in the forest.

“Bugbear,” Kate gasped, struggling to catch her breath. It was less from the exertion and more out of fear.

Susie nodded to Kate, checking her over with a quick glance to ensure she was alright before answering over the radio. “Kate says it was a bugbear. It’s fucking huge. About the size of that ogre from before. Maybe a little smaller?”

“What did it want with you?” Daryl responded. His voice sounded like he was beginning to calm down.

“I think it wanted to eat Kate and me, but that’s a privilege reserved for you,” Susie joked, realizing that her levity was going a long way in getting him to relax, even if she and her companion felt anything but relaxed. “But we got it. It’s dead.”

Daryl didn’t respond immediately, giving Susie’s heart a chance to slow down a little. The adrenaline was beginning to wear off, and the effect made her a little nauseous. She couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of grim satisfaction as she looked over the creature’s remains for anything useful. Even as outmatched as she had felt, she had managed to keep a cool head and get out of the situation with her life.

“Fall back to the exit,” Daryl’s voice finally said over the radio. “If it has any friends they definitely heard the shots and will come to check it out.”

“Alright,” Susie answered, pausing briefly before following up. Hey, if you see any bodies, don’t touch them.”

“Why’s that?” Daryl asked, a little confused.

“They’re rigged with traps that’ll go off if you move them,” Susie explained as Kate pointed to a couple of crude devices hanging from the belt of the creature. Neither of them was an engineer, but it didn’t take much work for them to puzzle out the function. Each looked like a miniature reverse bear trap constructed of wrought iron. Each was closed with a strange glass flask in its center, set to shatter when the device opened. The weight of the goblin bodies was just enough to keep them closed, only springing open whenever they were moved.

“Poison,” Kate said, jabbing a finger toward the devices. Susie nodded and rose to her feet, deciding she was thoroughly done with this place for the night—perhaps the week.

“Understood,” Daryl acknowledged. “Just gather your arrows and casings and get the fuck out of there.”

The two of them didn’t have to be told twice as they grabbed what they could hurried back in the direction they’d originally come from. Every couple of minutes, they glanced over their shoulders to ensure they weren’t being followed. Even with her proximity sense, Susie was leaving nothing to chance. If there were just a few more bugbears out there in the forest with them, she was almost certain she didn’t have the ammo to bring all of them down.

Kate led for most of the way, having a much better sense of direction in the wilderness than Susie did, especially in her rattled state. Her footing was a little sloppier than it had been earlier, but she managed to keep herself from tripping on the way out.

They met Daryl and Moppi at the base of the hill. The moment he saw her, Daryl threw his arms around her, pulling her into a firm hug that caused all of her cares to melt away. Despite how tight the hug was, it felt like she was finally able to breathe.

“Thank God,” he said into her neck before pulling back to examine her. “Are you alright? Did it hurt you?”

“He didn’t have a chance,” Kate answered with a deceptively convincing tone of bravado. “We were too fast for him.”

Daryl’s brows went up, clearly impressed as he looked between them. “That’s… awesome. So, nothing broken or bruised?”

“No,” Susie answered, forcing a smile onto her face the way Kate had. Once it was there, she realized the boost of confidence it gave her. It must have been what people meant when they said, “Fake it ‘til you make it.”

“We still go,” Moppi interjected, glancing out into the trees before motioning for them to begin their ascent up the hill. “More may come.”

“Right,” Daryl agreed, motioning for them to move on ahead of him. “I’ll bring up the rear.”

Susie’s eyes gleamed impishly as she looked back at him. “After the night I’ve just had, you better be bringing my rear up onto that dick when we get back.”

“You’ve got yourself a deal,” Daryl chuckled. “I think you all deserve to have your rears brought up when we get back.”

Chapter 14

I had my misgivings about splitting up in Elyndor, but Susie had proven her point about being able to handle herself. With a formidable weapon in hand, she hadn’t panicked, and she’d managed to get herself and Kate out of the situation unharmed. Still, it was hard for me not to think of how it could have all gone wrong. Babying her wasn’t an option, but every time I let her out of my sight lately, something happened to nearly give me a heart attack.

When we returned through the portal, I was happy to see that the notebook I had left out with a pencil had a few symbols drawn in it around a roughly circular formation. Boulder had made good on his promise to relay the information about the unseen symbols of the gate back to me. I didn’t call any attention to them, instead turning my attention to Koko who sat disinterestedly nearby. “Anything to report?”

“Nope,” she grumbled, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. “Boring.”

I was tempted to ask if she wanted to go next time, but I knew what her answer would be. I glanced back at the others as they stepped through the portal, one after another. Once the last of them was through, I flicked the lock on the crank and let the door slam shut behind us.

“Anything interesting?” Koko asked, one ear perking up as she noted the look of vague distress on Susie and Kate’s faces.

“Bugbear attacked us,” Kate answered. “Toughest one I’ve ever seen.”

“They’re not normally that tough?” Susie asked curiously as she reached for one of the towels we had on hand in the event of a storm in Elyndor. She wiped the sweat and dirt from her face as carefully as she could.

“No,” Kate answered, grabbing another towel to do the same. “They’re big brutes, but I’ve never heard of one taking that kind of punishment.”

This didn’t sit right with any of us, but for me, it was especially disturbing. I was pretty certain we’d just had our first brush with the other Zintari known as the Balor of Back Bay. With the same ability to augment those sworn to him, there was no doubt in my mind that he could have enhanced something to such a degree that it required several rounds from a shotgun to put down. Whoever this Zintari was, he was getting closer.

“I’ll have to go back out in a little bit,” I groaned, running a hand through my hair in frustration. “But I think the rest of you should stay behind. I don’t think—.”

“Cut the shit,” Susie laughed a little, tossing the towel over her shoulder. “First, you owe us a victory fuck. Second, you’re not going anywhere without us. If you don’t want to split up, I get that, but you’re not a lone wolf. We’re a team, remember?”

I sighed and held my hands up defensively. “I know, I just don’t want to—.”

“Worry about us?” Susie interrupted again. “We know this. Which is why we’re keeping our shit together, you know? Kate and I handled ourselves just fine. I’m the least experienced, too, so I don’t doubt the others can lay down an ass beating when it’s needed. You don’t think we won’t worry about you, too?”

I looked around at the others and saw the same look of determination on their faces. Even Koko, who was practically allergic to any of the heroics and exploration we were doing, wasn’t about to let me run off on my own in search of the Balor of Back Bay. “Alright, alright. Point taken.”

“Good,” Susie said brightly. “Now, time to fuck!”

“Yeah!?” Koko perked up excitedly, her nipples growing erect with excitement at the prospect of getting laid. “Me too?”

“Daryl said everyone,” Susie answered with a sly smirk, making her way out of the cave with a few sultry sways of her hips.

“Everyone who helped!” Moppi objected. “Koko, not help. Koko sit on ass.”

“Koko help!” The goblin spat, throwing herself at Moppi viciously. Despite Moppi’s enhanced durability, the other goblin caught her higher up along her torso, her massive tits squashing themselves against Moppi’s face and disorienting her. They tumbled to the floor of the cave, rolling in a mass of gnashing teeth and claws.

“Hrrgh,” Shantaka growled, reaching down and pulling Koko off of Moppi, tossing her to one side in frustration. “We do not waste our strength on each other.”

I raised a brow, curious at the orc’s intervention before I could respond. She didn’t typically concern herself with the goblins' squabbles, even when they got particularly bad.

Moppi, furious at Shantaka’s audacity to interfere, shot to her feet to throw herself at the orc. I hadn’t had the chance to enhance Shantaka’s abilities much, but was only slightly surprised to see that she didn’t need them. With a swift, fluid motion, Shantaka slammed the hilt of her sword into Moppi’s nose with enough force to have completely shattered it were she not already upgraded.

The goblin stumbled back, hands held inches from her nose as she struggled with the painful sensation spreading through her face. Shantaka made no move to follow the blow with anything, only regarding the goblins coldly instead. “Don’t you understand?”

“What?” Koko whined, getting to her feet awkwardly.

“We have an enemy out there getting closer,” Shantaka explained with a brief gesture to the portal. “A Zintari and its loyal servants. Servants like us that work together and use their gifts to better serve. We can’t waste time fighting each other.”

Both goblins grew quiet and glanced at one another, taking the orc’s point. Without another word, Shantaka breezed past them and left the cave, visibly irritated with their hijinks.

“Sorry,” Koko muttered toward Moppi, who echoed the apology back at her. I had a feeling that Shantaka’s outburst wasn’t entirely about us working as a team or the squabbling goblins, but I had to let it go for now. There was a part of me that was sure it had to do with those she’d been forced to leave behind in her own world. Kate had said she’d seen many bodies during her scouting mission.

“Let’s get cleaned up,” I suggested, gesturing for everyone else to head back to the house. They followed after me without any objections.

“Someone’s here,” Susie announced, coming to a dead stop as we neared the house. “They’re at the gate.”

“I’ll check it out,” I said calmly, knowing who to expect at the door after Boulder’s warning. My tone caught the others off guard, as it lacked the sense of urgency I usually had when the chance of being discovered reared its head. Instead, I sounded a little on the annoyed side. Susie followed after me, keeping her shotgun at the ready despite my assurance that it wasn’t needed.

Instead of using the intercom, I pushed the door open to see exactly who I expected to find there.

“Miss Jaqueline Heins,” I said as the woman came into view. I had to admit, she wasn’t bad on the eyes. Despite the constant surveillance in the summer heat, she managed to maintain a pale complexion and almost immaculately kept black hair. She had a way about her that made her seem both intimidating and sexy at the same time. “I was wondering when you might stop by.”

“You know me?” the woman asked, though she was much less surprised than someone should have been for such a revelation. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, adjusting the suit jacket she wore over a flattering white blouse. Even though it was relatively late, the heat of the day hadn’t dissipated enough for me to even consider wearing something with long sleeves like that.

“I’ve got sources,” I commented nonchalantly. “What can I do for you?”

“You can cut the bullshit, for one,” she answered coldly. Behind me Susie did her best to try and worm past me, but I kept my grip on the door firm to prevent her from stepping out.

“Not sure I know what you mean by that,” I chuckled. Her insistent seriousness made it too tempting to goad her a bit. Putting her off balance was my only hope of getting the upper hand, considering how much more she likely knew about me than I did about her. She had waited until she’d collected a great deal of information before approaching, which told me how much she prized knowing what she was going into. “You’ll have to be a little more specific.”

“Alright,” she agreed readily, unbuttoning the suit jacket to produce a few photos from within it. Holding each of them up for me, I was able to see the stunning clarity with which she’d captured images of the goblins, Kate and Shantaka. “I was wondering if perhaps you had any comment to add to these before I put in for a formal investigation.”

I glanced at the pictures, doing my best to remain as impassive as I could. “I would say that you should think twice before doing that.”

“Why’s that, Mr. Barnes?” She asked, lifting her chin in a show of defiance. “Afraid of what we might find once we come crashing through this rickety great wall of redneck?”

“That’s good,” I chuckled a little, acknowledging the joke. “I like that. But in all seriousness, yes.”

“Excuse me?” Susie hissed behind me, jabbing me in the ribs with one finger. “What the fuck?”

I shrugged a little, keeping my attention focused solely on Miss Heins. “It would be a shame to see your career immediately take the same turn that Boulder’s did once you get back to DC and throw this on some section chief’s desk.”

The dark-haired woman stared back at me, tilting her head to one side. I had hit a nerve, but she was doing an incredible job of retaining her composure. “You may want to adjust your tone with me, Barnes.”

“No,” I shook my head. “I don’t think I do. From what I hear, you’re actually a pretty good cop—or agent, whatever. It would be a shame to see that get flushed down the toilet because you just couldn’t help yourself.”

“This isn’t about me,” she replied, taking a few steps closer. She was shorter and less muscular than me, but the way she carried herself more than made up for it. “This is about the truth. It’s about justice and what you did to my friend.”

“Ex-friend,” I corrected her. “You don’t want to repeat the same mistakes he made. He wouldn’t want that for you.”

“You’ve got quite the pair on you,” she responded with a level tone, barely containing her rage. “After what you did to him?”

I frowned a little, tilting my head to the side as I leaned a little closer. “What I did to him?”

She blew a bit of air out through her mouth slowly, glancing down at the ground as she absorbed what I’d said and what it implied.

“Fuck it,” she said, looking up at me before slamming a fist into my nose. I took a step back, more surprised than hurt by the blow. She pushed herself through the door, seizing the shotgun from Susie with practiced ease, disarming her of it in the span of a heartbeat. With the weapon firmly in hand, she turned it on Susie and demanded she back up. “Get on the fucking ground, Quickly. Don’t move a muscle out of line, or I’m gonna turn those tits into hamburger!”

“H-holy shit!” Susie exclaimed, stunned by how swiftly she’d been relieved of her weapon.

“Heins,” I said in a warning tone, resisting the urge to let my anger off the chain the way I had done with Boulder. His words echoed in my head, not just about not harming her, but in keeping a level head in general. Even if I had to strike, I would have to keep it restrained and measured. Nothing she had done yet justified having her life put to an end. Hell, it didn’t even merit a severe ass-kicking. “It’s not too late to put it down and back the fuck up. I promise you this isn’t going to go the way you think it is.”

She glanced at me and froze as the others came into view somewhere behind me. Seeing it through a telephoto lens was one thing, but in person, it was a totally different story. “Holy shit,” she muttered.

“Put it down,” I repeated as she turned the weapon on me and the girls behind me. “Before you do something you can’t take back.”

“How dare you lecture me about—!” I didn’t give her the chance to finish what she was saying, closing the distance between us with astonishing speed to slap the barrel of the gun upward. A shot went off harmlessly into the air before I ripped it free of her grip and tossed it to one side.

Stunned as she was, she didn’t leave it at that. Her speed and precision would have been enough to outclass me before taking the first monster soul in the cave, but since then things were very different. She hit me with a swift combination of powerful strikes around my midsection, knuckles bouncing off my ribcage uselessly before she brought a fist into the side of my face.

My head didn’t move from the blow, much to her surprise. “Heins. You’re in over your head here.”

I slapped her hand away from my face and shoved her back with enough force to send her reeling. Shantaka and Moppi both moved to dogpile on her as she fell to the ground, but I held a hand up to keep them in check. There was no reason to get carried away. Taking a few steps forward, I leaned down to help her up.

She turned on me with a fistful of dirt and threw it into my eyes. Whatever power I’d gathered over the last few months didn’t do shit to help me with my eyes. I recoiled with a little spasm of my head, both hands going up to rub at my face and free them of the bits of gravel and dirt she’d just hit them with.

She took advantage and brought a knee into my face, then a fist into the side of my skull. Again, it would have been much more concerning if she was a monster from Elyndor and not a mundane member of law enforcement. Still, it was a little hard to maintain my balance with her knocking into me like that, blinded as I was.

I swung wildly to get her off of me and ended up connecting pretty solidly with the side of her head. Had it been any harder and not with an open hand, it could have been lethal. As it stood, she was still on her feet, but she was likely to have a bruise to show for it the next morning.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that,” I growled. “But I can’t see fucking shit.”

I heard the sound of her pulling a gun from a holster in her jacket and knew that things had just escalated further. With one eye a little more functional than the other, I snatched the end of the gun just as she pulled the trigger. The round tore a hole right through my hand but didn’t end up going much farther than that. Without the muscle and tendon needed to maintain my hold on the weapon, she pulled it free and put a round in my chest as Susie let out a horrified scream.

Unlike the last time I was shot, I wasn’t in a blind rage, but I knew that without more firepower, she wasn’t going to be able to bring me down.

Three rounds hadn’t been enough when Boulder had done it and I’d accumulated more power since then. I reached out to grab hold of her and was surprised when she took my arm, leaped up along the side of my body, wrapped her legs around my head, pressed the gun right into my neck, and began dumping the mag into me. That was a little more cause for concern.

I made a few sounds of pain as I tried to speak, only to find that my vocal cords had been utterly destroyed on their way through my neck. Catching a glimpse of the others readying their weapons in a frenzy, I forced myself to focus. I couldn’t give in to my rage. I couldn’t allow myself to go off on someone so much weaker than me. Reaching up, I grabbed hold of the back of her jacket with one hand and threw her forward over my shoulder into the dirt. She hit hard enough to knock the wind out of her but not hard enough to crack any ribs.

I grabbed the gun and closed my hand around it as hard as I could, warping and bending it until it was rendered completely useless. She stared at me with a kind of horror that sent chills down my spine. I’d seen looks of horror like that before, long ago, in the eyes of children who realized only too late that they weren’t going to live forever.

I tossed the weapon aside and pinned her arms down, allowing myself to bleed on her for a few seconds as my natural regeneration kicked in. Her look of horror became one of confused awe as she watched the fatal wounds inflicted on me become trivial and then close entirely, vanishing moments later as if they’d never been there. If it wasn’t for the blood, you would never have been able to tell I’d been hurt at all.

“Now, don’t you feel pretty fucking silly?” I asked, glancing at Shantaka to step back. The orc had been ready to take the woman’s head off with her sword, but seeing me unharmed, she was relatively easy to convince.

“H-how,” Jacqueline croaked, her brows furrowing helplessly. “That’s not possible.”

“Generally, no,” I agreed with her. “But there’s a lot here you aren’t seeing in your little stakeouts.”

“You’re really one of those Zintari things, then?” she asked, trying to pull away from me. I released her, allowing her to crawl a few feet away.

“How do you know about that?” Now, she had been the one to catch me by surprise. I had never encountered the term in my research, nor had I heard anyone on this side of the portal use it without me explaining it to them first.

She chuckled briefly before coughing, not fully recovered from having the wind knocked out of her. “Guess you’re not the only one with sources.”

“Right,” I muttered as I got to my feet, gesturing with one hand toward Susie to join the others. Her look of confusion was understandable but I just needed her to do as I asked for now. “If you can keep yourself from pointing weapons at my family, I’d be happy to compare notes with you, if you’re interested.”

Jacqueline coughed a few more times, regarding me coldly from her spot in the dirt before nodding slightly and getting to her feet. “Alright. Don’t see that I have much of a choice otherwise. There doesn’t seem to be much that I can do to harm you.”

“You shouldn’t want to,” I objected with an impatient look. “I’m not looking for a fight with anyone.”

“Tell that to Boulder,” she snapped hotly. “He’s dead because of you.”

“Ha!” Susie chimed in bitterly. “He’s dead because of his own actions. Motherfucker tried to rape me.”

I held a hand up to cut the exchange short. “No, he didn’t,” I said with a note of authority, taking Susie completely by surprise. The look of wounded betrayal in her eyes was heart wrenching. “But his choices absolutely did put him in that position, yes. But so did mine.”

A tense silence settled in between us. Susie regarded me as coldly as Jacqueline did, but neither wanted to push me any further than I already had been. “Like I said,” I continued. “We need to compare notes. There’s a lot that needs to be discussed.”

Chapter 15

“Have a seat,” I said, motioning to one of the chairs at the small kitchen table. Jacqueline approached the table slowly, glancing at the goblins around her ready to pounce at the first sign of trouble. The hobgoblin and orc near the door practically ensured she wouldn’t be able to make a clean escape if she decided to bolt. Susie flopped down in a chair on the other side of the room, crossing her arms bitterly as she looked on.

“So these three are goblins,” she said, motioning to Moppi, Poppi, and Koko before glancing at Kate. “That one’s a hobgoblin. But what’s that one?”

Shantaka’s brows furrowed indignantly. I waved a hand dismissively. “I’m going to be the one asking questions for a minute. Sit down.”

Jacqueline glanced around the room again before letting out a sigh of resignation and slowly settling into the chair. “Okay. What do you want to know?”

“Where did you hear about Zintari?” I asked immediately, crossing my arms expectantly. “No one should know that word. I just learned it recently.”

“Spoke with a few people around town,” Jacqueline replied a little evasively. “Most of them don’t know anything useful, but there’s a few nuggets of wisdom in there.”

“I’m going to need you to be a little more specific,” I pressed. “It’s important.”

“Tough,” she grunted. “Until I’m convinced you’re not dangerous, I’m not about to give you the names of civilians.”

I frowned, pinching the bridge of my nose. I understood the logic but just didn’t have the patience for it. I was too worried about the implications at a time when another Zintari was nearing my portal between Earth and Elyndor. “Alright. Sure. But it’s not me you need to be worried about.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jacqueline responded.

“There are other Zintari,” I explained. “Others like me. One of them is nearby, and I haven’t been able to figure out if it’s hostile yet.”

Jacqueline shifted uncomfortably in her seat, looking for any signs from others in the room that I might have been bullshitting her. Luckily, the goblins were immensely uncomfortable enough with the subject to show that I wasn’t. “Where is it?”

“I don’t know for certain,” I answered. “Somewhere on the other side of the portal, close by.”

“What portal?” She frowned, motioning quickly between the goblins. “Is that where these things come from, some kind of portal?”

“Hey!” Poppi protested. “You don’t need to be so rude. We’re goblins, not animals.”

“You know about Zintari but not about portals or Elyndor?” I wondered skeptically.

Jacqueline frowned with a shrug. “Like I said, not all of the information is good. It’s incomplete.”

“Alright,” I acknowledged. “Well, they came here through a portal to another world called Elyndor.”

“Except me,” Shantaka corrected, shifting her weight uncomfortably. “I come from Numedha. Different place.”

Jacqueline’s frown deepened. “Why are they here, then?”

“Fleeing dangerous situations at home, why else?” I answered, unable to ignore the irony of explaining the concept to someone from Homeland Security.

“No, no,” She groaned, waving both hands at me. “I mean, why now? Why have they come only now and not any time before in any other place?”

I shrugged, genuinely unable to answer her question. “I don’t know. There was a quake, and the portal appeared. After that, I’ve been trying to deal with it one step at a time.”

“When did you hear about this other Zintari?” she asked, a hint of accusation in her voice.

“Only just recently,” I admitted. “There are signs that are supposed to be portents of his coming.”

“Portents?” Jacqueline scoffed, stubbornly crossing her arms over her chest. “You all really think highly of yourselves, huh?”

I shook my head, letting out a frustrated sigh. “Not me. But from what the others here have told me, Zintari do have a tendency to huff their own farts.”

Susie snorted, trying to contain her laughter. I glanced over at her, but she looked away, not wanting me to see her amusement while she was still angry with me. “I don’t like it, but it’s what their lore says. So, I’m trying to be cautious around something like that.”

“But it’s just a person,” Jacqueline muttered, half-statement and half-question. “Like you and me.”

“Probably from our world,” I agreed in part. “But I don’t know much else. It calls itself the Balor of Back Bay.”

“Back Bay?” Jacqueline repeated, arching a dark, thin brow. “You’re certain that’s what it calls itself?”

I nodded. “That mean something to you?”

“It’s a neighborhood in Boston,” she answered. “So this Balor is probably from there. Do they have a title for you, too?”

“These three call me the Goblin King,” I chuckled a little, causing the trio of goblins to perk up and puff their chests out proudly. “But that’s more of a private thing. Anyone I’ve spoken to from Elyndor is in this room, so there’s no one to even circulate a moniker with.”

“Well, if you’re worried my source is tied to this Zintari, then don’t,” Jacqueline remarked. “It's totally unconnected. There are scraps of lore about them—you, here and there. Based on the information I had, it was determined you might have been one.”

“Someone else in town knows about me?” I groaned. My problems just kept multiplying.

“Not someone you need to worry about,” she assured me. “Unless I had known to go looking, it wouldn’t have been a source I would have given a second glance.”

“Where did you hear about the source?” I pressed. “Maybe that person is someone I should be worried about.”

Jacqueline offered me a silent, cold stare before answering. “I came across them in Boulder’s files. Something about a psychic.”

“Ah,” I said awkwardly.

“Which brings me to the topic of what the fuck happened between you two,” she continued. The question got Susie’s attention as well, who now made a pointed effort to be seen staring at me expectantly.

“Originally, it was just what it looked like,” I began, trying to be careful about how I phrased things so as to set neither of the women off. “Boulder was poking around, and instead of being upfront with him, I tried to keep everything a secret. He started jumping to his own conclusions and somehow let it get out of hand. Susie thought he was trying to force himself on her when all he was doing was panicking when he realized how badly he’d fucked up. Before he could explain himself, I lost my shit and…”

I trailed off and looked away. “He put a gun to her head. You saw my file. I couldn’t let something like that happen again and I… just snapped. I shouldn’t have, maybe, but I honestly don’t know what else I was supposed to do. I couldn’t risk losing someone else again, least of all her. She means too much to me.” I paused and took a breath. “I lost control, though. I went too far.”

Susie looked at me thoughtfully, frowning. It was the first time I’d talked about it in such a way. Part of what haunted me so much about it wasn’t just the flashback to what had happened years ago but what the trauma had forced me to do when pressed.

“That’s all well and good,” Jacqueline commented, the edge in her voice softening slightly. “But that won’t bring him back, will it?”

“He’s not worried about it,” I countered, perhaps a little more nonchalantly than I meant to. Before anyone could mistake what I’d said as a joke about him being dead, I continued. “We spoke about it. At least I spoke to his ghost about it.”

“What,” Susie snarled. “Run that by me one more time?”

“He’s a fucking ghost now!” I exclaimed, spreading my arms. “What do you want me to say? He’s been skulking around here fucking stuck. Then, one night, he starts talking.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this!?” Susie yelled as she jumped to her feet. “You’re talking to the ghost of the man that tried to—!”

“He didn’t,” I cautioned her. “We talked about it.”

“Sure, sure,” Susie scoffed incredulously. “Because people always admit to their crimes, right? So long as he double secret pinky promised, huh?”

“Susie,” I groaned. “It’s not like that.”

“What is it like?” she fumed, taking a few steps closer to me, her hands planted firmly on her hips.

“I don’t know how to explain it, exactly,” I grumbled, realizing just how stupid I sounded. I knew that he hadn’t lied to me, but it had everything to do with how he had explained it. The disconnected objectivity that came with death. “I don’t know if the dead can’t lie, but they have no incentive to.”

“Nothing to protect, really,” Jacqueline agreed, much to my surprise. I remembered what he said about talking to her to scare her off. She must have given it a little thought during her research as well. I would need to get the name of her source from her sooner rather than later. Someone who knew just a little about what I was dealing with would be a huge help.

“So because he says so,” Susie reiterated, a look of smoldering disappointment in her eyes. “You don’t believe me.”

“I believe you,” I argued. “I believe that it seemed like it at the time. He even admitted as much.”

Susie paused, conflicted by my answer. “He did?”

I nodded, finally feeling like I was starting to make a little sense to her. “Yes. During our conversation, he freely admitted he knew what it looked like and that it was his fault. Since then, he’s been stuck. Something has bound him to me—it prevents him from getting too far away from me or from the property. So he’s been trying to help us pass the time.”

“He can’t leave?” Jacqueline asked quietly, a hint of sorrow in her voice. “He’s just stuck here?”

“I’m sorry,” I responded. “If I could cut him loose, I would. But I don’t understand how it even works.”

“But he’s helping us?” Susie questioned, tilting her head to the side skeptically. “How?”

I took a deep breath and again considered how to explain it. “He says there’s stuff on the other side—the dead side, I guess— that he can see that we can’t. The portal has runes around it, for example. They glow differently depending on how we interact with it. So he’s been keeping an eye on it and trying to show me what the runes are. It’s taken him forever to figure out how to move a pencil and write with it.”

“Why?” Susie asked a little bitterly. “Why the fuck does he care?”

“Because he’s still on the job,” Jacqueline reprimanded. “Even when he’s dead, he’s still trying to work the case. Portals connecting to other worlds ought to be understood—studied.”

“He’s concerned about how many worlds and what else could come through,” I added. “Just like us.”

“Oh, well,” Susie sniffed. “Anything else you care to share with me besides your little ghost predator study buddy?”

“I want to see it,” Jacqueline interjected. “The portal to this other world.”

“Why?” I asked, a little annoyed. With everything I was trying to juggle and deal with, taking her on a tour didn’t even register on my list of priorities. “For your report?”

“Probably,” she admitted. “This isn’t something you can just keep to yourself, Barnes. Professionals need to be brought in on this to help mitigate any potential damage. I’ve been combing through Boulder’s old reports and he noticed a lot of things just in this area alone, without realizing their significance.”

“Like what things?” I asked uneasily. “Like other supernatural things? Like this?”

Jacqueline nodded as she got to her feet. The goblins all shifted slightly, ready to take her out at the legs if she made a wrong move toward me. “I’m not sure if I believe your whole story yet. I’m not sure I can trust you. But what I do know is that neither of us can keep this shit a secret for much longer. It’s going to come out. So we can have some asshole in Washington put together a group of his cronies to oversee it and likely fuck it up in the process, or I can walk into a room with my superiors looking like I know what I’m doing and demand that I be put in charge.”

I glanced at Susie, wanting to get her opinion on the matter. She frowned and looked away with a huff. “Don’t look at me. You seem to be doing pretty well making decisions all on your own. If you want someone else’s opinion, maybe ask your ghost boyfriend or something.”

“Christ, Susie,” I muttered. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

“Not anytime soon,” she mumbled. “Just take her to Elyndor, so she knows it’s real, at least.”

I shrugged and motioned for Jacqueline to follow me, “Alright, let’s go. Koko, I want you on the door. The rest of you just wait here until I get back.”

Susie offered me an exaggerated salute before I stepped back out into the night with Jacqueline and Koko hot on my heels. We didn’t say anything until we arrived at the cave, which she took a moment to examine. I lit the lantern near the crank before turning it to open the door. Koko took up position on a stool next to it, ready to close it behind us.

“Give us about twenty minutes,” I said to the goblin as I approached what looked like a flat stone wall in the newcomer's eyes. I extended my hand for her to take.

“We need to hold hands?” she muttered, glancing at my hand before taking it.

I stepped forward, pulling her through the wall. An instant later, we emerged in the cave in Elyndor. It wasn’t immediately obvious that we’d been transported to another world, but stepping through solid stone was impressive enough to Jacqueline that she spun around a few times on the other side to check for signs of trickery. I chuckled and led her from the cave, motioning to the grand expanse of the landscape beyond.

“Holy shit,” she gasped, slowing to a stop beside me as she looked down at the forest and the mountains that towered over it beyond. She fidgeted with her suit coat before pulling out her cell phone and snapping a few pictures with surprisingly good resolution. She froze when she noticed the two moons, then snapped a few pictures of them as well. “This is incredible.”

“It is, but it’s dangerous, too,” I cautioned her, placing a hand on top of her phone and lowering it slowly. “Namely, the radiation.”

“Radiation?” She echoed with no small amount of surprise. “Here?”

“They call it miasma,” I explained. “And the source seems to be magical in nature rather than technological. But the end result still seems to be ionizing radiation that can fuck you up while mutating other stuff.”

Jacqueline stared at me in silence for a moment before looking back out across the forest, rife with various types of trees that had likely become twisted by that very same radiation over time. “It’s a lot to take in, Barnes.”

“It is,” I agreed. “I’ve been doing what I can with what I have, but things are—.”

An explosion in the distance caught both of our attention. My eyes went wide with surprise, while Jacqueline immediately got low, on high alert from years of training. In the distance, what remained of the goblin settlement I’d seen had ignited as more explosions ripped through the space between the mountains. I furrowed my brows, confused.

“The fuck is going on?” she asked under her breath. “Is that the other Zintari?”

“Dunno,” I muttered, unsatisfied with the truth in the statement. There was too much that I didn’t know, and now there were explosions practically within spitting distance of a portal to my home, and I didn’t have anything to go on.

“We should check it out, then,” Jacqueline suggested, taking a few steps down the hill.

“Heins,” I said abruptly. “You don’t have a weapon, and it’s not a short walk. The door opens again soon.”

“You’re just going to ignore this?” Jacqueline scoffed, jerking a thumb back in the direction of the burning settlement.

I glanced between her and the fires raging in the distance, worried that they might somehow spread to the forest itself. The trees didn’t reach up to the cave entrance, but the damage that would be done was unpredictable, to say the least. “No,” I answered. “But we should get some gear before we go.”

Jacqueline lifted her chin before answering me with a little nod. “Alright. I can’t argue with that. Do you have anything I might be able to borrow?”

“You don’t have anything else you brought with you?” I wondered aloud.

Jacqueline shook her head. “I could get some, but it would just mean more wasted time. So if you got something I can use in the meantime, that’d be better. Other than that, I guess I should say…sorry for getting aggressive.” She frowned and chewed briefly on the inside of her cheek. It was a surreal apology given the lengths she’d just gone to.

“Alright,” I muttered. “I’ll ignore the fact that you just, you know, tried to murder me very earnestly a moment ago because, well, I’ve been there, and I understand your motivation. I’m much saltier about you threatening Susie, but I’m making the decision to give you the benefit of the doubt here.”

“Appreciated,” she said. “So, now what?”

“Once Koko opens the door, we’ll—.”

“You named the goblin Koko?” Jacqueline laughed. “That’s a name you might give to a cat or a monkey.”

“I didn’t give it to her,” I corrected with a little wince. “That’s her name. The other two goblins are Moppi and Poppi. The hobgoblin is Kate, or Katanika. The orc is Shantaka. I would recommend using their names and shit before one of them decides to bite your nose off.”

Jacqueline held her hands up in surrender. “Fine, fine. In that case, you can call me Jackie. What should I call you? Because I’m not calling you Goblin King or Your Majesty or anything like that.”

“Just regular old Daryl is fine,” I responded, leading the way back into the cave. It was much earlier than I wanted for another excursion into Elyndor, but if there was something transpiring right on my front doorstep, it was past time that I dealt with it.

“Alright, Daryl.” She agreed. How do we get back? We just step right back through?”

“Once the door is back up,” I said, glancing down at my phone to see that it was time for Koko to open it again. “Which should be now.”

I held my hand out to the portal and moved forward, only to be cut short by cool, solid stone. I stared in shock before pushing harder, only to find that nothing happened. “Oh no.”

“What?” Jackie asked, watching as I pushed uselessly against the stone wall. “Maybe she’s running late.”

“No, you don’t understand,” I stammered, beginning to feel a slight panic bubbling up in my guts. “If the door was closed, I should just be able to reach through and touch it. But I’m not. It’s just stone.”

“Has that ever happened before?” Jackie wondered as an edge crept into her voice as well.

I shook my head in disbelief. “No, never.”

Jackie stared at me before looking at the spot on the wall where the portal was supposed to be. “What does that mean? Will it open again?”

“I don’t know,” I said, getting sick at the sound of those words leaving my mouth. “It’s never happened before. The portal is closed.”

Chapter 16

“Alright, there’s no need to panic,” I assured Jackie. “Once they realize we’re running late, someone will come and check things out.”

Jackie frowned, glancing back at the mouth of the cave. “What if it’s closed on the other side and they can’t come through, either?”

I took a deep breath and stepped away from the wall. “Well, we’ve already determined there have to be other portals, right?”

“So we find one of them and step back through to a random place back home?” Jackie asked incredulously.

I looked back at her with a bit of a smirk. “You don’t think you’ll be able to get us a ride back home, Miss Government Agent?”

“Aww, you’ve got jokes,” she grumbled as she turned her attention to the various building materials around the cave. “Are there any weapons on this side?”

Stepping off the platform, I shook my head. “Unless you count the hammers, no. I keep them all locked down on the other side.”

“Probably smart,” she remarked, picking up one of the hammers to test its heft. “So what are we looking at here? Dragons and stuff like that?”

“Stuff like that,” I repeated humorously, contrary to how I actually felt about the situation. It would have been interesting to see if I could just fist-fight a dragon at that point, but I was more than happy to put off finding out if it could be helped. “I’m still learning all the names for things here, but there seems to be a general fantasy theme.”

Jackie nodded, giving the hammer a test swing before looking over the other building materials for other possible weapons. “My source says that much of what we regard as myth either once existed in our world before migrating to other worlds or continued to be spoken of in oral histories by people who migrated from other worlds to ours.”

I looked at her, startled by the revelation, but the more I thought of it, the more it made sense. If there were cracks in these realities where things could slip through the way I or the goblins had, it made sense that chance encounters could generate extravagant tales. I considered what sort of influences existed in the other direction. What sort of cultural impacts and legends had our world had on Elyndor or perhaps Numedha?

Deciding there was nothing else she wanted to put to use, Jackie started back toward the mouth of the cave.

“What are you doing?” I asked, following after her.

“I’m going to check out that fire,” she answered, looking back at me. “We can’t wait for the portal to open.”

I chuckled, impressed at how quickly she was able to pivot while remaining laser focused at the same time. “Alright. You want to do that with a claw hammer?”

“Well,” she huffed thoughtfully. “If it’s a fantasy type world, we should be able to pick something better up along the way. That’s how it goes right? We start with a shitty weapon and get the good shit later?”

I quirked a brow curiously at her statement. She waved me off, a little flustered. “I’ve played a few video games growing up, who hasn’t? I was more of a shooter and fighting game type though.”

“Bullshit,” I laughed as we stepped back out into the open. “You?”

“Some racing games,” Jackie added, gesturing into the distance with the hammer. “What’s over there, anyway?”

“Old goblin settlement,” I answered, going along with her change of subject. She didn’t want to let things get too personal, which was fine considering everything we had to deal with all of a sudden. “It’s where Moppi, Poppi, and Koko are from. They say the king there was quite the tyrant so I’ve been keeping an eye on it. Day after the last miasma storm, it looked like it was sacked.”

“Miasma storm?” Jackie scoffed, half horrified at the term. “The land is irradiated?”

I shook my head, pointing down at the forest. “A lot of the plant life feeds on it, neutralizing it within days. But you don’t want to be out here while it’s happening.”

“Fascinating,” Jackie mused before starting down the hillside. “This will all have to be documented when we get back.”

“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” I cautioned, even as I followed after her. “Isn’t this all a little outside of your jurisdiction or something?”

“Probably,” she acknowledged. “But this is just a fact-finding mission. The more I know, the more I can use when I go back to Washington.”

“Right, right,” I muttered. At that point my accompanying her was more about keeping her safe than anything else. My thoughts continued to go back to the portal inside the cave, and the panic the girls back home must have been experiencing. But there was nothing I could do to change it, not yet anyway. All I could do was make sure that the person I’d brought here wasn’t harmed.

I’d never been in the goblin settlement, considering the only way to get there was right through the forest itself. While Jackie took a few moments to marvel at the strange and unusual plant life that twisted up into the thick canopy overhead, snapping a few pictures with her phone in the process. Some of the plants actually glowed in the dark, providing opportunities that I even took advantage of with my own phone. She continued on as I switched one of the pictures to my phone’s background, wondering why I hadn’t done it earlier.

“It’s quiet out here,” Jackie noted, placing her phone back inside her suit jacket. “Is it always like this?”

“Only after the storm,” I answered. “But Kate says that it’s still unusual. Enough of the creatures here have adapted to the miasma that we should still be hearing more than we are.”

“That’s unsettling,” Jackie muttered, stepping over a twisted root and pausing at the sight of a slain animal we’d both mistaken as part of the terrain a moment before. It was large, like a boar but with a hide that was armored in several places. Its tusks had been sawed off and its guts spilled into the brush surrounding it.

“Trophy hunters are disgusting,” Jackie remarked as she gave the remains a wide berth. Seeing my look of confusion, she pointed at the stumps of the tusks. “I’ve seen this shit before in trophy hunting. They take the one piece they want, leave the meat to rot in the sun or whatever. Absolutely disgusting.”

Frowning, I tilted my head as I examined the body more closely. Susie and Kate had mentioned the body of a dracolisk that had been left in a similar state. I wondered if I had a chance to examine it I wouldn’t find some other piece conspicuously absent. Was the other Zintari taking trophies in addition to the souls he was gathering from each monster he felled?

We continued on, with the ambient glow of the fire in the distance growing with every passing minute.

“Has it spread to the forest, you think?” Jackie wondered aloud, becoming more wary of her course of action.

“Hard to say,” I responded. “Back home, I would say everything is too wet and green for a wildfire to get any traction. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions though, with how different things are here.”

She didn’t say anything in response, but her body language became visibly more cautious as she proceeded forward. It was only when we heard screaming that our paces quickened again, running forward through the forest heedless of the growing orange hue that loomed ahead of us between the trees.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a large hulking figure charging through the trees toward us. Acting solely on reflex, I tackled Jackie to the ground, barely avoiding the vicious blade of a massive scythe. “Down!”

Realizing what was happening almost immediately, Jackie rolled away from me into the brush and brought her hammer up defensively, realizing only too late how feeble it was compared to the creature before us.

Though I’d never fought one before in my various excursions, I’d had enough conversations with Kate to recognize a troll when I saw one. This one appeared large, more savage than the ones she had described to me. It was also much faster than I would have guessed by its size. I jumped backward, narrowly avoiding another swing of the scythe before kicking the flat of the blade up and away from me. It maintained its grip, using the momentum to come around again and drive the blade a foot or so into the ground where I’d been standing a split second before.

I drove my fist into the large hand gripping the haft, expecting to hear the strangely satisfying pop of bones that usually came with such force. Instead, it cried out in pain, slapping me away with an annoyed gesture and ripped the scythe free from the ground.

Before it could advance on me, Jackie struck the back of the troll’s knee with the hammer at such a precise angle that the creature faltered, his knee buckling under the hit. With the claw of the hammer she hooked some of the chains around his neck and pulled down, but she lacked the strength to make much use of it. I took a step forward to assist when an unusually large arrow whizzed past my face, barely missing my nose. From my right, another troll wielding a bow big enough to be a siege engine readied another arrow.

“Shit,” I snarled just as the first troll threw Jackie off of it and into the bushes nearby. I picked up her discarded hammer and leaped up into the air, bringing it down on the skull of the troll with all my might. I didn’t expect to kill it, or even knock it unconscious, but it was stunned for just long enough to rip the scythe free from its grip and hurl in the direction of the second troll as it took aim.

The spinning blade of death cut cleanly through the bow, rendering it useless and forcing the troll to draw a dagger that could have served as a sword in my own hands. The first troll moved to do the same but I was quick to respond, imitating the combination of blows Jackie had peppered me with in our fight against one another, working the monster’s midsection like a side of beef.

As it shrank away from me, I seized his wrist, twisted, and slammed my fist up into the elbow, hyperextending it. The dagger fell limply from its hand as it let out a cry of pain. I caught the weapon before it managed to hit the ground and met the second troll head on with a brutal parry that caught the creature completely by surprise.

Jackie emerged from the bushes where she’d been thrown and I quickly tossed her the hammer. She caught it in one hand, slamming it into the knee of the second troll as she had done with the first, providing me with the opening I needed to drive my blade deep into its chest. The troll howled with pain before slamming its thick skull into my face, causing an explosion of color to overcome my vision as I was sent reeling. Regaining my sight a second later, I could see that the troll was already beginning to regenerate the wound I’d just inflicted upon it.

“Sonuva bitch,” I groaned. I’d thought Kate’s telling of their healing might have been an embellishment, but it seemed like it wasn’t. From that point, fire was going to be the only option available to me. Which meant pushing forward to the fires, hoping that I could lure them close enough to the flames to make use of them for myself.

“Come on!” I shouted to Jackie as I bolted past her. She was hot on my heels without bothering to ask any questions. The area of the forest here was more well traveled, with game trails and larger openings between the trees, giving us the ability to move at much higher speeds. Behind us, the trolls gave chase, filling the air with roars of fury.

Emerging from the tree line, I was finally face-to-face with the towering inferno of what used to be the goblin settlement roughly a hundred feet away. Several goblins knelt in the clearing, their arms and legs bound in such a way as to force them to watch as their homes burned. Soldiers, humanoid in shape and clad in dark metal armor from head to toe, stood in a line a few feet from the goblins to ensure that none managed to escape. At the center of the line was a tall figure with embellishments to his armor that marked him as the leader.

“This stops when you surrender your king to me!” The leader shouted, his hands clasped behind his back as he walked up and down the line. “Give me his location and we can finally put an end to this. We will be merciful with any who co-operate.”

The only reply from the goblins was more sobbing and screaming. The leader motioned to the soldier nearest to him and pointed out one of the goblins in the group. The soldier drew a long, vicious looking blade and advanced.

“Stop!” I shouted, temporarily forgetting the trolls in hot pursuit behind us. The soldier paused, looking up at me as a stunned silence settled in across the entire line. Seeing the reaction I’d gotten, some of the goblins turned to look in my direction, looking both confused and afraid.

The leader held a hand up as he moved toward me, commanding the soldier to stand down. “What in the hell do we have here?”

The trolls erupted from the tree line a moment later, but immediately broke off pursuit when they caught sight of the armored figure before me. Jackie huffed and puffed beside me, gripping her hammer tighter as she tried to take in the sudden shift in tone at play.

“Who are you?” the leader asked me, making a brief upward nod in my direction.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I responded evasively, stalling for time so Jackie could catch her breath. If we had to spring right back into action, it would be better if she’d had a moment to recover.

“I am Balor,” the leader responded from inside his helmet. I realized now that he was standing only a couple of feet from me that it wasn’t just dark metal, it was completely black. “The Balor of Back Bay, as they call me. If you were from here, you would certainly have known that.”

He held out a hand, gesturing to my jeans and t-shirt. “But you’re not from here, are you, sir?”

“No,” I admitted, seeing no point in lying to him. “No, I’m not from here. My name is Daryl. This is Jacqueline.”

“Two of you,” Balor chuckled inside his helmet. “One is rare enough. Two is practically unheard of.”

With a flick of his wrist, the armored man bid the trolls to leave us be, sending them back into the forest to resume whatever it was they’d been doing before catching sight of us. “You’ve caught me at a bad time, unfortunately.”

“What’s going on here?” I asked, nodding toward the goblins.

He turned briefly to look back at them before waving a hand dismissively. “Standard negotiations,” he said casually. “Trying to locate their king.”

“By burning down their village?” I asked skeptically, nodding now toward the inferno that used to be the goblin settlement. “What if he’s in there?”

“He’s not,” Balor replied confidently. “They fled into the forest when we arrived. We’ve been trying to lure him out for days now. How about you? What are you doing out here? Working on starter stuff?”

“Starter stuff?” I asked a little confused, exchanging glances with Jackie.

“Yeah,” he shrugged. “Low level mobs, grinding, treasure, that sort of thing. I assume because you’re lingering out here in a low-level area that you’re just getting started, right?”

“Something like that,” I laughed a little nervously, looking back toward the goblins in distress watching their homes burn. Did Balor think this was some kind of game? “I saw the fire and I was curious.”

Balor held his hands up apologetically. “Sorry, I didn’t know there were more Zintari out here, otherwise I would have run it by you first.”

“Right,” I acknowledged, trying to play it cool so he didn’t have any reason to regard me as his enemy. There was an unsettling quality to how friendly he was being. It was an unwholesome contrast to the horrors being perpetrated against the goblins and the destruction the guy left in his wake.

“Tell you what,” the armored man said, finally pulling his helmet off. Once upon a time he probably looked as normal as I did, but now he had a sort of leanness to him that didn’t seem quite right. His hair was cut short and his eyes had a strange piercing quality to them that implied he could see whenever someone was being dishonest with him. They were more vibrant than I was accustomed to seeing in green eyes, to the point where they almost seemed to glow. “I’ll sound the horns and we’ll clear out. Seeing as you’re both new enough to still be wearing your Earth clothes out here, I’ll let you finish up the quest and have whatever loot you manage to find. I did most of the heavy lifting for you so the rest should be a breeze.”

“Loot?” Jackie asked incredulously. “You’re joking.”

“No,” the man said with a smile, his thin lips showing more teeth than seemed strictly necessary. “It’s all yours. I’ve got more than enough right now and I didn’t even come here for this quest in the first place.”

“Why did you come here?” Jackie pressed, wanting to know what the man’s deal was as badly as I did. “What was this all about?”

“Hunting dracolisks,” he laughed. “What else? They follow the miasma storms so sometimes you end up going into low level areas like this one while you’re chasing them. A lot of the other creatures think that I bring the storms or somehow cause them, which is useful in intimidation sometimes.”

“So, you’re just going to leave?” I asked, trying to steer us back to the main point. “No problem?”

“No problem,” he repeated, taking a deep breath. “I can hang around for a couple days on the other side of the town, if you’d like. I could answer a few questions for you, get you on your way.”

“On my way?” My brows furrowed as I frowned. “On my way to where?”

“Don’t know,” he scoffed with another little shrug. “But if you stay in this area you’re not going to get stronger. You have to take out tougher monsters eventually because of the diminishing returns of grinding.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, beginning to piece together what the guy was talking about. He didn’t seem to want to cause any problems for me, but for all his attempts to take a familiar tone with me I sensed something brittle and fragile about it. He was still trying to size me up despite acting as the more experienced of us. His eyes darted to Jackie several times, clearly curious about her slightly more formal attire. If two were as rare as he said, he wanted to know as much about us as he could.

“What do you want me to do with all of these?” He asked me, jerking a thumb back toward the assembled goblins. “So far I haven’t gotten any of them to talk, but maybe you’ll have better luck.”

“Yeah, sure,” I agreed hesitantly. “I can take them.”

“Great,” Balor agreed, sliding his helmet back on. “I’ll have everyone pull back and let you handle the rest. Come see me in my camp just on the other side of the settlement when you’re done and wanna talk. I’d be interested to hear what you’ve been up to and how far along you are. It’s been too long since we had someone new.”

“We?” Jackie asked, tilting her head to one side. “Who’s we?”

Balor laughed again as he looked between us, signaling the soldiers with one hand to move out. “Me and the other Zintari, of course.”

Chapter 17

The goblin winced as I grabbed the ropes around her arms and pulled them taut. “Sh, sh,” I whispered. “It’s alright. I’m not going to hurt you.”

She glanced up at me, confused, as I cut the ropes and continued onto the ones around her legs. The minute she was free, she scrambled away from me, but she didn’t go far. I moved on to the rest of the goblins that had been restrained while Jackie kept a lookout. Balor and his soldiers had cleared out just as he promised, but she seemed relatively sure that he’d left someone behind to observe them.

“Did that whole thing seem a little strange to you?” I asked her, moving on to the next prisoner’s bindings.

“Yep,” she answered, shifting the weight of the hammer around in her hand. “He’s acting like this is some kind of video game.”

Once the last of the goblins was cut free, I got to my feet. I counted a dozen of them as they threw their arms around each other and sobbed. They’d been certain they were about to meet their ends at the hands of Balor and his men. “I think you’re right about the Boston thing.”

“You heard it, too?” Jackie replied with a slight smirk, referring to his accent. It wasn’t very strong, but it was enough to pick up on certain words.

I nodded as I glanced at the goblins. “Not sure what to do with them. I don’t want to leave them out here.”

Jackie finally turned her attention on Balor’s former prisoners and nodded slightly. “Agreed. It’s not right what he did to them, but I think the only thing we can do for them is find them somewhere safe to resettle.”

“Are you suddenly developing a little empathy for them?” I teased as I crossed my arms over my chest.

If looks could kill, Jackie’s would have been able to put me in the ground right then and there. “I’m not a monster. They might not be human, but you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this.”

Looking at the sobbing goblins, I nodded again, abandoning my attempts to rib her a little. Deciding it was time to get moving, I walked over to where they had gathered, making sure to take it slow so they didn’t think I had changed my mind about not hurting them. “You guys want to come with me?”

“W-what?” An older female stammered fearfully. “Why? What you want with us?”

“Nothing,” I assured her, realizing that every one of the goblins standing before me was female. Their ages seemed to vary wildly, but there wasn’t a single male among them. “I don’t want anything from you. I’ve taken in a few other goblins already, so it wouldn’t be a problem to add a few more.”

“R-really?” Another asked in astonishment. “Why help goblins?”

I shrugged and held up my hands. I didn’t have a good answer besides some corny-ass shtick about it being the right thing to do. Saying something like that felt like it might sound like pandering at the time. “Couldn’t say,” I finally said. “They asked me for help, so I gave it.”

“Who are they?” The older goblin asked. “What names?”

“Moppi, Poppi, and Koko,” I answered, causing her to break into a renewed fit of sobbing along with a few of the others. This time, the tears seemed to be more of joy than of sorrow. They spoke at breakneck speed in goblinoid amid their sobs, eventually throwing themselves at my feet.

“Hey, now,” I laughed uneasily, glancing over at Jackie, who was eying me with a great deal of scrutiny. “That’s enough. You don’t have to do that, but we do need to get going before anyone or anything else comes along.”

The goblins scrambled to their feet and fell in behind us as we rushed away from the burning remains of the goblin settlement. We walked for roughly twenty minutes before I felt comfortable enough to ask the group some questions.

“How come there aren’t any males with you?” I wondered as casually as I could.

“All dead,” one of the other goblins responded bitterly. “We tell them. All dead, but no listen. All males gone now. Only females.”

“But they’re still looking for your king?” Jackie asked, frowning as she looked back at the group of goblins. The sun was beginning to come up, making it much easier for us to navigate through the forest. “You told them this?”

“We did,” the older goblin responded. “Many times. No listen. Only want king. King died.”

My frown deepened in concern. If they had told him that there was no king left to be captured, why had he insisted that was what he was looking for? Indeed, if the king hadn’t been his original reason for coming to the area, why was he so intent on finding him in the first place?

“Strange,” Jackie muttered, glancing over at me before turning her attention forward. It was much more than strange, but her look told me subtly that we could discuss it later rather than theorizing in front of them. It seemed like a good idea to me.

We didn’t emerge from the forest until the sun was already up, and by then I could see Shantaka farther up the hill watching the area carefully. The portal was open again.

“Hey!” I yelled, waving one hand over my head to get her attention. She held a hand up in response before turning around to yell further into the cave. Within moments, Susie, Koko, and the others came down the hillside, overjoyed to see that I was alright.

“Poppi!” One of the goblins with us cried, catching her completely by surprise as she met her halfway to throw her arms around her. “You alive!”

What followed was a tearful reunion between the goblins I had come to know and a few of the goblins from the recovered prisoners. Amid the gibberish I was able to determine that one of the goblins was Poppi’s cousin and a few others had been friends that had lived in the same area as Poppi and Moppi. The older goblin was a matriarch of sorts, hailing from another branch of their clan through marriage. Maybe. It was a little difficult to keep up with.

“What the hell happened?” I asked Susie quietly as I pulled her aside. “How did you get the portal open?”

Instead of answering me right away, she threw herself into my chest and wrapped her arms around me. “Thank fuck, I thought I’d lost you. I don’t know what I would have done without you. Especially with us fighting being the last things we had to say to each other.”

“Yeah,” I acknowledged a little somberly before wrapping my arms around her and giving her a squeeze. “I didn’t mean for things to get so messed up. But the ghost thing was a lot to digest for me and I had no idea of how to address it with anyone else, least of all you.”

“It’s fine,” she said dismissively. “It’s not important right now.”

“I’m alright,” I assured her, kissing the top of her head and giving her another squeeze. “Everything’s okay. We managed to get out by the skin of our dicks.”

“No, no, no,” Susie argued as she peeled herself off of me. “That’s not what I mean. The reason the portal was closed was because someone else was trying to use it!”

My head cocked to the side in surprise. Jackie took notice of the explanation as well and scooted a little closer to us to listen in. Susie ignored her for a while longer as she continued to explain.

“Someone was trying to come through,” She repeated. “Shantaka thinks it was coming from Numedha with how it was banging on the door.”

“Banging?” Jackie said, her brows shooting up. “Did it get through?”

“No,” Susie answered with an annoyed look, trying to exclude her from the conversation and failing. “But it scared the shit out of us. It kept going for a while, roaring and screeching.”

“Jesus,” I gasped. Some kind of monster had found the portal and had tried to pass through it. While it was in the small space between the other side and the door, the portal with Elyndor had been unable to connect. It was like how phones used to be when I was a kid. We’d been getting a busy signal and hadn’t even known it. “How long?”

“Off and on for a couple of hours,” Susie responded with a haunted look in her eyes. “We would have come sooner if we thought it was safe to open the door.”

“Well, what about right now?” Jackie asked, her tone slightly accusatory. “Who’s keeping an eye on the portal? What if something is trying to get through right now?”

“Kate’s got it,” I answered, glancing around and doing a quick headcount. “How much time do we have before she opens it?”

“An hour,” Susie replied smugly, making a little face at Jackie to let her know she wasn’t an idiot. “I wanted to give us plenty of time.”

“Good.” I smiled at her, and she returned it reflexively, even though she was still rattled by my absence. Let’s get everyone back up to the portal so we’re ready when Kate opens the door.”

“What are you going to do with all of them?” Jackie asked as discreetly as she could. “You don’t have the room for them all.”

I sucked my teeth as I thought about it. “I have some camping tents they can use while we get something a little more permanent set up for them. Whether they want to stay on our side or set up over here. Without the king kicking them around anymore, they might not hate the prospect of living here now.”

“Does that mean you’re going to leave us alone now?” Susie asked Jackie pointedly. Can we get back to living our lives?”

“Look,” Jackie sighed. “I’m not going to lie to you. There’s no way I can just look the other way on this. But I’m relatively convinced that you guys have just been trying to mind your own business when things keep showing up at your front doorstep.”

“And…?” Susie pressed, moving her hand over in a little circle.

“And I apologize,” Jackie replied sincerely. “I made some mistakes, but I’d like to rectify them if I can.”

I crossed my arms and squared my shoulders a bit defensively. “Yeah? What did you have in mind?”

“Well, first,” She began glancing at the others. “I’ll help you get these refugees settled in. You’ll need to expand so I can help that process along as well. Once I get back to Washington, I’m going to call in a few favors and get the ball rolling on some things. We might be able to get someone stationed out here to help you out, have some guards on the door, and get you something more military-grade.”

“What are the odds the government will just rip the land out from under me instead?” I asked irritably. “Why would they bother to work with me when they can just take it?”

“You’re a Zintari,” Jackie said matter-of-factly, glancing between me and Susie to see we weren’t taking her meaning. “Well, first of all, the implications of jurisdiction need to be addressed. There’s also the fact that you’ve basically got superpowers. Having you at the door in the event of another superpowered asshole coming through the gate seems like a pretty good idea to me. After what Balor said about the other Zintari, it might be good to have you as a liaison or diplomat with them, too.”

“You met the Balor?” Susie gasped, clapping her hands over her mouth. “How did you get away?”

“He let us go,” I responded, still in disbelief. “The guy acts like this is some kind of game and that I’m a new player that he wants to take under his wing or something. As soon as he clocked me as a Zintari, he tried to be friendly with us.”

“He thought I was a Zintari, too,” Jackie murmured. “I don’t know if that works to our advantage or not. He made an assumption, and I’d like to know if there is more of a reason for him to have made it besides me just standing next to you at the time.”

“Humans are pretty rare,” Poppi said, interrupting the conversation. “At least around here. That might be why he assumed it.”

I shrugged and waved my hands to the group. “We can speculate on all of that later. Let’s get going.”

“Are you going to meet with him?” Jackie asked, disregarding my directive to ascend the hillside.

I heaved an agitated sigh, though it wasn’t directed at her. I didn’t want to be a diplomat. I didn’t want to go and talk to some weird guy who was trying overly hard to be my new best friend. I wanted to go home, curl up in my bed, bang some goblin, hobgoblin, and orc pussy, and throat Susie. It’s crude to say, but it was honestly all I wanted after the long night I’d just had. “I suppose I have to, don’t I?”

“I’ll go with you,” Susie said brightly, holding tightly to my arm as he continued up the hill.

Jackie cringed at the idea. “Probably not a good idea.”

“I agree,” I added before Susie could get another word in. “Right now, he only knows about me and Jackie. I’d prefer he knows as little about the rest of you as possible, assuming he’s not already been spying on us.”

“I thought you said he was friendly,” Susie remarked skeptically.

“He tries to be,” I corrected, gently returning the squeeze around the arm. “But it’s different somehow. It feels off.”

Susie frowned, looking down at her shoes as we trudged along together. “So we’re back to him being dangerous?”

“For now,” I said. “I can’t ignore the fact that he sacked that settlement and then forced survivors to watch their homes get burned down. I don’t care if he has a great reason to want their king. That has little, to fucking nothing, to do with them.”

“Yeah,” Susie agreed, chewing her lip. “I get that. But I don’t think you should come back here alone after the close call we just had.”

“I agree,” Jackie interjected. “Which is why I’ll go with him.”

“WHAT!?” Susie exclaimed, nearly boiling over with rage in the span of a second. “Over my dead fucking body!”

I stuck a finger in my ear and wiggled it to clear a bit of the ringing she’d just put there by shouting right next to my head. “Take it easy.”

“No!” Susie objected. “I’m not about to let you out of my sight again while this bitch tries to get into your pants!”

Jackie quirked an amused brow at Susie’s sudden bout of jealousy. “You and some of the others are going to be assembled here, ready to come assist us if we need extraction.”

“Nope!” Susie argued, shaking her head frantically. “I’m not falling for this shit. I’m not letting my fat cocked fuck machine out of my sight with you around.”

Jackie slowed before crossing in front of me to approach Susie with a calm look on her face. “Hon, you’ve got it all wrong.”

Susie stiffened as Jackie took her chin with one hand and eased her closer until their lips nearly touched. “You’re much more my type than Barnes if you get my drift.”

“O-oh!” Susie blushed wildly with realization. She glanced around nervously, catching Koko offering her a demonstration by making scissoring motions with her fingers.

“Hehe,” Koko snickered and wiggled her eyebrows a little to egg Susie on. The two often operated on the same perverted wavelength. Had Jackie not caught her by surprise, I had no doubt she would have been more curious and horny about it. I was just as surprised by the revelation, but I was much better about keeping it to myself.

“Sorry,” Susie whispered awkwardly. “I didn’t know!”

“Most people don’t,” Jackie admitted, taking a step back, amused by the brief little game of teasing she’d shared with Susie. “But only because I don’t talk about my personal life in general. It’s not a closet situation.”

“Of course,” Susie responded with a dismissive wave of her hand. No sooner had she begun to regain her social footing and continue up the hill that Jackie gave her a firm slap on the ass, eliciting a yelp from her.

“Alright, tone it down a bit,” I cautioned, raising a hand. “If you get her riled up, I’m going to have to put out the fire.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen how you put their fires out,” Jackie scoffed as we approached the mouth of the cave behind the concealment we’d built up around it.

“How long were you creeping up on that hill?” I huffed a little indignantly. I’d been giving out free porn for who knows how long.

“Long enough to know that you’ll give it to them in whatever hole they fucking want,” Jackie laughed a bit, finally letting go of the uptight demeanor she’d had with me almost the entire time. “You really should stop doing it out in the open like that if you don’t want to be seen.”

“I put up a fence,” I reminded her. “It's a pretty clear way of letting people know I want my privacy, don’t you think?”

Jackie waved me off as Susie stepped onto the platform, checking her watch before placing a hand on the stone. When her hand sank through up to the wrist, we knew it was time to go. With Poppi’s assistance, we were able to corral the rest of the goblins through the portal to the cave on the other side, much to the surprise of the hobgoblin waiting there for us.

“I’m going to head back and get changed,” Jackie said as the little group of goblins was escorted out of the cave to what could very well become their new home. “When do you want to go back to talk to Balor?”

“Tomorrow night,” I replied decisively. “Gives us enough time to rest up, get something to eat, and get our shit together. I want you back here around dinnertime so we can go over everything. We’ll go through after nightfall and get the base camp setup before going to meet at his camp.”

“Solid plan,” she agreed, slapping my arm briefly before making her way to the exit. When she reached the mouth of the cave, she paused to look back over her shoulder at me. “Barnes?”

“Jackie,” I responded flatly.

“If you talk to Boulder again any time soon,” she continued quietly, a conflicted look in her eyes. “Would you tell him that I’m sorry? For everything?”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” I assured her. “He doesn’t hold you responsible for anything that happened, I promise.”

“Still,” she insisted, staring back at me unblinkingly. “Tell him?”

I took a quick breath and nodded. “Sure. I’ll tell him.”

“Thanks,” she muttered before stepping out of the cave and leaving me behind. I shivered at a sudden chill that ran down my spine, realizing I hadn’t been left alone the way I’d initially thought. I could relay the message for her when Boulder and I next spoke, but I had a feeling he’d already heard it.

Chapter 18

We had to pass through the goblin settlement to get to Balor’s camp, which was a grim experience for both of us. It would have been much gorier if not for the fire that had swept through the settlement. Entire structures had collapsed into smoldering heaps, still hot as we passed them that night.

“This is going to be more difficult than I thought,” Jackie remarked, staring at the nearest smoldering heap. “We’re really going to sit down and have a conversation with someone who would do this?”

“How do you do it with any investigation?” I wondered, glancing at her curiously.

“In those situations, we’re looking to bring someone to justice,” Jackie explained, her brow furrowing as she worked through her feelings on the subject in real time. “We need to have interviews and gather evidence to reach that point, to be sure we have the right person. But this guy… not only did he admit it freely to us, he was completely unbothered by it.”

“Yeah, it’s a bit much,” I agreed with the understatement of the year. I had been mulling over my misgivings since last we’d spoken, but I kept coming back to the fact that I needed to meet with him at least one more time. I had to understand more about the other Zintari, where I might find them, and what sort of relationships they had with one another. Learning something about myself was tempting, but if I could do it from someone other than Balor, that would be preferable.

But the fact neither one of us wanted to acknowledge was that there wasn’t much we could do about it. The difference between myself and Jackie in a fight had already become obvious, but the difference between us and Balor would be much greater. Our chances of overpowering him if things went south were very low. It was a concern that extended to the other Zintari as well, so more information was critical.

“Let’s try to stay focused on getting as much information as we can,” I suggested. It wasn’t as though she had forgotten, but hearing it aloud seemed to help.

“Do you think there’s anything here worth salvaging?” Jackie asked, changing the subject.

I turned my attention back to the wreckage, scanning it carefully for anything that suggested it might be worth it. Everything that the goblins had told me lined up neatly with what I saw. Everyone under the Goblin King had little to call their own. What they did have was typically constructed of poor, low-grade materials. “Doubt it.”

It made me wonder what the king could have possibly had that was worth all the death and destruction. What did the king of such a poor society call riches, anyway? Would he have the sort of precious metals and gems everyone else valued, or did he merely horde food and women? I realized then that I didn’t even know what forms of commerce Elyndor possessed. I hadn’t seen a single coin or gem but had just attributed it to the relatively poor living situation of the goblins.

The ruins of the settlement extended through the narrow ravine that wound its way through the craggy mountains. From what I could tell, the settlement had once risen along the ravine’s walls. Now, all that remained was smoking stumps of the crude support beams that had once propped the buildings up.

We traveled through the ravine, emerging on the other side after roughly an hour of slow walking. It was dark, but not so much that I had second thoughts about not bringing Susie with us. With two moons, the nights could be surprisingly bright in their breathtaking ethereal beauty. The other side descended immediately along a winding path, overlooking a flatter area with much sparser plant life than what we’d left behind.

The camp stuck out amid the relatively barren landscape. Calling it a camp was also something of an understatement. While there were plenty of tents lined up in rows around the edges of the camp, the interior had various stalls for commerce, fighting pits, a stage, and a dirt floor arena for more organized combat sports. The heart of the camp, obviously Balor’s, was settled at a slightly higher elevation. He had a very specific demonesque aesthetic that reminded me of the metal kids back in high school. It would pass for Satanic stuff to regular people, but to anyone with even a little experience in those circles, it was the most basic surface-level manifestation. In Elyndor, it probably made quite a splash.

A large bonfire burned out in front of the pavilion tent housing Balor, and numerous braziers for heating and lighting were scattered around the camp. Besides the aesthetic chosen for banners, flags, and—what I supposed was—heraldry, there was little evidence that my counterpart had come from Earth at all. I saw no sign of firearms, no use of vehicles, no modern conveniences, or even generators for electricity. Granted, I hadn’t brought many of those things over to Elyndor either, but if I were looking to make a strong go of things the way Balor had, I would have certainly considered it. He appeared to have fully embraced the way things were done in Elyndor, though it wasn’t clear whether it had been by choice or not.

As we descended the path toward the camp, a few guards took notice of us. They approached us with weapons at the ready but upon realizing who we were, they fell in behind us as escorts. Even the unknown Zintari commanded more respect than the average traveler. Each of the guards was equipped with a version of the black armor we had seen on the soldiers prior, with their faces completely concealed by the intimidating helmets they wore. They said little, and when they did speak, it was typically in the briefest ways possible.

There was more diversity in the camp than I had seen in any of my excursions to Elyndor, but not in the way that would have made people proud back home. It was immediately clear to us that there was some kind of racial divide we didn’t fully understand. There were some creatures clapped in chains, others in collars that glowed with eerie runes, and those who seemed to hold the keys to either. The stereotypical savage races you would expect were forced to grovel at the feet of—and serve— what appeared to be mostly humans. As rare as humans were supposed to be in Elyndor, these ones seemed to be doing alright for themselves in the most distasteful way imaginable.

“This is abhorrent,” Jackie muttered to me, glancing in the direction of an open-air brothel that didn’t seem to give much of a damn how the patrons treated the workers. I nodded in agreement but said nothing. I’m sure that it looked like I was playing it cool, but in truth I was simply speechless at what I was seeing.

I heard a whip crack amid the din of creatures coming and going along the main thoroughfare between the tents and improvised structures, followed by a few cries and a plea for mercy. I forced myself not to look, lest I lose control and try to spring to someone’s rescue before having what I came for. I steeled myself as we approached the central pavilion, and we were announced to Lord Balor within.

“Weapons,” a woman said, jarring me from my tunnel vision. She was a tall, willowy elf with a very dour and severe look on her face. She wore the symbols I had come to associate with Balor, but her armor was much lighter than what I’d seen up to that point. Were it not for the glare of dissatisfaction she gave, she would have been attractive. Her long blonde hair had been tied up into a tight “no-nonsense” sort of bun on the back of her head, and her eyes were a piercing, icy blue.

She motioned to a trunk near the entrance to the tent and repeated her command. I began to pat myself down, pulling the Glock from its holster in the process. I ejected the mag before tossing it and the weapon into the trunk. Next came the survival knife I had on me, holding it up for the elf to see before dropping it in after. I paused, letting my eyes linger on the long, slender, pointed ears of the woman as she turned her attention to Jackie, who disarmed herself as well. Both of us had come in practical clothing, like a couple of hikers in the wilderness, but there was no arguing with the fact that Jackie made it look a lot better than I did.

The elf’s nose wrinkled as she looked at the weapons, unconsciously placing a hand on an impressive longsword she wore on her hip. Either she didn’t know what they were, or she did and simply didn’t approve. With a brief jerk of her head, she bid us to enter.

What we found inside put the most debaucherous bouts of group sex on my little homestead to shame. A grand assortment of scantily clad women bumped and ground against one another as minstrels in the corner played a strangely familiar tune that I couldn’t place at first. Balor sat atop a portable throne at the rear of the tent, more than half-naked as two elven women took turns lavishing his erect cock with their tongues while finger-fucking themselves. Still, more women draping off of the throne ran their fingers over the man’s bare chest, laced with a few light scars here and there.

Many of the revelers wore masks, with some adorned in robes nearest to the throne looking on in near silence as others catered to their desires between their legs. Women who had not found a means to slake their lust in each other had been tended to by soldiers or male officers of Balor’s retinue. I picked my way slowly through the orgy pit that was the central focus of the gathering to cautiously approach Balor.

“Ah! There they are!” Balor exclaimed, throwing his arms open to welcome us. “Come in, come in. There’s plenty for all. You may have any woman you like for the night. They are eager to obey my every command and, by extension, any Zintari who is my guest.”

“I was hoping we might be able to discuss some more serious matters first,” I evaded, not wanting to offer any commentary on the events transpiring around me. While I’d had my fair share of debauchery with my own little group, this felt very different. It felt somehow unclean in how impersonal it was. The fact that there was no shortage of leather, chains, and shackles also put me on edge. “Of course, of course,” Balor agreed, pushing one of the elves down to the base of his cock. “Just let me finish up, and I’ll be right with you.”

The elf flailed a bit, choking as her eyes rolled into the back of her head. Balor bit his lip, savoring her distress as he released himself down her throat. Jackie looked away out of reflex while I forced myself to stand firm. I didn’t want to give a guy like that a reason to think I was weak or not of like mind.

“Ah!” He groaned, pulling the elf off his dick by a fistful of her hair. “Not bad!”

Balor slapped the side of her face playfully, earning a nervous laugh from the woman before he dismissed her with a motion of his hand. Jackie frowned as she watched the two women retreat, though others remained to continue their idle caressing. “A little rough on her, aren’t you?”

“What?” Balor scoffed, jerking a thumb in the elf’s direction. “Nah, they love that shit. The rougher, the better.”

I almost broke out in hives, I was so allergic to the bullshit in the statement, but I pressed on regardless. “Quite the retinue you’ve built up here. It’s very impressive.”

“Ah, you like it?” He laughed a little before putting his half-hard cock away beneath black robes. “This is just a portion of what I have at my command. Basically, a hunting party.”

“A hunting party?” I repeated in genuine wonder. The amount of people he had here just for a little hunting was mind-boggling. “How much more do you have?”

“Easily twenty—thirty— times more than this back home,” he replied, eager for the chance to show off a little. “I’ve got siege monsters, warlocks, pleasure slaves, fortresses, you name it.”

“That’s pretty impressive,” I admitted truthfully. Aside from how he seemed to treat everyone around him, the acquisition of the things couldn’t have been easy. “Which way is back home?”

A brittle smile crossed Balor’s face as he glanced at the robed masked figures on either side of him before turning his attention back to me, his finger rubbing idly at his temple. “You’re not looking to make a move on me, are you, Daryl? Among the Zintari, that’s considered bad form, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” I responded. “But no, I was not planning anything. You said before that there is a protocol for respecting each other’s territory.”

“Ah!” Balor laughed again, but the act seemed somewhat hollow. “Of course, of course. You’re right. My territory begins a few days' ride east of here. A week to the north, you’ll find Izolde, and to the south is Frjor.”

A few servants emerged from another entrance, carrier chairs and other refreshments, setting them down across from Balor for us. It was worth noting that we were not given a position on the raised dais with him and were forced to look up at him when we took our seats—which we did politely.

“How about the west?” I asked, looking over the plate of fruit I had been brought and didn’t recognize a single thing on it. I hadn’t even bothered to think about the possible crops I could pull in from Elyndor, but now I wondered if having some might help with the sustainability of the homestead now that I had so many more mouths to feed. I picked up what looked like a small green cherry and took a bite, finding it to have a pleasantly sweet and sour flavor to it.

“No one has any claim to the west until you’re on the far side of the badlands,” he explained as he took a big gulp from the goblet he had been provided. “Too much miasma, not enough resources, and the monsters out there are too formidable for all but the most powerful among us right now.”

“So you’ve been out there?” I asked, caring more about the flattery than any answer he might provide. So long as I kept the conversation focused on him or fed his ego, he seemed to be all too happy to spill his guts.

Balor spread his arms and tilted his head. “Of course! But when I hunt, I try not to venture too close. It takes the focus off of the hunt.”

Jackie leaned forward curiously. “Dracolisks, you said? What are they like?”

“Immense beasts,” Balor answered, even more eager to show off for her than he was for me. I realized that her leaning forward had been a ploy to let her breasts strain against the clean white cotton of her top, which seemed to capture his attention even more. Even drowning in sex in all directions, he could still be tempted. “Drakes are mutated by the miasma. Anything that has seen a mutation that increases its lethality usually has a ‘lisk’ at the end of its name to draw a distinction between it and whatever its regular counterpart is. Dracolisks have multiple venom sacks instead of just the one, and they can have a wide range of effects for alchemy. You can also use their ignition fluid and tongues as well.”

“So you’re an alchemist?” I wondered aloud, trying to push the conversation in a more industrial direction.

“Nah,” Balor responded with a wave of his hand. “I just sell the stuff. It’s very lucrative. I’ve even done business with Izolde on occasion.”

“What sort of currency are they using around here?” I continued, showing a little of my inexperience in the process. I decided to add a little more so it didn’t seem quite so bad. “There hasn’t been much coin around here among the goblins and other monsters.”

“Gili,” Balor replied with a knowing smile. “And yeah, I can’t imagine there’s much out here. Like I said, starter area. You need to get out and into some of the other areas if you want to start pulling down some dosh, you know?”

“You seem pretty knowledgeable in all of this,” Jackie said, vaguely indicating everything around us with a little twirl of her finger. “How long have you been doing it?”

He offered her that same brittle smile as something unsettling twinkled in his eyes. “Good question!”

Pursing his lips, Balor eased back into his seat and made a show of thinking as he looked around the sex-filled orgy-chamber. “Let’s see. I’m not sure, really. It’s been a wicked long time since I’ve ever bothered to go back to Earth, I sort of stopped keeping time in those terms. But I would say years, now.”

“Years?” I exclaimed in surprise. The guy had been in Elyndor for years, just conquering and fucking his way through everything?

“At least,” Balor added nonchalantly with a shrug. “I didn’t see much of a point in going back. Here I can do whatever I like to whomever I like, while back home….what? Am I supposed to just get a job at a big box store? Be a register jockey? Fuck that.”

It was a fair argument on its face anyway, though it didn’t justify anything else he was doing with his time in Elyndor. I understood the allure that came with the power and prestige, not to mention the sense of wonder that came with exploring a whole new world. That’s about as far as my understanding went, though.

“So, where’d you find your portal?” I asked, causing the room to become quieter all of a sudden. I felt like I’d just let a fart slip in the middle of church with the number of eyes that had fallen upon me.

Balor glanced around uneasily and then waved a hand to some of his attendants to dismiss them. Once they had moved away, he leaned forward in his seat. “We don’t talk about them. Not with our lessers and not with each other. We don’t want any of them getting any ideas. It’s a safety thing, you see.”

“Oh!” I laughed, holding my hands up in surrender. “Of course. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

The noise grew again as people returned to what they were doing, and the various revelers renewed their efforts to slake their thirst and lust all at once. Balor’s brittle smile returned as he sat back in his seat. “It’s alright. You’ve still got a lot to learn. I remember when I first came over, and I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. I had to stumble over things until I found the other Zintari. They showed me the ropes, just like I can do for you.”

“What about the others?” Jackie interrupted before I was forced to speak to his offer. “What are they like?”

Balor’s face twitched awkwardly as he thought of how to respond, finally deciding to wave the question off. “We can talk about them another time. Now’s not the time. Things are tense among us right now.”

“I’m sorry,” Jackie said apologetically, following my lead with the tone I’d adopted.

“Nah, it’s fine,” he grumbled. I have a few questions for you two, though, if you don’t mind, of course.”

“Shoot,” I said, trying another item on my plate that looked like a cross between a mango and a potato.

Behind us, a commotion grabbed my attention as one of the women slapped a hulking masked figure across the face, nearly knocking the mask off. The mask itself appeared to be made of a thin, lightweight metal, but beyond that the designs seemed somewhat unremarkable to me. The creature, perhaps a type of orc, returned the blow in kind before threatening to beat her over the head with his fist.

“Enough!” Balor roared suddenly, the ground shaking beneath our feet in an awe-inspiring display of fury. Everything in the tent went quiet, including the music, plunging us into an uncomfortable silence. Balor rubbed his temple with two fingers, his expression going sour. “Don’t you see I am trying to speak with my guests?”

“Ergh, sorry, m’lord,” the creature said in a guttural voice from behind his mask. “She struck me.”

Balor’s eyes shifted toward the woman, an elf with long flowing hair and gorgeous immaculate skin. “Well?”

“I..I did,” she stammered. “I requested a reprieve so that I could take some water. He held me down to force himself in me, anyway.”

Balor’s jaw tensed as he looked between the two of them, motioning for them to come closer. They did so with a great deal of trepidation, both looking like children who had just been admonished by their parents. “What am I supposed to do now, hm?”

Neither of them said anything, looking down at their feet in shame. It only seemed to make the man angrier. “Hm!? I have esteemed guests for the first time in moons—Zintari no less—and you would dare to make a fool of me in front of them like this?”

I held a hand up meekly. “It’s alright, really. It sounds like it was a misunderstand—.”

“No, no,” Balor interrupted, holding a hand up. “I appreciate you being polite. I do. But unfortunately, if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. They have to be punished.”

Punishing both of them seemed ridiculous to me. Even from the perspective of someone who regarded people as property, it seemed like the orc was clearly in the wrong. Balor didn’t agree. Seething as he looked between them, his eyes suddenly began to glow a sickly yellow-green color.

“N-no, m’lord!” The orc pleaded, falling to his knees. The elf burst into tears. Many of the people in the room looked away. “I beg ye’! Forgiveness.”

“You embarrassed me,” Balor snarled as beams of yellow-green energy leaped from his eyes, instantly converting the orc and elf's physical presence before him into greasy smears of ash along the floor, flanked on either side by a couple of digits or limbs that managed to escape the blast through pure happenstance.

The room remained quiet for a few moments more before one of the masked-robed women on the dais motioned to the minstrels to resume playing, which they did immediately. A couple of servants rushed in to begin cleaning the mess the pair had left behind while the revelry resumed around us as if nothing had happened.

Chapter 19

“Holy fucking shit,” Jackie whispered in astonishment, her eyes glued to the spot where the elf and orc had stood just a moment before. Now they were being wiped off the floor and scooped into a trash receptacle.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Balor chuckled uneasily, putting the brittle smile back on his face. “It wasn’t my intention to dish out any punishments tonight, but they can be an unruly crowd from time to time.”

With the acrid smell of burnt flesh and fat filling my nose, I almost missed the wispy glowing orbs that wound their way from the smears on the floor to Balor. He reached out and casually plucked them both out of the air with one hand. A subtle glow traveled up his arm, fading before reaching his shoulder. “I’ll figure out what to do with these later.”

I nodded once, barely able to muster a thought about what I’d just seen. Reading my and Jackie’s response in his own way, Balor pressed on. “You’ll come across your own unique powerset once you’ve had a little more time and done some more reaping.”

“H-hm?” I grunted, my vision coming back into focus as I looked at him. “Powerset?”

“Mhm,” he responded, looking pleased that he’d recaptured my interest. “Almost all of us start out with the basics: super strength, durability, healing…you get the idea. But eventually, you cross a threshold where the abilities unique to you begin to manifest.”

He motioned to his face as the last vestiges of the yellow-green flow faded away. “This is one of mine. My signature, really.”

“I can see why,” I commented, unable to bring myself to compliment it directly. He’d just vaporized two people with that ability right in front of me. One of them was decidedly more innocent than the other, but neither deserving of summary execution for the crime of being an embarrassment.

“It can be a little more varied with the Nu-Zintari, but it’s pretty rare,” he added, taking another gulp from his goblet.

“Nu-Zintari?” I asked, trying to keep him talking while I grappled with just how fucked I was. How did I even respond to something like that if he decided I had slighted him in some way? I had already been pretty ambivalent about a fistfight with another Zintari, and Balor was out there throwing laser eyebeams around. I didn’t want any of it. I just wanted to live peacefully on my homestead.

“Nu-wave Zintari,” he scoffed. “It used to just be a term for any of us who came up after a certain time, but now it’s kind of used as a derogatory thing. I suppose I should stop using it. But the point I’m trying to make is that with some of us, the starter powerset rarely deviates.”

I nodded my understanding and shoved another of the strange green cherries into my mouth to occupy it for a minute. I didn’t know what to do. I had to get myself out of that animal’s sight as quickly as possible, but now I had to worry about doing it in a way that might be seen as rude.

“I’ve heard that whatever you reaped first can influence it, but there’s no proof,” he went on. “Some even claim that the things you reap after can influence the course that your powers take, but again—no evidence for that to speak of.”

I reached for the goblet and nearly drained its contents before realizing it contained some kind of potent wine. The last thing I needed at a time like this was booze, so I set it aside with a slight huff.

“Not a wine guy, huh?” He laughed, quite amused with me. He gestured to one of the servants to bring me a fresh goblet into which she poured some fresh, clean water. “There you go.”

“Just been feeling a little off,” I lied. Without much else to offer, there was always the old “Mom, I’m sick” excuse, I suppose.

“You have to be careful,” Balor cautioned. “Anything afflicted with miasma can make you pretty sick if you reap too much of it. You have to pace yourself until you’re stronger and your immune system can take it. Otherwise, you’re just sucking down a bunch of that shit.”

“That’s probably it,” Jackie said, jumping in, much quicker to improvise after the execution than I was evidently. “I should probably get him back so he can sleep it off.”

“Back where?” Balor asked pointedly, his voice a little on edge. “Where would you go?”

“Uh,” Jackie tilted her head slightly. “Home?”

“Where is home?” Balor asked. I could have sworn his eyes had started to glow again, but it was likely all in my head.

“I have a homestead back on Earth. A place out in the country,” I explained, not wanting to let Jackie flail alone on my account.

“Ha!” Balor laughed in a way that didn’t seem like laughing at all. “You’re still going back? That’s wild.”

I laughed a little uneasily and Jackie joined in soon after. Though still amused, the look in Balor’s eyes said he was becoming irritated or impatient with something. I had no idea what. “If you need somewhere to lay down, I’ll have something made up for you. You can stay here in camp for the night.”

“Oh, no,” I objected as politely as I could with a shake of my head. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“Nonsense!” Balor waved a hand. “It’s nothing. You can go lay down while Jacqueline and I get to know each other a little better.”

“She’s gay,” I blurted out before Jackie could conjure a defense for herself, earning a look of shock and surprise from both of them. I cleared my throat and faked a burp before correcting myself. “That is to say, she uh… prefers the company of women.”

Balor stared at me wide-eyed before bursting into uproarious laughter. “Ohhhh shit! Alright, this all makes a lot more sense now!”

“What?” Jackie asked coldly, frowning slightly.

“I was wondering about you two. You’ve got a smokin’ body, and he’s not a bad-looking guy,” he continued to laugh. “But the two of you have zero chemistry. It’s because you’re a dyke!”

“Hey, now!” Jackie objected, scooting to the edge of her seat like he wouldn’t just bump her off with a dirty look.

“Sorry, sorry,” he responded, waving his hands as he got himself back under control. “I didn’t mean it to sound like that. Really. Look, you can pick any woman you want. I would have offered earlier if I’d known.”

Jackie glanced around quickly and briefly considered what she might be able to do with her pick of the litter before deciding to decline with a shake of her head. “No, I shouldn’t. I’ve got work in the morning.”

“Work!?” Balor exclaimed before breaking into another fit of laughter. Rather than try to talk over him and risk his ire, we waited for a little bit for him to calm down and take another drink from his goblet. “You two are too much, really. I guess that’s probably just because Elyndor didn’t get its hooks into you in the vale there. Understandable. But it will.”

He wagged a finger at us both, his expression amused. “It always does.”

With a snap of his fingers, he bid the servants bring us some supplies and return our things to us, seemingly unoffended by our desire to cut the evening short now that he’d had a good laugh out of us. As we took our things from the chest, he held a hand up to stop us. “What the fuck?”

Jackie and I both stopped in mid-motion of holstering our weapons, glancing at each other confused. “Hm?”

“Are those fucking guns!?” Balor got to his feet and stepped off of the raised platform, raising his voice. “You brought guns in here?”

“No,” I argued, gesturing toward the entrance. “We left them at the entrance like we were told.”

“Don’t get cute with me!” Balor spat, snatching the Glock from my hand and turning it over a few times. He was handling it like a child, which made me even more nervous. “I meant into Elyndor. How?”

Again, Jackie and I exchanged glances, this time unsure of how to answer the question in a way that didn’t end with green death beams. “I don’t know. I just had it on me when I came through, and I’ve been carrying it ever since.”

I intentionally left out the part about arming others with weapons from our world, just in case it was going to be a problem. “Is that unusual?”

“Damn near impossible,” he responded, holding the weapon up and aiming it into the crowd with one eye closed. I held my hands up slowly in an attempt to get the weapon back before he blew a hole in anyone with it. No one in the crowd seemed to quite understand what he was pointing at them, so no one bothered to be cautious about it. “Most stuff from our world just evaporates off of you when you try to bring it here. Sometimes it gets left behind, but most times it just disappears.”

His eyes moved from the weapon to Jackie, suddenly reaching out and plucking her cell phone from her pocket. I could tell it took all of her self-restraint not to attempt laying him out for fishing around in her pockets. “I haven’t seen one of these in a while. This one’s so thin!”

He pressed the button on the side and frowned at the presence of the passkey protection on the device but didn’t make a fuss about it. He turned it over a few times, admiring the vibrant colors before handing it back to her and my gun back to me. “I guess if I could bring things like that over, I’d consider going back a few more times, too. What other sort of stuff have you brought over?”

“Not much,” I responded a little more calmly now that I had my weapon holstered. “Just the normal stuff you would have on you every day, plus some tools.”

“What kind of tools?” He looked at me curiously as he clasped his hands behind his back. “Like hardware store tools?”

I nodded again, wondering if I was giving too much away just by mentioning the tools. I didn’t want to find out what sort of nefarious purposes he could use such things for. “Yeah.”

His eyes drifted thoughtfully between us for a moment. “Huh.”

“I didn’t mean to—.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said impatiently, waving me off. “It’s not a problem. You couldn’t have known. I guess you’ve shown you’re trustworthy enough by not trying to hide it from me or lie. So no offense taken.”

I let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you. It’s been quite educational. Will you be hanging out here for long?”

“Not sure yet,” Balor responded evasively. It seemed like an odd answer for someone who claimed the area known as the vale had so little to offer him. “We’ll see.”

“Maybe we’ll see you soon, then?” Jackie added politely, though neither of us was interested in seeing the man again for as long as we lived. I hoisted the pack that had been given to us over one shoulder, unaware of what was even inside. Unless it was something crucial to our trip, I was likely to ditch it on principle once we were out of sight.

“That’d be nice,” he remarked before turning around and stepping back up onto the dais to retake his seat. We said our goodbyes and offered half-hearted bows without knowing if that was even how it was done. There was too much of the standard decorum and protocol that we weren’t going to learn until we made contact with someone other than him, it seemed.

“What’s the biggest thing you’ve brought through the portal with you?” the Zintari suddenly called out to me from across the tent. The revelry grew a little quiet as everyone present understood that talking over Balor wasn’t a risk worth taking, even on the verge of orgasm.

My brows furrowed as I thought about it for a moment. Something about the question struck a chord with me, despite how nervous it made me. I hadn’t pushed the limits of the portal at all because there had been no need. But now that the idea of having crops either in Elyndor or from Elyndor had entered my mind, I was considering how I would go about moving them or setting them up. Could I drive any larger equipment through? Perhaps a small excavator? I had been doing everything by hand because of how strong I’d become, but something like that would be useful for everyone else.

“Just lumber, really,” I answered honestly, imagining the longest piece that I or Moppi had carried through to build the platform. “Why?”

Balor shrugged nonchalantly and took a drink from his cup. “Just curious.”

I nodded and offered another short wave before taking my leave. Jackie and I said nothing to each other as we tried to walk as casually as we could from the camp now that there were so many eyes on us.

“He’s not just curious,” Jackie snarled once we were halfway up the hill to the ravine. “That motherfucker is up to something, I know it!”

I took a breath that felt like it was my first in the last hour. “Yeah, no doubt in my mind. I don’t want him finding out where the portal is.”

“How are we going to stop his X-ray vision?” Jackie objected, moving at a faster pace as we entered the ravine.

“I mean, I don’t think those were X-rays,” I responded. “Aren’t they invisible? Plus, the worst those will do is give you cancer in a couple decades.”

“Whatever the fuck that was, then,” she snapped, waving both arms. “He flash-fried two people like it was nothing!”

“Yeah, I was there,” I groaned, running both of my hands through my hair. It was bad enough the first time, I could have done without the recap.

Jackie shook her head in frustration. “We need to find a way to put him down.”

“Excuse me?” I scoffed. “Are you fucking high?”

“A fifty-cal can put a hole straight through an engine block at a distance,” she continued, heedless of my question. “I’m willing to bet it can put one in his head, too.”

“We’re not JFK-ing him!” I objected.

“Different kind of rifle.”

“I don’t give a shit!” I shouted a little louder. “We’re not posting a sniper on a hill to turn him into salsa, alright?”

“We’re not?” Jackie huffed, looking back at me irately. “Why?”

I held my hands up and let out a deep breath. “First, I’m not convinced anything we throw at him would do a damned thing. But even if it did, he still has a lot of soldiers with unknown levels of power. Anyone sworn to me can be upgraded on a whim, and the same is true for him, except he has a lot more to work with.”

Jackie frowned, walking a little faster now that I had angered her. She knew I was right but she wasn’t quite ready to admit it yet. Assassinating a Zintari with his experience was a dubious prospect at best, but kicking off a whole war with his followers was a non-starter. “So what do we do, then?”

I thought about it, looking up at the sky as I walked. She stopped a few times when she got ahead of me to look back impatiently. “Well?”

I smiled gently, finally turning my attention back to her. “We bore him.”

Jackie’s frown deepened, so I elaborated. “This guy abandoned his whole life for the thrills he’s been chasing in Elyndor. He doesn’t even come around here normally because nothing here poses a challenge to him. So, all we have to do is be boring enough that he gets fed up and moves on. I have no desire to conquer fucking anything, and the travel time to meet with anyone else is not ideal at the moment. So, I say we stay here and kick back until he decides to go become someone else’s problem.”

“Even if I thought that would work, and I’m not saying I do,” Jackie argued. “Are you going to be alright with just shuffling him off onto someone else like that?”

“If they all have similar experience and power to him?” I scoffed. “Abso-fucking-lutely. I meant what I said when I told you I just wanted to be left alone and mind my own business.”

“I don’t buy it,” she objected with a short chuckle. “You? Barnes, you can’t help but get involved. I saw how you tensed up when you heard those people being tortured. I saw how much it was killing you not to white knight for those poor women. You can’t just walk away.”

“I have other people to think about,” I remarked shortly, moving ahead of her as we stepped out of the ravine. I pulled the pack off my shoulder and opened it to see what was inside. Though part of me had expected some kind of sabotage or one of the weird poison bombs that the goblin corpses had been rigged with, what I found was just bundled-up rations and water. Even then, I couldn’t bring myself to trust it. It was just as easy to poison such things if he really wanted.

As the aroma of the food wafted into my nose, I realized his likely purpose in giving us supplies when he knew we were so close to home: “He’s going to track us.”

Jackie looked at me abruptly and then took a couple of steps closer to peek inside. The same savory and sweet aromas from inside hit her just as they had me. She nodded. “Yeah. Get rid of it.”

“If I do, he’ll know we’re on to him,” I muttered. “All that pretending like he didn’t care about going back. Laughing at us for doing it. Was that all just an act so we wouldn’t think to protect ourselves?”

“Probably,” Jackie remarked, taking the bag from me and going back to the burned remains of one of the buildings at the mouth of the ravine. When she found a pile that was still smoldering, she used a few large sticks to dig a hole large enough to toss the pack in before handing the stick to me to bury it. “So much of how he behaves is an act. Like he’s presenting an approximation to an emotion or behavior rather than the genuine article.”

Once the pack was buried in the smoldering pile, I tossed the sticks aside, and we resumed our course. Either the pack and the contents would eventually burn away, or the smoke of the burning rubble would be enough to conceal it. “Probably some kind of hounds, right?”

Jackie agreed with my assessment of the tracking, seamlessly switching topics with me. “I didn’t see any but he probably has something that can track by scent, yes. He bragged about everything he had, and he’s an avid hunter, so it stands to reason.”

“Right,” I acknowledged as we entered the fringes of the forest. We didn’t say anything else to one another until we emerged from the other side and began to climb the hillside where the rest of our people eagerly awaited us.

“So what are you going to do about him?” Jackie asked again. “I know you can’t stand back and do nothing. You know it too.”

“There’s nothing I can do right now,” I answered morosely. She was right about me not being able to ignore things. That was how good, innocent people got hurt, and it didn’t seem to be any different in Elyndor. “He’s way out of my league, so provoking him now would be suicide.”

Jackie stared back at me, wearing her dissatisfaction with my answer as plainly as she could. I understood it, even if I didn’t like it. Of the people she knew, I was best positioned to take immediate action, and I wouldn’t—I couldn’t.

I took a deep breath as Susie and the goblins came running toward me from their observation post. If nothing else, I had already committed to protecting them from the dangers of our world and Elyndor, and this was just an extension of that. Susie threw her arms around me, squealing girlishly with how happy she was. You would have thought I’d been deployed overseas for months with her level of excitement.

I looked at Jackie over Susie’s shoulder as I held her close and offered her a reassuring nod. “Don’t worry. I’ll figure something out.”

Chapter 20

I tried not to let the encounter with Balor bring me down after that. If I showed signs that I was worried, it would have devastating effects on the others. Instead, I focused on making arrangements for the newcomers we had. Tempted as I was to put Poppi to work on the tree houses she had mentioned, I decided expanding with the shipping containers might be better.

Jackie made good on her promise to streamline the whole process before she had to return to Washington. She gave me the keys to Boulder’s place to keep an eye on while she was taking care of things out of town. Her hope was that if I brought him back there, perhaps he would be able to find some peace or something. I was skeptical, but it was worth a shot.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said, jabbing a finger in my direction. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone, alright?”

“I’ll wait until you get back to do something stupid, then,” I responded, earning me an unenthused middle finger.

We’d shared everything we found out with Susie. As the most detached of the bunch, we needed her thoughts on the situation and how to tackle it. She came to the same conclusion that I had that we simply had to be vigilant and maybe seize a few opportunities to take down a few monsters when they presented themselves.

Shantaka and Moppi became the primary guards on the Elyndor side, usually working in shifts so that neither of them was too exhausted. The night after my return, Moppi reported movement and light down in the ruins of the goblin settlement, but nothing after that. Jackie and I had managed to throw them off the trail for the time being.

I’d hoped that with so many more hands to help divide the work between, things would go easier, but I was wrong. Many of the goblins were as unfamiliar with agriculture and related tasks as Moppi, Poppi, and Koko had been. Kate and Poppi were able to explain the various chores well enough, but it took some time for them to get accustomed to it, even as we were making more room for new crops. Eventually, we started to see an uptick in efficiency, which was a load off my mind.

The biggest problem came with their libidos. Each of the goblins was as insatiable as the first three, and they were just as eager to prove themselves to me in that regard out of fear I might kick them out. I woke one evening in bed, completely alone, while a bonfire blazed outside. I got to my feet and padded out the front door in my underwear.

Gathered around the fire were the goblins, Shantaka, Kate, and Susie. Everyone was present and everyone was naked, painted with patterns across their bodies that I didn’t recognize.

“By the gods of old, we gather,” the goblin matriarch announced, her English having vastly improved just from a little time conversing with the rest of us. There was still a fairly obvious accent, but it wasn’t difficult to understand.

“What are we gathering for, Susu?” I asked suspiciously, though looking at all the naked goblins, I had an idea of what was about to happen.

“To crown a new Goblin King!” she answered, shaking the staff she held, causing the beads and other trinkets on it to rattle.

“Oh?” I glanced at Susie, who nodded enthusiastically. “Officially?”

“Officially!” Susie exclaimed, bouncing up and down, causing her full, perky breasts to do the same.

“So what do we have to do?” I wondered, turning my attention back to Susu.

Susu smiled wickedly as the goblins all began to circle up around me. “You must make all of us yours, of course! A test of strength and stamina for the Special. You will have your way with us until sunrise, marking us as your loyal subjects, inside and out.”

“Uh-huh,” I muttered, glancing between them skeptically. It didn’t sound like an official rite of passage to me, especially considering that anything meant to declare a Goblin King wouldn’t have a special section carved out for a Zintari.

Ignoring my tone, Susu reached out with her staff, hooking it into the waistband of my underwear, and pulled them down. Whatever I had to say beyond that was rendered completely irrelevant to the throbbing erection that sprung from between my legs. The eyes of the goblins—old guard and new arrivals—became as big as dinner plates. They all moved forward, but Susie held a hand out to stop them.

“Ah, ah!” she said impishly. “As the Goblin Queen, I get to decide who mounts this fat monster first.”

Koko rolled her eyes, suspecting as I did that she was going to name herself.

“Susu, after you,” Susie said with a little smile, gesturing almost gallantly to the twitching flesh of my cock. It was actually the first time I had seen Susu naked. She was a little older than the rest, but by the light of the fire I could see it hadn’t had much ill effect on her body. I realized I was going to have to stop regarding her as the goblin matriarch and more as the goblin MILF. She licked her lips hungrily before setting her staff aside and grabbing mine.

She wrapped her lips around the glans of my penis, sucking as much of the shaft up into her mouth as she could without nicking anything on the points of her teeth as they withdrew into her gums. She had more experience than many of the other goblins, and it showed in how professionally she nursed my cock in her mouth. I let out a little groan as the other goblins began to circle up around me. A blanket was laid out in anticipation of what came next.

Rather than allow myself to be molested by a procession of horny goblins, I took control. Lifting Susu up and pinning her to the ground on the blanket, I plunged myself to the hilt inside of her, practically wearing her like a condom with how different the size between us was. She let out a primal groan of appreciation, putting her hands up over her head to lay back while I had my way with her.

“Oh, she’s into it,” Susie laughed a little, taking a step forward to stand over Susu so her cunt was eye level with me. “Think you can do a little multitasking there, Your Highness?”

I answered her by leaning forward and giving her wet, eager pussy a long lick. She shuddered happily as my hips worked the goblin MILF like a piston. Soon, the rest of the goblins began to line up, moving onto all fours or laying flat on their backs with their legs spread to present themselves to me. Moppi and Poppi flanked Susu on either side, allowing me to drive my fingers into them without losing a beat between my hips and my tongue. Unable to resist herself, Susie placed her hands on the back of my head to help me along, grinding herself desperately against my tongue as the warm, sweet taste of her invaded my senses.

There was always something about eating that woman’s pussy that drove me wild, and that time was no exception. I moved like an animal, bucking fiercely into the goblin MILF until her body contorted and twisted with the intensity of her orgasm. Before I could finish, she was pulled off of me by the other two, replaced by Koko, who was practically salivating in more ways than one.

Her enormous goblin breasts leaked milk freely, causing a few of the others to latch onto her and begin suckling hungrily while I drove myself to the back of her and went as hard as I could. Any one of them could have probably taken it, but few so enthusiastically as Koko. Her body was upgraded in such a way that she was practically built for it. She could take everything I had to give her, fit perfectly to my size with a vacuum seal, and keep coming back for more. I spared a hand from Poppi to vigorously abuse Koko’s engorged clit as one of her breasts swung free and heavy from one of the goblin mouths attending to her.

“Ah! Ah! Yes!” She moaned, the heat of her cunt practically melting around my shaft with how hot and wet she’d become. If I had to name any of the goblins as the royal cock addict, it was going to be her. There was no competition. “I want it! Give it! Give it!”

I knew what she wanted, and there was no denying her. With a few final powerful thrusts, I let myself go inside her, causing her little goblin body to twist around in much the same way as Susu’s. Koko’s eyes rolled into the back of her head as a torrent of thick Zintari seed flooded her guts. “Ooohhh!”

The scene was too much for Susie to resist, whose hips bucked and shuddered wildly as my tongue worked her greedy clit into climax. The sound she and Koko made together was like a miniature chorus—it was music to my ears. Susie nearly fell over with the intensity of her orgasm, but I was quick to catch her and ease her down onto the blanket as I pulled out of Koko and drove myself into Poppi without warning.

She mewled like a giddy slut at the lack of decorum, preferring to be taken with a little more force or when she was pretending she might not be interested. I leaned over her, grabbing her by the wrists to pull her into a bent back position as I fucked her from behind. She squealed and moaned, her tits swinging wildly under the force and power of me behind her. “Ah! NYAHH!”

It didn’t take long for her to cum, bending further back as she bit her lower lip in a vain attempt to contain her mind-blowing ecstasy. I couldn’t help but give her a little of my own, painting her guts white with my thick seed. It didn’t matter that I’d orgasmed already; my sack was practically brimming with enough to fill every hole in every goblin.

Releasing her arms, I picked up Moppi and brought her hungry, slippery slit to my mouth like a big juicy cheeseburger. I literally dove in head first, slurping and licking at every inch of her goblin pussy, making sure to penetrate deep with my whirling tongue before batting her erect clitoris around. She writhed like I’d rammed a taser up her ass, and as soon as she started to finally get a handle on herself, I dropped her onto my erect cock and worked her like a fleshlight.

Moppi threw her arms over my shoulders, wrapping them around my neck as she fucked me back, aggressively bucking against me with such speed and force that the plapping noise of our flesh provided a perfect percussive accompaniment to the growing moans of the goblins still waiting for their turn.

“Give it, give it, give it!” she snarled happily, exulting in the primal power I had leveled upon her. “All inside!”

I wasn’t ready to blow another load quite yet, but that didn’t stop the muscular goblin from doing everything she could to milk me for one with her insides, eventually succumbing to her own pleasure in the process. I dropped her next to Poppi to recover before beckoning to Kate.

The hobgoblin seemed almost surprised that I had even noticed her, much less chosen her as the next one on the fuck-list, but she didn’t stop to second guess the decision. She laid before me, turning onto her side so that Susie could suck on her tits for a little bit. Behind me, I felt Koko crawling underneath me, caressing my swinging sack with her tongue as I plunged deeper into the horny hobgoblin.

“Haa! Haaa!” Kate groaned, thrusting her chest out toward Susie while pulling herself open a little more in a desperate bid to get an inch or two more out of me. This time I was ready to answer the orgasm with one of my own when it came. Kate’s toes curled wildly as her whole body went stiff, every muscle clenching and holding her frozen in the moment of bliss for what could have been forever. By the time she came crashing down to earth, I’d served up another creampie.

“Let’s not let it go to waste,” I laughed, spreading the hobgoblin’s long legs open, exposing her glistening cunt to the lust-hungry goblins. They descended on her like a pack of wolves, mauling her pussy as they slurped the jizz from her slit. Kate moaned and groaned, her hips twisting in unusual directions as she tried to adapt to the spike in sexual attention.

I was caught off guard by Shantaka’s sudden push, falling back onto the blanket amid the throng of ravenous goblins. Before I could respond, she was on top of me, gripping my cock with one hand to line it up with her cunt. She sat on it hard and full, not bothering to take it slow. Her pussy was hot and wet enough that I slid right in without issue.

It was more than just sex for her. It was a show of dominance. She wanted to show her skill and ability in working a cock, and I was inclined to let her. She pressed a hand down on my chest, her hips bouncing and swiveling aggressively as her large, full breasts bounced inches from my face, greenish nipples glistening with sweat by the light of the bonfire. “F-Fuck yes!”

“Fucking incredible,” I muttered as she managed to squeeze down around me on every backstroke before pounding my pelvis on the descent. I don’t know how, but I was already close. Somehow, she could tell. It must have been something in my face.

“Yesss,” she groaned, holding her arms up behind her head to give me a show as her pussy danced wildly on my cock. Her heavy breasts moved in large, ostentatious circles, clapping together slightly with how hard she bounced on me. “Breed me! Fill me up!”

Around us, the goblins hooted and cheered as Shantaka, the dominant female of the moment, extracted a hard and powerful load from the Goblin King. Toward the end, as I rode the final waves of the climax, she hit hers, gripping tightly at her own breasts and tugging as the pleasure warped her mind momentarily.

“Now I have to get me some of that fuck-meat,” Susie demanded as Shantaka slid happily from my lap. Though there were others among the newcomers I hadn’t drilled yet, Susie’s insatiable sexuality wasn’t going to allow her to sit around and spectate for much longer. She was a pro at servicing the others as my queen, but at the end of the day, it was the king she wanted to conquer her.

“Come on, babe,” I said with a smirk, motioning for her to hop on. She did so in a squat rather than a kneel. It was one of her favorite things to do when she was on top, not just because it showed off a little of her physical prowess but it allowed her to easily present her pussy to me with her fingers. Susie wasn’t content for me to just watch her, she wanted me to watch me going into her. She wanted me to relish the penetration on every stroke, and it was something I always went for.

She rode me long and hard, both of us hitting our stride as we had many times before in our one-on-one marathons. The new goblin royalty had to show their subjects how it was done after all. She was good at controlling the pace, slowing down at key moments to give us precious seconds of recovery time before kicking it back into high gear. I adored the way she looked against the night sky, illuminated by the warm orange light of the fire. Her skin glistened with a nice, clean sweat that caused her stiff nipples to seem even more erect by how they shined in the night.

“Oh, fuck!” She groaned. “I love feeling you inside me, Daryl! I love you!”

“I love you too,” I groaned, and that was what did it for her. She collapsed forward on me, quaking and quivering as powerful waves of orgasm pummeled her senses. She grinned wildly, taking everything I had to give her and still wanting more. The goblins marveled at her as much as they did me. As much as I did, even.

At long last, I cycled into the newcomers, nearly all of which were much less experienced than we were. I showed a little restraint until they were ready, but it didn’t take long for them to throw caution to the wind and demand more. I nutted in pussies, assholes, mouths, between tits, and in one case, between the plush, round ass cheeks of Susu as she demonstrated an ancient goblin mating dance that was essentially just twerking.

One by one, their bodies were spent until finally, myself and Koko collapsed onto the blanket beside them and allowed ourselves to doze off under the night sky. When the sun came up, we hadn’t had nearly enough sleep, but I was able to rouse my new subjects by throwing some bacon and sausages into a pan over the fire. I decided I would have to teach at least a couple of them how to cook in order to keep up with the increased demand.

“Not that I’m dying to get back to serious business,” Susie began as she suggestively slurped down one of the sausages. “But we might want to go over to Elyndor today before taking a look at Numedha.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, flipping some of the bacon in the pan to make sure it was nice and crispy. “I’d like to know what the story was with all that pounding, but I can’t afford to take my eyes off of Balor until we’re sure that he’s gone.”

“Kate said it looked like they were packing everything up the other day, so that’s promising,” Susie remarked, snatching another sausage from my plate while I was unable to defend it. I was tempted to accept the hobgoblin’s report at face value, but Balor had shown a willingness to be deceptive, so I couldn’t put it past him that he would put on a show to make us think he was leaving.

“I’ll double-check.” I flipped the bacon again before plucking them from the pan with a long pair of grilling tongs. As soon as I deposited it onto the nearest plate, a series of goblin hands were there to snatch up the salty strips.

“Alright,” Susie agreed, leaning back to give me a show of her bare breasts in the morning sun. “What else do we need to take care of?”

I looked over at her, smiling softly as I savored the sight of her. Every little contour, every saucy shape, every single detail my eyes could take in—they were perfect. She was perfect. Looking at her banished all of the heavier concerns in my life from being. It didn’t matter what was on the other side of the door or what some superpowered psychopath might be cooking up. I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to bother with that day.

“You know,” I sighed dreamily. “I think today we’ll just take it easy and relax.”

Susie Quickly beamed. “That sounds great.”

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