Alex did not know how long he stayed in the dark, or for how long he kept clutching the potion vial in his hand, but when he finally opened his eyes after the darkness that had engulfed his entire world faded, he found himself lying on the ground in the same way he had back in the restroom, just when his hands had reached toward the gate.
"Thu thu." Alex spat out whatever dirt had entered his mouth from the barren ground beneath him. His tongue felt it tasted the worst thing it had ever been subjected to, and he kept spitting and spitting until he was reasonably certain that the gutter-sewer taste had left his mouth.
Only then did he lift his head and look ahead, trying to make sense of where he had ended up, trying to understand his situation, but all he saw was an endless open expanse of ground filled with the carcasses and skeletal remains of dead creatures, some of which vaguely resembled humans but were in no way human. Rocks sprawled across the dark brownish-red earth as though the ground itself had given birth to them, jutting out in varying sizes, many of them roughly around Alex's height with an equally considerable width, while some were twice, even thrice as large, looming with a quiet and indifferent menace.
With great effort and more than a few groans, he pushed himself onto his knees, and with one last ditch effort he hauled himself upright. His body was still in pain from the beating he had taken. His back ached terribly from being thrown against the wall and rolling across the floor, and his gut burned like hellfire from the punch he had taken to his stomach.
Just recalling the beating made Alex feel as though the pain that had been dulled by the potion was now creeping back, clawing its way to the surface. Perhaps it was because he had shut his senses down earlier, or perhaps he had been on the very edge of losing consciousness, so he simply had not registered it properly, and now that his body was in a somewhat recovered state, everything that had been suppressed was returning all at once. He was finally feeling it.
As if to confirm that thought, a gut-wrenching wave of pain came gushing out from his stomach like a tsunami, so violent and sudden that it nearly dropped him on the spot. Somehow, barely, he managed to hold himself together. He bent forward, rested his free hand on his knee, and immediately downed what remained of the potion from the vial.
He devoured it like a glutton. He did not let a single drop slip this time, not willing to waste even a fraction of this holy elixir. It was not of any particularly high quality, he knew that, but at this present moment it felt like nothing less than divine, perhaps even more godly than any expensive potion he had ever had the privilege of drinking.
The vial soon ran empty and he let it slip from his fingers. Despite hitting the rocky barren ground, it only clink-clanked twice or thrice before coming to a still rest, and the glass did not break. Whether it was because he had not dropped it from a great height or because he had let it go slowly enough, Alex could not say.
What he did know was that the potion worked wonderfully despite his earlier dismissal of it being not so potent. The pain subsided. The soul-eating agony that had erupted from his stomach dulled into something tolerable, though it was not gone entirely, which once again forced Alex to grudgingly admit that the potion was not of the highest quality. The pain in his back also eased, and more than anything else, his vision cleared in a way he had not even counted on. It was as though he had previously been seeing the world through water-logged eyes, everything dim and distorted, but now the world before him was crystal clear and sharp.
And that clarity did nothing to calm him in the least, because what he could now see quite plainly was a group of green-skinned, human-like creatures charging toward him from the far horizon, their mouths hanging wide open with strings of drool snapping in the air, their eyes locked onto him with the unmistakable hunger of predators who had finally stumbled upon prey.
Each of them carried a wooden club, all in disgruntled shape with irregular mass and no discernible craftsmanship, and they wore tattered loincloths that barely covered their wiry, misshapen bodies. What Alex noticed the most, however, was one among them that looked entirely different from the rest. It was enormous, nearly twice Alex's height, with broad shoulders and a rough wooden club as tall as Alex himself clutched in one massive hand. When its eyes met Alex's, it smiled. A cruel, predatory smile, mouth splitting open to reveal teeth broken at ugly angles, brown and dark with grime as though they had never once seen a brush, drool trailing freely from the corners of its lips.
Alex immediately checked their names and levels. He had already recalled what these hideous creatures were the moment he had laid eyes on them, having read their descriptions in books and seen the occasional rough drawing, but it was always better to confirm than to assume.
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[STATUS WINDOW]
Monster Name: Goblin Runt
Level: 9
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[STATUS WINDOW]
Monster Name: Goblin Runt
Level: 13
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—————————————
[STATUS WINDOW]
Monster Name: Goblin Runt
Level: 15
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.
.
.
—————————————
[STATUS WINDOW]
Monster Name: Goblin Warrior
Level: 30
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A shudder ran down Alex's spine as he took in the levels of the twenty or more goblins now bearing down on him. The lowest among them was a single runt trailing at the rear that looked almost pitiful at level nine, but that was the least of his nightmares. The enormous one, the one with the club and the cruel smile, was level thirty. Thirty. Alex's mouth, which had been wet from the potion just moments ago, turned dry and rough, and his hands broke into a cold sweat.
With each passing second, they were closing the distance. Barely a hundred metres separated them now, and they had already covered far more than that since he had first spotted them as nothing more than specks at the horizon.
Alex immediately snatched the empty vial from the ground, then turned and swept his eyes frantically across the broken brown earth, hoping desperately to find something, anything that could serve as a weapon. He even checked his dimensional storage, and what he found there made him feel as though he had truly stepped into a nightmare. It was almost completely empty. He had followed the academy's rules and brought nothing from the outside world, and now he felt like an absolute idiot for it. An even greater idiot for the fact that he had reached out and touched the gate without thinking it through. He vaguely remembered the conversation with Old Wan echoing in his mind, but that alone should never have been enough reason to do something so reckless.
Seeing that there was nothing around him that could reasonably be called a weapon, he started picking up rocks, and snatched some bones from the old skeletons that filled the nearby ground and shoved them into his dimensional storage. His hands moved as fast as he could manage. He would have preferred rocks that fit his grip perfectly for throwing, but there was no time for that kind of careful selection. He grabbed whatever he could reach, and in his shaking, frantic state he even shoved in a rock large enough to require both hands, his mind too rattled to stop and question whether it was worth the space.
"Kikik. Koko kaka." A thundering shout snapped Alex's eyes back toward the goblins. The goblin warrior was barking something that looked very much like an order, jabbing its club in Alex's direction, and as if on cue the goblin runts following behind it surged forward with renewed speed. Alex's body locked up for a single, horrible second as he registered just how close they were, only a few dozen metres now, and then instinct took over. He snatched two rocks, one in each hand, and bolted in the opposite direction.
"Karkar! Khokho!" An enraged cry erupted from somewhere behind him. Alex did not turn to look. He did not have the desire or the luxury for that. He already knew from the way the runts had deferred to the larger one that the goblin warrior was almost certainly the one screaming in fury, though he could not be entirely sure since every single one of them sounded the same, all shrieking and cackling in that same awful chorus of kako kho kho kiki.
For what felt like an unquenchable itch, Alex stole a glance back anyway, despite knowing better, and immediately wished he had not, because the goblin warrior had broken away from its pack entirely and was charging after him alone, abandoning the others and sprinting toward Alex with every clear intention of ending him quickly.
In a last desperate attempt, Alex hurled both rocks at the warrior, hoping to slow it down, but neither found their mark. He wrenched his eyes back to the path ahead just in time, because his foot had caught the edge of one of the cracks splitting the dry ground and he had nearly gone sprawling. He lurched forward, his body tipping dangerously, arms flailing, and by some miracle managed to keep himself upright.
He slapped both cheeks hard and forced himself to focus on the horizon stretching out before him. It was barren, empty of goblins at least, and he found himself hoping with everything he had that there would be something ahead, some form of cover or shelter, something he could use to protect himself, because right now there was no good ground to hide in and nothing resembling a proper weapon within reach other than skeletons. Most of them were rotten. The entire landscape would have been utterly naked and featureless if not for the rocks and these skeletons that sprawled endlessly across the dry earth, earth that looked as though it had not seen rain in centuries or perhaps millennium.
***
"You bastard. Why didn't you stop him?" Eldric snarled as he grabbed Nack by the collar, making the latter flinch and shrink back in obvious fear.
"Young master, it happened so fas—" Nack never got to finish. Eldric flung him into the wall. His back struck it hard, and the back of his head bounced painfully against the hard wall.
"Save your excuses." Eldric growled, turning to sweep his gaze across the others in the room. Every one of them had their heads bowed and their hands clasped behind their backs, doing everything in their power to avoid his eyes.
"I will kill that bastard." Eldric snarled through clenched teeth, and drove his fist into the wall beside him with enough force to make the air hiss. The punch landed just a hair's breadth from Nack's head, who trembled visibly where he stood. The wall, however, was entirely unmarked.
***
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