The tide of Gay-Bros surged forward like a wave with their swords gleaming under the dappled jungle light as they crashed into the improvised goblin barricades. The Gay-Bros used everything they had—fists, feet, and swords—to hack and smash at everything in sight as they rampaged at the enemy's first line of defense, causing the goblins to desperately keep them away.
Wood splintered, bones crushed, shoddy shields shattered, and then blood spilled. The first rank of goblins died very fast as they raised their spears, hoping to deter the enemies, but the charging Gay-Bros don't even care about hurting themselves and throw their bodies at the barricades regardless.
The Gay-Bros don't seem to give a fuck as they boldly impale themselves on the spears under the confused and gleeful gaze of the goblins, which instantly turns to fear after as the impaled Gay-Bros are still moving around even with spears in their guts, and then they immediately screw the goblins with their swords in return.
Screams and screeches erupted—not just of pain, but of confusion. The goblins had expected traps and barricades to slow the invaders down, but the Gay-Bros' relentless suicidal charge that disregarded everything threw the goblins out of the loop, ironically reminding them of themselves when they swarmed the bigger prey in the jungle.
They had never seen such a thing as the featureless and pure white skin men moving like one big organism without regard to their individual lives while their blades flashed in chaotic, murderous swings, giving the illusion of a snapping maw that was devouring the goblins.
As the fight continued, both sides, but mostly the goblins, died very quickly in the first five minutes of the assault, a casualty rate that alarmed the biggest goblin staying in the back, who was the leader of the horde and was watching the situation deteriorating in real time with trepidation. The biggest goblin is trying to encourage the other goblins, but alas, he can't do much other than howl at the rest of the goblins to fight harder, which is not really helpful to the morale of the nest defenders.
Under the relentless Gay-Rush, the goblins could only scramble backward from their own barricades, tripping on scattered bones and each other as the Gay-Bros cleaved through the shoddy goblin barricades and the slow ones that didn't fall back and regroup fast enough.
Amidst the battle, one goblin managed to bury a wooden spear into the chest of one of the Gay-Bros, and only for another Gay-Bro to grab the goblin's grinning face and pull him into the group of Gay-Bros, who pierced through his ribcage from different angles, lifting the goblin off the ground like a macabre puppet before tearing the goblin body apart as the twitching corpse fell back on them.
Mormon watched the ongoing battle beside Zarba and Nadia, her big blue eyes observing the Gay-Bros and Zar-Bros around her with curiosity as the three of them walked through the lines of summoned units, who made a path for them to get closer to the battlefield.
"They are… golem, right?" She whispered, watching as one of the Gay-Bros casually decapitated two goblins mid-leap with a powerful single horizontal slash of his sword. The movements of those that she assumes are golem feel and look so human that Mormon is uncertain of what they could actually be.
"I'll join the fight." Nadia muttered, rolling her shoulders with a crack of the pauldrons and her bone. She'd been itching for action since the first ambush, and now her greatsword could finally be used to fulfill its purpose.
"Sure, go ahead." Zarba turned to the muscular woman next to him and gave his permission for her to go rampaging with a smile.
With a quiet hum, Nadia kicked off the damp ground, her steel-toed boots digging into the soil as she launched forward like a javelin. The goblins didn't even see her coming until her long blade carved a whistling arc through the air, cleaving six of them in half horizontally. Their upper bodies slid off with wet plops, intestines slipping out like rotten ribbons.
Zarba and Mormon watched as Nadia wreaked havoc in the middle of the goblin horde, bisecting goblins left and right like she was just reaping wheat in the field. The goblin girl's nose wrinkled slightly at the stench of the bowels mixing with iron-rich blood, her blue eyes darting between the carnage and Zarba's calm expression.
"You really don't need my help, do you?" she said softly, catching a glance at Nadia stomping on a goblin's head until the skull popped like overripe fruit.
"Well, your help in navigating the cave system is still appreciated." Zarba shrugged his shoulders while he mentally commanded the Gay-Bros to surround the goblins and encircle them in a deathtrap.
"It might take a couple of minutes before they all get annihilated, so how about we talk about you in the meantime?" Zarba suggested, crouching down to look at Mormon at the same eye level as the sounds of slaughter continued in the background. His arms resting on his knees as he smiles at the goblin girl like there are no goblins being slaughtered nearby. "You mentioned that you were born different, but where did you learn how to speak common human language? I don't think there are any humans you could learn from around here, right?"
The goblin girl's ears twitched a little. A hesitation—too brief for most to notice but not Zarba, who is staring at her without blinking—before she finally decided to answer him about her lore.
"I think you are not going to believe me..." Her clawed fingers twirling her black hair, a gesture of nervousness as she glances at Zarba, who is waiting for her to speak patiently. "But I was once a human just like you..."
"You were a human??" Zarba blinked and repeated slowly, pretending to be surprised while already knowing everything about the goblin girl from the game, and while they were talking, a leader goblin's shriek could be heard as it got cut off abruptly by Nadia's greatsword, which bisected the goblin vertically, demoralizing all of the other goblins, but they can't really escape as the Gay-Bros have already put them in an encirclement.
"That's… pretty unusual." Zarba's gaze flicked to the battlefield, where Gay-Bros were methodically killing the goblins, herding them toward Nadia in the middle of the encirclement, where she was spinning around with her greatsword that cut down anything that got close mercilessly. The goblins' panicked squeals almost sound like pigs, as they can only fight and not flee; it'll probably look more pitiful if not for their ugly faces that drip down the sympathy point a lot.
"That also explains how you can speak human language and how intelligent you are..." Zarba nodded his head with his eyes closed like he just solved a great mystery of the centuries.
"You believe me…?" Mormon's fingers stopped playing with strands of her hair as she turned towards Zarba with her blue eyes wide open in astonishment. "Just like that? No 'prove it'? No calling me a liar? Why?"
'That's right, my husband. How could you just believe her?' Xin, who was listening in on them quietly until now, can't help but question her husband as well.
"I think just your existence has already earned you a benefit of doubt," Zarba said with a chuckle, watching the goblin girl fidgeting as she feels oddly like this is not how it's supposed to go.
"But I still want to hear the full story, though. Why did a human turn into this..." He gestured at her small frame and pointed ears that were twitching under his gaze.
Mormon exhaled tiredly through her nose, and then she snorted, a sound almost like a laugh, as she found her situation a bit funny but mostly ironic.
"It is not by choice that I have become a goblin," she said, her high-pitched voice dropping lower as she reminisced about her past. The memories are still crystal clear even if she has now become a monster that was born from mana. "When I was human, I was also a magician, a very powerful one, I like to believe, but foolish enough to try myself in experimenting with forbidden soul magic..."
'I see, this idiot is probably trying to find a way to extend her life…' Xin comments in Zarba's mind as she could guess how Mormon ended up as a goblin.
"I was already very old when I started to research about the soul and wanted to find a way for me to live longer just like those liches but not as a cursed undead just like them." Mormon told Zarba about her past; she recalled that she was quite desperate since she felt that her time to eternal sleep was near, and that scared her into foolish actions.
"I was so overconfident back then that I would succeed no matter what and ended up making a mistake in the spell matrix of the soul transfer ritual that I invented from my soul research." Mormon scratched her head with an embarrassed expression as she recalled how arrogant and pretentious she was after managing to invent a new grand ritual.
'Huh, she might actually have been a prominent magician in her past life if she managed to invent a new ritual from scratch…' Zarba could almost imagine Xin pressing F in his mind as he continued to listen to Mormon's lore that he already knew.
"And then the ritual went out of control…" Mormon says with a solemn face…