Nickel observed the goblins until they seemed to reach some form of agreement.
He quickly pulled his head back around the corner. Four of the goblins had begun walking towards him, while the remaining three stayed at the top of the stairs.
Good. He could divide and conquer.
Nickel moved back from the corner, ducking into another passage that split off to the left. He waited, crouched, pressed up against the left wall.
A minute later, the group of goblins had fully passed by.
Nickel crept out behind them, silently making his way up to the goblin in the rear of the group. His arm thrust forward swiftly, piercing it's back. The goblin let out a shriek of surprise that quickly devolved into gurgles.
Hearing the cry of their companion, the other goblins in the group turned back, and also began shrieking.
Not wasting any time, Nickel stepped around the dying goblin and removed his arm from it in one fluid motion.
He moved to the next, ripping it's throat out and continuing past. A swipe of his claws carved open the chest of the third. He swung his arm in the opposite direction, and did the same to the fourth.
Collecting the corpses, Nickel quickly removed their cores. He left the butchered corpses there, no longer worried about attracting more goblins. If they were guarding the stairs, there shouldn't be anymore on this floor.
He made his way back to them, not bothering with stealth this time. There were only three goblins, and he could kill them all easily.
The fight went as Nickel expected. The goblins were dead within seconds, and none of them even made it to the stairs.
Fighting goblins was both a blessing and a curse for Nickel. He wasn't in any real danger against such a small number of them. But that also meant he wasn't gaining any real combat experience either.
Once he met a larger number, he'd likely get more of an actual battle. Goblins tended to get bolder the more of them there were.
After extracting the goblins' cores, Nickel made his way down the stairs, to the second floor of the dungeon.
—
At the bottom of the stairs, Nickel found… A hall identical to one at the top of the stairs.
It didn't seem to have any intersections, even after Nickel had been walking for several minutes.
Eventually it let out into a larger hallway. To Nickel's left a seemingly manmade structure stood around twenty meters away. Or perhaps it'd be more accurate to call it goblin-made.
It was little more than a crude, wooden wall, standing around two meters tall, half the height of the passage he was in. A small door was set into it, right next to the wall of the dungeon. At the top of the wall were spikes pointing outward. And a goblin.
The goblin didn't seem to have noticed him yet. From the other side of the wall, Nickel could hear what sounded like a large number of goblins.
Based on his internal compass, that should be directly under the room he arrived in.
Retreating back into the hall he entered from, Nickel progressed his Dragonification to total hybrid.
His void-black scales crept further up his arms, completely covering them. Scales grew out along his back, and the scales across his chest spread lower, covering his stomach. They didn't stop there, continuing down, armoring his legs, his feet growing claws of their own.
Two pairs of curved silver horns grew out, one pair from his forehead, piercing upward. The other grew from the sides of his head, and curled back behind his ears, coming to rest on either side of his jaw.
Finally, silver scales bloomed from the edges of his eyes, fully armoring his face along with the rest of his body.
There was one unfortunate downside to total hybrid dragonification.
If the clothes you were wearing weren't specifically made to withstand it, they would get destroyed during the process.
Now that he'd fully committed, Nickel would have to maintain this state until he left the dungeon.
Good thing this was an immaterial trial world. At least he'd still be clothed in the material world.
Now that he was prepared, Nickel stepped back out into the main hallway, and crouched down.
Putting all his strength into his legs, he shot forward like a bullet.
The goblin at the top of the fort wall, presumably placed there as a lookout, barely registered the scaled giant rushing toward it's post. There was a deafening crack as Nickel crashed into the wall, both the shattered remains of the wall and the lookout that stood atop it sent flying.
Nickel stood among the wreckage he'd created, looking ahead at the center room. Before him was a goblin encampment. Quickly glancing around, he counted roughly fifty goblins, most of them staring at him in surprise. Surprise that quickly turned to anger.
As though they had planned it, all of the goblins staring at him let out furious cries, and began rushing at Nickel, weapons held high. Though, it seemed like some were actually rushing to find weapons.
Nickel grinned, a savage gleam in his eyes.
Several of the goblins stumbled, seeing only death before them. It was just too bad that those goblins that hesitated were pushed forward by those that hadn't seen Nickel, or didn't understand the danger before them.
Nickel rushed forward to meet them.
Needless to say, it was a slaughter. How could it be anything else?
While their number might have prevented them from being frozen in fear, it didn't make them stronger or faster, nor did it make their weapons sharper. They were still goblins.
Nickel moved through them like a storm, reaping their lives as if he were a farmer, and they the wheat.
His claws sliced cleanly through anything they met. Arms, stomachs, throats, heads. Each swing of his arms claimed another life. The goblins were utterly incapable of defending themselves.
His scales formed an armor that to the goblins might as well have been truly impenetrable. No matter the method they used to attack him, they always failed to inflict any form of meaningful damage. Whether teeth, knife, club, or stone. All shattered upon black scales.
In a matter of minutes, Nickel stood alone, surrounded by the corpses of the goblin tribe.
Now, one might be wondering, if Nickel was so concerned about receiving a challenge, why would he use total hybrid dragonification. The answer was quite simple.
How could it be a challenge for Nickel if simply using one of his racial abilities removed all difficulty?
He wasn't interested in any sort of meaningless, self-imposed challenge. Maybe if there was a purpose to it, like only using a single weapon in order to improve his mastery of it.
But these were goblins. Almost every Pathfinder, with a few rare exceptions, would no longer find them difficult a few months into their journey. Some, like the Hexes, would stop having any difficulty with them after a few short weeks.
"But if Nickel was already so strong, why was he so concerned about being weak?"
This, too, had a simple answer. And it was that, Nickel was strong here and now. But what about in a year? In five years? In ten?
How long would it be until he hit a bottleneck? How much progress could he make before hitting a wall he couldn't move past? And how much would his peers have grown in that time?
If one were to look at the growth rate of, not even the Hexes, just Pentas, like Nickel's parents. He would already be several years behind. And now that he was almost certain he was meant to be a Hex?
He had even more to catch up on.