Low Risk Food

Now, it’s not that your afraid of giants, kobolds, harpies, giant lizards, over-leveled players, and whatever else lives higher up on the mountain, but today you don’t feel like dealing with all of that. You’re perfectly content to head down the mountain and into the low level forest. The goblins down there are not exactly nice, but they hardly ever attack you, and in return, you don’t attack them. Low level players are never that nice. They just start hacking away at you with swords and fire the moment they see you. Unsurprisingly, neither of those are a great way to die.

The other inhabitants of the forest are animals and wholly unintelligent monsters, they either bolt or charge when they see you. But none of them are really much of a concern to you in the way that goblins and players are.

After sitting at the edge of the cliff outside of your cave for a while, thinking about every possible situation you think you might encounter in the forest, you finally start moving.

Because of the very recent update, there shouldn’t be many players on to see you, so you just drag yourself straight over the edge of the cliff and begin to lower yourself down. It takes only 20 minutes or so to get all the way down to the forest, but your dangerous route has cost you a quarter of your health to the various sharp crevices and rocks on the way down. Unfortunately, you can’t easily digest stone, so it’s practically impossible to regenerate your health during the decent. You can start passively regenerating it from the grass you drag yourself over at the bottom though. So you just continue into the forest in search of food.

About an hour later, you find your first target, a rabbit that appears oblivious to your careful, slow moving presence. You drift closer, angling behind it, and making sure not to make a single sound. Then you pounce, rapidly pushing your body up and throwing yourself forwards, going completely airborne for an instant before splashing down on the rabbit.

It only manages a twitch before you land and engulf it completely. It struggles futilely for a few moments before your corrosive slime can eat through it’s measly health. Then you feel it stop and begin to actually dissolve. You smile in your mind at the first perfect kill of the day. You can really only engulf very small prey, but it seems you can still do that with ease you think as you slowly climb the nearest tree to digest your breakfast in peace.

Some time later, after you’re finished digesting your meal, you hear a slight rustling coming from below. Immediately, you banish your lethargy and scan the area around and below you for the source of the noise. It takes a few seconds before you spot the mottled green of a goblin sneaking through the underbrush a little ways away. It is quiet now, so the noise must have just been a mistake on its part. Wondering what it’s hunting you start to carefully maneuver closer in the branches of the forest canopy. You’ve done this sort of sneaking before, and you often have to stretch out into one or more thin tendrils to get across the smallest branches and gaps. It takes a good amount of your concentration however, so you are almost on top of the goblin when you figure out what’s going on.

First, the goblin is not alone. There are two other goblins sneaking through the underbrush near it, two carrying stone knives, and one a stone tipped spear.

Focusing on examining them, you see that the knife wielders are level 2 and the spear wielder is level 3. Their apparent prey however, looks much more dangerous, but also much less aware.

Robert Morningstar, Level 2 Warrior
Human, Hero, Active, Explicit
Calista Fallenstar, Level 4 Sorceress
Human, Hero, Active, Explicit

Two adventurers, within a couple hours of the update. The first one, the one in the lead, was just an ordinary warrior with a mace and shield. Alone, he might be killable by you, but probably not by the goblins. Pretty much any armor would stop the weak, stone weapons of the goblins.

The sorceress however, would probably be the opposite, a mediocre target for the goblins’ numbers, and a bad target for you because of her potentially high damage spells. Remembering your new magical ability though, maybe you could do more against the sorceress now. You just couldn’t initiate a fight, because then you would be going in without knowing what the sorceress, and by extension you, could do. You would just have to hope the goblins would attack and then you could attack from above, surprising both parties. So you continued to stalk closer to the adventurers, hoping things would work out.