Saimin Isekai

Rockbiter the goblin knew a lot about the world. Humans were tall. Goblins were small. Humans had cities. Goblins had dirt. Humans waved swords. Goblins waved sticks.

It didn’t matter much to her. Or to goblins as a whole. If humans had swords and goblins had sticks, then it just took a lot of goblins to gang up on a runt human and steal their sword. Rockbiter had done that with her old group and come out of it with a pretty fancy sword the humans called a ‘dagger’. She loved the sound of that word as it breathed out past her fangs. She had even considered changing her name to Rockdagger, but she wasn’t quite sure yet so she stuck with her old one for now.

She was using the dagger to pry open a stuck door. The old mine she was raiding was full of things that could be solved with a little bit of and a steel. Oh, yes, she was raiding a mine. Backbiter was smarter than most goblins. She knew that eventually she’d be the one ganged up on by humans if she stuck with her old raiding group. So she had left and gone searching for treasure.

Treasure was hard to find. But when she did find it she could trade it to other goblin tribes for food and clothes and everything a goblin could ever want. She could even get some shaman inscribed wards if she wanted. And she had. They had saved her hide more than a few times.

She hadn’t found any good treasure yet in this mine yet. Some abandoned tools which she could trade, but they were mostly rusted and halfway useless. Rockbiter was looking for the good stuff. The pristine equipment or even hopefully, really hopefully, a magical artifact that had been left behind.

“Grrr.” She was having a lot of trouble getting past this door. She wondered why it was stuck. Maybe there was a cave-in behind it, in which case she might not even be able to pry it open. But after a while of keeping at it, the door swung open, revealing a dusty room lit only by an everlight lantern.

She stepped inside and once she had fully crossed the threshold, she was able to see what the room truly held.

A lot of dust.

And a pedestal? Rockbiter liked pedestals. They usually had something magical on top of them! She rushed over and saw that indeed it had an item placed just so. It was an old looking thing. It looked older than her; like a lot older. The cover was dark and had a lot of stitches on it holding it together. Some human words were on the front, but she didn’t know what they meant.

Principia Peregrinatio.

What the hell did that mean? How would you even pronounce that? Rockbiter preferred names she could pronounce like ‘Rockbiter’.

She picked up the book. It didn't do anything, which wasn’t a good sign in the magic category. But it had to be, because no other book looked like that. Rockbiter would know, since she had stolen a few from the humans her old raiding party had killed. Those weren’t magical, but they looked so plain and simple compared to this.

The goblin opened it. Black pages with gold text sprawled across them. Diagrams and pictures littered the pages in between the lines and lines of text. This was a manual! She had heard of them before. Humans used them to teach each other about how to do smart stuff. She was smart. She could learn it. If she knew the words, which she didn’t. She had a very, very basic understanding of human. The few captives she had interacted with had deigned to teach her after a few prods and bribes. It wasn’t enough to understand whatever complex stuff this was though.

“Grr.” She bared her fangs at the book, tempted to sink them into it. But even if she couldn’t personally make use of it, she could trade it to a shaman. Though if they didn’t believe it was really magic, they’d just give her what a picture book was worth, and that was basically nothing.

She needed to prove it was magic.

Rockbiter flipped back to the first page. Slowly, with amazing effort for a goblin, she started to read out the first words.

"Ego... te... voco.” She was sure her pronunciation was off, but she continued on with as determination filled her small frame. “Ultra... haec... vela... terrena…, ego... te... voco.”

Nothing yet. There were still more words on the page though.

“Audire… vocationem… meam.”

Her mouth was beginning to burn with all the long and complex words. Her head seemed like it was stretching and contracting at the same time, but she kept on.

“Veni… veni… et… vide… ne… retro.”

The last few words burst from her chest of their own volition. Rockbiter couldn’t have stopped even if she had wanted to. The now glowing book that had risen from her hands controlled her mouth. The book moved her lips and tongue in precise motions, announcing the last command with perfect clarity.

“Praecipio tibi, veni.”

And before her a line appeared in the middle of the room. A thin, small, black and jagged thing. Like a crack in the floor or the walls but just hanging in the air.

A moment later the crack expanded, fissuring out from both ends until it was twice, four times, eight times its original size, running down and up until it touched both the floor and the ceiling at once. And then it spread outwards in much the same fashion until it was three goblins wide and glowing of its own accord with a glowing greenish black flame that belched forth from it to settle to the ground in a misty effusion.

Rockbiter was still under the book’s control and unable to look away, her eyes pried wide open and staring as a human was tossed unceremoniously from the rift.

“Achhhh.” The human yelped as her face collided with the ground. She was black haired and small and thin for a human, but that was still much larger than a goblin. Rockbiter’s guts seized. Humans were bad news. This book had the power to summon them? Thoughts raced in her head of how to make use of that and that she should run or that she should stick her dagger up the human’s eye socket. If only she could move.

The rift closed, and with that, the book’s control over Rockbiter as it stopped glowing and fell to the floor.

The human coughed and tried to get up from the floor. When she did, she saw a goblin standing over her with a gleaming dagger in its hands.

“Down, human!” Rockbiter growled.

Mina Kameyo looked up into fiction made very real. It had a lot more teeth than she had remembered from fantasy shows. The goblin’s boobs were also quite a big bigger than would have been safe to show on TV as well. She would have blushed, but her concentration was instead focused on that dagger looked very deadly up close. She had died once already, and while she was very grateful for this second chance at life, she wasn’t sure if third chances were a thing.

So she spoke the words the goddess had given her in that in-between place.

“Saimin Seigyo.”

A pink beam shot out from her hand to pierce the goblin straight between its eyes. The beast’s eyes went cross-eyed and the dagger dropped from its hand as its body straightened. Then it returned to normal with a confused expression on its face.

“Human servant?” It asked her, still with all those teeth in its mouth, blurring its words.

“Yes, you’re my servant!” The spell had worked. Mina breathed out a sigh of relief.

“No. You my servant. Carry goblin.”

Oh. Had the spell not worked right? She had pronounced it correctly, hadn’t she? And it looked like it had taken effect. But it was her first time casting anything, so maybe she hadn’t done it quite right. It took a day to recharge apparently, so she would have to wait a bit before trying again.

“Carry.” The goblin demanded again.

Best to figure this out later. She got up from the ground and dusted herself off before moving over and picking the goblin up and placing it on her back, piggyback-style. The shortstack’s huge boobs pressed into her back not unpleasantly.

“Good human. Carry book.” The goblin tossed the book down into her hands. Ew. Was that human skin? She’d prefer to not carry a dark magic grimoire or whatever this was, but then the goblin might stick her with that dagger. Her charm spell might only go so far towards making her amenable to disobedience. Ugh if only that damned goddess had explained anything.

The goblin patted her on her head, like she was a pet. Ugh. Okay she could deal with this for now. But first thing tomorrow she was using the spell again and hopefully getting it right this time. In her previous life she had been a massive fuckup, so she was resolved to do better this time around.