Chapter 3: Goblin Math

Ash fell like gray snow over what used to be Maplecrest Estates.

Rowan remembered the neighborhood from bus ads and real estate billboards: quiet living twenty minutes from downtown, all white fences, trimmed hedges, and smiling families grilling in backyards larger than most apartments. Now the hedges had grown teeth. The fences sagged in blackened ribs. Houses sat gutted beneath a blood-orange dawn, their windows punched out, their roofs caved in under the weight of roots that had not existed twelve hours ago.

The world had been overwritten badly.

Not cleanly. Not with the smooth transitions and lovingly curated biome blending Elysium Online had promised in trailers. This was a rushed deployment. Rowan could smell it in the seams.

Half a cul-de-sac had become cracked suburban asphalt. The other half had sunk three feet into marshy dungeon mud, complete with cattails, bubbling green puddles, and mosquitoes the size of fingernails. A swing set jutted from the mire at a drunken angle, one plastic seat still creaking back and forth though there was no wind.

Overhead, the sky burned with health bars.

They drifted above distant moving shapes, thin red brackets and names fading in and out through smoke. [Feral Dog – Level 2]. [Ash Wasp – Level 1]. Farther away, beyond the collapsed line of ranch homes, Rowan glimpsed a cluster of jagged green tags bouncing between ruined garages.

[Goblin Scavenger – Level 1].

There were three of them. Maybe four. The fourth tag kept ducking behind a minivan buried nose-first in a crater.

Rowan crouched behind the melted husk of a delivery truck and tried to breathe through his mouth.

It did not help.

The air tasted like wet soot, spoiled meat, ozone, and the faint copper tang that had clung to raid arenas whenever an encounter included too much blood mist for the art team’s own good. His throat hurt. His left ankle throbbed from the sprint out of the cathedral district. His shirt had stiffened where someone else’s blood had dried across his ribs.

He had no weapon except a broken mailbox post with one jagged metal screw still clinging to the end.

He had no class.

No god.

No starter skill.

No passive blessing smoothing out hunger, fear, pain, or exhaustion.

What he did have was the one thing the Pantheon had failed to strip from him.

He could see the seams.

Rowan wiped ash from his eyelashes and watched the goblins.

The closest one waddled across a driveway on bowed legs, sniffing around the remains of a lawnmower. It was barely four feet tall, all knobbed joints and stringy muscle beneath mottled green skin. Its ears twitched independently, too large for its skull. It wore a child’s bicycle helmet backward and a necklace of house keys. In one clawed hand, it dragged a steak knife with the reverence of a knight carrying an ancestral blade.

The second goblin stood on top of a sedan and threw handfuls of something into the street. Its shoulders shook with little barking laughs. Rowan focused long enough to make out the something: family photos. The goblin ripped them from a half-burned album, licked the glossy paper, shrieked in disgust, and flung each one away.

The third had found a garden gnome.

It was trying to interrogate it.

“Grik? Grik-grik?” The goblin leaned close, nose nearly touching the ceramic smile. When the gnome failed to answer, the goblin slapped it. The head snapped off and rolled down the gutter. The goblin froze, then howled as if betrayed by a lifelong friend.

Rowan held very still.

Low intelligence. Curiosity routines intact. Audio triggers. Pack proximity. Scavenger subtype.

His thoughts came clipped and cold, the way they always had during a test run when everything was on fire and a producer was asking why the boss had clipped through the arena floor.

Panic was still there. Panic had claws in his belly and fingers around his lungs. But Rowan had spent ten years turning panic into bug reports.

He blinked at the closest goblin’s nameplate.

[Goblin Scavenger – Level 1]
HP: 31/31
Disposition: Hostile
Aggro State: Idle
Threat Table: Empty

A smaller line flickered underneath it, nearly invisible beneath the monster’s red bar. Not public UI. Not player-facing. The font was wrong—developer gray, left-aligned, ugly as sin.

Hidden Patch Note 0.9.7b: Goblin Scavenger detection cone reduced from 110° to 82° after internal QA reported “unavoidable chain pulls” in starter zones. Rear detection radius remains 2m. Sound aggro threshold unchanged. Investigate post-launch.

Rowan’s lips parted.

“You beautiful, incompetent bastards,” he whispered.

The goblin on the sedan jerked upright.

Rowan flattened behind the truck.

A shard of broken side mirror reflected a sliver of the street. The goblin stared in his direction, ears quivering. Rowan did not breathe. The creature’s eyes narrowed. Its head tilted.

Then the third goblin began kicking the headless gnome and screeching triumphantly, and the sedan goblin lost interest.

Rowan let the breath out through his teeth.

Eighty-two degrees.

Two-meter rear radius.

Sound unchanged.

He needed experience. Desperately. The mob from the cathedral would spread. Blessed survivors with starter weapons and fresh god-complexes would be hunting anything that looked like loot, and the System had slapped GODLESS over Rowan’s soul like a bounty poster.

He needed a level before they found him.

He looked at his own status again, though he already knew how pathetic it was.

ROWAN VALE
Designation: Godless
Level: 0
Class: None
Patron: None
HP: 19/24
SP: 11/18
MP: 0/0
Traits: Error
Blessings: None
Active Quests: None

Level zero. It still felt like an insult in numerical form.

In most builds, level zero did not exist outside tutorial scripting. NPCs had it. Environmental critters had it. Test dummies had it. Players spawned at one with enough stats to avoid dying from a stiff breeze.

Rowan was beneath a chicken.

He shifted his grip on the mailbox post. The metal was cold and sticky. He had considered stabbing a goblin with it. The fantasy had lasted exactly four seconds before being murdered by math.

Goblin Scavenger: thirty-one HP. Rowan’s improvised weapon likely dealt three to five damage on a clean hit, assuming the System even registered it as a weapon and not “trash.” Goblin retaliation with a steak knife? Maybe six to eight per swipe. Bleed chance. Infection chance. Pack call. Three goblins became six, six became a respawn screen that might or might not exist anymore.

No, killing by hand was for heroes, paladins, and people who had never read encounter logs.

Rowan needed the suburbs to do the damage for him.

He risked another look.

Maplecrest Estates was full of hazards. The kind level designers sprinkled around starter zones to teach players that the environment mattered, then forgot to balance because QA was too busy testing paid cosmetics.

A gas main hissed from a cracked pipe near the curb two houses down, invisible but for the shimmer warping the air and the oily smell beneath the smoke. The pipe had punched through a patch of dungeon moss, and every few seconds the moss pulsed with faint blue sparks.

Across from it, a power line lay in a flooded driveway, spitting white arcs into ankle-deep water. The house attached to it had partially collapsed, exposing a kitchen where a refrigerator blinked on and off, somehow still powered, its open door chiming cheerfully into the apocalypse.

Farther down, a burned SUV hung nose-up against a maple tree. Something inside it glowed red. Battery? Fuel cell? Mana core? The vehicle had a status tag when Rowan squinted.

[Unstable Wreckage]
Integrity: 12/40
Hazard: Thermal
Trigger: Impact / Fire / Shock
Developer Note: Explosion radius increased by 15% to improve new-player “wow moment.”

Rowan almost smiled.

The expression felt strange on his face. Like wearing someone else’s mask.

“Okay,” he murmured. “Goblin math.”

He had said it often enough in test labs that people started putting it on mugs.

Goblin math meant solving the encounter without respecting the intended method. It meant pulling two patrols into each other, line-of-sighting archers into traps, abusing leashing until the AI forgot who hated whom. Designers called it emergent gameplay when it looked good in marketing clips. Exploitative behavior when players used it to skip grind.

Rowan called it survival.

He scanned the cul-de-sac again, not for danger this time, but for variables.

Three goblins. One gas leak. One electrified driveway. One unstable wreck. Multiple noise sources. Sight cones narrow. Rear radius tiny. Sound aggro unchanged.

The closest goblin drifted toward a toppled recycling bin, rummaging through cans. Its patrol path was loose but cyclical: driveway, bin, mailbox, lawnmower, repeat. The sedan goblin liked high ground and shiny objects. The gnome murderer had poor emotional regulation and kept wandering toward anything shaped like a face.

Rowan needed to pull one without pulling all. Or better—pull all, but not toward him.

He looked down at the rubble beside his boot.

A child’s plastic dinosaur lay half-buried in ash. Purple, one leg missing, molded teeth bared in eternal cheer. Rowan picked it up, weighed it in his palm, and glanced at the power line.

Sound threshold unchanged.

He waited until the nearest goblin turned away, its detection cone pointed toward the driveway. Then Rowan slipped from behind the truck and moved.

Every step felt louder than it should have. Ash crunched under his shoes. His ankle sent hot complaints up his leg. The air prickled where the System seemed to watch from everywhere and nowhere.

He kept behind the goblin, staying outside that fatal two-meter bubble. The creature smelled like wet leather and rotted onions. It hummed to itself while stuffing aluminum cans into a pillowcase decorated with cartoon moons.

Rowan reached the edge of the truck’s shadow, lifted the dinosaur, and threw underhand.

Not at the goblin.

At the flooded driveway.

The purple toy skipped once on asphalt, splashed into electrified water, and made a pathetic little squeak.

The power line snapped. A burst of white-blue light crawled across the puddle. Steam hissed upward.

All three goblin heads whipped around.

The nearest goblin squealed, ears flaring. Its nameplate flickered.

[Goblin Scavenger – Level 1]
Aggro State: Alerted
Investigating: Sound Source

“Grik?” it barked.

Rowan had already dropped flat behind a low brick planter.

The goblin padded past him, steak knife raised. It moved toward the driveway with the exaggerated sneaking posture of a cartoon burglar, knees high, shoulders hunched. The second goblin hopped down from the sedan and followed, annoyed at being interrupted. The third abandoned its gnome corpse and rushed ahead, eager to be first at whatever had squeaked.

Rowan watched their foot placement and saw the problem half a second before it ruined him.

The first goblin stopped short of the puddle.

It leaned forward. Sniffed. Its nose wrinkled.

“No. No-no.”

It had hazard avoidance.

Of course it had hazard avoidance. Some designer with just enough compassion to be dangerous had added basic “don’t walk into obvious death” behavior after watching goblins fry themselves during demos.

Rowan’s jaw tightened.

The three goblins clustered at the edge of the flooded driveway, chattering and pointing at the dinosaur. The gnome murderer reached toward it. The closest goblin slapped its hand away. They began arguing in a rapid, nasal language full of clicks and wet consonants.

Then the sedan goblin looked back.

Not at Rowan.

At the trail his shoes had left through the ash.

Its yellow eyes narrowed.

Rowan’s stomach dropped.

[Goblin Scavenger – Level 1]
Aggro State: Suspicious
Tracking: Disturbed Terrain

“That’s new,” Rowan whispered.

The goblin sniffed the footprint. Its ears flattened. It followed one step. Then another.

Right toward the planter.

Rowan slid his fingers through the ash, found a chunk of brick, and looked past the goblins to the hissing gas main near the moss.

The line was maybe twenty feet away.

Too far for a good throw from prone. Bad angle. Weak arm. Panic penalty, if reality had decided to be especially cruel.

The suspicious goblin came closer.

Six meters.

Five.

Its knife dragged over asphalt with a soft scrape.

Rowan’s heartbeat hammered so loudly he wondered if sound aggro would count it. He shifted, slow as rot, putting the planter between himself and the goblin’s cone. If the note was right, he could move behind it. If the note was wrong, he would become a patch note.

The goblin took another step.

Rowan threw the brick.

Not at the pipe.

At the sedan.

The brick punched through what remained of the driver-side window. Glass crashed inward. The sedan’s alarm woke with a dying electronic shriek.

WEE-OO WEE-OO WEE—

The goblins lost their minds.

All three spun toward the noise. The suspicious one forgot the footprints instantly. The gnome murderer screamed back at the alarm, insulted by its tone. The sedan goblin—the one who had claimed the car as its personal throne—charged first, waving both arms.

Rowan surged up from behind the planter and ran in the opposite direction.

He did not run far. That would trigger pursuit. Instead, he ducked behind a mailbox, rounded a burned hedge, and cut through the narrow side yard between two houses. The space was choked with smoke, weeds, and the skeletal remains of patio furniture. He crouched beneath a shattered window and peered through the house.

The goblins attacked the sedan alarm with religious fury.

The first stabbed the hood. The second bit a windshield wiper. The third climbed onto the roof and stomped until the metal caved.

The alarm kept screaming.

Then the unstable wreckage across the street responded.

The burned SUV’s red glow brightened. Its health tag flickered.

[Unstable Wreckage]
Integrity: 10/40
Reactive State: Heating

Rowan’s eyes narrowed.

Reactive to sound vibrations? No—impact chain. The sedan was rocking. Its bumper pressed against a fallen street sign, the street sign against a loose storm drain cover, the cover vibrating against the curb near the gas leak.

Not enough.

He needed one more push.

Rowan slipped through the broken window into the house.

The interior smelled of smoke, mildew, and old perfume. Family life lay scattered in freeze-frame: cereal bowls hardened on the kitchen table, a school backpack spilling worksheets across the floor, a refrigerator magnet shaped like a smiling sun. The System had no respect for abandoned breakfasts. It had overwritten the world while people were mid-bite.

Something moved upstairs.

A slow scrape.

Rowan froze.

Above him, floorboards creaked. Once. Twice.

A health bar glimmered through the ceiling.

[Ash Hollow – Level 3].

Nope.

Rowan backed away carefully, one hand raised as if the monster could feel disrespect. Level three meant death with extra steps. The thing upstairs dragged itself across the room, exhaling a sound like wind through a crematorium.

He turned toward the kitchen instead.

There—on the counter. A cast-iron pan.

Too heavy for a good weapon. Perfect for noise.

Rowan took it, winced as the handle bit into his palm, and moved to the back door. It hung half-open onto a small deck overlooking a yard where the grass had become black reeds. Beyond the fence, he could see the cul-de-sac from a different angle.

The goblins were still savaging the sedan. The alarm had degraded into a broken warble.

Rowan lifted the pan.

He sighted along the fence, past a dead barbecue grill, to the loose storm drain cover near the gas leak.

“You’re about to be promoted,” he told the pan.

Then he hurled it.