Goblin Heavy Dependence

Chapter 124 Corpse
George "Iron Hand".

Also from Riverdale, an experienced adventurer.

It is said that he was once a member of the "Green Blood" team and was a teammate of Adeline for a while.

But later, as his strength gradually increased, he no longer looked down on the goblins' melons and dates unless it was hunting day.

As per usual practice, he left the team and went out on his own.

After a few years, he had made a name for himself and earned the nickname "Iron Hand" among the lower-level adventurers in River Valley Town.

As for the origin of his nickname, it was naturally because of the silver-white metal arm armor on his right hand.

It's quite interesting to say that this arm armor has actually been damaged many times in battles. As George's value has increased after he left the team, he is fully capable of purchasing higher-level defensive equipment.

But after his nickname "Iron Hand" spread, every time he updated his equipment, he asked the blacksmith to make the arm armor back to the original style, even if he had to pay a dozen more gold coins in processing fees.

In recent years, he even adjusted the overall gloss and color of his arm armor to be more conspicuous, so that strangers can notice the eye-catching silver on his arm with just one glance.

With George's deliberate promotion, his reputation as the "Iron Hand" became more and more famous, and thus attracted many powerful adventurers to join his team.

In addition to his own good strength and his relatively honest way of dealing with things as a captain.

Accumulating year by year, today, the size and overall strength of his team have far exceeded that of the "Green Blood" team.

It can be said that he is the one with the best development among Adeline's former teammates.

After becoming rich, George did not become ungrateful and humiliate and belittle his former captain.

On the contrary, he maintained a good relationship with Adeline, and sometimes even recommended some good newcomers to her as supplementary staff.

Of course, after these newcomers grow up around Adeline, they often choose to leave the team and join the "Iron Hand" team.

So to some extent, George also has his own little thoughts.

But Adeline didn't care about these things. She would have to leave the team sooner or later anyway, and she felt more at ease following someone she knew.

Adeline gained teammates who were willing to hunt goblins with her, and George also gained teammates who were strong and had certain adventuring experience.

It can be said to be a win-win situation.

While Xia Nan was waiting for a mission in the association, he met "Iron Hand" George.

I remember that the other party had invited him as a joke, but I did not agree.

Apart from this, my impression of George can only be pieced together from a few words from other people.

"Silver-white metal arm armor", "Adeline's former teammate", "Good strength, many reliable teammates"...

Once upon a time, Shanan had no desire to understand the other party, nor did he intend to have any dealings with George.

Now, he no longer has those opportunities.

Because George at this moment is completely dead.

The carefully crafted metal arm armor, which symbolized his identity, was ruthlessly crushed by a blunt object, turning into a useless piece of iron with pits, deformation and twists.

The silver-white surface that had cost a lot of money to maintain was now covered with dirty mud and bright red blood, and was thrown on the ground and stuck into the soil like scrap metal.

"Tick."

The sticky blood beads with residual warmth dripped slowly, splashing tiny, imperceptible blood flowers on the brown-red meadow.

Lift your legs off the ground with your toes hanging naturally.

In the twilight, the high-hanging shadows swayed gently in the wind, and the air was filled with the faint creaking sound of tense fibers.

George, or rather his body.

A blood-soaked hemp rope was roughly tied around his neck and hung on the branch of a towering oak tree.

His right hand was empty from the elbow down, with a wound covered with hideous teeth marks and bloody tassels made of tendons and broken flesh hanging down; his left arm was twisted at an exaggerated angle, with the flesh around his five fingers and forearm peeled off, revealing pale bones mixed with blood, showing the inhuman torture he had suffered in his lifetime.

A light breeze filled with a strong smell of blood blew by, and as the branches and leaves swayed, the dim twilight that was originally hidden outside the tree canopy silently seeped down and sprinkled on the surface of the corpse.

Revealing the two horrifying empty holes on George's face.

The leather armor and the backing had been stripped off, leaving his naked upper body covered only with a layer of dried bright red blood scab.

Only the stain on the chest was cleaned.

Thus, the bloody wound in the middle of his chest was exposed, and the insulting words were distortedly spelled out:
"Coward", "leftovers".

Follow the indentations between the bloodstains and the grass, and push aside the dangling vines and tough bushes and thorns.

When Xia Nan saw the tragic scene in front of him, he could clearly feel that Abi beside him was shocked all over and the fragments of arm armor in his hand fell to the ground.

This newcomer, who had just entered the industry, had a pale face, a faint rolling Adam's apple, and an expression as if he wanted to vomit.

Xia Nan himself was not as calm as he appeared.

Although he had killed no less than a hundred goblins, his hands were stained with a lot of their blood.

But after all, the time of traveling was short and I have not yet completely desensitized.

When the corpse of this obviously tortured fellow came into view, the bloody and hideous wounds inevitably caused phantom pain in the same parts of the body.

Coupled with the dead, deserted and dangerous forest they are in, and the terrifying environment deliberately created by the perpetrators, the horror of the scene is deepened to a certain extent.

"George..."

Adeline's face turned very ugly.

Even though they have been apart from the team for a long time, the two still remain friends.

I had originally planned to have a few drinks with him after returning, but I didn't expect to encounter his body on the way back from the mission.

She subconsciously took two steps towards the corpse, as if she wanted to step forward and put down George's body that was hanging on the branch with a hemp rope.

But he seemed to suddenly remember something and stopped.

Abby didn't think too much and followed forward. When he was about to pass Adeline, she reached out and grabbed him.

"and many more."

He didn't care about the other person's frightened and slightly confused look.

His eyes carefully examined the ground covered with fallen leaves around the corpse, and suddenly stopped.

He found a stone nearby and threw it into the grass below the body.

"Chi bang!"

The trap hidden in it was triggered instantly, and several simple and rough bone clusters burst out from the bushes nearby.

It tore through the air, pierced through George's body with a whistling sound, embedded into his skin, and cut the hemp rope that was wrapped around his neck.

boom--

It was the dull sound of a body falling to the ground.

Abby looked at Adeline beside him with lingering fear, his chest heaving, and he took a deep breath.

If the other party had not stopped him, he would have been shot through by those bone clusters.

"There shouldn't be anything else."

Still in the most dangerous position, Adeline walked in front of the team and went forward to check the body. Shanan did not have relevant knowledge, so he just stood a little further away with Abi to watch out for her and be alert to possible dangers around her.

As for Berg...

I was already feeling uneasy because of the appearance of the professional Orcs, and after finally feeling a little relieved, I encountered this kind of thing on my way back.

His expression became even more gloomy, and he was almost a completely different person compared to when he was in River Valley Town.

But after all, it is a matter of life and death, not only for the entire team, but also for his own life safety.

At this moment, he suppressed the fluctuating emotions in his heart, and squatted down with Adeline to carefully examine George's body, which was full of holes due to the painful torture.

Xia Nan knew in his heart that this was not an unnecessary incident.

An ordinary team composed of low-level adventurers encountered two human corpses in a short period of time in a place like the Misty Forest, and one of them was even an acquaintance they knew.

No coincidence.

At this point, we still had nearly three days to get out of the forest, and there was a high possibility that we would encounter the same danger.

Be it humans or monsters.

At least we need to figure out what is lurking around the team and what they may face in the future.

It was like torturing George to death and then hanging his body from a tree as a provocative act.

These cruel beasts have no intention of concealing their identities.

The wounds on the corpse, the scars on the armor, and even the footprints and a few hairs on the ground nearby were all left behind with contempt.

It was for this reason that Adeline and Berg reached the final conclusion in just over ten minutes.

"First of all, judging by the degree of decay and the type of wounds on the body, George and the body we found when we arrived died at roughly the same time."

"In fact, the dead adventurer was a member of the Iron Hand team."

Xia Nan agreed in his heart.

It's not like he's a lone wolf. There are a lot of people in "Iron Hand" George's team. Unless there's an internal conflict, there's no reason for him to be the only one in danger.

As the captain of the team and the strongest one, George is in this state. Their team may not be wiped out, but at least they have suffered a heavy blow, with serious casualties.

"Secondly, although the armor we found had obvious traces of being hit by a blunt weapon, judging from the degree of damage to the equipment, the attacker's weapon was not very sophisticated, and it was purely physical force that damaged the armor."

"There were obvious bite marks on the body, and insulting words were deliberately left on the chest in the common language."

"So we can judge that the attacker is most likely not an adventurer like 'Gaptooth', but some kind of humanoid monster that has a certain degree of intelligence, is hostile to humans, can use weapons, and even knows how to set simple traps."

As for whether there is a possibility that human adventurers deliberately left traces and fabricated charges to frame the monsters...

All I can say is that in a place like the Misty Forest, even if you kill 10,000 people in the same way and leave them alone, there will probably be only a pile of bones left the next day.

There is absolutely no need to cover up the traces.

"So... it was the goblins who did it? But if it was them..."

After listening to Adeline's analysis, Abby guessed so.

His face was still pale, and his eyes glanced up to the sky as he spoke, as if he was afraid to look at the bloody corpse on the grass.

"It's not a goblin." Berg's face was so gloomy that it seemed like water could drip out of it. He turned his head and looked at the shadows in the dense bushes around him.

It's like being able to see something from the deep darkness.

If we go back to ancient times, before the war between gods, perhaps the violent goblins might have really done such things as torturing their prey.

But since they disappeared with their main god "Magrubiye" and returned to this continent.

These stupid green mice became "machines" dominated by desire and destructive emotions, acting purely on physical instinct.

They would never allow a complete human corpse, full of fat and muscle, to rot quietly in the wild.

Instead of taking it back to the nest to fill their stomachs.

Nor do they have the skills or patience to suppress the hunger surging in their stomachs and torture the delicious food that has lost its ability to resist.

Eating their prey alive while they are still conscious is the most cruel form of torture these greenskins can do.

"But if there are hobgoblins, their intelligence is not..."

Thinking back to the knowledge about goblins I learned from several people after joining the team.

Abhi offered his idea.

That's not wrong. After all, the goblin's subspecies, the "hobgoblin", does have an IQ comparable to that of higher-level intelligent creatures.

but……

Adeline shook her head, having already identified the real murderer in her mind.

His eyes turned to the bush not far from George's body, which was broken and crushed, and clearly showed signs of a living creature passing through it.

She had gone there to see it during her previous examination.

A set of footprints that were exactly the same as the ones found before next to the body of the suspected "Iron Hand" team member.

The same five to seven inches in length, the same parallel toe prints that expand outward and extend inward, and even the stride is exactly the same as before.

"Full of hostility towards humans", "a humanoid monster that can use weapons and set traps", "footprints with special toes", "insulting words left on the chest of a corpse"...

Combined with the recent anecdotes circulating among the lower-level adventurers in River Valley Town—

When setting up camp, there was a sharp and strange howl like a hyena from afar, a hunched figure standing quietly in the woods in the middle of the night with green eyes, and a team of adventurers who disappeared inexplicably during a simple mission...

And several high-bounty tasks suddenly appeared on the association's task panel.

The answer couldn't be clearer.

"It's... the Gnoll!"

Beside him, Berg almost gritted his teeth and growled in a low voice.

His face was shrouded in the shadow cast by the treetops above, so his expression could not be seen clearly. There was only a deep, dark darkness on his face.

"We can't stay here any longer, we have to leave now!"

Adeline looked solemn, her eyes quickly scanning the surrounding woods, as if she was worried that there were enemies lying in ambush there.

Abby basically only knew the name of the werewolf, but seeing how nervous the two men were, he couldn't help but tense up.

Xia Nan had previously taken emergency classes in the town on a large amount of monster-related knowledge, so he understood the urgency of the current situation.

In just a few seconds, the entire team retreated back to the dark forest and quickly left.

The twilight was dim and the air was dead silent.

All that was left in the woods was a cold, bloody scene.

The silver-white arm armor lay quietly on the ground, surrounded by mud and grass stems.

The shiny metal surface reflected the bloody corpse beside it.

(End of this chapter)