Warriors will die if they charge.

Marcus, who played bridge with Duncan for half the night, concluded that Duncan had good skills and character.

When observing, they don't interrupt, offer advice to the card players, proactively pour wine into empty cups, and when joining a game, they don't greedily play cards, stopping immediately after losing a single coin, and then chatting about past experiences.

Marcus's impression of this kidney-deficient thief was much better than that of the controlling Kelly and the shrewd O'Ha.

When Duncan mentioned the severed finger, a symbol of the thief, he smiled easily, deftly flipping the cards between the four fingers of his right hand:

"That was a long time ago. My father was a gambler, and my sister sent me to learn some thieving and lock-picking skills in the alley. One time I wasn't paying attention and got caught by a church knight. He chopped off one of my fingers, and that's when I met Kelly."

That must have been a terrible experience, Marcus thought to himself, while noticing that Duncan would occasionally peek at Kelly, who was snoring by the campfire.

For someone with severed fingers, was she the captain, the older sister, or a mother she had never met?

Marcus was unaware that he simply lay down, closed his eyes, and waited for the dawn of tomorrow, hoping to quickly obtain the rare card and have a thrilling all-in bet.

The next day, dawn arrived as expected. At least in this world, some basic geographical laws remained unchanged. Daylight in the tropics arrived with remarkable punctuality, the workers' working hours were also punctual, and the bosses' profits were precise—everyone was poor.

Carrying heavy equipment, the five-man team lit torches wrapped in grease and linen and entered the dark mine.

Water seeping from the dark rock walls refracted a faint light in the torchlight, sliding down the cracks to the ground and slowly flowing out of the cave along the dilapidated drainage channels on both sides, which were filled with mud and moss.

The tunnel is straight with almost no angles. As long as drainage ditches and water pumps are introduced, the problems of water seepage and ventilation can be easily solved. This is a common adit structure used when excavating shallow rich ore.

The orc Ohar walked at the front of the group, carrying a wieldable machete. Duncan walked alongside him, holding a torch for illumination. The master, Bardin, stood in the middle, holding a map and giving directions.

Marcus and Kelly walked at the back. The stray dog ​​was clearly interested in the dock-dwelling man; she glanced at the heavy bundle Marcus was carrying and asked curiously:

"Marcus, I didn't see you panting at all when you walked from town to here yesterday. You seem to have quite a bit of stamina."

"It's alright, I got used to carrying boxes at the docks." Marcus replied casually, his fingertips touching the rock wall of the mine. Before he even went deep into the mine, he could already feel a faint chill. This was the first time he had felt what cold was since he had been traveling for a week.

Even though it was raining, the air still carried an inescapable humid heat, and you could sweat profusely even while sleeping.

After exchanging a few casual words, they passed a goblin stronghold piled with excrement, rags, and bones. The tunnel soon began to tilt noticeably, and Marcus was fortunate enough to see a female goblin drowning in a pool of water.

A pool of water, clearly used for mining and accumulating water, was about two meters in diameter. A dark green-skinned goblin, her fleshy body bound by hemp rope, was submerged in the water, with a few strands of her hair spreading out and wriggling like seaweed.

It couldn't float. The other end of the rope was tied to a large rock, and across the water, you could see its expression as it drowned—its eyes were as big as copper bells.

The stench of rotting corpses floating in the stagnant water made Marcus instinctively pat the air in front of him.

Kelly looked at her masterpiece in the pool and kicked another pebble in: "Goblins are a bunch of cowardly trash. If you're tougher than them, they'll be afraid of you. Don't worry, the guys in this cave have all learned how stray dogs treat their prey."

Indeed, groups of stray dogs are often more ruthless than wolf packs. Wolves hunt for survival and food, but stray dogs will toy with their prey, using the cruelty brought on by fear as a means of amusement.

But does cruelty equate to strength?

Bardin spoke Marcus's unspoken words aloud, patting his fan-like hand in front of him with disdain, "Even the youngest Little Beard wouldn't find pleasure in torturing goblins; the whole clan would laugh at him for it."

Kelly showed no anger at being mocked, and calmly accepted her dwarf master's assessment: "At least it worked. There were no goblins harassing us along the way. Rather than waiting for the wolves to bare their fangs, we might as well make them feel fear first."

"Little Mustache wearing his furnace-fire... meteorite armor won't scare the goblins."

To put it another way, Bardin is saying that the Stray Dogs are all bark and no bite.

Regardless of one's opinion on turning female goblins into river delicacies, at least those chattering guys hiding in the tunnels were indeed afraid of the stray dogs' cruelty and did not launch any sneak attacks.

This made Marcus, who had just made contact with the goblins the day before yesterday, feel a little strange.

The goblins lured by Bardin were as ferocious as K-bomber berserkers with nails driven in. It took killing dozens of them before they realized the fear. In the end, they even attracted bear goblins and goblin wizards.

As Marcus ventured deeper into the mine, he witnessed firsthand the tragedy of blood and silver. In a deliberately excavated, empty cavern, the remains of laborers were piled up, all showing signs of mercury poisoning, with most of their teeth missing and their skulls bald.

The scarcity of oxygen made the atmosphere increasingly oppressive, and the cold, damp tunnel was filled with ponds and puddles.

Duncan had already thrown the torch into the water and replaced it with a precious magic lantern. The purplish-red glow appeared eerie and dark in the narrow cave, and when it shone on his face, it looked like clusters of ghostly figures.

"We're almost there."

Suddenly, Bardin crumpled the blueprints in his hand into a ball, threw them into a puddle at the edge of the tunnel, and pointed to the fork in the road on the left:

"The main tunnel was designed by the dwarves, but the mineral veins near the main tunnel were the first to be dug out. This pile of blueprints that looks like snot paper is full of mineral holes dug out by humans. Someone must have dug up an underground river, causing the river water to backflow into the tunnel, which was eventually abandoned."

That's what you call professional. Marcus mentally gave Bardin a thumbs up.

The group entered the left fork in the road that Badin pointed out. Amid the dripping sound of water seeping from the rock wall and falling to the ground, there was also a very faint and subtle snoring sound, which was steady and long and could last for more than ten seconds at a time.

"A bear goblin?" Duncan was the first to judge.

Oha slowly shook his head: "It doesn't seem like it. Goblins wouldn't go this deep. We haven't encountered any bear goblins before."

"Let's go in and take a look." Kelly waved her hand, squeezed past Marcus, walked to the front of the line, and drew her fine steel longsword.

The dwarf, who had already found the treasure for the stray dog, stepped back a few paces. Bardin beckoned, signaling the big guy to come closer and talk.

Marcus observed the stray dogs preparing for battle ahead for a while, then bent down and heard the dwarf's serious voice:

"The blueprints are faulty. There's a troll sleeping inside. We don't have any fire or acid. If things get dangerous, we'll have to find a way to get out."