The air stunk of shit, brimmed with the incessant drone of cicadas, and Eliza knew she was utterly fucked. She was surrounded by a throng of goblins. The stunted, ugly, beady eyed runts slowly tightening their circle around her as she tried to keep them at bay with her sword. A thicket of trees flanked the entire loamy clearing making her escape the more difficult.
"Just a few Adelan Berries," he'd said.
Easy money, she'd thought. She should have known it wasn't going to be a cakewalk given the payment for a bunch of berries any dim-wit could find with a bit of effort, but it wasn't as if she really had any other options. What was a girl supposed to do when she was neck deep in debt to a cartel of arseholes, disowned by her stuck-up family, and more than a little tipsy in the middle of the day?
"You know, you could help," she said, swinging at a particularly eager goblin as she slowly attempted to back out of the shitshow she'd found herself in.
The blue floating fist-sized crystalline orb that was her supposed familiar just buzzed, giving her what she figured was the static-filled equivalent of," not my problem."
She scowled. The stupid thing had been apparently her mother's most powerful familiar, when the old bat was an adventurer. How the crone managed to get the judgmental piece of crap to do anything was beyond her. When she got back to town, she'd just sell the damn thing, she mused, swinging at another feisty goblin, then it'd have done something useful. Whatever the case though, if she didn't figure a way out of her current predicament, she'd be completely...
Thunk.
She whirled, her gaze locking onto her newest assailant as she rubbed the spot on her head, which had been pelted. She glared at the bulbous nosed goblin hidden amongst the shrubbery with a slingshot in its hand and the goblin version of a smug smile on its bumpy face.
"You," she started, only to be interrupted by another pellet to her shoulder. She cursed, whirled around and was met with another pellet. And, another, and soon enough she was being bombarded by the obnoxious things. They didn't so much as hurt, rather each one stung like someone flicking an ear. She'd normally have just waded through the volley, but given her slight inebriation and the furiosity she was being pelted she soon found herself attempting to protect herself from the onslaught of gunk-covered stone and mud pellets as the circle tightened and the goblins grew bolder. It was only a matter of...
She slipped, landed on her ass, and they pounced.
They tore and clawed at her. She swung, punched, and kicked, but it was to no avail, the damn things were on top of her and their sheer number was overwhelming.
She opened her mouth to utter a curse but was interrupted by a goblin's stubby filth-caked phallus plunging into her mouth as it gripped her flaxen hair and sent her head to the ground. It rutted in her mouth, slapping her chin with its blackened pigeon egg-sized testicles while its companions continued to tear into her.