First Battle

"Charge!"

At Isaac's command, everyone rushed out in an instant. The Black Knight and Smith were at the front. Two flashes of sword light swept out, and the seven Goblins fishing instantly became fourteen!

"Uh..."

Meanwhile, the others had only just charged out from their ambush spot...

Isaac's Arcane Shield had not even had time to deploy...

Looking at the Goblin corpses on the ground, Isaac fell into thought. Had he been taking this matter a little too seriously?

"Waaah, waaah, waaah~~~"

While Isaac was still stunned, a Goblin emerged from beneath the boulder. It stared blankly at its doubled number of kin, then picked up a rock from the ground and charged at Smith and the Black Knight with a shout!

Very brave!

"Splurt!"

Smith casually swung his sword, cutting it in half and turning it into two and a half Goblins. He then dashed to the boulder, his swordstaff flashing with streaks of sword light!

"Boom!"

In an instant, the boulder shattered into countless small stones!

The Goblin Nest was completely exposed!

Revealing the densely packed Goblins gathered beneath it at the mouth of the cave.

Smith's eyes flickered. Without any hesitation, he withdrew to Isaac's side. He feared none of these Goblins, but there was no need to fight them inside the cave. Goblins had no brains to speak of; they would come out on their own.

Sure enough, a huge number of Goblins soon poured out of the tiny cave. In the blink of an eye, more than a hundred Goblins had appeared by the riverbank!

"Hiss!"

The sight made Isaac suck in a sharp breath. There were really fucking a lot of them!

It also overturned his earlier thoughts. There was nothing wrong with being this well-prepared. Before individual combat power underwent a qualitative leap, swarm tactics were extremely effective.

The Goblins' ability to churn out troops was terrifying. This was just one river!

How many people could a river support through fishing alone?

Even with all the cash crops planted on his estate, it could only support two or three hundred people!

And they had not noticed these hundred-odd Goblins at all. That was highly abnormal. Either they possessed exceptional hiding abilities, or they had an extremely terrifying reproductive capacity and had all been born in recent days!

The former was unlikely. Those seven Goblins had been openly catching fish, so they could only have been born recently!

What could he say? They truly were creations of a Legendary Wizard...

"Charge!" Shaking his head, Isaac no longer felt the slightest contempt for them. He lightly waved his right hand, and everyone immediately reacted, raising their longswords as they met the Goblins charging toward them with cries of "waaah."

A pale blue barrier appeared around Isaac, blocking several flying stones for him.

Glancing at the stones that had landed nearby, Isaac smiled faintly. With a tearing sound, a vicious Demon Claw burrowed out from the back of his neck. Its five fingers spread wide, aimed directly at the Goblin horde, while the jagged mouth in its palm let out excited, sinister cackles.

Then magic power surged through Isaac's body and gathered in the Demon Claw. Specks of blue starlight appeared before it, and the next moment, twelve blue meteors shot toward the Goblin horde!

Three consecutive casts of Arcane Missile!

"Pop, pop, pop~~~"

The blue streaks flew over the others and struck the Goblins first. In an instant, seven Goblins had their heads blown apart, three had their chests blasted through, and four had their arms shattered!

An impressive result!

"Waaah, waaah, waaah, waaah!!!!"

Yet losses approaching one-tenth did not crush the Goblins' morale. On the contrary, stirred by the blood of their kin, their ferocity only grew as they continued charging forward with savage faces!

"Splurt~~~"

However, their soaring morale was completely useless...

Even without the Black Knight and Smith joining the fight, the Knight Guard alone turned the battle into a one-sided slaughter.

It could not be helped. Although the Knight Guard was not a regular army and their equipment was poor, that depended on who they were compared to. Compared to regular troops, they were naturally far inferior. They wore nothing but Leather Armor, and even Barton had no metal armor.

But they at least had Leather Armor, and every one of them wielded a sharp knight's longsword.

And what did the Goblins have?

As for armor, if skirts woven from leaves counted as armor, then perhaps around one percent of the Goblins were armored. As for weapons, having a tree branch was already premium equipment. Most of them held rocks picked up from the ground, and some of those were even pebbles...

How were they supposed to fight?

They couldn't fight, you know.

Before long, without even needing the Black Knight or Smith to act, the hundred-plus Goblins were completely wiped out, leaving only corpses scattered across the ground.

Seeing this, Isaac lightly waved his right hand. The Black Knight immediately rushed into the cave and began another round of slaughter, while Isaac walked over to a Goblin corpse and crouched down, his eyes lighting up slightly.

He had discovered magic power within the Goblin's corpse!

Though extremely faint, it truly contained magic power. With a little processing, it could be used as spellcasting material.

There was an unexpected gain as well...

So...

Since they had magic power, what would happen if he performed Heart Replacement Surgery on a Goblin?

What could it be strengthened into?

Ideas sprang into Isaac's mind one after another. The corners of his lips curled up slightly as he found a relatively intact corpse. The Demon Claw lifted and flung it, and then...

"Crunch, crunch~"

The Goblin corpse fell into the jagged mouth in the Demon Claw's palm. As it chewed, the corpse was completely swallowed by the Demon Claw, while information about the Goblin's bodily structure transformed into streams of data that entered Isaac's mind. He stood, closed his eyes, and tilted his head slightly upward, receiving the information transmitted by the witchcraft with utter rapture.

"Ugh!!!"

However, the sight of him terrified everyone. Aside from Smith, everyone else, including Goblin Slayer, who had killed countless Goblins, turned pale and involuntarily took several steps back, covering their mouths as nausea rose within them...

No matter what, although Goblins were monsters, they were still humanoid. Eating one raw like that...

It was rather challenging to their worldview!

Goblin Slayer, in particular, began to regret coming. Before arriving, he had known that the Stingy Noble's five Gold Coins would not be easy to earn, but he had not expected them to be this difficult to earn!

If he had known Isaac was a wizard, forget five Gold Coins—even fifty! Five hundred...

Well, if it were five hundred Gold Coins, he would still consider it.

But only consider it, because of wizards' reputation...

It was hard to say. They were on par with Witches, and far inferior to Arcanists!

Isaac's savage method of casting witchcraft was hardly an isolated case...

Smith merely let out a heavy sigh. He had been mentally prepared for this, so he could still accept it. Overall, as long as Isaac had not personally eaten the Goblin corpse, it was fine...

By the time Isaac had roughly absorbed the structural information about Goblins, the sounds of slaughter inside the cave had also ceased.

Carefully avoiding the blood on the ground, Isaac curiously entered the cave filled with the corpses of juvenile Goblins. The instant he stepped inside, he was startled once more.

Because there were over thirty juvenile Goblins inside!

And this cave... was astonishingly large!