1.1 Goblin Slayer.
There are always days that are weirder than the rest.
Waking up naked in a random forest has got to be in the top five.
So yeah. One moment I was at home, doing absolutely nothing of consequence, and then one blink later I was face-down in a forest I didn't recognize, wearing nothing but my birthday suit.
That wasn't even the strangest part.
The strangest part was the hair. I didn't have long hair, let alone it being pink in color.
Not only that, upon inspection, the body I inhabited was very much not the one I had gone to sleep in. It was not exactly hard to figure it out, with the new lumps of fat in my chest, and a very notable absence of something I'd had my entire life, which I am going to respectfully refer to as my oldest friend and leave it at that.
I stood there for a bit, taking in the entire situation, which was made increasingly weirder when I looked at the sky above.
I saw three suns.
So, being the little detective I was, I carefully analyzed the available evidence and arrived at several conclusions.
One: coma. Brain desperately filling the void. It was said that some patients in a coma had very long dreams, maybe this was the case?
Then again, I don't remember getting injured, so there's that.
Two: kidnapped. Thrown into some insane Truman Show situation. Low probability, given that faking three suns would be genuinely impressive even for a reality TV budget.
Three: simulation. Someone changed the genre settings on me.
Four: isekai.
Five: something even worse than I didn't want to think about.
"Mm." I nodded to myself.
One might think I was being a little too chill about all this.
I don't know what to tell you. There was definitely a version of this where I screamed, raged against the very heavens. I saw that version and acknowledged it.
And then I thought: this will not make me less naked.
More importantly, screaming in the middle of a clearly dangerous forest was not a great survival strategy. I had watched enough horror movies to know that.
"I feel like this entire experience has made me more unhinged," I muttered to myself.
Because the thing that was bothering me most, standing in a fantasy forest, inside a stranger's body, under three suns, was the hair.
It was everywhere.
How did people with long hair function? This was my biggest complaint right now. Not the transmigration, not the three suns, and not even the whole situation with my oldest friend being gone.
It was the damn hair.
Of course, that might also have been because the hair was one of the few parts of this bizarre situation that I actually had some control over.
After all, what exactly was I supposed to do about everything else?
I could not magically return home through sheer force of will. Believe me, I tried. Several times, in fact.
Nothing happened.
As for the three suns, those were celestial bodies. They were not going to rearrange themselves just because I stared at them hard enough. Though, for the record, I did spend a solid few seconds trying to achieve that.
Again, nothing happened.
So that ruled out the possibility of me secretly being a god or admin.
Good to know.
As for the other issue...
I was a guy, but now I am a girl. I'm not gonna freak about this wonderf*ck right now, nor am I gonna commit the unthinkable, hoping to change this.
I am who I am; it didn't matter what I was back then, nor what I am now, I am still me.
Hey! Someone put that in a fortune cookie and preach it.
I would have mentally patted myself on the back, but something interrupted that train of thought, or rather, something hit me from the side, and everything went wrong very fast.
I didn't see it coming.
One second, I was standing there being enlightened, and the next, something slammed into me from the left, and I went down hard, shoulder hitting the ground first, the air leaving my lungs in one useless grunt.
It was on me before I finished falling.
Hands grabbed my throat, not human hands, since they had claws.
My vision blurred, only seeing specks of green. My lungs spasmed helplessly beneath the crushing pressure around my neck.
Every coherent thought disappeared under this pressure.
Air. Air. Air.
I clawed desperately at the creature's wrists, but it felt like trying to bend iron bars with bare fingers. My nails scraped uselessly against rough green skin while the pressure around my throat only grew tighter.
I bucked violently beneath it, twisting and thrashing in blind panic, but the creature moved with me effortlessly. It clung to my body like a starving animal, which it probably was in hindsight.
For the first time, I got a proper look at it.
Green skin stretched tightly over a thin, crooked frame. Its limbs looked wiry, but they had a surprising amount of strength. Long ears jutted outward from the sides of its head, and jagged teeth glistened with saliva beneath curled lips. Its red eyes burned faintly beneath the shadows of the trees as they stared directly into mine.
There was something deeply wrong about its face.
Hunger. Just a starving, animalistic need that made my stomach twist.
The creature opened its mouth wider as a guttural growl rattled in its throat. Hot, rancid breath washed over my face while its claws dug even deeper into my neck.
Black spots began dancing across my vision.
Panic surged harder.
I thrashed violently beneath it, my heels kicking uselessly against the dirt while my hands searched desperately through the leaves for anything I could use.
It was then that my fingers brushed against something rough and jagged, buried beneath the forest floor.
At the same moment, the creature's grip tightened again.
Pain exploded through my throat.
And somewhere beneath the panic, beneath the terror and desperation, something ugly inside me finally snapped.
With every bit of strength I had left, I swung the jagged rock sideways into the creature's skull.
A sickening crack echoed through the trees.
The creature's head jerked violently to the side, and its grip loosened just enough for me to suck in a ragged breath.
Air flooded back into my lungs so suddenly that it hurt.
I coughed violently while scrambling backward across the dirt, my throat burning with every desperate inhale.
The creature collapsed beside me, twitching and snarling weakly, but it was still moving.
Still trying to get up.
Still trying to attack me.
Something dark settled inside my chest as I stared at it.
Slowly, I tightened my grip around the bloodied rock and stood back up.
Then I brought the rock down on its head again.
And again.
And again.
Die.
Die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die—
I kept swinging until the creature stopped moving beneath me.
Even then, I hit it several more times.
Only after my arms began shaking from exhaustion did I finally stop.
For several long seconds, I simply stood there breathing heavily while blood dripped from the stone in my hand.
The creature's body had become an unrecognizable mess.
Bits of dark blood soaked into the dirt beneath it while shattered bone and gore stained the surrounding leaves. My stomach twisted violently at the sight, but somehow I did not throw up.
Not yet.
Eventually, I let the rock fall from my fingers.
For a while, I just breathed.
The shaking in my body slowly faded. The red haze clouding my vision gradually cleared while my heartbeat stopped trying to punch its way out of my chest.
I looked down at my trembling hands. My body had scratches due to thrashing, and my throat felt a burn, but it was okay. I had survived.
"…Okay," I croaked weakly.
Around me, the forest slowly returned to life. The birds had started singing again. Leaves rustled softly overhead while distant chirping echoed through the trees as though nothing had happened.
I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that birds returning after a disturbance meant the danger had passed.
Right now, I was choosing to trust the birds.
Slowly, I sat down in the dirt, just staring at the strange sky for a moment.
"What was it again? The key to surviving was not dying? Truly a wise saying." I chuckled.
Y'know, surviving a near-death experience and coming out alive from it felt almost euphoric. Yup, my head is definitely screwed.
I stood up and looked at the creature, finally. It was then that I noticed something.
It looked like a goblin.
Green skin, red eyes, jagged teeth, ugly little body, murderous behavior. Straight out of fantasy fiction, isekai's, the games.
After all, if it looked like a goblin, acted like a goblin, and moved like a goblin, then it was probably a goblin.
And goblins were fantasy creatures.
"Oh god! Am I in a fantasy world?"
As I sat there thinking about that, a single word surfaced inside my mind with impossible clarity.
[YES]
I froze.
The answer did not come from outside. No voice echoed through the forest, and nothing whispered into my ears. The word appeared directly inside my consciousness, carrying with it an absolute certainty that made it impossible to doubt.
For some reason, in that instant, I had a feeling that this was my ability. It just felt like it, it was a supernatural sense. Then, cautiously, like someone testing whether a wire was live, I asked another question.
"Was that thing a goblin?"
[YES]
The answer arrived immediately.
And this time, I noticed something else.
A faint wave of exhaustion followed the response, subtle enough that I might have ignored it under normal circumstances. But right now, every bit of energy mattered. My body already felt drained from panic and nearly being strangled to death, so even a slight mental strain stood out clearly.
I sat there quietly for a moment, thinking.
Two questions. Two answers. Both were followed by that same strange drain afterward.
Slowly, I asked the next question.
"Am I male?"
[NO]
The exhaustion afterward felt slightly stronger this time.
I glanced down at myself briefly before sighing.
"…Right."
Then I rested my chin against my hand and started thinking seriously.
Now there were two trains of thought. Either this entire situation had made me a schizo, or I had a cheat, which I leaned towards.
I asked inside my head. "Help me become invincible."
Nothing.
"Send me home."
Nothing.
Interesting. When the ability refused to answer, the exhaustion never came either.
I tried one more.
"Am I the protagonist of some isekai?"
Nothing.
"...rude." I mumbled at not getting the answer. Why don't I have a generic system or something? At least they got instruction manuals.
Over the next few hours, I properly tested the ability.
Simple questions barely seemed to cost anything.
Was this water safe to drink? Was there food nearby? Was one direction safer than another?
Questions like those only caused mild fatigue, subtle enough to ignore if I was not paying attention.
But when I tried asking something heavier, the problems began.
"Will I survive the next twenty-four hours?"
A sharp wave of exhaustion slammed into me hard enough to make my vision blur slightly. It felt as though something inside me had suddenly been pulled outward, like the ability was draining more than simple energy to produce the answer.
Instinctively, I cut the question off before the response could fully form.
The sensation faded almost immediately afterward, but it left my skin cold.
After that, I became far more cautious. Still, one thing had become undeniably clear.
The answers were true.
The branch I had tossed behind me without looking had landed exactly the way the ability described. The berries I found after asking whether food existed nearby had been right where the answer implied they would be. Even the water source I eventually discovered matched perfectly.
It was as if it were omniscient. No matter how low-budget it may seem. That level of accuracy should probably have disturbed me more than it did.
Unfortunately, I was currently operating on approximately one and a half functioning brain cells and a vague sense of forward momentum, so my standards for normality had dropped significantly.
Honestly, the ability to improve my chances of survival mattered more than the existential horror attached to it.
That realization alone improved my mood considerably.
By the time the three suns had begun lowering toward the horizon, I had eaten enough strange blue fruit to stop feeling like I was actively dying. The fruit had been confirmed safe through the ability and confirmed delicious through personal experience, making it one of the few genuinely positive developments of the day.
After resting for a while, I retraced my steps through the forest carefully, using the ability to avoid wandering in circles.
Which was how I found the goblin.
A different one this time.
It was crouched near a tree in a small clearing with its back facing me, doing something I heard before I properly saw it. Wet, tearing sounds drifted through the forest, followed by low growls of satisfaction.
When I finally got a clear look, I immediately wished I hadn't.
There was a body on the ground.
A human male, from the looks of it. The goblin was preying on the flesh.
I stopped walking. My stomach twisted violently. Then my eyes landed on something important.
Pants. Intact pants.
Right there on the corpse.
Partially tucked beneath one leg, stained with blood, but very much still wearable pants.
My expression immediately became serious.
"Can I win with a surprise attack?" I asked internally.
[YES]
A sharp wave of exhaustion hit me the moment the answer appeared, but thankfully, the food I had eaten earlier seemed to help. I felt dizzy for a second, though not enough to collapse.I stared at the response silently."…Really."Okay. Fine.The pants situation was becoming increasingly urgent anyway. I had spent the better part of a day wandering naked through a fantasy forest, and admittedly, the opportunity to kill one of these green skins before it tried killing me again was sounding more appealing by the minute.Fortunately, I already had a plan.The plan was rock.I picked up a heavy stone from the ground and tested its weight in my hands. It felt solid. Dense enough to do damage.
Humans, despite all our flaws, were absurdly good at throwing things. Evolution had practically designed us for it. Hopefully, that remained true even after an unexpected gender swap.
"If I throw it in this motion, would it hit the goblin in its head?" I asked internally.
[NO]
"In this motion, will it hit the goblin in its head with sufficient force to knock it out?" I tried again.
[NO]
It took me two more tries to trace the path for the perfect hit.
Then, taking a deep breath, I hurled the rock at the goblin.
The stone cracked into the back of the goblin's head with a sound that made me wince.
The goblin went "GRAAAH" and stumbled sideways.
I was already moving.
I grabbed another rock off the ground mid-charge, smaller, didn't matter, and closed the distance while the goblin was still reorienting, and brought it down on the top of its head with both hands.
The goblin shrieked and spun despite the hit. It was surprisingly more agile than expected, but I had the upper hand. It came at me, bearing its claws. There was no thought behind it's action, only instinct.
I swung the rock, hitting it right in its face.
The goblin went down, so did my attacks. Double-tapping was customary; triple-tapping was expected. So, I did it again and again.
One thing I found was that rock was super effective against goblins. That held true yet again, as I hit it until it stopped moving.
I sat back.
I was breathing in huge ragged gulps. My arms were shaking. There was blood-goblin blood, dark and green, spattered up to my elbows, and probably on my face, and definitely in my hair.
After coming out of the rush of adrenaline, I realized I had killed something again.
Was it bad that it didn't bother me as much?
"Still, now it's time to reap the rewards." I moved towards the corpse of the man, trying to check if he still had some salvageable goods besides the pants.
A branch snapped at that moment. I spun around.
Three people. Standing at the tree line, frozen, staring at the scene in front of them with expressions that cycled rapidly through several stages of horror.
Two boys and a girl. They looked young, wearing clothes that would not appear strange in an RPG. They had the whole leather armor, a sword, robes set up.
All three of them were staring at me.
I became briefly aware of how this looked from the outside.
Naked pink-haired girl. Covered in goblin blood from head to toe. Sitting over a freshly destroyed corpse. Holding a rock and trying to loot another corpse.
I looked down at myself.
I looked at the goblin.
I looked back at them.
"...ah." I smiled. "Hello."
The trio just gawked.
First impressions: nailed it.
...
Thanks for reading~