CH.72

Now that Johanna was alone again, she thought about enjoying her time with the blacksmiths in this town again, but she decided against it since she was already exhausted and the blacksmiths handled her pretty rough, which she enjoyed but didn't want to feel right now. Instead, she chose to go home to Basil after stopping by Noah and Ethan so that she could catch up on the things happening lately. 

So once she was finished seeing the group off, she turned around and walked back through the village. Once Johanna walked all the way back to the goblin cave and was about to step out of the bushes, she spotted Noah and Ethan chatting together with the shapeshifter, who was doing a good job keeping up the pretence of her. Since she didn't want his cover to be blown and everything looked alright, she simply moved over and took a closer look around everything else. It seemed like the huge spider didn't cause any major harm to their base, and since Johanna was curious about the situation inside the cave, she decided to take on the form of the black cat and make a small inspection herself.

As she was done transforming, she snuck into the cave, even though it was not required for her to sneak since she was the cat now. Moving down further, she could see the cave getting busier and busier. She was confused by this, but once she arrived back at the hole where she initially fell through, she saw what was going on. 

The goblins have been doing construction work all over the new cave. Since the cave was at least 80 feet tall, the goblins had a hard time living there, so they decided to construct paths, or better called suspension bridges, crossing through the entire cave, which go down and up in an unordered manner. Some of the goblins decided it would be a smart idea to build little woodshacks into the cavewalls, using the space more efficiently. Overall, Johanna thought it looked pretty cool, but she wasn't sure if this place would collapse at some point. That would be a problem for future Johanna. And since Johanna's curiosity had now peaked, she decided to go down further to explore a little more of what the goblins had done and what they were currently doing.

Johanna saw that the further down she got, the fewer houses were carved into the cave walls, but there still seemed to be construction going on there. It looked like the deeper parts of the cave were still undesirable for the goblins, maybe because their fear of the spiders still hadn't subsided, even though they were all dead by now. Once she reached the bottom, she could see what all of the goblins were doing. They were digging their way through the ashes of the remaining spiders and the wood that they burned to keep the fire going for long enough, but instead of moving the ashes out of the cave, they just pushed them deeper into the cave, which wasn't a particularly smart idea, but maybe they could use it to block some of the branches of the still-undiscovered cave.

She had seen enough now; it seemed like everything was going well, even though it seemed like the goblins had started to form a hierarchy based on where they would sleep. For example, the ones at the top of the cave near the exit were more "powerful" than the ones at the bottom of the cave, who seemed to be the weaker ones. This system was not only for showing off status or prestige, since it also protected the weaker ones from the dangers of the overworld. Of course, there were exceptions to that, like the military forces that Aiko was leading; they seemed to have moved down into the cave and had built up a sort of barracks where all the soldiers were currently living, to build up a sort of last force of defence if they were to get attacked, since even if an whole army ten times stronger than theirs would attack the base, they couldnt follow them into the confusing tunnel system which can be used to evacuate the weaker civilians and also as the ground, to fight a huge gurilla war, that would cost enemys hundreds of men, if they dont think of the same tactic they had thought of, and even then they could still use the ashes to lock of the tunnels air tight, which would render even that tactic usless. 

After inspecting the whole cave, Johanna decided it would be best if she were to leave again and return to Basil and the rest of her new family. As she left the cave, "Johanna" spotted her and gave her a little wink. She responded with a discrete nod, which was responded to with a smirk. It looked like everything here was in good hands.