Clock - 4

The door burst open with a sound that resounded through the halls. Every second was counted, every moment was taken in.

And for it, there was a walk, a stride. Her steps, a flagrant disrespect of any courtly order, everything about her drove the goblins at the side into a fury.

Yet because of some obscure custom there was peace. If all for a minute.

For a moment there was silence, a chatter here, a small voice there. But it was all silent under the crushing pressure. All of the royal goblin that sat upon the throne. With a regal step he strode from that golden chair of his.

For every step he took came a squeak of another. The fear was palpable in the air.

But there was a reason for this, for everything that she had done.

"What was it…?" I couldn't help but whisper. But for some reason I couldn't reach for it, the reason was right there, right on the tip of my tongue.

Yet I could not find it.

But then, just as I watched the snout of the goblin, with all of the bad breath and sight that it came with, it was in that moment that it dawned on me.

And for that reason I skulked away all under the eyes of each and every goblin. They stood no chance against something that even the most stoic of humans could not resist.

Drama.

Every single one of them couldn't resist the urge to watch and gasp in excitement as their king and Emilia duked it out in a duel of flagrant disrespect.

There was a passage, an old thing, it told of not what one should do but what he should not do. An anecdote from an old traveler, who had done many things and survived even more.

It went on and on about inane things. The best way to cook a lobster so as to not disrespect the cats, the worst way to dress in a convention of whales. There were many varied stories.

But the one that struck out to me in the moment was one of his about goblins.

It read as such.

-For I had traveled to the goblins, to the grand chambers of stone, and stood about the gates. As for every flagrant design, they were nothing more than but a mere speck. And so, I stood upon one foot, and with a heave, broke down the door that refused me entry. It spoke great of my skills that I survived unscathed. It was something obvious in hindsight but I had just traveled with dwarfs- you know them, the rowdy bunch they are- but that is besides the point, they had the best way of disrespecting races but they got away with it on account of their skills. And you know me, I had no such renown. So when I broke down their door the king came himself, off his throne and down to my face. To which -another stupid mistake- I bowed with one hand and smirked.

As I was recalling the passage she did just so, her bow revealed nothing of her body under that silk but the one handed gesture. The way that her foot stood below her body.

'Fuck me' It was the only thought on my mind, that and that there was a reason that she chose me.

I knew all of this stuff and she knew that I knew.

And so she also knew that I knew that the goblins had a fatal weakness. One that would help us if we were to go up against one as strong as these ones were

I looked around and saw the tightened grasps that the courtly knights and wizards held.

'For fucks sake' 

They were pissed, majorly pissed and I could do nothing about it. Nothing about me nor my strength could do anything.

I could only do my part as I was supposed to. And because of that I looked over the king goblin, at every part of him and found the spot I was looking for.

The slight bend of his knees as the armor he wore bent him down lower.

Not many would know but there was something unique about goblins. Something that none would bother learning, none but the most desperate.

But did I not fit that description to a tee.

It was their bones. A long while ago someone had found it weird, that for a creature of the first level that they fought in speed like those of the second level.

Many had thought this before but he, unlike many, wanted answers, more than the surface level warning.

And so he embarked on a short trip. He took the corpses of goblins, from the biggest to the smallest and found the reason.

He dissected them from bone to skin. And when he did that he found what it was, it was their bone. 

Unlike what his initial hypothesis was, in that it was merely developed muscle. No it was not that as it was quickly disproven by a thought of the children.

The bones were like those of birds, they had a lightness to them that reduced their weight by almost half of what it should have been.

But it came at a great cost, one of the reasons why they were not much of a threat. And that was that they had fragile bones.

That a decent hit would shatter this.

The person who came up with this tried to spread it, to make their hunting even safer but he was met with ridicule.

On why he researched such a useless subject. But that useless research was helping me today.

As I crouched and held my knife in my hand. I set my sight on the goblin. At his armored knees and the gaps it held.