The Summoner Chapter Two

You would think losing your job, your shelter, most of your belongings, and being forced to endure a heatwave outside would be bad enough.

It wasn’t.

The worst thing that happened to me that week was waking up under a bridge with a goblin standing over me, holding a short sword and swearing at me.

A lot.

In between the swearing, it kept ranting about being confused.

It looked like he was going to stab me, but he didn’t. Not straight away, anyway, which I appreciated. I was having a bad few days and being stabbed by a hallucination felt like an unnecessary addition.

I could only ask myself one simple question.

“Am I going insane?”

Actually, make that two questions.

“I wonder what that pill was that I found on the ground?”

The goblin was small, about the size of a ten-year-old, but with muscles. Its skin was a brownish-greenish colour, it had pointed ears, a large mouth full of pointy teeth, and breath that could have been used as a chemical weapon.

If I had been standing, I might’ve been able to bitch slap it from under the bridge to somewhere nicer.

Maybe.

Sword or no sword.

The problem was I wasn’t standing. I was on the ground because I had fallen over in fright and shock when the little bastard appeared out of nowhere.

I said to myself, because apparently that was the sort of day I was having, “It must be the pill.”

The goblin stopped ranting and stared at me.

I kept going, because once my mouth starts moving it likes to see how much worse it can make things.

“When I took the pill, I was thinking about the jerks I played Defenders of Krondor with. They kicked me out because my goblin character, Karkit, stole the magical short sword from the halfling fighter.”

The goblin calmed down a little.

That should have made me feel better.

It did not.

Now it was just staring at me with angry eyes and a grimacing smile. Somehow that was worse than the ranting. It looked like it had found the person responsible for every bad thing that had ever happened to it, and that person was me.

Which was unfair.

Probably.

It pointed the short sword at my face.

“You,” it said. “It’s you who got me put into exile, wasn’t it?”

I stared at him.

“It’s the pill,” I said. “This is not real.”

The goblin slapped me across the face.

Hard.

My head snapped sideways, and my cheek burned.

That felt real.

“It’s not the pill, idiot,” the goblin said. “This is real. You made me steal the halfling sword, and I was exiled.”

I rubbed my face.

“Yeah, sure, okay,” I said. “I did that to you.”

I answered irritably because, at the very least, this was more interesting than lying under a bridge, dying in the heat, with nowhere to sleep when night came.

The goblin narrowed its eyes.

“Say sorry.”

“Why?”

“Because you ruined my life.”

“It was a game,” I said. “Those dimwits were going to throw me out anyway. I figured, take the magic sword and run.”

Karkit showed me his teeth.

“Yeah. Ha fucking ha. Sure made me laugh having no group as my backup.”

I sat up straighter.

“It was a game. It wasn’t real. Shit, the next group I joined, I played a Half-Orc. He was more fun than you by a long shot.”

From behind me, another voice said, “My name is Cleaver, and this is my battle axe, Cleavage.”

Karkit and I both turned.

A half-orc stood there.

He was huge.

Bodybuilder huge.

With an ugly-ass face and an axe big enough to split a fridge in half.

Karkit and I said in unison, “Fuck.”