SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 51: The Thing Beneath the Cargo

The goblins came at him from both sides.

Elias didn’t move right away. He stood in the middle of the tunnel crossing and watched them come. The chattering. The torches. The rusted blades catching the light.

He exhaled slowly.

Then he dropped the short blade he had taken from the treasury.

It hit the stone floor with a clang.

The goblins slowed for a half second. Confused by it. A man throwing away his weapon in front of them. Some of them looked at each other. The chattering dropped in pitch for a moment then picked back up again angrier than before.

Elias reached up and unclasped the front of his traveling coat and let it fall off his shoulders onto the ground. Underneath he had a plain shirt. Simple. Nothing remarkable about it. He rolled the sleeves up to his elbows slowly and deliberately like a man preparing for work he had done many times before.

He looked at his own hands for a moment.

Then he looked up.

The goblins started moving again.

The first one that reached him swung low with a short curved blade. Elias stepped inside the swing without hurrying and put his palm flat against the goblin’s chest and something moved through his arm.

Bang...

The goblin left the ground and hit the tunnel wall ten feet away and did not get back up. It didn’t move after that. Not even a twitch.

The second and third came together from the left.

Elias caught the second by the wrist and turned his body and the goblin spun with him and went down hard onto the stone. Before it landed he was already moving to the third which got close enough to scratch his forearm before he put his elbow into the side of its head with a crack that echoed off the tunnel walls and carried down into the dark in both directions.

He stepped back to center.

He wasn’t rushing. That was the thing about watching him. He was moving at a pace that seemed almost unhurried. Measured. Like the goblins were arriving slower than they actually were. Like he had more time inside each moment than a person should reasonably have.

Four came at once from the right passage.

Elias moved toward them instead of away which made them hesitate for just a fraction of a second and that fraction was enough. He hit the front one with a straight strike to the throat that stopped it completely. Caught the next one’s blade on his forearm and absorbed it and turned it and drove that goblin sideways into the one running up behind it. The two of them went down tangled together in a heap. The fourth he grabbed by the collar mid stride and used its own momentum to send it headfirst into the tunnel wall. The sound it made when it connected was flat and final.

He stepped over the pile without stopping.

From the left passage three more appeared. These ones were bigger than the others. Slightly. They had better weapons too. Short spears instead of blades. They fanned out as much as the tunnel width would allow and approached in some rough version of formation. These ones had seen enough to be cautious.

Elias stopped.

He looked at the three of them.

He pressed two fingers against the tunnel wall beside him. The stone under his fingertips hummed faintly. A low vibration that moved up through the rock and then stopped. Nobody would have felt it over the noise and the chaos. But it was there.

The spears came in.

He was not where they landed.

He moved through the space between the three points like he had already seen where each one was going before it arrived. The first spear passed his left side close enough to graze his shirt. The second went over his shoulder as he dropped an inch. The third he redirected with a single downward tap of his hand and the shaft buried itself into the ground at an angle.

He caught it before it stopped moving and swept it low in one motion and took the legs out from under two of the three goblins simultaneously. They hit the ground together. The third one he dealt with in two quiet movements and set it against the wall almost gently.

The tunnel went still for a moment.

Just the torches and the sound of his own breathing.

Then more came from the far end of the crossing. A larger group this time. Eight or nine of them pouring in from the deeper passage. But these ones slowed when they reached the edge of the torchlight and saw what was on the ground around him. The chattering dropped. They were looking at the ones that had come before them and processing what they were seeing.

One of them threw a torch at him. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

He stepped aside and let it tumble across the stone and looked back up at them.

Then he walked toward them.

What happened after that would not have been easy to describe to anyone. It was not dramatic in the way that fights usually were. There was no shouting. No wild movement.

Elias moved through the remaining goblins the way water finds the path through rock. Quiet and inevitable. Using the tunnel walls when they helped. Using the goblins own weight and direction when that helped more. Each one dealt with quickly and without waste. Some hit the ground. Some hit each other. Some simply stopped when he touched them in a specific way that should not have worked as well as it did.

Just like that he killed more then 100 goblin.

When it was finished he stood alone in the crossing.

He was breathing normally.

He looked down the tunnel in the direction the others had gone. He stood there for a moment. Then he looked back the way he had come.

He picked his coat up off the ground and put it back on. Fastened the clasp at the front carefully. He looked at the short blade on the ground and left it there.

He turned and walked back toward the treasury.

---

The room was exactly as they had left it. Torches still burning in their brackets. Gold still piled along the walls. The magical items still sitting apart in their corner untouched and glowing faintly.

Elias walked past all of it without looking.

He went directly to the Baros caravan section. The chests with the family mark burned into the wood. He started with the open ones. Cloth. Spices. Folded fabric and trading goods. He moved through them efficiently, checking underneath layers, pressing along the bottom boards of each chest.

He moved to the closed chests. Opened each one in turn. More cargo. More ordinary merchant goods. He worked without rushing and without expression.

He crouched down and looked at the stacked piles from a lower angle, letting the torchlight fall across the arrangement differently.

There was a chest at the very bottom of one stack. Smaller than the rest. No family mark on it. No merchant symbol of any kind. Plain dark wood with no decoration. The kind of container built to sit under other things and not be noticed.

He moved the two chests on top of it and set them aside carefully.

He opened it.

Inside was cloth packing folded tightly around something sitting in the center. He moved the cloth aside piece by piece until it was fully exposed.

A small black box. No latch. No visible hinge. No markings on any surface. Just smooth black material that seemed to pull the torchlight into it rather than reflect it back. It sat in the cloth like it had been packed by someone who knew exactly what they were handling.

Elias looked at it without touching it for a long moment.

Then he reached in and picked it up. It was lighter.

He closed both hands around it and stood up slowly.

"Finally."