Thankfully, the high Goblins didn''t participate in the fight.
Emily looked on with worry from the side while Patricia was inside the Awe Cube.
Zarnark had explained to Alex that this was part of Goblin culture, and if he did this, the rest of the Goblins would recognize him as their leader.
Hearing this, Alex still hesitated, but Zarnark told him they would fight in multiple rounds.
After some thought, Alex agreed to do it.
Their loyalty would make many things easier, and at the same time, it would allow him to gain more life force and combat experience.
At first, Emily didn''t agree and wanted to join the fray, but Alex convinced her, saying she could intervene if things really went south.
With numerous enemies, Alex needed to maintain the use of his qi and mana energy efficiently.
The first few waves were easy.
Alex only needed a few swings of his hammer to finish them, but when ogres started to join the battle, the difficulty escalated.
Despite their large bodies, ogres moved with surprising agility, and with a club in hand, their attacks were devastating.
He also had to be wary of the barrage of arrows from goblin archers while goblin warriors kept harassing him with attacks from multiple directions.
Alex couldn''t counterattack recklessly; he had to make sure every hit killed a goblin warrior instantly.
Otherwise, they would just activate their battle frenzy skill, increasing their combat strength.
Feeling overwhelmed, Alex used Volcanic Smash, then adjusted the Embershift hammer''s weight, crushing an ogre''s head into a pancake.
With a thud, the ogre''s body dropped, and he then looked around to see there were still three more goblin riders and five goblin archers left for him to finish.
Alex had already planned how to finish them off.
Based on the pattern of attacks so far, he knew the goblin riders would use their charge skill while the archers would only shoot a few projectiles since their stamina was still recovering.
But this plan quickly became void, as Zarnark didn''t wait for the wave to finish before entering the fray with the rest of the goblin army.
This took Alex by surprise.
''Did Zarnark trap me?
But it doesn''t make sense for him to do this suddenly.
If he really wanted to kill me, he should have overwhelmed me with numbers from the start.''
''Vesa, any idea?''
[I think he probably got insulted by the King''s remark before.]
"What?
You translated what I cursed before?"
Alex''s vein popped.
[Well, King, you told me to translate everything automatically without you asking.]
''Fuck!'' Alex cursed in his mind.
But he knew he didn''t have time to debate this with Vesa.
In reality, Zarnark didn''t do this out of anger; he thought Alex had said it because he got bored with the fight and wanted to finish things quickly.
Seeing his fight, Zarnark respected Alex a lot.
His strength was no joke, and even with all of that, he still wanted to negotiate with them.
He thought Alex didn''t feel any challenge at all from the fight, so he said that on purpose to trigger him to attack them.
He was also surprised by how Alex could absorb the bodies of the goblins after killing them.
This made Zarnark think that Alex grew stronger every time he killed a creature.
Zarnark also felt relieved that he had only allowed the high Goblins to watch; otherwise, the other goblins would have complained about how Alex didn''t respect their deceased.
Even goblins had their own culture for those who had died; they performed a burial ceremony.
The only difference was that they didn''t bury the body in the ground; they offered the body to their wolves to eat.
They believed this allowed the Goblin to contribute to their society, earning them good deeds, to be reborn again as a high goblin.
Since Zarnark thought Alex wanted more of a fight, he went all out from the start.
All the ogres'' eyes turned red, with their muscles becoming bulkier.
They activated their rampage skill.
Zarnark''s golden tattoos also began to glow, activating his Master Tactician skill, which buffed every Goblin''s attack and allowed them to communicate telepathically with each other, increasing their coordination to a whole new level.
The goblin archers launched a barrage of arrows toward Alex.
"Vesa, augment the skill with life force.
Go all out," Alex ordered.
He had tried his best to stockpile life force energy since it wasn''t easy for him to gather it.
Unlike MingYue, who could easily look for a cultivator to kill, Alex didn''t have that luxury.
Outside of dungeons, his only option was hunting monsters in the forest, which was far less efficient compared to dungeons.
Moreover, Alex couldn''t just enter a dungeon whenever he wished to gather life force, even when he had exclusive rights to a farm dungeon.
He needed to share it with guild members.
And Alex didn''t want to risk anyone seeing him absorb life force.
Using life force to enhance a secret technique would significantly increase the damage output, but at the same time, the consumption was very high.
Seeing the barrage of arrows and the imposing figure of the ogre, Alex''s eyes turned sharp.
He burned his qi, pointing the Embershift hammer forward.
The hammer head started glowing red intensely.
Vesa started sending life energy over it, making it glow even brighter. Sear?h the N?vel(F)ire.ηet website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
A flame started to ignite in front of the hammer, and it then grew larger.
The once formless flame started changing shape into a real-life fox.
The fox, completely made from flame, roared, creating a shockwave of heat, destroying all the arrows raining down toward Alex.
"ROOOAR!!!"
The scorching heat didn''t just halt the goblin archers'' attack; the goblin warriors who had their skills activated with red eyes were also pushed back.
Their skin melted, pushing them back further as they screamed in pain.
If not for Zarnark''s buff, they would have already been set ablaze by the heat, but their fate was still better than that of the wolf riders.