SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 55: The Goblin Shaman

Hiroshi consciousness came back slowly.

Then comes the pain. His chest. His arms. That bone-deep ache from the strength multiplier, still sitting heavy in his muscles like something poured in that hadn’t drained. The pain suppression was still running. Whatever reserves it had left, it was scraping the bottom of them.

He opened his eyes.

The reddish glow was still above him.

He was still in the same room. He had to sit with that for a second, he’d half-expected to wake up somewhere else entirely, or not wake up at all, and the fact that he was here and breathing and apparently alive took longer than it should have to actually land.

He tried to move his arms. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

But he couldn’t.

He looked down. Old iron chains were tightly wrapped around his body, bolted to the stone floor. His wrists were pinned close to the ground, which meant he was sitting up against something, hands trapped at his sides. He tested the chains once, put real weight behind it.

Nothing happened.

Whatever they were anchored to, it wasn’t moving.

He looked to his left.

The woman guard was chained the same way against the wall two meters from him. Her head was down. Her breathing was visible but shallow. The shoulder wound from earlier had soaked through completely and dried dark against her uniform. Her face was pale in the reddish light. Too pale.

He looked to his right.

The clicking sound was the Kobolds. Four of them positioned around the room. Crouched at intervals, they were not moving, their flat wide eyes catching the light and throwing it back. They weren’t agitated. They weren’t aggressive. They were simply watching with a patience.

Hiroshi looked at them and tried to understand the situation clearly.

They were alive. That was the first thing. He and the woman guard were alive and chained and being watched and not harmed beyond what had already been done. That meant they had been kept alive for some reason. Which meant someone wanted them alive and had communicated that to the Kobolds and the Kobolds were following that instruction.

That was more organized than anything he had encountered from goblin-adjacent creatures before. That level of instruction following required a chain of command. It required someone at the top of that chain who was making decisions with a purpose.

He thought about the ritual room around him. About what it was built for.

He thought about what it might need that two live humans could provide that two dead ones couldn’t.

He stopped thinking about it.

He tested the chains again. Slower this time. Working through the options. The bolt points were solid. The chain links were old but the age hadn’t weakened them the way age sometimes did with iron. Whoever had prepared this room had maintained it or atleast kept it functional.

He was still working through it when the door opened.

Not the door they had come through. A different one. Set into the far wall that he, smaller and lower than the other. It opened inward and something came through it that made the Kobolds shift their posture slightly.

The Goblin Shaman straightened up after clearing the low doorway and Hiroshi looked at it and understood immediately that this was different from anything else he had seen down here.

It was old. Ancient in the way that some creatures got where the age had changed them into something that barely resembled what they started as. Taller than a normal goblin by nearly half, the extra height coming from a spine that had curved and then somehow straightened back differently over a very long life. Its skin was the color of ash, grey-green and dry looking, pulled tight across the bones of its face and hands. One eye was clouded completely white. The other was yellow and moved with an intelligence that was uncomfortable to look at directly.

It wore robes. Dark and layered, covered in markings that matched the ones cut into the walls of this room. The robes moved when it walked. Around its neck hung things on cords. Bones mostly. Some carved. Some natural. A small dark pouch that it touched briefly with one hand as it entered the room.

It carried a staff. Gnarled wood wrapped in more cord and at the top of it something glowed faintly in a color that was close to the reddish light of the room but not quite the same. Slightly different.

The Shaman walked into the center of the room without looking at Hiroshi.

It looked at the woman guard.

It studied her for a long moment. Standing over her with the staff held loosely at its side. The yellow eye moving across her slowly. Taking inventory of something. Making an assessment.

Then it made a sound. Low and guttural. It came from somewhere deep in its chest and the sound moved through the room in a way that Hiroshi felt in his sternum.

The woman guard’s head came up.

Her eyes opened and found the Shaman above her and for a moment she was just confused in the way you were when consciousness came back in pieces. Then the confusion became understanding and the understanding became something else and she pulled against her chains once hard.

Hiroshi said her name.

She looked at him.

He didn’t have anything to tell her. There was nothing he could say that would mean anything useful. He just looked at her and she looked back at him and something passed between them that didn’t need words.

Then the Shaman moved.

It was fast for something that old. The staff came down and what happened next was brutal.

Hiroshi looked at the wall across from him.

He kept his eyes there. On the markings in the stone. On the geometry. On the lines connecting point to point to point.

He kept them there until it was over.

The room went quiet again.

The Shaman stood over what remained and was still for a moment. Then it turned. For the first time since entering the room it looked directly at Hiroshi.

The yellow eye held him.

Then it moved toward him. Slowly. No aggression in the movement. It crouched down in front of him and reached into its robes and produced something small and thin and curved. A blade. Narrow. More like a needle than a knife.

Hiroshi held himself still.

The Shaman took his arm. Its grip was stronger than it looked. It turned his forearm over and drew the narrow blade across his skin in a single clean line.

The blood came up slowly.

The Shaman watched it for a moment like it was confirming something. Then it looked up at Hiroshi with the yellow eye and made that resonant sound again, deeper this time, and turned toward the stone table in the center of the room.

It began to speak.

The markings on the walls started to glow.