CHAPTER 147: UNSAID

"Yes, Chief," she replied immediately.

I frowned. I had realized how she had shifted in the way she addressed me during our conversation. Once, she had always called me young totem, a name that carried a strange mix of respect and familiarity.

Now she used chief instead, and somehow I disliked it.

From her, it felt wrong.

She was clearly older, far older, and having her strip away that former address only reminded me of the gap of my inexperience, of how new I still was to this role.

Young totem might have sounded odd coming from anyone else, but from her, it carried something almost maternal, a grounding I hadn’t realized I valued until it was gone.

"Call me young totem from now on," I said quietly but firmly.

"Yes, young totem."

I raised a brow, watching her closely. She switched so quickly, no hesitation, no argument.

Calling me chief must have been uncomfortable for her, I realized.

Perhaps it was because she had come to respect me, and felt the need to show it by using the title. But it stripped away something that had felt more natural between us.

I decided not to linger on it and instead pressed forward with the question that had been circling in my head since earlier.

"How did you even figure out the name of your innate skill?" I asked, narrowing my eyes. "You didn’t have the system after all."

Her response came without hesitation, quick and certain. "Drugar told me."

I froze, my breath catching for a moment as the words settled. Then the questions burst out of me before I could contain them. "When?... How? Can you actually speak to him?"

I found myself leaning closer, invading her space without even thinking, my curiosity pulling me forward like a hook in the chest.

But if she noticed, she didn’t show discomfort.

"I don’t remember much," Flogga admitted, her voice softer now, tinged with something that almost sounded like regret. "But when I died, I found myself in a strange place. There, I was told I would be sent to a new world in the form of a goblin, and that I had been granted a skill that would enable me to survive. Lord Drugar called it Divine Touch. He also told me many things — what I was meant to do here, what the end goal was supposed to be. But as soon as I lost my title, all of it slipped away. I forgot everything."

What the hell... This was new. Entirely new.

"You said you met another Chosen, the one who became your mate after you lost your first clan," I pressed, trying to ground myself in something solid. "Didn’t he share any details?"

"He did," she said, her face unmoving, "or rather, he tried. But whenever he spoke of certain things, his voice would turn muffled, as though I wasn’t supposed to hear. Like the words themselves were being swallowed before they reached me."

A chill ran through me. So Drugar didn’t want ordinary goblins knowing the full plan.

Why?

Better question...Why wasn’t I told?

I was also a Chosen.

Shouldn’t I have been given the same instructions, the same guidance she claimed to have received?

Even the other Chosen I had met seemed to know more than I did.

They had said things I only half-understood, as if they had been briefed on some grander design while I was left stumbling in the dark. It was all still a mystery to me.

I sighed heavily, frustration weighing on my chest.

Why was Drugar being so unfair? Was this deliberate? Was I supposed to piece it all together by myself like some puzzle designed to test my patience? How troublesome.

It was clear, though, that Drugar must have been serious about his plan for his Chosen in the past. Serious enough to commune with them directly, to give them knowledge and goals before sending them off. Now, however, he didn’t seem half as invested. Whatever fire had driven him then, it felt absent now.

Maybe this was all nothing more than a game to him, one he had grown bored with over time, abandoning the rules he once followed and forgetting to bring the whole thing to an end. The thought twisted in my gut, unsettling in its plausibility.

And yet it circled me back to a question I had asked earlier, but never truly gotten an answer to. My eyes settled on Flogga once again, studying her worn face, the lines etched deep with age and experience.

Just how old was she?

When she was speaking, it had sounded as if she was dragging the words up from somewhere deep, her pauses stretching like she was straining to remember details.

That alone told me she had been here a long time — but how long exactly?

She had said she was hit by a truck. Trucks had been around since the early 1900s.

Could she have been from that far back, some woman pulled out of a world I could only picture in black-and-white photographs? Or maybe she was from the early 2000s, closer to my own time, someone who might have walked past me on a street and never noticed.

Hell, it was even possible she had been my age once, but time here moved differently than on Earth. Faster, slower — who knew?

Who knows?

The thought unsettled me more than I cared to admit. If time really did flow differently here, then what did that mean for me? For the people I left behind? For the world I had once called home?

I shook my head, forcing myself to ground the thought. If I was going to survive, I needed to keep track of time here, at least for myself. I thought back carefully, replaying each night, each fire, each restless sleep.

Let’s see. By my count, I’ve spent two nights here.

Which would make it... two and a half days, give or take.

Two and a half days in this world, and so much had already happened.