Goblin King: My Innate Skill Is OP

A herd of what looked like elephants stood in the clearing.

Eight of them.

Calling them elephants felt wrong the longer I looked, because while the general shape was familiar, everything else about them was not.

They were enormous, far larger than any beast of that kind had any right to be, their bodies towering like living fortresses. Their skin was slate-gray and marble-smooth, almost polished, and beneath it faint veins glowed softly, branching and pulsing like slow lightning trapped inside stone.

Their tusks curved upward at unnatural angles, elongated far past what biology should allow, hollowed through the center, and etched with runes that crawled faintly with residual energy, which were 100% not decorative markings.

Their eyes were small, set deep into their massive skulls, cold and calculating, utterly devoid of the softness you’d expect from a herbivore. There was intelligence there. Predatory intelligence.

Even their trunks were wrong. Thick. Segmented. Reinforced with dense ridges, each one resembling the barrel of a living siege weapon rather than a sensory limb.

They were… beautiful, in a terrifying, awe-inducing way.

But whatever admiration I might have felt evaporated the moment I realized what they were feeding on.

Goblins.

The bodies were scattered across the clearing, broken, torn apart, unmistakable even from a distance. Some were already lifeless husks, others little more than shredded remains pressed into the soil. And the way the beasts fed made my stomach tighten.

Their trunks lifted, locking onto corpses with frightening precision, and then they fired.

Compressed air blasted out in focused bursts, the force striking like a ballistic projectile, tearing chunks of flesh clean off the bodies with brutal efficiency. Bone shattered. Bodies ruptured. And what remained was scooped up immediately, the trunks curling with mechanical grace as they fed themselves, depositing the mangled remains into their massive mouths.

My expression soured almost immediately.

As if their sheer size and presence weren’t terrifying enough already. They were meat eaters.

Though I doubt they were fully carnivorous, because if creatures like that relied purely on meat, the amount they’d need to consume to stay sated would be obscene.

Yeah, no way they were strict carnivores.

If they were, they’d wipe out entire ecosystems in weeks.

Behind me, Gork was trembling now, not subtly either. His breathing had gone shallow, his body stiff as he stared at the clearing below, finally processing what his eyes were telling him.

”Are those elephants… feasting on goblins?” he asked quietly, as if raising his voice might draw their attention.

”Yup,” I replied without looking away. ”Isn’t nature beautiful?”

”Beauty?... I wouldn’t call it that.” Gork responded, fear evident in his voice.

I grinned at the response and activated [Analyze] to know what the hell these creatures were called.

[Aether Behemoths]

[Level 50]

I scanned across the herd slowly, letting the information settle instead of rushing past it. Four of them sat squarely at level 50, right on the threshold where raw power alone started to blur into something more refined.

The remaining three were even worse, two levels higher, their auras thicker, heavier, as if the space around them was bending in anticipation of their movement.

Then my gaze locked onto the last one.

The sixth.

The one whose presence I’d felt from miles away, long before my eyes ever confirmed what my instincts had been screaming.

[Aether Behemoth – Matriarch]

[Level 70]

I inhaled sharply.

Level 70?

That was quite high.

While the others were massive, she was immense in a way that warped perspective, her body so vast and dense that it looked less like flesh and more like layered plates pressed together over time.

Her hide wasn’t just thick, it was stratified, almost laminated, as though countless generations of power had compressed into her frame and hardened into something closer to living armor.

Her tusks were broader at the base than the rest, subtly faceted rather than smooth, their surfaces etched with deep, natural grooves that didn’t resemble damage or wear. They looked like growth patterns, as if the tusks themselves were still evolving, responding to forces far beyond simple age.

But her eyes were what truly set her apart.

The others possessed cold, predatory gazes, sharp and calculating, yet still recognizably animal, driven by hunger and instinct. The matriarch’s gaze went far deeper than that. There was no frenzy in it, no impatience born of appetite.

She watched the world the way something territorial does, as if the sky above and everything beneath it already belonged to her, and any intrusion was merely a problem waiting to be erased.

That was when I saw it.

Impaled against her tusks was a goblin, his body lifted off the ground as if he weighed nothing at all. Blood poured freely down the grooves of the ivory, dripping onto the earth below in thick, uneven splashes. Even from this distance, I could tell he wasn’t just any goblin.

I knew it.

This was the Chosen I had sensed.

He was still alive. Barely.

His body twitching, one arm moving weakly as he tried to muster some last resistance, some desperate attempt to fight back against something so utterly beyond him. But whatever abilities he possessed, whatever confidence had carried him this far, they meant nothing here.

The matriarch didn’t even acknowledge his struggle.

Her tusks flared.

There was no warning roar, no dramatic buildup. Just a sudden, violent release of compressed force that detonated outward from the runes etched into the ivory. The goblin’s body came apart instantly, torn into fragments that scattered through the clearing in a wet, horrific spray.

It was over in less than a second.

Behind me, Gork shuddered, a sharp intake of breath escaping him as his entire body stiffened. His heart was pounding so violently I could hear it.

The sight shocked me too, but not in the way it had shaken Gork.

My reaction wasn’t rooted in fear so much as curiosity. What she’d done looked like an explosion originating from her tusks, violent and instantaneous, yet when I focused, the tusks themselves were still intact, unmarred, unchanged.

Interesting.

I didn’t have time to dwell in curiosity for long, though, as the matriarch’s gaze suddenly shifted.

Slowly, her massive head tilted upward, those ancient eyes locking onto us as if we’d never truly been hidden in the first place.

There was no rumbling. No warning. No dramatic display of aggression.

Just recognition.

And then action.

Her trunk lifted and aligned with us, unnaturally steady for something so massive, and in that instant, I felt it, a sharp, screaming sense of danger prickling across my skin even before the attack manifested.

I didn’t wait.