Goblin King: My Innate Skill Is OP

I gritted my teeth in frustration and punched at the air, even though there was nothing there to hit. My fist cut through the space in front of me before I slowly lowered my arm.

”Damnit!”

It pissed me off that, despite how powerful I had become, there were still so many things that could screw me over. I could crush most enemies that stood in my way, yet all it took was one unknown ability or some trick I didn’t understand to turn the situation against me completely.

The clan was under attack.

And I wasn’t there.

Once again.

My jaw tightened as the thought settled in.

At this point, it was starting to feel like it was always the case. Whenever the things I valued were in danger, something would inevitably happen to drag me away from them, leaving me unable to do anything while the people I cared about were forced to face the consequences without me.

I clenched my fists until my knuckles tightened.

I didn’t understand it.

It was almost as if some higher being was messing with me, constantly finding one way or another to keep me away whenever the people I cared about needed me most.

No matter how hard I tried to prevent it, something always happened.

And I was getting sick of it.

I let out a frustrated sigh and decided to focus completely on figuring out how to get out of here. Getting angry wasn’t going to help me, and whatever this place was, I needed to understand its rules before I could find a way around them.

If this was a prison, then surely there had to be an escape.

A release.

There had to be some kind of weakness, mechanism, or condition that could allow me to leave.

I looked around carefully, taking in my surroundings now that I wasn’t distracted by my frustration.

As I said earlier, this was a bubble-shaped prison, with walls that looked like glass but weren’t exactly glass. They were transparent enough for me to see the strange environment surrounding me, yet I couldn’t see any seams or physical structure holding them together. Those bluish glowing lines continued to flow through the surface, moving slowly like ink suspended in water.

There was even a sun overhead, bright enough to illuminate the entire place, casting warm light over the trees and vegetation scattered throughout the area.

At first glance, it almost looked like a peaceful forest.

But the closer I looked, the more wrong it became.

The trees weren’t quite right.

Their trunks seemed slightly bent in directions they shouldn’t have been, while the branches twisted at unnatural angles, and the leaves appeared to stretch and distort whenever I looked at them from certain positions.

It was subtle enough that I might have mistaken it for some kind of visual trick if I hadn’t been paying attention.

Odd.

It was almost as if I were looking at a distorted reflection of a real forest.

Yet when I walked closer and reached out to touch one of the trees, my fingers met solid bark.

It was real.

I could feel the rough texture beneath my fingertips, and when I pressed harder, the trunk resisted just like an ordinary tree would.

I pulled my hand back and frowned.

”What’s going on here?”

I looked around again, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

Was this some sort of upside-down world? A distorted world? A domain?

If it was a domain, could I override it with mine?

I immediately considered using my domain skill, [Sovereign Dominion], but quickly dismissed the thought, shaking my head.

”Let’s not get hasty.”

There was no point jumping to conclusions about what this place was when I hadn’t even tested the most basic methods of escaping it. If I could figure out what the prison allowed and what it prevented, I might be able to understand how it was keeping me here.

I tried to use [Warp].

But as expected, it didn’t work.

Or rather, it did work, but it took me nowhere.

I frowned as I felt the familiar distortion of space begin to form around me. The space in front of me twisted for a brief moment, responding to my mana and the activation of the skill, but almost immediately, the distortion collapsed and vanished as though the effect had been forcibly cancelled.

It was strange.

The skill itself hadn’t failed.

The effect had activated.

But whatever command [Warp] was trying to impose on space was being denied before it could actually complete.

It was almost as if the prison was saying:

You can distort space all you want, but you can’t use that distortion to leave.

I narrowed my eyes.

Even [Leap] didn’t work.

That was even stranger because [Leap] didn’t require the same level of spatial manipulation as [Warp]. Yet the moment I tried to activate it, I felt the same resistance, as though the prison recognized the movement skill and prevented it from carrying me beyond whatever boundaries it had established.

I wasn’t done testing, so when I spotted a leaf falling from one of the nearby trees, I used [Swap], attempting to exchange positions with it. But nothing happened.

The leaf continued falling at its normal pace while I remained exactly where I was, and I simply watched it land on the ground before narrowing my eyes.

”Interesting.”

That told me something.

This space didn’t seem to fancy movement-type skills too much.

Anything that relied on breaking, bending, or manipulating space was being restricted, whether the skill was meant to cross a large distance like [Warp] or simply alter my position like [Leap].

I rubbed my chin as I thought about it.

So it wasn’t that my skills weren’t functioning.

The prison was specifically preventing them from doing what they were supposed to do.

That meant this place wasn’t simply a physical cage.

It was controlling the rules of space inside it.

If I had to...