The forest floor was a tapestry of damp earth and decaying leaves, and I moved through it with a silence that had become second nature. The air, thick with the scent of pine and wet stone, was cold against my face. Two weeks of relative peace had been a necessary reprieve, but this—this was my natural state now: in the field, on the hunt, moving toward a calculated objective.
This mission was an investment. The potential return was three new citizens, three more sets of hands, three more minds to integrate into the growing machine of the Grotto. The cost was minimal: a few hours of my time, Elara's, and that of my best assets. The ROI was promising.
A flicker of movement to my right drew my eye. Elara. She moved like a phantom, her black Lurker-hide armor seeming to drink the shadows between the ancient trees. She wasn't walking; she was flowing over the terrain, her eyes, sharp and predatory, scanning every detail. Her presence was a physical guarantee of security, a shield that allowed my mind the freedom to operate at full capacity. She was the tip of my spear.
Behind us, I heard the heavy, deliberate tread of Torvin. The Berserker's rage, once a symptom of his brokenness, was now a tool. I had helped him reforge his trauma into a weapon, and he walked with the quiet, simmering intensity of a banked furnace, ready to be stoked into a conflagration at my command. He was a living weapon, and I had aimed him.
Flanking him were the five Hobgoblins of the Gutter-Guard, Gnar at their head. They were no longer the scrawny, desperate creatures I had found starving in the filth of Grul's camp. They were soldiers. Their iron-tipped spears were held at a uniform angle, their reinforced shields strapped to their backs. They moved with a matched, loping stride, their large ears twitching at every snapped twig. They were the proof of my theory, the living result of my grand, terrifying experiment in racial evolution and social engineering. Their loyalty was absolute, a construct of desperation, manufactured faith, and the undeniable results I had delivered. They were my soldiers.
A familiar blue box shimmered into existence in my vision.
Elara held up a single, gloved hand. The entire party stopped as one, the silence we left in our wake profound. I watched her kneel, her fingers hovering over a set of scuffed prints in the mud.
"Three of them, just like the crow said," she murmured, her voice a low rumble that barely disturbed the air. "One is dragging his leg. Badly. They're not trying to hide their trail. They're just trying to move."
"Desperate," I stated. It wasn't a question.
"Desperate people are dangerous," Elara countered, her eyes meeting mine. The unspoken addendum hung in the air between us: Let me handle this.
"We approach with caution," I agreed, "but we show our faces. I need them alive and willing, not dead and terrified." The latter was easy to achieve, but far less useful.
Elara gave a curt nod. She trusted my strategic judgment, even when her own instincts screamed for a more direct, overwhelming show of force. She rose and moved forward, her pace slowing, her entire being focused on the trail ahead.
Ten minutes later, the scent of a small, smoky fire reached me. Elara signaled again, and the group fanned out, melting into the foliage with practiced ease. I moved forward with Elara and Torvin, leaving Gnar and his Gutter-Guard as a hidden reserve of overwhelming force, a trump card I preferred not to play unless necessary.
Through a screen of ferns, I saw them. They were huddled in a small, pathetic clearing around a sputtering fire that produced more smoke than heat. Corvus's assessment had been brutally accurate. They looked half-dead.
One man, young, with a dirty, makeshift bandage wrapped around his thigh, lay on the ground, his face pale and beaded with sweat. He was shivering. Standing over him, holding a sharpened stick like a spear, was another man, his face a mask of aggressive fear. His eyes darted wildly, scanning the trees.
The third was a woman. She sat with her back against a mossy boulder, her knees drawn up to her chest. She was thin, her face smudged with dirt, but her eyes… her eyes were different. While the man with the stick was projecting panicked defiance, she was watching. Analyzing. There was an intelligence in her gaze that cut through the grime and exhaustion. I felt a faint but distinct energy signature pulsing around her. Mana.
A series of blue boxes popped into my vision, one after another.
[ System Notification: 'Analyst' skill has identified the following individuals.
Marcus, Human, Level 4. Vocation: Brawler. Status: Panicked, Fatigued.
Finn, Human, Level 3. Vocation: Tailor. Status: Critically Injured (Infected Wound), Exhausted.
Althea, Human, Level 6. Vocation: Mage. Status: Wary, Mana Depleted, Exhausted.]
A Mage. My internal calculus shifted. The potential value of this encounter skyrocketed. A Brawler was useful muscle, a Tailor could be trained, but a Mage… a Mage was a strategic asset on par with Samuel or Leo.
The man, Marcus, finally spotted us. His eyes widened in terror. "Stay back!" he yelled, his voice cracking. He brandished his pathetic stick-spear. "I'm warning you!"
I held up my empty hands, stepping slowly into the clearing. I kept my posture deliberately open, non-threatening. Elara and Torvin flanked me, their stances relaxed but ready.
"We're not here to hurt you," I said, my voice calm and even. I pitched it to carry, to soothe. "My name is Kale. We saw your fire. We thought you might need help."
Marcus's eyes darted from my face to Torvin's, then widened further as he caught a glimpse of Gnar's hulking, green-skinned form in the shadows. "Monsters!" he shrieked, stumbling back. "You're with them!"
This was the pivot point, the moment that would decide between recruitment and bloodshed.
"They are with me," I corrected, my voice hardening slightly, taking on an edge of command. I felt the subtle, metaphysical weight of my titles—Leader, Tyrant-Slayer, Blessed One—reinforce the words, giving them a power beyond mere sound. "They are my soldiers."
The woman, Althea, pushed herself off the rock. Her eyes were fixed on me, ignoring Elara and Torvin completely. She was looking at me, truly seeing me, her gaze sharp and analytical. She was assessing me, weighing my words, analyzing the power dynamic.
"You're the leader," she said. It wasn't a question. Her voice was raspy from dehydration but clear and intelligent.
"I am," I confirmed. I gestured to the injured man on the ground. "Your friend is dying. The wound is infected. We have a healer and medicine back at our settlement. You can either trust me, or you can watch him die here in the mud. The choice is yours."
I laid out the brutal calculus of this world for her. It was the only language that cut through the fear. Survival.
Althea's eyes flickered to Finn, then back to me. She saw the undeniable logic in my words. She gave a sharp nod to Marcus. "Put the spear down, Marcus. They're not here to kill us."
Marcus hesitated, his knuckles white on the wood. "But Althea, the goblins…"
"They are not goblins," she said, her gaze unwavering from mine. "They are Hobgoblins. And he commands them. That makes him either very powerful or very stupid. And he does not strike me as stupid." She took a hesitant step forward. "You have a settlement? A safe place?"
"We have a fortress," I said. "Food. Water. Walls. A future. But it comes with a price."
"Everything does," she replied, a world of weariness in those two words.
"I need to know what happened to you," I said, my gaze intent. "I need to know where you came from, and what you're running from. Information is the currency I deal in."
Althea looked at her two companions, then back at me. A silent understanding passed between us. She was the leader. She made the decisions. "Alright," she said, her shoulders slumping slightly as the tension finally bled out of her. "I'll tell you everything."
I had Elara tend to Finn's immediate needs while Torvin, with a quiet authority that surprised me, managed to calm Marcus down. It left me free to focus on the real prize. I led Althea a short distance away and offered her a waterskin.
"You're a Mage," I began, seeing no point in pretense. "I can feel the mana, what little you have left."
She stopped drinking, her eyes sharp again. "And you're a Scholar. I can see it in the way you analyze everything. Your Vocation is practically written on your forehead."
A thin smile touched my lips. "Touché. A Scholar needs knowledge. Your story, Althea. Start from the beginning."
She took another long drink, gathering her thoughts. When she spoke, her voice was low and filled with a bitter exhaustion.
"There were twelve of us, originally," she began. "We appeared in the Greywoods about three weeks ago. We were lucky. We had a good mix of Vocations—a hunter, a carpenter, a couple of strong Brawlers like Marcus. We found a defensible set of ruins and made a go of it. I… they chose me to lead."
The memory was clearly painful. "It worked, for a while. But then… then the whispers started."
My internal threat matrix lit up. "Whispers?"
"Five of our people," she said, her voice dropping. "They started acting strangely. Sneaking off at night. Carving strange, spiral symbols on the trees. On themselves. They claimed they had found a new god. A god who spoke to them in their dreams. A god of decay and secrets, who promised them power."
A new deity, one not in the pantheon Samuel had described. This was new, dangerous data. "What did you do?"
"I confronted them," she said, her jaw tightening. "I told them they were bringing something dangerous into our camp. They refused. Said their god was the true power of this world. It… it came to a fight. The seven of us… we were stronger. We forced them out. We exiled them."
She looked down at her hands. "I thought that was the end of it."
"It wasn't," I stated. The narrative arc was grimly predictable.
"No," she whispered. "A week later, they came back. But they weren't alone. They had… masters now."
Her eyes lifted to meet mine, and for the first time, I saw true, soul-deep terror in them. "There's a city downriver. A goblin city. Not a camp. A city. Built into the swamps, all mud and wicker and rot. And they have hundreds of us. Hundreds of humans, captured and kept in sunken cages, living in filth. They're slaves. Food. Worse."
My blood ran cold. The map of my world tore itself apart and reassembled into something far larger and more terrifying. A city. A regional power.
"The five we exiled," Althea continued, her voice trembling, "they'd been captured by this city. Enslaved. And to get in the good graces of their new overlords, to prove their faith to their whispering god, they offered a tribute." She choked on a sob, forcing it down. "They betrayed us. They led the goblins right to our door. An army. We never stood a chance. The exiles… they were laughing. They called it a holy sacrifice."
"How did you escape?" I asked, my voice quiet, intense.
"I'm a Mage," she said, a flicker of pride in her voice. "I used a Minor Illusion to make myself look like a pile of refuse. I hid. When they moved on with their new captives, I slipped away. I found Marcus and Finn a day later. We've been running ever since."
She finished, her story hanging in the air between us like a shroud. She looked at me, her eyes pleading. "You have a fortress, you said. Walls. Please. We can't go back there. Nobody can."
I stood silently, my mind a storm of calculations. A goblin civilization, allied with a dark, unknown god, holding hundreds of human captives.
It was a nightmare.
It was an opportunity.
Hundreds of captives. Hundreds of potential citizens. A labor force that could build my fortress in weeks instead of months. An army that could pacify this entire region. The risk was astronomical. A direct assault was suicide. But a surgical strike? A rescue? A repeat of the Grul gambit, on an impossibly larger scale?
The requirements for Tier 2 Civilization flashed in my mind's eye. Population Minimum: 20 Citizens. Expansion: Found a second, fully-supplied outpost.
I had been wondering where I would get the fifty people I needed to garrison two settlements.
Althea, in her terrified, desperate confession, had just given me an answer.
I looked at the Mage, at the exhausted Brawler, at the dying Tailor. I hadn't just found three survivors.
I had found a new front in my war.