The tunnel stank of damp earth and sweat.

  Water dripped from the stone ceiling, gathering in shallow puddles that glimmered beneath the faint glow of a few weak spirit lights. Every strike of pick or pulse of energy sent a dull echo rolling through the dark tunnel. Half a dozen men and women worked at the collapsed end of the mine, their breath ragged, hands blistered despite their gloves. The scrape of metal on stone blended with the low murmur of fatigue and muttered curses.

  Robert stood a little apart from the dig, sword point resting on the ground, palm cupped over the pommel. The blade had lost its shine days ago. The once-silver armor he’d worn into the Deep was nearly black now, caked with dust and dried mud. Only the faint runic lines carved along the pauldrons still gave off a whisper of light in the chill air.

  He barely noticed the cold anymore.

  His gaze stayed fixed on the darkness at the far end of the tunnel, on the heap of rock that barred their way forward. The lone geomancer knelt before the collapse, pretending at confidence as he coaxed the stone to yield. Young, wiry, and wide-eyed, the boy looked like a kicked dog every time he glanced wearily toward Robert. “It’s just an old cave-in,” he’d told them earlier. “It doesn’t span very far. Hundred meters, maybe two. We can chew through if we keep at it.”

  Robert wasn’t sure he believed him.

  Lately, it felt as if the heavens themselves demanded his death.

  Three weeks ago, he’d been at the head of a Guild expedition — well supplied, respected, admired. Now he led the remnants of a failed raid through a half-collapsed mine, trailed by men who followed him only because they lacked the courage to run.

  He closed his eyes and let out a slow breath.

  It shouldn’t have come to this. The retreat should have been simple — a straight march back to Halirosa. Should have been. But the heavens loved their jokes.

  The first blow had been the harpies: Silver Spirits, migrating early for the season. The flock had come down like knives in the night, their shrieks cutting through the forest canopy. His men had broken almost instantly. Robert had killed three dozen of the creatures himself, burning through half his essence to do it. When the sky finally cleared, a quarter of his force was gone — dead or carried off screaming into the clouds.

  Then came the Crimson River Troll.

  It had found them two days later, likely drawn by the trail of corpses left behind. A Spiritual Awakening beast, far from where such things should roam. He still remembered the stink of it, the hiss of water against its hide. He’d killed it, but more men died in the crossfire. By then, whispers had started — rumors that the Deep had cursed them, that something below still followed.

  He’d silenced those whispers the same way he always did: with promises and authority. Rest in Halirosa, he’d told them. Gold, food, and drink when they arrived. They’d followed because they wanted to believe him. Those who didn’t were silenced with more… direct methods.

  He still remembered the group’s faces that last night above ground — tired, hollow-eyed, nursing wounds that should have been healed by a proper caster, not left to rot beneath dirty bandages. He’d pushed them on anyway. Told himself it was necessary. That if he stopped — if he showed weakness — everything he’d built would collapse.

  Then the goblins came.

  He should have expected it. The Blood-drinker tribe prowled these hills — vicious things that hunted anything that bled. He’d thought they’d avoid a group this large, this armed. He’d been wrong.

  They came out of the fog before dawn: hundreds of them, pale shapes moving with the silence of wolves. The first scream came from the watch post, cut short mid-breath. By the time Robert rallied his men, the camp was half aflame. The goblins fought like rabid beasts, swarming under blades and spears, climbing over the bodies of their own dead to reach the living. Robert cut down dozens before the hobgoblin appeared — mid-Spiritual Awakening, muscles like iron and eyes full of hate — thinking to challenge him.

  When Robert’s blade slipped past the brute’s guard and pierced its heart, the remaining goblins scattered into the night. The raiders had cheered then, thinking the battle over.

  It wasn’t.

  By that time, half the survivors were too wounded to move, and another quarter had fled into the hills. Cowards. He told himself they wouldn’t make it far — that the goblins would catch them and keep them busy. Blood-drinkers were notoriously… slow with their kills. Maybe that was true. Maybe it wasn’t. He didn’t care anymore.

  The survivors who remained had followed Robert into a half-dead quarry, chasing a rumor wrapped in desperation. One of them — nervous, eager to please — had sworn the tunnels here ran clean through the range toward Halirosa. Safe passage, he’d said. If true, it would spare them days of marching and keep any pursuers bottled behind them.

  For a blissful moment, it had felt as if luck was finally smiling on him. The quarry and its network of mine shafts existed exactly where the man said they would.

  But luck, Robert had learned, always carried teeth. The main tunnel had long since collapsed. Worse, as they slipped inside the outer shafts, he’d glimpsed shapes moving in the treeline above the valley — goblins, watching. Tracking.

  They’d been found, and the earth itself had become their cage.

  Robert hadn’t needed to punish the fool who’d led them here. His own companions had done it for him. Robert hadn’t stopped them.

  When it was done and the body pulled off to rot in some side tunnel, Robert had waved toward the blockage. “Get to work,” was all he’d said.

  And they had — because there was nothing else left to do.

  That had been three days ago.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  Now they worked to clear the blockage with the dull obedience of men who knew the alternative. Shoulders hunched. Hands blistered through gloves and cloth wraps. When the picks sparked against stone, the light died fast, swallowed by dust motes and damp.

  The sound came in uneven rhythm, like a heartbeat trying to remember its pattern. The air thickened with the smell of sweat and churned earth. Each blow took something out of them, not just strength but belief. You could see it in the shoulders — their rhythm fraying as the hope bled away. They weren’t just mining anymore; they were digging a grave they refused to admit.

  A raider coughed, spat a thread of blood into the mud, and kept swinging. Another muttered a prayer that came out as a curse. The geomancer knelt farther down the slope, palms pressed flat to the wall, veins bulging as he urged the stone to yield. It did, reluctantly — small tremors and a rain of grit. The boy’s eyes flicked toward Robert once, looking for approval. Robert gave him none.

  Instead, he watched the darkness on the opposite side of the tunnel without moving. Waiting.

  He shifted his grip on the sword hilt, tracing the nicked crossguard with a thumb.

  They needed a breakthrough soon.

  Because time was their enemy now.

  Because beyond the ring of dim light, beyond the dripping dark, the goblins waited.

  The Blood-drinkers had time. They had patience, too.

  On the first day in the tunnels, the goblins had probed with a handful of bodies and ran at the first spark of danger. The second day, they came in two claws — twenty, then thirty — testing corners, counting blades, laughing in their half-words when they retreated back into the darkness and out of Robert’s reach.

  Today already felt longer, and the air had the tightness of a held breath. Robert wasn’t sure if they were waiting to gather more forces, to fill the tunnels so full of teeth and claw and rusted blade that even he drowned… or if they were just playing with their ‘food.’

  Pick. Scrape. A cough, then silence.

  Robert rolled his shoulders until the muscles loosened. He checked the fit of his glove where the leather creased over scar tissue on his thumb. The scar pinched when he gripped too tightly — an old reminder from a fight he hadn’t had to think about in years. Funny what the body chose to remember.

  He let his eyes travel the line of men. Most avoided his gaze. The ones who didn’t stared with the blankness of men who had gambled and lost and were desperately trying to pretend otherwise. They had followed him because he had sounded certain when he said he could lead them home. It had been true when he’d said it, too. It was almost true now.

  Now, the memory tasted like metal.

  Suddenly, a sound different from the rhythmic clank of pick on rock snapped his attention forward. He turned his head to better catch the sound. Quick, steady footsteps echoed from the distance. Too heavy and widely spaced to be a goblin. Likely the scout he had guarding the shaft entrance.

  “Eyes,” he said without raising his voice.

  Heads came up. Picks stilled mid-swing. Someone near the rear muttered a prayer and bit it off when he realized he’d said it aloud.

  Footfalls broke into a sprint. The lanky scout he’d set at the last bend burst around the corner, wild-eyed, wet with sweat despite the cold. “They’re coming!” he blurted, voice cracking. “They’re com—”

  The spear hit before the last word left his mouth. It hissed out of the dark and struck him clean through the shoulder and scapula, pinning him to the stone wall like an insect on display. The impact thudded deep, shaking dust loose in a drifting veil. The scout gurgled, eyes wide with confusion. A heartbeat later, a volley of smaller shafts tore through the same corridor, punching leather, ribs, throat. His body jerked once, then sagged, limp, against the haft.

  The tunnel did that strange thing they did at the edge of violence, where sound narrowed and stretched. The men behind Robert sucked in a breath as one, and every one of them tried not to take a step back.

  Hoots and clicks rolled around the bend in a wave, that awful, almost-language the Blood-drinkers used when they wanted you to know they were laughing. It tripped along the stone and returned from behind in a way that made you feel surrounded, even when you knew you weren’t.

  In the inky darkness, red eyes rounded the corner, low to the ground, then more above them, layered until the dark wore a constellation’s worth. Then, above them all, a larger pair of eyes emerged. Even in the deep black hiding the figure’s features, Robert could feel the largest pair of eyes grin.

  A torch hissed to life. Smoke smeared against the low ceiling. Orange light shoved back the dark in a hard circle and found the front ranks: green-black skin painted with cracked symbols, the brown of dried blood, teeth too many and too sharp, trophies strung off collars — fingers, ears, and tongues, many still fresh and dripping. The little ones crowded, jostling with the eager impatience of dogs at a fence. Their spears were mismatched — bone tips, chipped steel, scavenged iron — but held with competence that did not belong to animals.

  They parted for the larger shape behind them. The hobgoblin stood nearly twice the height of the rest. But where the annoyingly smug hob female that worked for the Dungeon Core had at least tried to put on an air of civilization, the… creature in front of him made no such attempt to hide the beast it was. Its head cocked, and the paint across its shoulders pulsed as it lifted its chest to sniff the air. Its eyes were not the flat animal kind. They were old and measuring in a way Robert recognized as dangerous.

  The men and women behind Robert started to edge their way backward. One dropped his pick by accident and swore too loudly, then flinched at his own noise.

  Robert set his left foot forward until the sole bit the earth and all his weight shifted into a stance he’d practiced ten thousand times before. His hands shifted as he adjusted the grip on his blade. He drew a breath and felt the edges of the tunnel — the sweep of wall to either side, the low brace of timbers above the collapse, the slick stone underfoot.

  The big goblin grinned at him. Half its teeth were gone, the others gaped and yellow with a rot that smelled sickly sweet, even from this distance. A strip of human leather hung from its belt, chewed on one edge. It lifted its chin as if to ask a question only it understood.

  Robert sneered because it fit the shape of his mouth, and because he refused to wear any expression the goblin would enjoy.

  Since he was a child, Robert had known only control. For the longest time, that control hadn’t belonged to him. It had been enforced with an iron fist by his father, one of Icefinger’s most trusted confidants. When the fool had gotten himself killed, it had been enforced by Magnus Ironheart, his godfather and adopted uncle.

  For years, he’d kept his pace even, his speech level, his smile bright and clear, to play the perfect part. He danced on strings not his own and was the ‘perfect young master’ who played his part. The pressure had not lessened. But he had stood nonetheless. He had learned how to become iron. Then, finally, the moment had come to take hold of his strings for himself.

  He had taken it. Without hesitation. In that way, he felt both his father and Magnus would have been proud of his choices.

  And yet… here he stood. Only a short way away from finally being the one to pull the strings instead, and once more, he was being denied!

  As Robert stared at the hobgoblin in front of him, its repulsive face with its rotting grin mocking him, and the hoard of cackling insects surrounding it, something inside him snapped.

  Spirit energy erupted, billowing out from Robert in waves that shook the tunnels around him and rattled the ground beneath. The stale air of the tunnel whipped up until it was a howling gale that pushed the raiders behind him against the stony wall.

  All at once, something clicked into place, and the pressure extruding from Robert sharpened into something ‘more’. As his spiritual pressure settled over the area, several goblins screamed, dozens of thin cuts forming on their skin from seemingly nowhere.

  The hobgoblin’s eyes narrowed and its grin slipped from its face, replaced by something more wary.

  Robert bared his teeth back at the thing and let loose a primal roar that sent a portion of the gathered goblins scrambling for the back, only to be blocked by the sheer press of their peers.

  Then he charged.