The camp was a cesspit, a sprawling, chaotic tumor of filth and violence. I moved through it like a ghost, a whisper of displaced air. The goblin illusion Kale maintained around me was a useful cloak, but my true invisibility came from their own incompetence. My first cautious steps, melting from shadow to shadow, quickly gave way to a fluid, contemptuous stride. There was no need for the deep arts of stealth here. Not yet.
They were goblins. That single, simple fact explained everything. It explained the sentries who drank themselves into a stupor, their spears leaning forgotten against a post. It explained the haphazard placement of their crude huts, creating a maze of blind corners and indefensible positions. It explained the quality of their gear—rust-pitted blades, cracked leather, bows with frayed strings. The higher-level warriors, the hulking brutes near the center of the camp, were a collective danger, a pack of rabid dogs that could overwhelm through sheer numbers. But individually? They were nothing. They had no training, no discipline, no answer for a predator like me. This wasn't a military camp; it was a brawl waiting to happen.
My path was a slow, spiraling reconnaissance, my mind a cold ledger, marking patrol routes, guard rotations, and structural weaknesses. The information flowed in, clean and sterile. Two guards at the east gate, drunk. A patrol of four Bully Boys, route predictable, easily ambushed. The chieftain's hut, large, well-built, but with a weak point on the rear wall. It was a simple, satisfying equation of observation and analysis.
Then I heard it.
It was a sound that did not belong, a note of pure, piercing misery that cut through the guttural symphony of goblin life. It was the sound of crying. Distinctly, undeniably human.
My trajectory changed. The broad, circling path of my reconnaissance collapsed into a single, sharp vector aimed directly at the source. The sound drew me past the roaring cookfires and the drunken brawls, towards the camp's center, to a hut larger than the rest, second only to the chieftain's own dwelling. It was built with more care, its thatched walls thicker, its wooden frame sturdier. It was a place meant to contain something.
As I drew closer, the sound resolved itself, and a cold knot tightened in my gut. It wasn't the cry of a man in agony or a woman in despair. It was higher, more frantic, more hopelessly primal. It was the sound of an infant.
A child. Here. The tactical implications of that single fact were staggering. A child meant a longer period of captivity. It meant breeding. It meant a level of permanence to this horror that we hadn't anticipated.
I circled the hut, my feet making no sound on the packed, filthy earth. The front was guarded by two goblins, their spears held loosely, their attention focused on a game of dice they were playing with carved knuckle-bones. Amateurs. I slipped around to the rear, into the deep, oppressive darkness where the firelight did not reach. The thatched wall was thick, woven from dried reeds and reinforced with a lattice of branches. I drew my dagger, its edge a keen, silver line in the gloom. It was not a tool for hacking. It was a scalpel. I inserted the tip into the thatch and began to cut, my movements precise, surgical. The blade whispered through the dry reeds, a sound lost in the night's ambient noise. An opening, a small, dark window into the heart of the hut, took shape under my patient hands.
I put my eye to the hole, and the world tilted on its axis. My mind, the cold, analytical engine, stalled. It was not a hut. It was a pen.
A crude fence of sharpened wooden stakes, like something you would use to contain livestock, sectioned off the interior. And inside this pen, packed together in the stinking, claustrophobic space, were humans.
Kale was wrong. So terribly, catastrophically wrong.
He had said three. I saw at least twenty.
They were huddled together for warmth and a pathetic semblance of security, their bodies a pale, bruised tapestry of despair. Men and women, old and young, all naked, all stripped of their dignity as thoroughly as they had been of their clothes. Their bodies were thin, their ribs starkly visible beneath skin stretched taut over bone. Sores and bruises marred their flesh. Their hair was matted with filth. But it was their eyes that broke me from my tactical trance. They were dull, vacant, lifeless. The thousand-yard stare of a soul that has given up. They didn't even have guards inside the hut, I realized. They didn't need them. These people were so thoroughly broken that the thought of escape was a long-dead language they no longer understood.
In the center of the huddled mass, a young woman, barely more than a girl, rocked a tiny, wailing bundle wrapped in a filthy rag. The source of the cry. A baby born in this cage. A new life beginning at the absolute nadir of existence.
And then I saw him.
He was not one of the prisoners. He was a goblin, but unlike any I had seen before. He was small, almost frail-looking, and he sat on a stool just outside the pen, meticulously cleaning a set of tools laid out on a piece of hide. They were not the crude, brutish weapons of a goblin warrior. They were hooks, clamps, serrated knives, and slender metal rods. Tools designed for a single, specific purpose: the methodical deconstruction of a living being.
A torturer. Not just a brute who enjoyed inflicting pain, but an artist. A specialist with a Vocation in agony. This was not random cruelty. This was a process. A system. A way to break minds and bodies so completely that a wooden fence became as impassable as a fortress wall.
A wave of nausea, cold and sharp, rose in my throat. It was not pity. It was a profound, soul-deep disgust. A revulsion so complete it felt like a physical blow. This was the true face of our enemy. Not the drunken, incompetent guards outside, but this quiet, meticulous monster and the system that not only allowed him to exist, but gave him a title for his work.
The thought, unbidden and venomous, slid into my mind like a shard of ice.
How easily this could have been me.
The image was instantaneous and absolute. I saw myself in that pen, stripped bare, my axe taken, my skills useless. I saw my own body, bruised and broken. I saw the light in my own eyes extinguished, replaced by that same, hollow emptiness. I saw the Pain-Artist looking at me, his gaze speculative, wondering what new sounds he could make me produce.
The disgust I felt was not for the goblins, not for the filth, not for the horror. It was a primal, violent rejection of that image. It was the fury of a predator seeing itself in a cage. It was an affront to the very core of my being, to the warrior's spirit that had kept me alive. My alliance with Kale, my skills, my axe, the very air I breathed—these were the only things that separated me from them. Strength was the only wall that mattered.
The Pain-Artist worked with the detached air of a watchmaker. He selected his subject with a casual, appraising glance, his gaze settling on an older man whose broad shoulders and defiant posture suggested a spirit not yet fully extinguished. The goblin's movements were unhurried as he unlocked the pen's crude gate, dragged the man out by his hair, and secured his wrists to a thick wooden post in the center of the hut. The other prisoners did not watch. They turned away, huddling deeper into themselves, a silent, practiced ritual of disassociation. They had seen this play before. They knew all the lines.
I remained at my post, a silent observer in the stinking darkness, my eye pressed to the hole I had carved. The torturer did not begin with screams. He began with whispers. He leaned close to the man, his voice a low, sibilant murmur, his tools glinting in the dim light from the single oil lamp that illuminated the hut. I could not hear the words, but I could see their effect. The man's defiance began to crumble, replaced by a confusion that quickly curdled into fear. The goblin's work was not just on the flesh, but on the mind. He was unmaking the man from the inside out.
Then came the tools. A small, hooked blade that traced a line of fire across the man's back. A clamp that tightened with agonizing slowness. The man's initial grunts of pain gave way to choked sobs, and finally, to a high, thin wail of pure, mindless agony that was abruptly cut short. The goblin had found what he was looking for: the breaking point. He worked for another ten minutes in a silence broken only by the man's ragged, wet breathing. When he was finished, he unceremoniously cut the man down. The prisoner collapsed to the floor, a trembling, weeping ruin, and crawled back into the mass of his fellow captives, who parted to receive him without a word.
The Pain-Artist took a grimy rag and meticulously wiped each of his tools clean, his movements precise and unhurried. He placed them back on the hide cloth, rolled it up, and with a final, contemptuous glance at the pen, he left the hut, securing the door behind him. The two guards outside grunted a greeting and resumed their game of dice.
This was my chance. The window was small, the risk absolute.
I waited, counting the seconds, letting the rhythms of the camp settle back into their drunken, chaotic normalcy. Then I went to work. My dagger, a whisper of sharpened steel, enlarged the hole in the thatch wall, creating an opening just large enough for my lean frame to slip through. The sound was lost in the crying of the infant and the distant, raucous laughter from the main fire.
I slid through the gap, landing in a silent crouch inside the hut. The stench was overwhelming, a thick, cloying miasma of unwashed bodies, stale fear, and excrement. It was the smell of hopelessness.
My goblin illusion was still active, a shimmering, greasy lie. As I rose from my crouch, the prisoners flinched away from me. A wave of terror rippled through the huddled mass. A goblin was inside the pen. This was new. This was a violation of the established, brutal routine. They scrambled back, trying to press themselves into the very walls, their eyes wide with a fresh, raw panic.
I ignored them. My gaze swept the room, my Predator's Gaze seeing not stats or numbers, but the stark, physical reality of their condition. Malnourished. Dehydrated. Covered in sores. Dozens of them. But my attention settled on the young woman with the baby. She had pulled the infant to her chest, turning her body to shield it, her face a mask of pure, primal terror. She was afraid, but she was also defiant. She was a shield. That was a spark.
I moved towards her, my steps slow, deliberate. The prisoners parted before me like water, a testament to their brokenness. I knelt in the filth before the young mother, bringing myself down to her level. I was a monster in her eyes, another goblin come to inflict some new, unimaginable horror.
I met her gaze, and for the first time since entering the camp, I spoke. My voice, after hours of silence and guttural mimicry, was a rough, human rasp.
"I am not one of them."
The words, quiet as they were, landed with the force of a physical blow. The woman flinched, her eyes widening in disbelief. The other prisoners, the ones close enough to hear, froze. The concept was so impossible, so alien, that their minds refused to process it.
"Look at my eyes," I commanded softly. I leaned closer, letting the dim lamplight catch my gaze. They were not the flat, black, soulless beads of a goblin. They were the eyes of a human. Sharp, focused, and right now, burning with a cold, controlled fury.
The woman stared, her breath catching in her throat. The terror in her eyes was slowly, hesitantly being replaced by a fragile, terrifying flicker of confusion.
"Help is coming," I continued, my voice a low, urgent whisper. "We are going to get you out of here. All of you."
I saw the flicker of hope, and I saw it immediately crushed by the weight of their despair. One of the men nearby let out a harsh, bitter laugh that turned into a hacking cough. "Help?" he rasped, his voice a broken thing. "There is no help. There is only this." He gestured weakly at the pen, at their cage, at their living tomb.
"There is now," I insisted, my gaze never leaving the mother's face. I needed to reach her. She was the anchor. "But you have to be ready. When the time comes, there will be no hesitation. There will be chaos, fire, and blood. I will open this cage. When I do, you will run. You will fight. You will do exactly as I say. Your survival depends on it."
I was not offering comfort. I was giving orders. I was not asking for their hope; I was demanding their obedience.
"How?" the woman whispered, her voice trembling. "How can we trust you?"
It was the question. The only question that mattered.
"You have no reason to," I admitted, my voice brutally honest. "I am a stranger. A voice in the dark. But look around you. Look at what they have done to you. Look at what they will do to your child." My gaze dropped to the wailing infant in her arms. "What other choice do you have?"
I let the cold, hard logic of her situation settle over her. Trusting me was a risk. Not trusting me was a certainty of continued horror.
"When the fighting starts," I said, my voice dropping to a final, conspiratorial whisper, "look for a woman with an axe. She will be your shield. Follow her. Now, I have to go."
I didn't wait for a response. I had planted the seed. Whether it took root or withered in the barren soil of their despair was out of my hands. I rose, turned my back on them, and slipped back through the hole in the wall, melting into the darkness of the camp.
I found Kale by the Guttersnipes' fire, still holding court, a reluctant prophet to a congregation of monsters. I moved to his side, a silent shadow rejoining its master.
You were wrong, I sent the thought along our mental link, the message sharp and cold. So wrong.
He turned his head slightly, his illusionary face unreadable. What did you find?
The words of my report were stark, stripped of all emotion, a litany of horror delivered in the cold, efficient language of a scout.
Twenty of them, Kale. At least. And a baby. They're broken. All of them. There's a specialist. A torturer. This isn't a holding pen. It's a factory for breaking souls.
I felt the shock ripple from him, a psychic tremor of disbelief and horror. The neat, tidy lines of his plan, the glorious, insane vision of a goblin civil war, had just been drenched in a reality far more complex and far more monstrous than he had ever imagined.
The plan has to change, I sent, my thought a hard, unyielding stone. This isn't about liberating a few captives anymore.
His response was a single, grim pulse of agreement. I know.