We didn't run. Running makes noise, and noise gets you killed. We simply melted back into the oppressive green gloom, the guttural sounds of the goblin camp fading behind us until they were nothing more than a bad memory. But the memory was still there, seared onto the inside of my skull. The cage. The chieftain's leer. The word livestock. The word breeding.
You have to be realistic about these things. The rage I felt was a useless luxury. Rage makes you stupid, and stupid gets you dead. What I needed was to be cold. I needed to take the hot, seething mass of fury in my gut and hammer it into something sharp and useful. I needed a plan.
We found a hollow, a damp, miserable little depression shielded by a curtain of hanging moss that wept a constant, cold drizzle. It was a pathetic excuse for a camp, but it was defensible, and more importantly, it was out of sight. I dropped my pack with a grunt, the weight of it a dull ache in my shoulders. Elara didn't bother. She simply leaned against a black-barked tree, her arms crossed, the Orcish axe held loosely in one hand. She was a coiled spring of violence, waiting for a target. Her silence was more eloquent than any war cry. She was ready to go back there and start killing until they put her down. A fine way to die, perhaps, but a terrible strategy.
I, on the other hand, was the strategist. The Scholar's mind at work. I pulled out my journal and the iridescent quill. The fire we made was small, smokeless, and provided precious little warmth, but it cast enough flickering light for me to see the page. I didn't write words. I wrote equations. I drew maps. I translated the horror show we'd witnessed into a problem of logistics and applied violence.
Elara watched me, her expression a mask of stony patience. She thought I was wasting time. She thought I was hiding in my numbers, a coward afraid to face the ugly truth. Maybe she was right.
"Fifty," I said finally, my voice a dry croak in the damp air. "Give or take. I counted fifteen in the clearing, plus the patrol of five. But those huts… they're not for storage. There are more. Let's assume a total strength of fifty."
"So we die," Elara stated, her voice flat. It wasn't a question. It was a conclusion. "We go in there, we kill maybe three, four if we're lucky, before they swarm us. They'll pull us down and eat us. Or worse."
"Correct," I said, not looking up from my journal. "If we go in there as us." I drew two crude stick figures on the page. Then I drew a line through them. Beside them, I drew two more figures, these ones smaller, hunched, with pointed ears. "We don't fight fifty goblins. We walk past forty-eight of them and we kill two. The right two."
She pushed off the tree and came closer, peering down at my mad scribblings. "What are you talking about?"
"Rebellion," I said, the word tasting strange and grandiose. "The problem with a tribe of vicious, backstabbing, opportunistic little monsters is that they're vicious, backstabbing, and opportunistic. They follow strength. They fear pain. Their loyalty is a currency, bought with violence and intimidation. We just need to bankrupt the current leadership."
I tapped the drawing of the chieftain's hut. "The power is here. The Chieftain. And his two big guards. They're the lynchpins. We take them out, and the whole structure collapses into chaos. The rest will squabble and fight amongst themselves for days."
"And how, precisely, are we supposed to walk up to the chieftain and kill him?" she asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "Are you going to ask him to look at a flower while I sneak up behind him?"
"Something like that," I admitted. I took a deep breath. This was the part where she was going to think I'd finally lost my mind. "We don't walk in as us. We walk in as them."
I explained the new, improved Minor Illusion. How it had advanced beyond simple sounds and flickers of light. How I could now, in theory, create a sustained, static visual illusion. A costume. A shitty, shimmering, low-resolution costume, but a costume nonetheless.
Elara stared at me. Her face was a perfect, blank canvas of disbelief. "You want to put on a goblin suit and just… stroll into their camp?"
"It's a terrible plan," I agreed readily. "It's insane. It relies on them being stupid, unobservant, and blinded by their own arrogance. Which, from what I've seen, they absolutely are. They're not going to be looking for two of their own to be impostors. They're going to be looking for threats from the outside."
"And the mana?" she pressed, her sharp mind immediately seizing on the practical flaw. "How long can you keep that up?"
"A day. Maybe. If I do nothing else. It'll be a constant, draining cost. By the end of it, I'll be a walking husk. But it only needs to last long enough to get us into position. Long enough to get close to the chieftain's hut. Long enough for an opportunity."
She was silent for a long time, her gaze flicking from my face to the journal and back again. I could see the gears turning in her head. She was weighing the sheer, balls-out insanity of the idea against the cold, hard fact that every other option ended with us as goblin food. She, a creature of the wild, understood the value of camouflage. She understood the principle of the wolf in sheep's clothing. I was just proposing a particularly ugly, magical version of it.
"It's still a shit plan," she said finally.
"I know."
"It'll probably get us killed."
"Almost certainly."
A slow, dangerous smile spread across her face. It was the first real smile I'd ever seen from her, and it was terrifying. "Alright, boss. I'm in. But first," she said, her smile vanishing as she drew one of her daggers, "we need two goblin suits."
Finding a pair of goblin scouts wasn't hard. You just had to think like them. You had to find a place that was strategically unimportant, poorly lit, and just far enough from the main camp that a bit of screaming wouldn't immediately bring the whole horde down on you. We found the perfect spot a quarter-mile from the camp, a narrow, muddy game trail that snaked between two moss-slick boulders.
We didn't have to wait long. They came bickering down the trail, two scrawny, miserable-looking specimens armed with crude spears and chipped wooden shields. They were arguing over a dead squirrel, their guttural snarls echoing in the quiet woods. They were so focused on their petty squabble that they didn't notice the world holding its breath around them.
Elara was a blur.
She exploded from the ferns to their left, a low, compact shadow moving with a speed that defied physics. The first goblin didn't even have time to register her presence before her dagger, held in a reverse grip, punched upward under its jaw. There was a wet, crunching sound, and the goblin's argument about the squirrel's tail was cut short forever. It crumpled like a dropped sack of laundry, its spear clattering on the rocks.
The second goblin was faster. It shrieked, a high, piercing sound of alarm, and brought its shield up just as Elara's follow-up strike, a vicious slash with the Orcish axe, came whistling in. The axe bit deep into the wood of the shield, splintering it, the force of the blow staggering the creature backward.
This was not going to be a clean kill.
The goblin, recovering with surprising speed, shoved the ruined shield forward, using the embedded axe to wrench the weapon from Elara's grasp. It was a clever, desperate move. Elara, disarmed of her primary weapon, danced back, her remaining dagger held ready.
The goblin didn't press its advantage. It knew it was outmatched. It turned to flee, its mouth open to scream a warning to the camp.
This was my cue. The clumsy, thinking part of the machine had to do its part.
I burst from my own hiding place, the pathetic goblin cleaver clutched in my hand. I charged, my feet slipping in the mud, my lungs burning. The goblin saw me coming, its beady eyes wide with surprise. It was faster than me, it would outrun me in a second. I had one chance.
I didn't try to hit it. I just threw myself forward in a desperate, undignified slide, my arms outstretched. My shoulder slammed into the back of its knees. It was like tackling a wiry, surprisingly solid bag of sticks and hatred. The goblin yelped as its legs were knocked out from under it, and it went down hard, its face planting in the mud.
I had it. For a second.
Then it writhed, twisting with a snake-like speed. It kicked out, its hard, bony foot catching me square in the ribs. The pain was a brilliant, white-hot flash. The air rushed out of my lungs in a pained gasp, and I rolled away, clutching my side.
The goblin scrambled to its feet, spitting mud and snarling. It raised its spear, the point aimed directly at my throat. This is it, I thought. This is how I die. Drowned in mud and stabbed by a creature arguing over roadkill. A fitting end.
A shadow fell over the goblin.
Elara had retrieved her axe. She moved with a chilling, unhurried calm. The goblin, seeing her, forgot all about me. It spun, raising its spear defensively.
The fight, if you could call it that, was brutally short. Elara feinted with the axe, a low sweep that forced the goblin to bring its spear down to block. As it did, she stepped in close, inside the spear's range, and her dagger blurred. Once, twice. The first strike opened the goblin's throat in a gushing, crimson smile. The second, a precise, economical thrust, slid between its ribs and into its heart.
The goblin stood there for a long, frozen moment, a look of profound surprise on its ugly face. Then it collapsed, its spear falling from its nerveless grasp.
Silence descended again, broken only by my own ragged, painful breathing. I pushed myself to a sitting position, my ribs screaming in protest. Elara stood over the two corpses, her chest rising and falling, her face a mask of cold focus. She wasn't even winded.
"You're slow," she said, not looking at me.
"I'm a scholar," I wheezed, spitting out a mouthful of dirt. "Not… a fucking acrobat."
She nudged one of the bodies with her boot, then looked at me. "Well, Scholar. You have your costumes." She gestured at the two dead goblins, their filthy hides and crude armor waiting. "Now for the hard part."