Chapter 26: Goblins

Brandt rose from the bench.

“We’ll finish this later,” he said, already reaching for the bastard sword. His steel hand closed around the grip. “Stay inside.”

The carriage lurched to a halt. Wheels locked. Horses whinnied and stamped.

“Goblins?” I said. “What are goblins?”

Ghost turned from the window slit and regarded me with an expression that sat somewhere between disbelief and clinical fascination.

“Are you one of those nobles who never left the estate?” he asked. “Never set foot past the garden walls?”

“Something like that,” I said.

The lie came easily. Each loop, I’d navigated with incomplete information had worn down the friction between truth and fabrication until they felt almost identical in my mouth.

I didn’t like how natural it was becoming.

But I didn’t stop.

“I never had Circles,” I continued, layering truth beneath the lie the way you reinforce a wall by alternating brick and mortar. “Couldn’t use magic. So I studied. Spent years trying to fix the problem. Books, libraries, research. That was my whole world.”

I let a note of bitterness creep in. That part wasn’t difficult.

“My family didn’t exactly go out of their way to teach me about anything beyond the estate. The fewer things I knew about the outside world, the fewer questions I’d ask. The fewer questions I asked, the less trouble I caused. Something like this.”

Ghost’s pale eyes held mine for a uncomfortable moment.

I couldn’t tell if the lie had landed or if he’d seen straight through it. His face gave nothing away.

“Goblins aren’t one of the Eleven Sins,” Ghost said, shifting his weight as the carriage rocked. “Not directly. But when the portals opened and the eleven damned crossed into our world, they brought their own pests.”

He paused, letting that settle.

“Every world that died had its own ecosystem. Its parasites. When the refugees migrated, the problems that had plagued their worlds were brought as well.”

I nodded slowly.

“Goblins are intelligent,” Ghost continued. “Not brilliantly. But enough to use tools, form hierarchies, set ambushes. They also breed faster than anything else alive. A single nest can produce hundreds of offspring in a season.”

His lip curled faintly.

“They’ve spread across every territory. It doesn’t matter, human or elven. They’re the cockroaches of the post-portal world.”

Through the carriage’s window slit, I saw them.

A dozen creatures. Maybe more.

They were smaller than I’d expected. Hunched, crooked things with skin the color of algae-covered stone. Their bodies were thin but wiry. Shoulders too high. Spines curved at angles that should have been painful. Heads too large for their necks, dominated by wide mouths filled with teeth that grew in every direction.

They made sounds. A chittering, clicking, guttural series of noises that fell somewhere between language and the sound of bones being ground together.

In their hands, they held bone weapons.

Sharpened femurs. Crude clubs made from what looked like a single massive vertebra.

They stood in a loose cluster on the road ahead, blocking the path. Some hopped from foot to foot with a nervous, twitching energy. Others crouched low to the ground, their oversized eyes reflecting the afternoon light with a yellow-green glow.

Brandt didn’t give them a speech.

He didn’t shout a warning or demand surrender or perform any of the theatrical gestures I’d seen officers make before engaging. He simply stepped down from the carriage, planted his boots in the packed earth, and walked forward.

His bastard sword came free of the scabbard.

The first goblin shrieked and lunged.

It covered three paces with a speed that caught me off guard, its bone club raised high, its mouth stretched open.

Brandt’s sword moved.

A single horizontal cut. The edge met the goblin at the midsection and continued through without slowing, as if the creature’s body offered no resistance.

Two halves fell to the road.

The second goblin was already airborne, leaping from a crouch with a sharpened bone in each fist. Brandt pivoted. His blade came around in a rising diagonal that intercepted the creature mid-flight.

The impact didn’t throw the goblin backward. It split it. Upper and lower halves tumbled in different directions, trailing greenish ichor that spattered against the road.

My eyes devoured every movement.

Why did he pivot instead of step back? What made him choose the rising cut over a thrust? Why did his weight shift to the left foot before the third goblin attacked from the right?

His footwork was different from the elf’s. Where the assassin on the wall had been fluid and lateral, all side-steps and angles, Brandt was rooted. He planted himself and rotated from the hip, his center of gravity low and stable, the bastard sword tracing arcs that used momentum like a lever.

Each movement had a reason. Each choice flowed from the position of his feet, the angle of his shoulders, the direction of the next threat.

It wasn’t instinct. It was a structure of violence built on foundations I could almost see.

I watched the way his steel hand gripped the hilt. The prosthetic didn’t flinch. Instead, it seemed to redirect force, channeling the impact of each collision down through the wrist joint and into the forearm.

The fourth goblin charged from behind. Brandt didn’t turn fully. He pivoted his back foot, let the shoulder rotate, and extended the sword behind him in a reverse thrust that caught the creature through the throat.

He pulled the blade free and continued forward. Twelve goblins. Each swing was a lesson and a new body on the ground.

Yet it was over in less than a minute.

The last goblin tried to run.

It made it four steps before the bastard sword caught it across the back.

Brandt stood among the bodies.

He didn’t pause to survey his work. He simply turned, walked back toward the carriage, and climbed inside.

The greenish ichor on his sword dripped steadily onto the carriage floor.

Only then I noticed.

My hand had gone to my hip during the fight. An instinctive gesture, reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there.

My fingers closed on empty air.

“Where’s my sword?” I asked.

Ghost glanced at me from the opposite bench.

“You mean that piece of scrap metal you were carrying?” he said. “It was destroyed. The blade was warped past any reasonable repair. Three notches deep enough to compromise the edge entirely.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

He raised an eyebrow.

“We left it in Grezheim. I wouldn’t have used it to stir soup.”

I shook my head in frustration. We had left in such a rush that I never picked up the sword I’d commissioned. In the end, I had essentially paid twenty silver coins for a weapon that didn’t even last a single combat.

“You’ll receive a training weapon when we get to the testing grounds,” Brandt said, settling back onto his bench. The bastard sword went across his knees. “Standard issue. If you pass the evaluation, you’ll be fitted for something custom.”

“And if I don’t pass?”

“Then you won’t need a sword.”

That wasn’t reassuring.

The convoy lurched forward. The horses resumed their rhythm.

Something moved.

Not in the carriage, on me.

A vibration. Soft and steady, like a heartbeat.

My hand went to the inner pocket. The pocket watch was shaking.

I pulled it free.

“What is that?”

Roen’s voice. His enormous head had turned toward me, brow furrowed, eyes fixed on the watch in my palm.

The question drew the others’ attention.

Brandt’s gaze dropped to the watch. Ghost leaned forward from his position near the window.

I held it up so they could see.

Gold details traced the edges. The name on the back, Kaspar von Hexenzeit.

“It’s my grimoire,” I said.

The silence that followed was different from any that had preceded it.

Ghost’s head tilted.

“That,” he said, “is strange for a grimoire.”

“I’ve seen grimoires from every major school and tradition in Silberwald,” Brandt said. His voice was quiet. “Most times books. Sometimes scrolls. Never…” He gestured vaguely at the watch. “Never that.”

I turned the watch over in my hands. The vibration continued against my palm.

“I can’t explain it,” I said. “It’s been like this since I can remember. I didn’t choose the form.”

The three Knights studied the watch with expressions that ranged from Roen’s simple fascination to Ghost’s unsettled analysis.

I didn’t give them time to ask more questions.

I pressed the clasp.

The cover sprang open.

Light spilled from the watch face.

 

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