“Back to being furniture with spikes,” the AI muttered faintly, as if embarrassed to be heard here. He didn’t answer it. He needed the part of his brain that names things for the cave’s grammar instead.
The first thing he found found him—sound first, then smell. A wet thrumming, a chop-slither, and the meaty stink of things that had forgotten the sun. He flattened to the wall, doused the lamp to a coin, and let his eyes eat what blue gave them. A carcass of some tunnel-beast lay canted in a sump, and on it a clutch of blood maggots gorged—fat, translucent tubes wrinkling as they took, heads buried, tails flicking like obscene metronomes. A handler crouched beyond—small, thin, stone-colored, a rope of intestines for a leash coiled at his feet, knife between toes the way some men hold a cigarette.
UI tagged them as he breathed.
Blood Maggot: Level 10
Goblin Scavenger: Level 11
He roofed the lamp with the back-shield, slid the fore-shield on its rim until its face hovered inches above the slickstone, and pushed. The nearest maggot never knew anything but new gravity—the shield’s weight kissed it sideways into rock hard enough to break its thinking end. Its body jittered, writhed, and then unmade itself into just mass. The handler hissed and sprang and found only the place where Kevin had been. A second shove, a low bash—short, ugly—and the Goblin pinwheeled on bones not built for that angle and hit the sump with a sound like a dropped sack of wet laundry.
The cave held its breath for the span of a dozen heartbeats. No whistles. No drums. He let the lamp breathe again, knelt, and did clean work with the knife because discipline is a way of speaking to whatever listens.
Blood Maggot slain. XP increased. → 69%
Goblin Scavenger slain. XP increased. → 72%
He moved. Left, where old footprints had polished a line shin-high; down a rib of stalagmite-born stone; into a seam where air made a ribbon along his jaw. Behind a pinch point he paused. He wasn’t alone.
Light—amber again—licked the far wall and fell away. Voices like walnuts cracking. The smell of hog—cleaner than swine should be, hot, curt. He went to ground: lamp barely breathing, shield low, eyes listening. They came in the efficient way of people who know every scrape: two Goblins in boiled leather and a third above them, astride a war-hog whose tusks had been shaved to spears and capped in copper.
The UI found them for him:
Goblin Wrangler: Level 12
War-Hog: Level 12
Goblin Cutter: Level 12
The rider had a torch; the hog had a trot meant for corridors; the tail Goblin had a hook he wore like an opinion. They would pass him if he let them. They would know him if he didn’t take the light away.
He slid the lamp behind his heel and rolled the fore-shield into the corridor where the amber would have to meet it. Torchlight hit leather and wood and stopped; the tunnel brightened without gaining distance, and in that hesitation he moved—Ironclad settling over him like cold iron in his blood as he surged.
The hog did the hog’s thing—low head, straight line, good heart. He gave it a ramp. The shield took the tusks, climbed its own angle, and he stepped—just enough. Boar and rider scraped the wall, copper on stone like a struck bell; the rider’s knee screamed and then broke in a voice bones make. The tail Goblin leaped—with more courage than judgment—and got the rim of a shield in the mouth for it. Teeth clicked, hook clanged, light went spinning to the floor and died under a grind of heel and wood.
He finished the fights the way caves like: quickly, intimately, with the awareness of how sound runs here and who learns from it. The hog’s last breath steamed the leather, then the tunnel took it back.
War-Hog slain. XP increased. → 76%
Goblin Cutter slain. XP increased. → 78%
Goblin Wrangler wounded—fled.
He didn’t chase the rider’s elbows scraping the dark. He listened until the sound became someone else’s problem and only then took one tusk tip for a future lever and went on. His left forearm burned where the strap had lifted skin; the itch of mending under it made him want to swear like a craftsman and he did, softly.
The world changed accent—a set of chimes made of bone somewhere up-corridor, a smell like wet copper being warmed. He made himself narrower and climbed two ledges and looked down on a gallery cut by time rather than hands. Three Goblins painted head to toe in a waxy red moved in a slow, tide-timed pattern around a bowl of coals. Worms lay heaped in a wicker cradle—the blood maggot pups: skin like pearl onions, mouths like purse strings. A fourth figure stood too tall to be a Goblin and too short for a man—a blood-priest by his cut, with bracelets that twitched as if something inside them tried to remember the shapes of wrists.
Goblin Blood-Priest: Level 15
Blood Maggots (Nest): Level 10–11
Goblin Acolyte: Level 12 ×2
He watched for a long breath. He watched for a second. He left.
A soft, thrown pebble took the gallery’s attention sideways. A low rasp of shield on stone wrote his absence into the wall and the wall remembered it instead of his smell. He backed into the depth and didn’t make the mistake of being proud.
Farther on the tunnel split on a weir—stairs water had built, the steps slick as argument. Hair along his forearm lifted before his ear brought him the sound: a dire wolf’s breath, that dry bellows that always belongs to something that has learned to be quiet until quiet means dinner. It came from the left. The right smelled like mold and rest. He took the left because running now would only cost him running later.
The wolf came low and confident, gray as neglected iron in his lamp, eyes like dull coins. A second pair glowed and then closed—there after all. He stole their charge—took it on wood, slid it, turned it into a shoulder that kissed rock hard enough to make teeth think of other work. The second bit leather and found teethful of hide and shield rim. He answered with a bash that wasn’t elegant and didn’t need to be; bone met wall, wall won.
Dire Wolf slain. XP increased. → 84%
The second wolf thought about the other kind of maths and chose it—melting backward into a crack with the talent of animals who learn from other animals’ noises. He let it have the lesson. He bound a bite with linen and salve, spat blood into the weir and watched it swirl brown, then clear.
Time walked him on. The drums receded. The whistles came and went like skittering thoughts. At a bend ripped half-wide by an old fall he met two Goblins in good leather and bad moods, knives low, feet sure, painted with ash the way men do when men taught them about war. Their levels blinked and steadied as he set.
Goblin Cutthroat: Level 13 ×2
The first came fast, the second smarter. He broke the smart one first—angling a Shieldwall Bash into the feinting space where overconfidence goes to die—then stepped into the fast one’s rhythm and took it, absorbed the blade on leather and wood and weight, and returned something that required no metal to be final.
Goblin Cutthroat slain. XP increased. → 88%
The second left. He let the leaving be his alarm and wore it like a cloak for the next two turns, listening with his skin.
He nearly walked into a line across the corridor—twine at shin height, bells made of vertebrae. He saw it because the cave told him in the way the dust sat—too tidy, too sure. He stepped over, reached back, and laid a rock on the twine so if it were tripped later, the bells would cough once and then give up their voice. An urgent don’t at knee height for an honest future.
Beyond that, a small place of rest with no right angles—roof low, floor dry, smell of old stone and nothing else. He took the moment to turn the lamp down, check the straps, drink the last of Renna’s tea from the lid he’d saved, taste its bitter as if it were a blessing.
He didn’t get the blessing. The cave sent him rank air, the smell of old meat under bark, and a scrape like someone sharpening a mistake. He lifted the lamp and found a Goblin in plates too nice for these halls, helmeted, stance like a man who’d made a career of being harder to move than doors. Behind it, a dire wolf with one ear torn and one eye blind breathed like a saw.
Goblin Iron-Guard: Level 16
Dire Wolf: Level 14
He backed out before the breath could stick to him. Cave maths : some problems are meant for later. He left them their dignity and himself his skin.
At a pinch that had become a chimney he paused to listen to the world’s higher floors. A trickle of dust came on his cheek and tasted of smoke from the impossible day outside; the amber light got into the dark through a seam somewhere and made the rock look briefly like honey. He moved on into honest night.
In a low run with a ceiling that made him own his posture he took a maggot he hadn’t meant to—the thing lunged from the sump with desperate hunger and got a shield, and he finished it because mercy is for things that can recognize it.
Blood Maggot slain. XP increased. → 90%
He crossed a bridge water had made of itself—ribs of stone between pools, each rib barely a boot wide—and found a watch-post on the far side: ashes, a marrow-cracked pile, handprints on the wall the height of his hip. No guards; only sign. He marked home and moved quietly for a long time after, because signs sometimes listen.
He let fatigue tap him on the shoulder and turn his head; then he counted ten slow breaths and made himself sharper. The cave tolerates sloppy for exactly as long as it takes to teach you why it doesn’t. He stopped only when he could smell fresh water again and heard the weir’s decent murmur. On the lip of the steps he found two Goblins arguing in whispers over a snapped spear.
Goblin Spear-bearer: Level 12
Goblin Spear-bearer: Level 12
He loved a weir for what it did for sound. He took the first at the step where the water made knives of feet; he took the second on the sound of his friend falling. It was ugly. It was short. It was the sort of lesson the cave approves in low voices.
Goblin Spear-bearer slain. XP increased. → 93%
He withdrew before the argument could become a funeral others would attend with knives. A last bend; a last squeeze where his shield refused to be humble; a last stillness to let his pulse come down to something not embarrassing.
Far off, a drum tried again: three, five, seven. Closer, a pipe of bone sang one long note and stopped.
He checked his sheet in the quiet, not to be pleased but to be precise.
XP: 93% to 11
The cave didn’t argue. It never does. It simply reminded him, in the groan of old seams and the soft click of something many-legged, that he had chosen to be here instead of under the amber sky. He rolled his shoulders once, felt the itch under the strap spike and ebb as the last of some shallow cut knit shut, and went hunting for a problem the size of the man he was now, not the one the savannah had nearly unmade.
The next kill came because he wouldn’t have a better chance: a Goblin slinger alone on a perch, working a pouch of ball-stones smooth as oaths. The rim of the back-shield turned the first shot into a machine’s clang; the second he stepped through and \— once in a lifetime clean—put the wood’s edge above the collarbone in a way that made argument a past tense.
Goblin Slinger slain. XP increased. → 95%
He faded from that kill like steam, taking nothing, leaving no lamp-glow on the wall, a polite ghost in a house full of loud tenants. The air cooled. The humidity worked soft under the leather. Somewhere water laughed a little. He let himself think of sleep and then didn’t. The drums taught patience. The wolves taught economy. The cave taught a man to count only the breaths he could pay for.
He moved like a rumor through the bone-ways, letting the cave’s grammar speak first: water drew the map, dust fixed the edits, drums and whistles annotated the margins. Between those lines he did small, necessary things—cutting, steeping, mending—until hours lost their names and the only clock was the one that ticked in his stomach.
A Goblin Spear-bearer stepped into the weir’s music with too much confidence and found the rim of a shield where balance should have been.
Goblin Spear-bearer: Level 12
Slain. XP increased. → 97%
He harvested spearmoss from a damp lip—pepper-green threads that made his fingertips tingle—wrung them in warm water with a shaving of ironroot from a seam he’d learned to smell, then cooled the infusion in a shallow dish until it went the right kind of bitter. Into stoppered glass it went: a clarifying draught that tasted like discipline.
A Blood Maggot lunged from a sump with more appetite than angles. He gave it stone instead of throat.
Blood Maggot: Level 10
Slain. XP increased. → 99%
He found a Goblin Slinger setting up bells made of vertebrae across a low corridor. The first stone rang uselessly against his back-shield; the second didn’t fly.
Goblin Slinger: Level 12
Slain. XP increased. → 100%
Level Up: 11 → XP: 3%
He slept there—if you could call it sleep—curled between two ribs of stone with the shields making a crooked roof, lamp hooded to a blue coin. His belly gnawed at him, loud enough he pressed a hand to quiet it. Drums found him twice, near and far; he dreamed of doors counting backward.
Days—or cavedays—learned his name by the time he could say no in the dark without sound. He shook glow-cap spores loose over thin muslin, boiled a little into a night-sight wash Renna would have hated and approved of, and smeared his veil with it until the air near his mouth tasted faintly of mushrooms and electricity.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
A Goblin Wrangler pushed a war-hog too fast around a blind curl. The hog did the hog’s honest thing; Kevin did the Bulwark’s dishonest thing and turned that honesty into a fall.
War-Hog: Level 12
Slain. XP increased. → 31% (to 12)
Goblin Wrangler: Level 12
Slain. XP increased. → 46%
He foraged a shelf of bitter-caps (not the luminous kind), stewed them with a thumb of cave-ginger, and made a stamina tonic that went down like an argument and sat in him like resolve.
A Goblin Cutthroat tried the old two-body feint in a squeeze where two bodies didn’t fit. The wall took the first; the floor accepted the second.
Goblin Cutthroat: Level 13
Slain. XP increased. → 71%
Sleep, again: a low pocket with dry stone and a draft that smelled of old water. He woke twice sure something had stepped over him. He counted ten breaths and only then believed nothing had.
A Dire Wolf ghosted the weir with professional quiet and learned what a shield rim tastes like at a bad angle.
Dire Wolf: Level 14
Slain. XP increased. → 100%
Level Up: 12 → XP: 5%
He avoided ceremonies when he could. He didn’t pick fights he hadn’t already half-won. The blood-priest he’d scouted days ago kept his nest and his red-painted retinue; Kevin left them their religion and himself his breath. In the interstices he harvested: fern-tongue for fever, a twist of salt-lichen that made wounds forget to rot, a net of silk-mold he smoked gently over coals until it made a bandage that clung like a promise.
Two Goblins in ash warpaint tried to out-patient him at a fork with poor sightlines; patience was the one thing he could spare.
Goblin Cutthroat: Level 13 ×2
Slain. XP increased. → 34% (to 13)
A Scavenger prodded a sump he shouldn’t have, and the sump answered with teeth; Kevin only corrected the accounting.
Goblin Scavenger: Level 11
Slain. XP increased. → 48%
He boiled down spearmoss and salt-lichen with a pinch of powdered scale from an old war-hog tusk until the mixture went the right shade of mean green: restorative salve, thicker than Renna’s, uglier, serviceable. He learned to love the smell of it because it meant not losing parts.
A Goblin Spear-bearer met him at a staggered choke and learned that staggered chokes are built for shieldmen.
Goblin Spear-bearer: Level 12
Slain. XP increased. → 100%
Level Up: 13 → XP: 4%
Hunger gave the world edges. He cut his bread thinner and let smoked root sit on his tongue until taste remembered its job. He stopped twice in places that looked like rest and weren’t—hairline cracks singing overhead, a low hiss that meant gas where flame had no business. He turned his lamp down and let the cave’s own faint chemistries be enough.
A Goblin Sapper—pack heavy with bad ideas—fumbled a spark at the wrong bend and paid the full bill before Kevin needed to intervene.
Goblin Sapper: Level 13
Slain. XP increased. → 27% (to 14)
A pair of Dire Wolves worked a pincer with admirable craft. The first took wood, the second took wall, and both gave up more blood than they’d budgeted for.
Dire Wolf: Level 14 ×2
Slain. XP increased. → 61%
He found a wash of sweetmoss near an air seam and brewed a thin calming tea that turned his thoughts from knives to tools. It didn’t fill his belly. Nothing did. It quieted his hands.
Three Goblins—two cutters and a slinger—made a last stand around a broken idol hammered from stalagmite. He broke the idol with them because idols that sharpen knives deserve it.
Goblin Slinger: Level 13
Slain. XP increased. → 74%
Goblin Cutthroat: Level 13 ×2
Slain. XP increased. → 100%
Level Up: 14 → XP: 6%
Sleep came skittish and light. He woke to his own stomach answering distant drums. He kept one hand on the chalk and one on the waterskin and dreamed of kitchens without ceilings.
When the blood-priest finally crossed his path, it wasn’t in ceremony. It was at a weir with bad footing and worse angles, two acolytes at his elbows and a basket of pearly larvae held as if it were a baby. Kevin took the acolyte who didn’t know he was already dead, then the one who did. The priest breathed a word that tried to turn his blood ambitious; the veil, smeared in glow-cap wash and stubbornness, made it nothing but a taste.
Goblin Acolyte: Level 12 ×2
Slain. XP increased. → 33% (to 15)
Goblin Blood-Priest: Level 15
Slain. XP increased. → 58%
He made more salve. He learned to count the seconds it took for a cut to stop talking about itself. He traded two feathers to his own conscience for a long nap he didn’t take.
A War-Hog patrol clipped him at a corner; he turned their speed into regret.
War-Hog: Level 12 ×2
Slain. XP increased. → 76%
A Goblin Cutthroat with a better stance than most made him work for it; caves approve of work.
Goblin Cutthroat: Level 13
Slain. XP increased. → 100%
Level Up: 15 → XP: 7%
The higher ranks came fewer and farther, carrying discipline the lower ranks only imitated. He avoided Iron-Guards when the corridor honored them. He chose them when the room honored him.
One met him at a dogleg where the wall’s lean made overhand strikes stupid. The wolf at his heel breathed sawdust rage; Kevin fed the wolf wall first. Then he fed the guard the short stroke—a Shieldwall Bash that used every inch of angle the cave gave him and none it didn’t.
Dire Wolf: Level 14
Slain. XP increased. → 31% (to 16)
Goblin Iron-Guard: Level 16
Slain. XP increased. → 55%
He foraged coinwort from a slot where water whispered secrets and pounded it with salt-lichen into a poultice that pulled heat like a thief. He ate the last honest scrap of smoked root and let the absence be a tutor.
A Goblin War-Crier tried to turn the hallway into a trumpet; the shield turned the trumpet into a swallowed note.
Goblin War-Crier: Level 15
Slain. XP increased. → 73%
The wrangler he’d spared earlier came back with a limp and a grudge and learned that caves are collections of second chances mostly for the stone.
Goblin Wrangler: Level 12
Slain. XP increased. → 80%
He slept badly, belly loud, head full of drums that weren’t there, lamp down to a breath. He woke with his fist closed on chalk he didn’t remember picking up.
A pack—two cutters and an iron-guard—tried a pincer at a place where stalagmite ribs made blind corners. He took away their corners. He made the room simple: one door (him), one problem (them). He solved it the only way Bulwarks do: with angle, patience, and the refusal to be interesting.
Goblin Cutthroat: Level 13 ×2
Slain. XP increased. → 92%
Goblin Iron-Guard: Level 16
Slain. XP increased. → 100%
Level Up: 16 → XP: 2%
He stood in the hush that follows finished arithmetic, lamp painting his knuckles into bone again, breath going in as if it belonged there. The drums were elsewhere. The whistles were someone else’s problem. His belly still argued; the tea still tasted like penance. The cave’s cool hand pressed his cheeks and approved by not disapproving.
Level 16. The work ahead had only grown larger, like rooms always do when you learn how to read them. But his marks on the walls made sense to him, and his hands had learned to do quiet things quickly. He wiped the shield edges clean, rolled his shoulders until the mending itch gave, and went looking—not for glory, not for story, but for the next piece of honest stone that needed moving.
He started picking the big problems on purpose.
Not recklessness—there was nothing reckless left in him—but a new arithmetic. The corridors had taught him their grammar; the small prey no longer spoke it loudly enough. He began to read for longer sentences.
He skipped the scavengers, let the maggots keep their quiet ceremony, passed a pair of cutters arguing over a snapped spear with nothing more than a soft rock under their trip-line so the bells would cough once and then forget their job. He hunted for the places with flags: old bone chimes; a stink of cooked fat; amber light where no honest weir reached; walls finger-painted with handprints and crude boars’ heads. Banners happened where rank happened.
The first test came padded and gray—dire wolves working a pincer at a split where stalagmite ribs made blind corners and overhand cuts into jokes. He let one take wood and the other take wall, turned their hunger into a bad angle, and finished cleanly. He didn’t bother to count what it earned him; the cave counted in other ways.
The next test wore copper on its teeth: a war-hog with blade-capped tusks and a handler whose limp said he had opinions about shieldmen. They came fast, proud of straight lines. He made their line into a ramp, let tusks climb the face and ride past while his weight became a hinge, and the handler’s knee learned stone’s language. He walked away from that one with his breath in the right places and the itch under the shield strap telling him the shallow slice across his ribs intended to be forgotten on its own.
The drums changed accent after that—fewer, heavier, answering one another with the patience of authority. He followed the answers.
The hall presented itself not with architecture but with evidence: walls rubbed flat by shoulder after shoulder; old coals in a grind of soot; a collar made of someone else’s vertebrae nailed to a stalagmite like a coat rack. Amber licked the far end and failed to light it; the smoke that made the amber tasted of fat and iron. Bone chimes worried the draft.
He took the lamp low and the shields honest and stepped into the long room as if it might be a throat.
They knew he was there. That was all right. He’d chosen them because they’d know.
Two Iron-Guards in good leather and better posture squared off, and a war-crier stood behind them with a horn whose throat had been lined with copper plates. The voice that mattered sat higher, on a dais hammered from fused stalagmites: armor stitched from boar hide and bronze scraps, an old wolf-pelt thrown across one shoulder, a jaw worked with beads until it looked like it wore its own speech. His eyes found Kevin and did not blink, and when the UI breathed in his vision, it did so with tidy bureaucracy.
Goblin Chieftain: Level 16
The chieftain didn’t roar. He flicked two fingers. The guards came like doors someone had decided were too close together.
Kevin went small, then wide—left knee soft, right heel biting, fore-shield catching the first guard’s weight with that quiet give that turns impacts into arguments. The second tried the obvious correction: flank, step behind, blade low for tendon. The back-shield took that cut with a bark of wood and leather; the bite still got through far enough to prove the point. Hot wet drew its line along his lower back. He let the pain be a fact, not an editor, and moved the first guard into the second’s space with a short, ugly shove that turned two bodies into one problem. Bone knocked plate. Someone swore in a language that treated consonants like cudgels. Kevin answered with a rim-stroke and a step that made a wall out of a man and a man out of the wall.
The war-crier got a note off—a honk that tried to make the stone itself pick sides—and Kevin put the edge of a shield through the horn’s mouth and into the crier’s hands. Copper screamed like a scalded kettle. The echo did them all no favors.
The chieftain moved then: not fast, but correctly. He came down off the dais not as a ruler but as a man who knows rooms, using the angle of the last step to add weight to a blow that wanted to reach around a shield and speak to collarbones. Kevin let it speak to wood instead. It said disrespect in a lovely dialect. Kevin replied in Bulwark: a bash that was almost a shrug, half step, twist—just enough to give the chieftain’s knees a question to answer. The goblin answered with grit and a sidestep and a knife that came up mean and low. Leather bit his thigh; he returned bone to the goblin’s cheek with a sound like someone closing a cupboard hard.
They traded truths. The chieftain had patience and a sense for cadence; Kevin had a room that liked him better. He pulled the fight toward the weir that ran like a quiet stair along one wall. Slickstone makes liars of brave feet. The chieftain took a cut to give one and did, and Kevin took the cut—felt the small warmth bloom and run—and then took the weir from under him. A half-block, a shove, the smallest gift of physics, and the chieftain’s ankle found an argument it couldn’t win. He went down on one knee with a barked syllable that wasn’t a word at all.
The first Iron-Guard climbed back into the world the way disciplined men do: badly hurt but convinced of their job. Kevin gave him the job he deserved—short, efficient, out of the way—then put his whole weight behind a final press that pinned the chieftain’s blade against slickstone, fore-shield crushing wrist to rock. The goblin’s teeth showed; the beads in his jaw clicked. He tried to spit and found no spit. For a fragile, honest heartbeat their breath met in white puffs. Then Kevin pushed through.
Silence moved in with the smoke.
The System arrived like paperwork sliding into view.
Chieftain of the Hollow Tribe slain.
Mysterious Gilded Chest manifests…
The body went still. Then it un-was, but not the way meat fades into air. The space it had used answered differently, as if some deeper rule took precedence: a gilded chest unrolled itself from the corpse, not appearing so much as deciding to be true where a body had been. It gleamed with brassy warmth even in his poor blue, edges crisp, corners banded with a motif that tried to be vines and ended up knives.
He watched it a long breath, because men who open such things without watching first go home without fingers. Nothing else happened. The chest waited like a clerk behind a high counter.
He knelt. The latch was a simple riddled plate; he let the knife’s point be a finger and persuaded it sideways. The lid rose with a sigh that could have been smugness. Inside lay a coil of cloth the color of fresh coals under ash, the nap tight, the weave fine as armor. When he reached, heat tickled his hand—not enough to warn, enough to promise.
Unique (Uncommon): Cape of Fire and Flame
Backdraft (Passive): When struck from behind, ignite the attacker for minor Fire damage. Does not negate incoming damage. Bonus 10 to Armour.
He turned it over in his palms. It wasn’t pretty in the way court things are pretty. It was useful, and it was beautiful for that. He shook it once and the fabric roared in response, embers racing along the hem like a whispered thought, then dying as if embarrassed.
Aural Module Enabled
“Bling! Yolo swag! Dang girl where’d you find this?!” The commentator's voice spewed. “Nice cape Kev! Lookin fly you white white guy! Although having said that, you Humans aren’t really so white are you?!” The commentator sounded even more enthusiastic than usual.
“What are you on about?” Kevin replied. “Are all your references from the early 2010s?”
“Hey Kev?! I’m getting up to scratch on your human History” Kevin heard the air quotes. “One decade at a time. Anyway folks. Look at our boy! Our bouncing baby squeaky clean boy!”
“Please go away…” Kevin said, slewing the cape over his shoulders. He brought a tarnished brass broach—in the shape of a flame—to a close, fastening it around his neck.
“Let’s see if all that pummelling will pay off, folks!” The commentator continued, ignoring his request. “Now remember, if you want in on the action, speak to your local representative and bring along your largest credit boxes. Maybe, just maybe your idea, or your gift, will be given to our dear player Kev! Fingers Crossed. Just remember, the crazier the idea,” The Commentator paused.
A crowd of voices joined the Commentator, “The crazier the show!”
Aural Module Disabled
What the hell? They can decide what happens to me? To what end? And gifts? Was this cape a gift?
He did not have to wait long to see the language the item spoke. Sound scuffed in the long room’s side throat—a patter, a held breath, a tiny oath of iron on leather. He turned a fraction too late on purpose—the Bulwark trick of making the ambush reveal itself while you’re already naming the exit—and a Goblin Cutthroat finished his beautiful silent sprint into a strike he was proud of.
The knife went in where it intended—thin and mean under Kevin’s right shoulder blade, the kind of cut meant to make lungs rethink commitment. Pain blew through him like a hosepipe turned on; his teeth clacked. At the same instant the cape took its vote: heat erupted outward along the goblin’s arm in a fast orange peel, a clean push of fire that wasn’t a bloom but a bite. Hair crackled; skin blistered; the knife’s owner screamed and let go.
Kevin moved how pain teaches—without flourish. Clumsily, he trapped the goblin’s wrist with a twist of shield and forearm, turned, and put the rim where neck meets shoulder. The body went obedient and dropped, smoking. A strong smell of crackling accompanying the slump. He staggered a step, put one palm to stone, and hissed air until his head stopped spinning quite so much as he could unsling one shield and reach behind him. The cape whispered on his back, the pierced hole smoldering its own - flames licked toward one another from either side of the breach, joining hands and stitching itself back to its more comfortable whole.
He grinned—thin, humorless, honest—”Shit,” because the hurt deserved witnesses. He dug the knife out carefully, grasping the leather wrapped bone handle, he breathed heavily between each minute tug, the way Renna had taught him: pull, press, pack. Though he no longer needed salve for out-of-combat wounds such as these, he wiped a small modicum of it on, for pain relief more than anything else, the sting quickly eased as his Second Wind took over for him.
He looked back at the chest. It had already decided it had been here long enough; it bled its gold into the dim, faded, and was again the empty rightness of stone. In its place the room offered only coals dying and bone chimes worrying. The banners hung from their hooks with that sudden humility colors get when the hand that ordered them is gone.
The cape lay on him like a promise he hadn’t meant to make and would keep anyway. He rolled his shoulders; heat pooled and then went docile. He drew the fungus-veil down just enough to take a slow mouthful of the hall’s hot, fat-scented air and let it out in a long, measured line.
