It was raining. Of course it was raining, and they went through the gate already fighting.

  The barricade they’d smashed like a cheap walnut had not been braced to stop them—only to shape them. Timber burned low and oily, sloughing smoke and sparks into the narrow throat beyond. Peat from the mire had been packed tight into the ramshackle beams and bracers—meant for burning long and slow. The gate sagged inward like a kicked jaw, half-collapsed, its broken joints forcing bodies sideways, shields scraping, shoulders catching. Retreat narrowed behind them with every step forward.

  Skaggad swallowed.

  The sound hit first. Not the drums—those were already pounding, steady and deep, felt more than heard—but the layers beneath. Horns bleating short commands. Goblin voices barking in clipped bursts. The wet thud of something heavy hitting stone. Fire crackling where it shouldn’t be.

  Above them, movement.

  Sludge surged through the smoke, axe already moving, cleaving a goblin mid-leap as it dropped from a walkway. The body burst apart on impact, spraying green-black across the wall. Another followed, then another—hooks flashing, blades stabbing downwards. Oil sloshed from above, splattering across shields and helms, stinging eyes, turning the ground slick.

  “Up! UP!” the Butcher shouted from behind Sludge.

  A weighted net slapped across its shoulders, tangling axe haft and arm. Sludge didn’t slow. It walked through the resistance, tore free, and buried the axe into the wall support holding the nearest platform. Timber screamed. The whole structure lurched and folded, dumping three goblins into the crush below. They disappeared under boots and blades without ceremony.

  The Barston mob poured in behind it, compressed tight now—no room to fan out, no room to breathe. Shields up. Heads down. Every step forward earned in inches.

  The old trappers voice roared out from the shield-shell. “On his back!” He cried. “Stick to him now, boys! Keep your throats covered!”

  Goblins rotated in from side alleys and trap-doors, stabbed, hooked, vanished. Bodies were dragged back by clawed hands before they hit the ground. The greenlings had seen enough of their dead littered like stray lettuce at a grocers market. Arrows came not in volleys, but single, careful shots aimed at knees, at gaps in armour, at hands gripping shields too tightly. The Barston tortoise held still—eeking forward like a rat the wrong way up a gutterpipe.

  As the Barston bulk rounded a corner, a man inside the shieldwall screamed as something yanked him sideways into a side passage. His scream cut off mid-syllable. No one chased him. There was nowhere to go. Barely nine of them left now; less flesh to cover.

  Sludge felt the pressure build—forward, sideways, down. This city did not want to be broken. It wanted to grind.

  That was when the fighting thinned.

  Not stopped—redirected. Goblins peeled away from Sludge’s immediate path, flowing aside like water around stone. The press eased just enough to notice it.

  The goblins halted from their rope walkways and plank-lines; braced themselves against false-windows and makeshift palisades. Strangely enough they were singing. No, not singing. Chanting. A deep, guttural rhythm.

  “Hag-nash-pag!”

  “Hagg-nasshh-pagg!”

  “Hagg-nassshhh paggg!”

  Ahead of them, a lithe, lean greenskin stepped out of the smoke—longer than the rest of them. Limbs lined with well-built sinew and veins that protruded in ridges and ribs.

  Though it towered over the green-wash of goblinflesh, it was smaller than Sludge by half at least, lean where Sludge was mass, wrapped in layered scraps of armour hammered from scavenged metal and bone. A mask of lacquered skull was nailed over its face, cracks webbing outward from the brow. Charms and finger-bones clattered at its waist, chest, and neck with every step. As it moved it click-clacked—movements like a puppet on a string, a marionette of murder

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  Hag-nash-pag, if that was its name, seemed quite the decorated warrior of Skaggad. If they had champions of goblinkin, then this would certainly be it. A force that could at least reckon with Sludge; albeit oblivious to the eldritch snarl that lingered deep beneath the folds of lumberjack flesh.

  Its weapon seemed all wrong in its grip, though it held it with the comfort of a painter to a brush. A hooked glaive of sorts—curved blade, weighted spine, barbs worked into the haft itself. Made to catch, to bind, to steer. It was forged to keep distance; to take down giants, goliaths, furious mountain-men wrapped in furs and hides and drunk deep on mushroom ichor.

  It walked forward calmly, goblins parting around it without being told. The drums and the war-chants softened, falling into a slower, heavier rhythm—drones and groans punctuated with shrill peaks.

  The creature pointed forward, smiling almost.

  Sludge raised its axe.

  It tilted its head in response, as if listening.

  And then it spoke. Sharp chords in the clattering din.

  “Kin… eater,” hissed Hag-nash-pag in the tongues of men.

  Sludge swung mechanically and the axe cut smoke. Was it scared? Or was it the cold presence of something else that surged its limbs forward in calm repose?

  The goblin was already moving—sliding inside the arc, the hook snapping up to catch the haft, twisting hard. Momentum was on its side. The force wrenched Sludge’s shoulders sideways, dragged the blade off-line. A goblin leapt in from a side alley, stabbing for Sludge’s ribs. The blow glanced, scraped bone, bit deep enough to hurt.

  Sludge roared and surged, smashing the goblin flat with its free hand. Hag-nash-pag was gone again, reappearing a step to the side, the hook clutched in its free hand flashing out to rake Sludge’s knee downward. The joint buckled for half a second—long enough for nets to slap on its exposed back, for hooks to bite into sludge-sodden meat; the first time on the menu.

  The goblins piled in. From above, from beside, from… beneath?

  The Barston folk surged forward with a shout from the old trapper. “Steady!” They were quick to be hacking, stabbing, dragging goblins off Sludge’s back. The butcher went down to one knee, still swinging, blood pouring from his arm. Someone else fell and didn’t get back up.

  “Steady boys!” Screamed the old man. “Get him up! Keep Axe forward!”

  Sludge tore free, axe rising, falling—crunch, crack, split—but the lean goblin stayed just outside its reach like some demonic frog-knight, circling, steering the flow, letting Sludge exhaust itself on lesser bodies.

  The hook snapped out again and this time it caught good and proper, lurching Sludge’s shoulder off-balance.

  The blade bit into Sludge’s side, not deep, but placed, tearing through muscle with a wet sound that sent a new kind of pain flaring through the borrowed body. Sludge staggered a step. It was bleeding; black, brown, and red.

  [Sludge integrity: 31/75]

  The goblins shrieked in delight.

  Something shifted deep within the sludge. It bristled over it like a frost.

  No words whispered. No thought. Just a tightening, a cold alignment deep beneath meat and bone. Sludge shortened its swings. Stopped chasing. Started controlling space—forcing the green demon to move where it wanted, not where it was fastest.

  Hag-nash-pag clocked on quickly. Its eyes narrowed, its goblin nostrils flared.

  Its movements sharpened, desperate now, the hook flashing faster, sloppier. It whizzed overhead like some annoying kite caught in an updraft. Sludge roared and took another glancing slice from the glaive—then it caught the haft as it sawed back, wrenched hard, hauled the goblin forward off balance, then thrust it bodily into the crush.

  For a moment, everything collapsed into pure violence.

  Steel rang. Bone cracked. Someone screamed Sludge’s name. Not Sludge. Son! Hag-nash-pag tore free from the melee in a splay of backwards limbs, retreating deeper in a blur of movement, vanishing up a ladder of ropes into smoke and shadow.

  The goblins surged to fill the gap—pointy lines of spears and blades pressing forwards like a vice.

  And that was when the trapper peeled into Sludge’s eyeline in a streak of grey and rain-sodden cloth. He wheezed and coughed a bubble of blood, his face twisted, his body braced between the lumberjack and a pressing crush of goblin spears.

  There was no roar of pain. No final stand. Just a selfless, sideways lunge to intercept a spear meant for Sludge’s ribs. The iron head punched through his chest with a dull, final sound. He spat blood, hacked once more with his flailing hand, then staggered forward a step, eyes wide in surprise.

  The old man was smiling at it, just like he had at the murky pool when Sludge stood transfixed by the soft shadows beneath.

  “Hol—” he started. “Hol—Hold…”

  Then his legs folded.

  [Quest failed! Avenge the Old Man’s… Daughter? Sister? Unclear. Kill Goblins.]

  Someone screamed. Someone else tried to reach him but took a hook to the throat and was swiftly dragged under the crunch of goblin feet. Sludge turned too late, axe mid-swing, as the old man hit the ground hard, breath rattling wetly in his chest.

  The drums thundered on. The singing had never stopped.

  Skaggad screamed as the shield-wall collapsed in on itself. Barston boys hacked to pieces in a whirl of scimitars and sharpened shanks.

  And then—when all seemed lost—a frost.

  Rime skittered on the blood soaked floor.