The cave extended back into the hillside in a broad, descending tunnel — natural limestone, the ceiling high enough to stand in, the walls rough and wet, glistening in the dim light that filtered through the entrance. The tunnel curved to the right after approximately forty feet, and beyond the curve, the light failed and the dark began.

  The sounds were louder here.

  The chatter had resolved into individual voices — dozens of them, overlapping, arguing, laughing (goblin laughter was a sound that belonged in the same category as goblin grins: technically an expression of amusement, practically an assault on the listener's sense of wellbeing), and, beneath all of it, a single voice that was louder than the others.

  Deeper and rougher. Commanding.

  The voice was giving a speech.

  Levin tilted his head. He listened.

  The speech was in Goblin, which was a language that operated on the principle that volume compensated for vocabulary and that grammar was a suggestion rather than a rule. Levin had picked up enough Goblin over seven weeks of encounters to understand the general thrust, if not the finer points, and the general thrust of this particular speech appeared to be:

  "We are strong. We are many. The soft-things in the valley have food. We take food. We take all food. Anyone who does not take food is weak and will be eaten by me personally because I am the biggest and I smell like chicken."

  The last part gave Levin pause.

  He listened for another thirty seconds.

  The speech continued.

  It covered topics including: the strategic importance of sheep (high), the tactical value of turnips (debatable), the correct method for raiding a chicken coop (pull the door off; if the door doesn't come off, pull harder; if it still doesn't come off, eat the door), and a lengthy digression about the speaker's personal combat record, which included the defeat of "a big rock that looked at me wrong" and "a tree that was in my way" and "another goblin who said my chicken smell was bad, which it is not, it is a good smell, the best smell."

  The speech was, by the standards of motivational oratory, comprehensive. It covered strategy, logistics, personal branding, and dietary philosophy.

  It was also, by the standards of anything else, terrible.

  Levin stood at the cave entrance and waited.

  He waited because the speech was still going, and because the speech was keeping the goblins in one place, because goblins in one place were significantly easier to deal with than goblins in many places, and because the fundamental tactical principle that governed Levin's approach to combat — a principle he had developed over seven weeks of goblin encounters and rat clearances and one very memorable troll fight — was this:

  Let them clump together.

  Clumping was the natural state of goblins.

  They clumped when they argued.

  They clumped when they ate.

  They clumped when they slept, piling on top of each other in heaps that were part nest and part scrum and that produced, from a distance, the visual impression of a single large organism made entirely of green skin and bad decisions.

  And they clumped when they listened to speeches, because goblin attention spans were short and goblin speakers were loud and the combination meant that any goblin who wandered too far from the speaker would lose the thread of the speech and wander back, drawn by volume the way moths are drawn by light, except that moths had better personal hygiene and a more sophisticated understanding of risk.

  The speech reached a crescendo.

  "—AND WHEN WE TAKE ALL THE FOOD AND ALL THE SHINY THINGS AND ALL THE BOOTS—" (boots, apparently, remained a topic of goblin fascination) "—THEN THEY WILL KNOW THAT WE ARE THE STRONGEST AND THE BIGGEST AND THE BEST-SMELLING AND NOBODY WILL EVER SAY MY CHICKEN SMELL IS BAD AGAIN—"

  Levin raised his left hand.

  The spell formed.

  It was not an Arcane Bolt. It was not Chain Lightning. It was not the raw, unnamed force that had punched through the troll's chest and left a hole in Cairn Bridge's granite.

  It was a Mana Bolt — the notification had given it a name, and the name, despite his feelings about the notification system and its opinions about his sleeve management, was accurate.

  A concentrated arcane projectile.

  Damage scales with current mana pool.

  Cost: variable.

  The bolt sat in his palm — blue-white and humming, larger than any he had produced before the troll fight, smaller than the beam that had ended it. It was the size of a melon, crackling with arcs of energy that leapt between his fingers and cast sharp, dancing shadows on the cave walls.

  He aimed it down the tunnel. Past the curve. Into the dark where the sounds were loudest and the clump was densest and the goblin king — or whatever title the creature with the chicken smell had given itself — was reaching the climax of a speech that had covered everything from sheep to doors to personal aroma and was now, presumably, building toward a call to action that would send forty-plus goblins streaming out of the cave and into the forest and toward the farms and the village and the people who lived there.

  Levin released the bolt.

  It left his palm with a deep, resonant thrum that vibrated in his chest and in the cave walls and in the air itself, a sound that was felt as much as heard, the way thunder is felt, the way a large bell is felt when you stand beneath it as it strikes.

  The bolt entered the tunnel.

  It rounded the curve.

  The blue-white light illuminated the cave's interior in a single, strobing flash that lasted perhaps a quarter of a second — long enough to capture, in frozen detail, the scene beyond the curve:

  A cavern. Large. Roughly circular. Fifty feet across. Ceiling lost in shadow. Floor covered in refuse, bones, scraps, stolen goods, and goblins.

  Goblins everywhere.

  Sitting, standing, crouching, leaning, climbing on each other, picking at things, chewing on things, arguing about things, and — at the centre of the cavern, standing on a raised rock that served as a podium — one goblin that was larger than the others.

  Considerably larger.

  The goblin king was perhaps four and a half feet tall, which made it a giant among its kind. It was broader than the others, thicker in the arms and chest, and it wore armour — actual armour, metal plates strapped to leather, dented and mismatched and clearly assembled from pieces taken off multiple victims over multiple raids, giving it the appearance of a creature that had mugged a blacksmith's clearance sale.

  It had a crown.

  The crown was a circlet of bent iron with three teeth — actual teeth, goblin teeth, yellowed and pointed — welded to its front like gems. It sat on the goblin king's head at an angle that suggested either a deliberate stylistic choice or a fundamental misunderstanding of how crowns worked.

  The goblin king's mouth was open.

  It had been mid-word when the light arrived. The word was frozen on its lips — the first syllable of whatever the next sentence of the speech had been, a sentence that would never be completed, because the bolt was there.

  The bolt struck the centre of the cavern floor.

  The detonation was not small.

  The detonation was not controlled, calibrated, or any of the other words that Levin had been using to describe his spellcasting over the past seven weeks, words that implied restraint and precision and the careful management of force in enclosed spaces.

  The detonation was a sphere of blue-white energy that expanded from the point of impact at a speed that made "fast" an understatement and "instantaneous" an approximation.

  It filled the cavern.

  It reached the walls.

  It reached the ceiling.

  It reached every corner and crevice and shadow and gap.

  It reached every goblin.

  The sound that emerged from the cave was complex.

  It began as the crack of the bolt's impact — sharp, clean, loud, the signature sound of compressed mana meeting solid matter. This was followed, approximately one-tenth of a second later, by a deeper sound — a boom that rolled through the tunnel and out the entrance and across the clearing and into the forest, where it startled birds from trees and sent small animals diving for cover and caused Pol, at the far end of the perimeter, to drop his boat hook.

  The boom was followed by a rush of air — a hot, fast exhalation from the cave's mouth, carrying dust and debris and the smell (intensified beyond anything the clearing had previously offered. A concentrated blast of goblin essence that hit the perimeter line like a wall and produced, across eleven faces, expressions that would have been funny if anyone had been in a position to appreciate them).

  The air rush was followed by silence.

  The silence was total.

  The chatter was gone. The arguing was gone. The speech was gone. The laughter, the scratching, the rustling, the constant background noise of dozens of living creatures occupying a shared space — all of it, gone, replaced by a quiet so complete that the only sounds were the drip of water somewhere deep in the cave, the settling of dust, and the distant, confused singing of a bird that had been startled from its tree and was now trying to re-establish normalcy through melody.

  Levin stood at the cave entrance.

  His hand was still raised. The blue-white glow along his forearm was bright — brighter than it had been before the cast, which was unusual, because casting normally dimmed the glow as mana was spent. The glow was bright because the reservoir was refilling.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  The warmth behind his sternum pulsed.

  It pulsed again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Rapid, rhythmic, a staccato of golden flickers that came so fast they blurred together into a continuous throb — each one a kill registering, counted, a percentage point being added, and one a tiny increment of power flowing into the reservoir from the mana stores of creatures that had, a moment ago, been alive and were now grey-green motes settling on the floor of a limestone cavern.

  The pulses kept coming.

  Levin counted then lost count at thirty.

  The pulses continued past thirty. Past forty. Past the point where counting was practical or meaningful, because each pulse was identical to the last and the sensation had become a sustained vibration rather than a series of discrete events. A hum that built on the existing hum and raised its frequency and its volume until the warmth behind his sternum was no longer warm but hot, and the hum was no longer quiet but loud, and the reservoir was no longer patient but urgent, filling and expanding and pressing against boundaries that Levin had not known existed until they were being tested.

  The pulses stopped.

  The silence held.

  Levin lowered his hand.

  He stood at the cave entrance and breathed.

  The air was thick with dust and the aftermath of concentrated magical discharge and the fading remnants of a smell that had been terrible before the detonation and was now, somehow, worse, because the detonation had aerosolised components of the goblin habitat that had previously been confined to the floor and were now distributed evenly throughout the available atmosphere.

  He turned around.

  Eleven villagers stood at the perimeter.

  Eleven faces stared at him.

  The faces were arranged in a spectrum that began at Dorin (jaw open, axe lowered, eyes wide) and ended at Pol (jaw open, boat hook on the ground, eyes wide, deaf ear turned toward the cave as though the hearing ear had received enough information and was requesting backup).

  Berta's rolling pin was at her side. Her other hand was pressed flat against her chest. Her mouth was a thin, straight line.

  Aldric's pitchfork was pointing at the ground. His grip had loosened to the point where the pitchfork was being held by approximately two fingers and the memory of intent.

  Tommas's squint had reversed. His eyes were wider than Levin had ever seen them — wider than seemed anatomically possible for a man whose default expression involved the maximum contraction of every muscle surrounding the eye socket. The squint had been replaced by its opposite, and the effect was startling, like seeing a building that had always leaned to the left suddenly lean to the right.

  The rake man had lowered his rake.

  Ria stood at the centre of the perimeter line.

  Her shield spell was active — the golden shimmer wrapped around her in a thin, luminous shell, steady and bright, activated by reflex when the boom had rolled out of the cave and the air had rushed past and the ground had trembled beneath her feet.

  She was clapping.

  She was the only person clapping.

  It was slow — three claps, four, five, six — each one deliberate, each one producing a sound that carried across the silent clearing with the crisp clarity of a single person applauding in an empty theatre.

  The clapping stopped.

  Ria lowered her hands.

  "Told you," she said to Berta. "Before lunch."

  Berta did not respond. Berta was staring at the cave entrance with an expression that her face had never previously been asked to produce and that it was assembling from available components with visible difficulty.

  Levin walked back toward the perimeter.

  His staff tapped the churned earth.

  The blue-white glow along his forearms was fading — dimming from bright to visible to faint, the mana field settling, the reservoir finding its new level.

  The new level was higher.

  Considerably higher.

  The pulses had added — he performed a rough calculation, based on the duration of the sustained throb and the approximate rate of one pulse per half-second — somewhere in the range of fifty to sixty increases. His mana pool had jumped from five hundred and fifty-two percent to somewhere north of six hundred.

  Six hundred growths of his original capacity.

  Many times the thimble.

  The thimble was now so far in the past that it belonged in a museum, displayed behind glass with a small placard reading: "Mana Pool, Original Size, Week One. Note: Actual current size not depicted due to scale limitations."

  He reached the perimeter line. He stopped.

  "How many?" Ria asked.

  Levin looked at the cave. He looked at the settling dust. He looked at the fading glow on his forearms and the queue of golden flickers that were still registering in the warm place behind his sternum, the last stragglers of a mass event that had overwhelmed the system's ability to process kills individually and had instead delivered them in a sustained burst that was still being tallied.

  "I'm not sure," he said.

  "You're not sure?"

  "They were clumped."

  Ria stared at him. "They were clumped?"

  "Very tightly in the cavern. Listening to a speech about chicken smell."

  "Chicken smell?"

  "The leader — the big one with a crown — apparently smelled like chicken. This was, from context, a point of pride rather than a hygiene concern. The speech covered several topics. Sheep. Turnips. Doors. The correct method for raiding a chicken coop. Personal branding. It was comprehensive."

  "And you waited for the speech to finish?"

  "I waited for the speech to reach the part where they were all paying attention and standing close together. Speeches do that. They gather the audience. The audience clumps. The clump is an easy target."

  "So you used the speech as a — as a tactical tool?"

  "I used the speech as a timer. The goblin king was doing the clumping for me. I just waited for maximum density and then—" He made a small gesture with his left hand. A flick. The same casual motion he had used in the mill clearing, a week ago, when five goblins had scattered and a circle of glass had formed on the forest floor.

  The gesture was identical.

  The scale was different.

  "One spell," Dorin said. His voice was hoarse. His axe was on the ground.

  He had, at some point during the last sixty seconds, set it down, and he was now standing with both hands at his sides and the expression of a man who had brought a woodcutting tool to an event that had rendered woodcutting tools — and, indeed, all tools, weapons, items, all physical implements of every kind — comprehensively and permanently irrelevant.

  "One spell," Levin confirmed.

  "For all of them?"

  "For all of them."

  Dorin looked at the cave then looked at Levin. He looked at his axe on the ground. He picked up the axe. He put it back on his shoulder. The motion was mechanical — the motion of a man whose body was performing its routine while his brain was elsewhere, processing information that did not fit into any existing category and that was going to require the construction of an entirely new mental filing cabinet.

  "Home by lunch?" Dorin asked.

  "Home by lunch," Levin agreed.

  The clearing settled.

  The dust from the cave entrance drifted and dispersed.

  The smell — still present, terrible, horrific, and occupying the olfactory foreground with the territorial confidence of something that had nowhere else to be — began, slowly, to fade, carried away by a breeze that had arrived from the south with the impeccable timing of a stage hand clearing props between scenes.

  Levin looked at the cave one more time.

  The darkness beyond the entrance was absolute. The sounds were gone. The chatter, the arguing, the speech about chicken smell and stolen boots and the strategic importance of sheep — all of it, silent.

  Somewhere in that darkness, on the floor of a limestone cavern, grey-green motes were settling into the dust and the refuse and the stolen goods (which had been forgotten in the shock), joining the archaeology of a place that had been occupied and was now empty, and that would remain empty for a long time, because the things that had lived there were gone and the thing that had removed them was standing in the clearing outside, holding a wooden staff and wearing an expression that communicated nothing more dramatic than mild satisfaction and a growing interest in lunch.

  "Right," Levin said. "Let's go home."

  They went home.

  The march south was faster than the march north, partly because downhill is faster than uphill, the group's energy had shifted from the heavy, anxious trudge of people walking toward danger to the lighter, quicker step of people walking away from a danger that had been handled, and partly because Berta distributed bread rolls at the stream crossing and the bread rolls, while not technically edible in the conventional sense, provided a burst of jaw-based exercise that kept everyone alert and moving.

  Pol retrieved his boat hook.

  He carried it over his shoulder for the remainder of the walk, and he did not swing it into any trees, which was either a sign of improved spatial awareness or a sign that the morning's events had recalibrated his understanding of what constituted a weapon and the boat hook no longer qualified.

  Ria walked beside Levin.

  Her shield spell had been dismissed, and braid was intact. Her medallion caught the light through the canopy in intermittent flashes that marked her steps.

  She did not ask about the pulses.

  She did not ask about the reservoir, the golden flickers, the sustained throb that had followed the detonation, or the fact that Levin's forearms had been glowing brighter after the spell than before it, which was backwards, wrong, which was a violation of the basic principle that casting spells costs mana and therefore reduces the visible indicators of mana, and which she had noticed, because she noticed everything, and which she was choosing, for the moment, not to mention.

  She walked beside him, the forest thinned around them, the light grew warmer, and Thornwall appeared in the valley below — small, modest, and doing its committed impression of a place where nothing happened.

  "Levin?" Ria said.

  "Hm?"

  "The chicken smell thing. Was that real? The goblin king actually bragged about smelling like chicken?"

  "At length. It was a central theme of the speech. Apparently, another goblin had criticised the smell, the king had taken it personally, and the speech was, in part, a public rebuttal of the criticism and an assertion that chicken smell was, in fact, a desirable quality in a leader."

  "And you stood there and listened to this."

  "I was waiting for them to clump."

  "You were waiting for them to clump while a goblin king delivered a speech about his personal aroma."

  "Tactical patience."

  "You were listening to a goblin defend his smell."

  "The smell was relevant. It confirmed the location and density of the group. Smell is data."

  "Smell is data," Ria repeated. She was grinning. The grin was wide and bright and slightly incredulous, the grin of someone who had spent the morning watching a Level 1 Mage eliminate a goblin infestation with a single spell and was now learning that the spell had been preceded by a period of quiet, attentive listening to a speech about chicken.

  "Smell is data," Levin confirmed. "The Principia Arcana says nothing about it. But the Principia Arcana was written by someone who had never stood outside a goblin cave at dawn. Field experience fills the gaps that textbooks leave."

  "Is that going in the notebook?"

  "It might."

  "'Day forty-nine. Discovered that goblin kings give speeches about their smell. Tactical applications: significant. Personal discomfort: also significant.'"

  "Something like that."

  They reached the village gate. The gap in the fence. The non-gate that served as Thornwall's primary point of entry and that welcomed returning heroes with the same architectural enthusiasm it welcomed everyone else, which was none.

  The group filed through.

  The village absorbed them. Shutters opened. Faces appeared in windows. A dog barked. The bell-ringer, who had been watching from the bell tower with the elevated perspective of a man whose job gave him the best view in the village and the least to do with it, struck the noon bell.

  Said bell rang across Thornwall.

  It rang across the farms, the goat pastures, and the eastern slope where Tommas's goats were testing the fence with renewed vigour.

  It rang across the Leaky Sovereign, where Marda was standing in the doorway with a towel over her shoulder and an expression that contained, beneath its usual fortifications, something that might have been relief.

  Levin walked through the village.

  The eleven volunteers dispersed — peeling off toward their homes, farms, shops, lives, carrying their axes and pitchforks and wooden swords and rakes and boat hooks and rolling pins back to the places where these objects belonged, which was anywhere that was not a goblin-infested forest.

  Dorin clapped Levin on the shoulder as he passed.

  The clap was heavy and it nearly knocked Levin sideways.

  "Good work," Dorin said. Two words and delivered flat. Containing everything that needed to be said and nothing that didn't.

  Berta pressed a bread roll into Levin's hand. "Eat," she said. "You're too thin. Especially those wrists."

  Pol waved the boat hook in farewell. The boat hook caught the edge of a market stall's awning and pulled it six inches to the left. Pol did not notice. The stall owner did.

  Levin reached the tavern.

  He pushed open the door. He crossed the common room and went behind the bar.

  Marda was already there.

  The kettle was on.

  The good waterskin — the one that didn't leak, with the brass cap, the one she had given him that morning with a hand that had almost touched his arm — hung from a hook behind the bar, returned to its place.

  "Goblins?" Marda asked.

  "Handled," Levin said.

  "All of them?"

  "All of them."

  Marda looked at him and at the dust on his clothes, the faint blue-white residue on his forearms, the bread roll in his hand. She looked at his face, which was calm and slightly dusty and showed no signs of exertion beyond a faint flush across the cheekbones that could have been attributed to the walk or the morning air or the sustained output of enough magical force to eliminate a cavern full of goblins in a single cast.

  She poured his tea.

  She set it on the bar.

  She did not ask how.

  She did not ask how many.

  She did not ask about the cave or the speech or the chicken smell or the detonation that had shaken birds from trees half a mile away.

  She poured the tea and set it down and turned back to the kitchen, and the gesture said everything that her words did not, which was: you're back, Ria is back, the waterskin is back, and the rest is your business.

  Levin picked up the tea.

  He took a sip.

  Acceptable.

  The warmth behind his sternum hummed. Six hundred and something percent. The exact number would require concentration and the blue status box and a willingness to look at numbers that he had been avoiding for seven weeks, and he was not, at this moment, willing.

  He was willing to drink tea.

  He was willing to stand behind the bar and watch the dust motes drift through the afternoon light and listen to Ria in the kitchen, telling Marda about the march and the cave and the speech and the single spell that had ended it. Her voice bright and animated and punctuated by the sound of soup being prepared, because Ria's response to every significant event was to make soup, and the soup was always good, and the rosemary was always present, and the kitchen was always warmer when she was in it.

  He set the cup down.

  He picked up the broom.

  [Sweeping: Level 9!]