She had thought the arena was the crucible. That the screaming pit and its gore-slick floors were the sum of goblin brutality. But beyond the arena's cracked gates lay a deeper, more insidious battlefield. One of whispers. Of poison smiles and knives behind cloaks. Where every nod was a gamble and every alliance a trap in waiting.
And she had walked straight into it.
Eliana's body bore the marks of her rise—scarred muscle, elongated claws, the jagged fangs of her orcish evolution. But power didn't just change the body. It rewrote the world's reaction to it. Where once goblins sneered, now they watched her with narrow eyes and calculating silence. Where once they mocked, now they whispered her name in cautious tones.
Respect, they called it.
But she could smell the truth in the air. It wasn't respect. It was fear. Thinly-veiled. Poisonous. Taut like a drawn bowstring.
And beneath that fear, deeper still, there was hate.
Not the open, animal hate of rivals in the pit—but a slow, cultivated hate. A hate that grew in council halls and back-alley taverns. The kind that didn't challenge you to a fight. It smiled, then poisoned your drink. The kind that watched your every move, mapped your alliances, recorded your routines. That kind of hate didn't roar.
It waited.
Eliana had become a symbol—and symbols were dangerous. Symbols were divisive. They could be worshipped. But they could also be burned.
The goblin kingdom was no kingdom at all. It was a hive of knives and old grudges. A maze of fractured tribes, feuding warbands, and hidden cults that all clawed for power under the illusion of unity. In the cities, blood flowed beneath the cobblestones. In the mountains, monstrous rites were held under the cover of darkness. Beneath the surface—always deeper—there were secrets that reeked of ancient things that should never have been unearthed.
And now, she was one of those secrets.
Her appearance as an orc had branded her. An anomaly. A threat. She was not born into her strength—she had clawed it from the dirt. That alone made her dangerous. She had evolved too quickly, with too much ferocity, too much silence. And the ones who watched from their crooked thrones of bone and rusted iron… they noticed.
Power in goblin society was not clean. It was not linear. It was layered in madness and rot.
There were many paths. Some walked the line of tradition: goblin to hobgoblin to orc to ogre. That was the old way. Predictable. Trackable. But Eliana had learned of the others—the unsanctioned branches. The evolutionary offshoots spoken of only in breathless murmurs, usually just before the speaker turned up dismembered.
She had seen one of them up close.
A Cursed Goblin. Its skin was glassy and black like obsidian, stretched too tightly over misshapen muscle. Its mouth opened sideways. Its hands ended in barbed fingers. Its mind twitched like a trapped insect. It laughed in the dark without reason. But gods, it fought like a demon on fire. It bled shadows.
And it liked her.
Then there were the Demon-Bound—goblins who had offered their souls to ancient forces in exchange for power that did not belong in this world. Their eyes gleamed with unnatural light. They moved like broken marionettes, whispering in tongues that hurt the ear to hear. The ground recoiled beneath them. Eliana had aligned herself with one—just for a time. Long enough to see its true form writhe beneath its skin when it lost control. Long enough to know: if she ever turned her back on it, it would wear her like a cloak.
Even worse were the Goblins of the Mind. They never fought in the pits. They watched from high places, from chambers where blood rituals carved open the veil between worlds. They dealt in toxins that twisted sanity. In illusions that made your own limbs betray you. They whispered lies into the ears of kings and let those lies become war.
One had spoken to her once.
Not with words.
But in dreams.
She woke with a sigil burned behind her eyelids. For three days after, her reflection smiled when she did not.
And yet, despite this darkness—because of it—Eliana rose.
She learned the language of fear. The currency of pain. She played the game, even as it devoured her piece by piece. She bartered with monsters. She broke bread with cannibals. She slept beside traitors, a blade hidden beneath her tongue.
Power was a parasite.
And now it lived inside her.
The goblin lords noticed. The arena masters noticed. The warbands watched. Some wanted to chain her. Others to break her. All agreed: she was becoming something else.
But Eliana no longer cared about their rules. Let them whisper. Let them plot.
Let them come.
She had already begun her next evolution—not just in body, but in mind. The hunger in her veins now twisted with intention. She wasn't simply surviving anymore.
She was weaving something.
A future. A vengeance. A tapestry of power stitched with bone and shadow.
And soon… they would all be caught in it.
Power came with a scent. A stench, more like it. Thick, metallic, like old blood and rotting ambition. Eliana could smell it now—on herself. In the way the other goblins flinched when she passed. In the tight-lipped silence that followed her victories. In the long shadows cast by her growing name.
She was becoming a monster—yes. But more than that, she was becoming noticed.
Every battle was no longer just survival. It was spectacle. A performance in violence. A grim theater of agony where her blade carved her reputation into living flesh. The crowd didn't cheer so much as hunger—for blood, for spectacle, for the fall of the next rising star.
And the higher she rose, the sharper the knives became.
They watched her from the balconies now. The old ones. The goblin lords with their jaundiced eyes and worm-thin smiles. The mutated nobles, stitched together from bloodlines and black magic. The tacticians and spymasters who saw every fighter not as a warrior, but as a piece on a board. And Eliana was now a queen in motion. That made her dangerous. That made her doomed.
She no longer slept fully. Dreams had grown foul—crawling, jagged things. Screaming faces. Dead eyes. The ghosts of the arena. Some she had slain. Others she would. A few… perhaps never would. And yet she welcomed them, for they were honest.
It was in the thick gloom of the lower corridors—where even torchlight seemed afraid to burn—that she encountered him.
Thrax.
An ogre, but not just any ogre. He reeked of politics, of slow poisons and centuries of rot disguised as wisdom. His presence sucked the air from the corridor.
His voice—too smooth, too rehearsed—slithered over the stone like oil:"You've come far, Orc. But remember this: you are nothing. Just another creature clawing its way to the top. And you will fall. We all do."
A statement. A prophecy. A threat.
His eyes were small, glimmering beads of malice sunken into a face like cragged leather. His mouth never smiled, not truly. His fingers twitched near the hilt of a blade far too ceremonial to be decorative. He had killed with it before. He would again.
The air coiled tight between them, filled with silent calculations and invisible daggers.
Eliana did not blink.
"I don't fall, Thrax," she said, her voice a blade drawn from flesh. "But you will."
And then she struck.
A blur of crimson and teeth, her body an explosion of learned violence. Thrax's eyes widened—once—before instinct took over. Steel rang, bone cracked, blood sprayed in arcs like ink across the damp stone.
He was strong. Cunning. A thousand years of death in his bones.
But Eliana was becoming something else.
Each strike was an equation. Every dodge a whisper of intent. She moved with precision born of pain, each scar a lesson, every howl she'd heard in the arena etched into her muscles.
He countered. Slashed. Cursed. He called her a whelp, a freak, a usurper. But the moment he spoke, she shattered his ribs.
A final twist—cold, merciless, perfect—and her blade buried itself in his side, slipping between armor and flesh like a lover's betrayal.
He stared at her, not with hatred—but with recognition. As though he finally saw what she truly was.
And then he died.
Just like that.
The silence that followed was absolute.
The corridor was full now—goblins, hobgoblins, two malformed Cursed watching from the dark like carrion birds. No one spoke. No one breathed.
They all saw it.
Not just the kill.
The message.
Eliana had crossed a line.
This wasn't the arena. This was politics. This was power.
She had killed a kingmaker. A relic of the old guard. A whisperer in the ears of warlords and nobles.
She had not just taken his life.
She had taken his place.
And that was unforgivable.
As she stood there, soaked in blood that steamed against her skin, she could feel it in the bones of the kingdom itself: the shifting of eyes. The reshuffling of allegiances. The cold breath of attention wrapping itself around her like a noose.
There would be no mercy now. No obscurity. No retreat.
She had crossed into the realm of true monsters.
Where every ally was a traitor in waiting.
Where evolution was not just survival—it was warfare.
Where power did not corrupt.
It consumed.