The night march had been steady, boots crunching over frosted dirt, the steady rhythm of one hundred and fifty armored men cutting through the quiet.
"Captain Korran! Sir!"
A lone scout came running up the column, his breath ragged, eyes wide as if he'd seen a ghost. He fell in at the captain's side.
"The goblin camp—" he panted. "It's… already gone, sir. All of it. Every last greenskin's dead."
Korran frowned, steps faltering. "You're certain?"
"Certain as my own heartbeat, sir."
The news traveled down the line in murmurs and raised brows. Even the veterans looked uneasy. Without another word, the captain signaled a quickened pace. The column surged forward, torches swaying in the dark.
When they crested the final rise, the camp lay before them.
It looked less like a battlefield and more like the gods had reached down and torn the place apart. Shattered barricades were splintered into kindling, the ground itself torn and gouged as if by massive claws. Goblin and hobgoblin corpses were everywhere—limbs missing, torsos split clean in two, skulls crushed like ripe fruit.
Some had been pinned upright by broken spear hafts rammed through their chests, others reduced to ragged heaps of meat and bone. The stink was thick enough to choke, a foul blend of blood, bile, and something almost… burnt.
Korran stepped over a headless hobgoblin, scanning the carnage with a tight jaw. He had seen slaughter before—but this… this was personal.
"Search the place. Bodies, loot—anything that's not goblin or hobgoblin," he ordered.
The men spread out, kicking over tents, shifting corpses, peering into the blackened pits where cooking fires had burned.
Minutes later, the sergeant returned, helm tucked under one arm. "Sir. Nothing. No footprints we can follow, no weapons left behind. Whoever—or whatever—did this didn't leave a scrap."
Korran's gaze lingered on a hobgoblin split from shoulder to hip as though it had been done in a single motion. "Virehall's handiwork?" he muttered, though his voice carried doubt.
The sergeant shrugged. "If it is, they've got someone meaner than I've ever met."
Korran turned, voice sharp again. "Forget this camp. We move for the next. If something's cutting down goblin warbands this fast, I want eyes on it before it finds us."
"Double pace!" the sergeant bellowed, and the column surged forward into the night.
---
The silence held for a long moment, broken only by the faint hiss of dying embers and the distant croak of night insects. Rodric's jaw worked as he studied the heaps of the dead, the warped ground, the utter absence of anything living. His destrier shifted beneath him, ears flicking at the smell.
He'd fought goblins since he was barely more than a squire, but he had never seen them beaten like this—not even in their worst defeats. This wasn't victory. This was erasure.
A thought settled in his gut, cold and unwelcome: if it could do this to goblins, it could do it to them.
"Form the column," Rodric said at last, voice flat but edged with steel. "We're not camping here. We ride for the main host."
The sergeant blinked. "Sir, it's near fifty miles—"
"I know the bloody distance," Rodric snapped. "And I know I've no mind to meet whatever walked through this place. We rejoin Lord Halvred at the main goblin camp. If this… thing is still hunting, I'd rather face it with an army at my back than three thousand alone in the dark."
Orders rippled through the ranks, and the uneasy host began to move, their torches forming a wavering river of light against the night. Men avoided looking too long at the carnage as they passed, as though staring might draw the attention of whatever had made it.
Rodric kept his eyes forward, but the image of that mound of corpses burned behind them.
Whatever had done this was still out there. And he had no wish to be the next to learn its name.