The battlefield was easy to interpret.

  Seven goblins, one in the middle with orange skin and scars over half of his body, facing Mark and company in a spread-out pattern. Scorch marks covered the ground, the evidence of Aaron’s bombing easily seen, but the goblins were transforming the ground into a solid dais right underneath, so the marks were vanishing. They weren’t running. They were preparing. Six goblins prayed on their knees toward the Stone Shaper in the middle and mana crystallized out of the air, forming lines and spirals on the ground around the cohort, like sugar settling at the bottom of a swirled cup of cold tea.

  Scattered weapons lay beside the goblins and the goblins did not reach for those weapons, but they glanced at Mark with side eyes. They continued to pray to the one in the middle.

  They were still 300 meters away.

  Mark pulled his Kinesis in all the way, stepping down onto the stone ridge, reaching far with Union, all the way to the casting goblins. His team let go of his handles as they went back to him. They saw what he was doing.

  Touching these goblins with Union was the weirdest feeling to a Union that Mark had ever felt before. It was like trying to touch an egg. Or touching the surface of a freshly frozen pond. Something was forming there, among the goblins, and Mark’s touch glanced off of that shielding, only briefly, and only because he hadn’t expected to feel something in the way.

  And then Mark focused and his Union shattered that nascent shield and drew it out of the goblins in a way Mark did not understand, and did not need to understand right now. What he felt was 3 goblins die to a Union of vein decay, and the others not die at all. They faltered.

  Mark rushed forward with Isoko running beside him and Samson carried on a handle.

  One goblin with vines entwined on his neck and chest reached out, toward his remaining people, with his other hand he reached for the corpses around them. Plants sprung out of everyone, and then died suddenly, and the goblins were revitalized. Mark tried to decay them again, but it wasn’t working. They were enchanted to heal faster than he could kill them right now.

  The goblins rallied.

  Four goblins, with blast wounds already healing, versus Mark, Isoko, Barba, and Samson, on a 10-meter-wide half-natural ridge that the goblins could knock down whenever they wanted. Not ideal. No fight was ever ideal.

  Behind them, Mark felt as Barba lined up a shot, the curve of the crater wall just enough to pass Mark, Isoko, and Samson by.

  Contact happened fast.

  A bullet knocked the Stone Shaper shaman on the head, cracking his neck as his upper body went backward, and then he stood firm and glared back at Barba, lifting a hand. A rock lifted off of the ground, turned to ten different needles, and shot forward, aimed at Mark, Isoko, Samson, and mostly Barba in the back line.

  Samson lifted a hand and a shield intercepted all of the stone, but the force behind the attack was great and Mark felt the pressure as Samson was knocked backward, because Samson was still holding onto Mark’s transport.

  Isoko said, “I’ll lock it down.”

  She meant she would Tactile Telekinesis the ground when she got closer, but there was no time for that many words.

  Mark rushed forward, 50 meters away, then 20, and finally at the goblins. Mark gave Samson a running start and Samson swung forward, releasing his handhold and bringing his mace to bear directly on a goblin who was picking up a stick. Other goblins were pulling stones out of the ground like they were making clubs and spears.

  And then Isoko landed and pulsed the ground with platinum, like a lightning flash on a screen, except the screen was the entire ridge for the nearest 10 meters. The stone weaponry broke off in the ground, the creation of weapons interrupted. Isoko faltered even as she ran forward, faster than even Mark flew, aiming right for the healer goblin with the dead vines around his neck.

  Mark stopped trying to kill the goblins directly as he focused on adamant and weakness, and on the strength of his team… Something was still off, though. Nothing was off with the enemy. It was with his team. Something was off and he didn’t understand it yet.

  He pushed through.

  The battle was joined.

  Stone implements rose into the control of three of the remaining goblins. The worrying one was the Shaman, with his much bigger stone clubs. The vine healer had his vines.

  Samson cracked his mace down onto one smaller stone goblin and the goblin tried to fight back, but Samson’s mace was insistent and the goblin’s mace struck grey shielding.

  The Shaman aimed for Samson with his weapon, turning it into a handful of stone spears and slamming it into the man, but Mark was there, watching the vector, intercepting the spikes with a thin layer of adamantium.

  And then Samson struck his target a second time, and instantly something strange happened. Mark, Isoko, and Samson, but not Barba because she was probably too far away, all gained a grey sheen to their bodies.

  Mark didn’t have time to contemplate that, but he was pretty sure Samson was able to make body shields out of damage, somehow. He was dealing with two Stone Shaper goblins, but only one of them was the Shaman.

  To the side, Isoko slammed her rapier across the head of the vine goblin, but she met solid flesh instead, and her blade gonged, like she had slapped something too hard to cut. The goblin sneered and tried to bite at Isoko’s legs, but Isoko moved with speed and precision, transitioning her grip backward on her blade to then slam her blade down into the goblin's head. It was like piercing stone, but Isoko could do that occasionally. Sparks flew and she buried her blade up to her hilt, the edge going down through the goblin’s face and through its chest.

  The goblin did not die instantly. It would die soon enough.

  Mark did not try to kill it; he was already defending stray stone shots and fortifying with Union. And then Mark turned his adamantium shield into a long, curved blade, as the Shaman coiled his hands together and summoned some sort of ethereal stone, all glowing and solid, but Mark slashed through the ethereal thing, not knowing what it was. The magic vanished.

  The other Stone Shaper goblin, not the Shaman, lifted himself into the air and then swung down with his mace, but Mark simply turned his adamantium into a poker and rapidly stabbed into the goblin's head, killing it, and then ripping his adamantium through the dying thing, turning it to bloody chunks on the ground. Dead in under half a second.

  Samson slammed his mace down onto the one he had hit again and the shields around Mark, Isoko, and Samson turned stronger.

  The Shaman focused on the ground, and the ground turned to mud.

  Isoko countered with a platinum flash, but it was weaker this time because she had to contend with the power the goblin had put into the stone ridge. Platinum warred with orange, and orange won. Stone was the Shaman’s element, after all. Isoko’s Power was not nearly as deep.

  The Shaman roared, “You’re mine, now!”

  And then all of the mana crystals that were on the ground vibrated into the air, ripping at everyone in the area like razor blades. The attack blocked out the sky, going far, and the Shaman passed into the fog of stone mana blades. It laughed. It tried to hide. Mark and Isoko knew where it was anyway.

  Samson slammed down into the downed goblin again, still not killing it, but doing something valuable, because the Shaman’s blades stopped cutting. They felt like grains of sand instead of knives. Mark’s armor wasn’t broken at all, though, so he had no fucking clue how the goblin was cutting him with blades that didn’t actually get through his armor at all.

  A thousand different blades of stone scraped across Mark, Samson, and Isoko, ripping at their flesh as much as the Shaman could, and finding only shielding. The air was filled with more than just his astral body, but there was a lot of that, too. Mark felt his Union almost break, but only because he wasn’t expecting all of the mana in the air to be so disruptive.

  And then the scattered metal blades of the dead goblins lifted into the air, held on ephemeral ideas of stone goblins, holding them strongly. Ghosts in the stone. Something pulled at Mark’s body, at the metal in his visor, and probably at Quark in his backpack, because his visor died. The lens started to scrape with stone carvings, blocking his vision.

  The goblin laughed straight ahead, but his vector was to the side, floating off of the edge of the stone ridge. He was trying to cut at their backside.

  Mark rushed forward and swiped a blade of adamantium at the Shaman and the Shaman sneered, welcoming the weapon, wrapping it with ghostly-goblin hands even as the blade came for his neck. The Shaman thought he could control the metal coming for him as he controlled the metal all around, but that wasn’t happening. In the brief second that the blade was descending to the Shaman’s neck, the Shaman tried to wrap it with more and more cutting stone and mana crystals.

  But Mark swept his blade through the Shaman, and the goblin still didn’t understand he was dead even as he died midair.

  Mark swiped the blade through the orange goblin a few more times, turning the Shaman to bloody chunks.

  The mana dust storm died slowly.

  The main threat was probably gone, but Samson was still slamming his target, restoring the shielding around Mark, Isoko, and himself. Grey sheens turned to something clear and almost invisible. Samson still couldn’t kill the goblin, though he had certainly locked down the goblin.

  Mark focused on the goblin, pulling out all of the goblin’s strength and giving the goblin all of the group’s weaknesses in turn.

  Samson slammed the goblin twice more and the goblin’s head was proving harder than either Samson’s mace or the stone underfoot, but the goblin was knocked out, so it wasn’t fighting back—

  The mace went through the goblin’s face and smashed its brains across the melty stone ridge.

  The fight began and ended within 20 seconds, but the fight hadn’t even really started.

  It had taken Samson a minute of whaling on the insensate goblin to kill it.

  Barba and Aaron were walking this way even before Samson had killed his target.

  They looked in a bad way.

  Barba was bleeding and Aaron looked much worse than Barba, but Mark was already healing them and so was Isoko. How far had the Shaman’s dust storm reached? It must have gone pretty far. Barba’s belt was sparking; broken. Her rifle was bent. Aaron’s backpack was in tatters, and half of his metal armor was twisted. The other half was gone. Had he removed it? He had removed it. Samson looked okay, though. He had managed to shield his stuff.

  Samson needed a better weapon and Skill if he was going to do nothing but whale on a target as a distraction, though. Did Mark really have to throw him some trash to kill? The fuck was up with that? Anyway. Quark might have been trashed along with all of Mark’s lenses, but Isoko and Samson had done just fine. As long as the enemy wasn’t focused on them, they could provide support... But Barba and Aaron had been too far away to receive that shielding.

  Eliot was talking.

  “Sorry, repeat that?” Mark asked, his coms not working right.

  Eliot garbled static in Mark’s ears.

  Isoko filled Mark in, saying, “He’s sending more visors and stuff. Another body for Quark. Near as he can tell there are three more main fights between strong forces, and a whole lot of trash down south. The Lightself goblins, who seem to be in charge, and the trihorn one that Barba saw, and some beamer goblins, and the main camp...” Isoko paused. She said, “Decision time, guys, and you know what I mean. That was fucking dangerous, and—” She stopped herself there.

  Aaron looked happy to be told that the fight was too much. Barba looked worried, but solid. Samson smiled a little under his helmet, feeling good about what had happened. Mark wasn’t sure why he should be feeling good. That had gone… decently well. But… Mark wasn’t sure.

  Isoko told them, “All your stuff was trashed.”

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  Yes, that.

  She didn’t need to say the rest of what needed to be said, because all of them knew what she meant.

  And yet Barba’s face was dark with realization.

  With hate.

  “My desire for revenge remains unblemished,” Barba said, as she held her bent rifle and focused, her vector pushing inside the metal. “And a Hunter is never without a weapon.”

  Her Skill flashed within the metal and the rifle straightened, flexing, groaning, and then snapping suddenly back into its old self. Magic sparked within the thing, breaking and remaking, and when Barba’s eyes stopped fluttering, when her vector was back in her own body, the rifle looked even better than before.

  “Neat trick,” Mark said, surprised. “Didn’t know Hunters could do that?”

  “Sacredcuts are good with weapons,” Barba said, as if that explained anything at all.

  Aaron said, “I can still scout, but I’m out of bombs.”

  Samson said, “I need to actually fight and I’ll be doing more.”

  Mark felt there was something he was missing because Samson had not been able to kill a single goblin very well. And the guy had been practically crushing it as he whaled on it. And that was too much.

  Mark straight-up asked, “What’s with the slow kill on that one?”

  Isoko was right there with Mark, though she said nothing. She just stared. She wanted an answer, too.

  Samson paused. He looked from Mark to Isoko then back to Mark. “You think—” He shook his head, saying, “I needed to get as much shield as possible out of that one. I can kill a goblin.”

  Barba nodded, like she knew what Samson had been doing all along. She probably had.

  “… Ah,” Mark said.

  “Well okay then,” Isoko said. “That makes me feel better.”

  Samson’s face flushed a little under his helmet, but he said nothing about how he felt.

  For Mark, this was fine. You could never find out everything about a guy’s Skills from just his words; you had to be there and see them in action, first. Now Mark knew how he needed to fight around Samson.

  “I’m not going to kill all of the ones in the next fight. Some will get through.” Mark reformed the stirrups for them to grab onto, saying, “I didn’t see any bows in this group, so that must have been you, Aaron.”

  Aaron grinned. “I took out their bows, yes, and the Marksman, too. Stuffed a grenade in his mouth.” He lightly kicked at one of the desiccated bodies that the vine goblin had utilized. “I need more bombs, though.” He asked Isoko, “Is Herb on the coms?”

  “Yes, and resupply is coming in now,” Isoko said, nodding toward the south. “This is stuff Eliot had prepared for normal replacements, and there are standard grenades in there. He doesn’t have armor or artifacts. Hoverbelt resupply is coming in along with a bunch of other stuff from the Sacredcuts for use against the goblin camp down south.”

  Drones came in even as Isoko was speaking, each of them labeled for individual persons. The drones dropped the stuff right there on the Shaman’s half-formed magical dais atop the crater ridge.

  They got to putting on the replacements.

  Mark would have loved to stand there and stare at the sights of the grasslands on the left and the magical forest on the right, but there were goblins to kill. He dumped his broken phone out of a thin adamantium shell and replaced it with a new one that was already glowing silver, Quark flickering before going dormant again. Mark slipped the new phone into his backpack and took out his broken coms from his helmet to replace those as well.

  “— from the craters— Mark’s here now.” Eliot was already talking about something, but he restarted, “So the goblins are coming in from the upper two craters. We’ve counted 45,000 goblins, with 3 groups of around 10 each that are worth a damn, with high Power Levels. Everything else is either fodder or not quite fodder. PL’s in the 25s, like the fodder Mark was killing.

  “There’s another Shaman like the Stone Shaman riding the mole dragonoid. We think he’s an animal controller, but without any animals to control but the mole dragonoid.

  “The Lightself goblins are now firmly identified as the leaders, with the tri-horn being the main leader of the camp. He hasn’t been active since Barba unearthed him with that welcoming shot at the trapped entrance you guys came through, but he has been seen at the other battlefields. The paladins there uncovered him and he vanished. He was testing them, more than he was trying to fight.

  “And then there’s a splinter group of high-energy beam goblins. We think those ones are trying to escape and spread, and way earlier than they normally should. That’s probably the leader’s influence. Team Tartu is dealing with the beamers as they try to escape from the northeastern crater.

  “Teams Lee and Franston are at the other exits, and they are twiddling their thumbs for most of the action is on you guys. All of the teams are backed up by paladins so they’re doing a lot better than expected.”

  Mark didn’t know Franston, and Lee was a good guy, even if he had been the one who wanted to hunt goblins for sport and to loot their primitive societies. Mark still didn’t know how he felt about that. It seemed wrong. Lee was on the Kaiju Squad, though, and he was a big flier, so he and his team could probably do that; just kill goblins while leaving some alive, take all their stuff, and then come and do it again next week.

  Still seemed dirty, though, even if the goblins had been setting up here in the canyons to make a civilization with the ultimate goals of picking off the humans for use as their own breeding slaves...

  … Well… thinking about it that way...

  Mark was perfectly fine with doing horrible things to horrible goblins. Kill them all and take their stuff. It wasn’t like you could ever actually rid the world of goblins anyway. Might as well leave a goblin nest to continually regrow if you knew it wouldn’t be an actual problem.

  This particular goblin nest was an actual problem though, so it had to go.

  Mark said, “Tell Lee I’m claiming finder’s fees on everything the goblins have taken to their main camp, and that we’re headed to the main camp now.” Mark didn’t wait for confirmation as he looked to his temporary team, and said, “Now that I know what you can do, we’re doing this a bit stronger. Aaron, don’t get hit and plant your new bombs wherever. Barba, pick valuable targets with Isoko. Isoko on security. Samson on keeping shields tight by killing fodder. I’m killing everything I possibly can, and then we’re cleaning up what I can’t kill outright.”

  Aaron strapped new grenades to his chest and waist. Samson nodded. Barba was focused, and Isoko was ready.

  Mark held out his stirrups for the team to grab on as he slotted new lenses into his helmet. He was ready in a moment and so was everyone else, so he said to Eliot, “Lay out the path to the main base. We’re going in.”

  “Okay!” Eliot said, “And now that we’re here, you should know that they’re forming killzones inside of the city they built. They hope to draw you inside, but we have special bombs for that. As for the rest…”

  Eliot spoke of the city ahead and what to expect as Mark and them went forward.

  The crater wall angled down to a second crater wall, both of them more like malformed city walls than natural stone formations. Mark got to the junction between canyons, and saw the fight ahead of him long before he got there.

  Down below the next canyon wall was a land of bulbous buildings, separated from the walls and looking like orange soap bubbles piled onto each other. Holes in the bubbles led to interior spaces while flat surfaces layered around the outside, like balconies and walkways and other sorts of exterior spaces. It was a whole little city, of a whole lot of goblins. They were moving in organized fashions, of which Mark could only guess, and which looked like a city setting up for a siege. There were no civilians in goblin culture, though. All of them were warrior males. Most of them were young, maybe born in the last few hours, but amongst those young ones were week-old goblins, or older, organizing all the rest.

  And there were goblins on the wall, between here and there.

  The goblins pinged them with crossbow bolts, but some of their crossbows snapped. They were not well made, and these were all basically children. They were still children that would kill if they got the chance. Mark felt their hunger from here.

  Mark Union’d them all to death and continued down the way, down the road leading to the city. To the enemy.

  Without even trying, Mark entered into the flow.

  And then Mark was among them, and Samson fell into a lot of them, smashing and crunching, and grey shields snapped around all of the team of humans, while Barba lifted her rifle and took aim at a distant target that Mark didn’t even recognize as a threat. But then Mark watched as Barba’s target’s head exploded, and the goblin had been at the top of a tower, acting as a mind goblin organizer, but now it was dead and the goblins’ morale crashed with it. Some of the youngest ones started running around, acting like horny idiots, rushing to get to Mark and the team, to bite and transform if they could. And then Aaron planted bombs, or at least that’s what Mark assumed happened, because the guy vanished and parts of the goblin city exploded, and smoke began to billow up from the deeper parts of the stone bubble city. And then Aaron came back, and said something about needing more bombs.

  They would not be entering those tunnels leading down. They would not be entering those traps.

  They would be blowing up the entire place, instead, and smoking out the enemy into the open.

  Mark got to killing with his team right beside him the whole time.

  They moved as a unit with Barba slamming off shots every other second, taking down every strong target that tried to mount a defense that was stupid enough to lift into view. More elemental bombs went off inside of the city, and parts of the stone itself began to melt downward, and goblins poured out into the world, only for Mark to slam them with black lightning, killing them by the hundreds, but there were 45,000 of them to go.

  It was a slaughter.

  Every so often Barba took potshots at flickering lights she saw in the distance, far outside of Mark’s current focus of all the goblins around him. Those lights were the Lightself goblins. The blue tri-horn.

  He never appeared close enough or solid enough for Mark to hit him, though. He remained distant, and the very second Mark was able to touch him with Union he turned back into light, and Mark had to focus on the goblins in front of him.

  Eventually, after shooting at the invisible enemy and breaking the tri-horn’s cover the tenth time, Barba broke the flow a little, asking, “That’s you helping me find the blue fucker, isn’t it.”

  “Yes,” Mark said.

  Barba nodded and slammed off three shots into the heads of three different red goblins who were coming out of the broken ground, only 10 meters away from her. Those red ones had a habit of exploding if they got too close to their targets. The explosions didn’t seem to harm the goblins, but they certainly did a number on the shields surrounding the team. As Barba’s bullets entered the red goblin, the red goblins exploded into red giblets, and then Barba focused on her rifle again, refilling her ammo with her Skill as a Hunter.

  She preferred arrows, for they were stronger, but when there were hundreds of soft targets it was cheaper to conjure tiny bullets rather than large arrows.

  Some goblin crossbow bolts harmlessly struck Mark’s chest and head, impacting from an over-the-top angle. Some goblins were firing from far away, from high up and out of sight, and hitting Mark even when he was moving back and forth and cutting open holes in the ground to get at the goblins inside. The impacts left small grey cracks in his shield. Mark ignored the ‘threat’ as he opened the wall in front of him and carved through five goblins that were huddled under a protective shield. Their shield was not nearly as good as Mark’s.

  And then Samson crushed a goblin underfoot, and Mark’s shield healed to full strength.

  Barba picked off more archers with more pops of her rifle.

  Isoko sliced through a goblin made of stone that didn’t die right away, and then she sliced it up some more, her platinum rapier flashing as she moved. The goblin died, eventually.

  More multicolored bombs ignited in the distance, and Mark felt the goblins in the area rush to get away from the brand new fires.

  Aaron reappeared and took a small break next to Barba, next to the resupply of bombs that had just come down on drone drop. He happily announced, “Tunnels are now fully on stonefire! That shit ain’t gonna stop burning for a long time!”

  Mark nodded.

  There was nowhere for the goblins to go except through them.

  And then Mark resumed the flow, and the team continued the slaughter until not a single goblin was left.