"Why we keep watch?" said Ganth. The white-skinned hobgoblin stood in front of the goblin camp's entrance, an open space of a few meters in a perimeter of sharpened deadwood trunks.

The stakes were positioned outwards in even, tightly packed intervals, ensuring that no bugs could come charging in without risking skewering themselves.

"Nobody come," continued Ganth, his breath forming an outline of fog visible under dim light cast by torches using lightstones as their tinder.

"You do not know that," said Shun, a red-skinned hobgoblin smaller in height by a head and lighter in weight by a dozen kilograms compared to Ganth. "At any moment, the adventurers might strike us. If the native goblins are right, then there is even tell of a gold ring sorcerer in this forest. We as the stronger in our respective tribes have a duty to keep watch when such danger may befall us so."

Ganth grunted absent-mindedly tugged at his jutting tusks. "You speak well. Like our thrall." Ganth took in Shun's form with a dull blue eye. "All goblins from Xin like you?"

"Oni," said Shun in a corrective tone. "Where I am from, we are called oni. And we have kept more of our ancestral tongue than you have here in Terra," said Shun. "A shame, really. I see precious few humans where I hail from, but it does irk my heart to know that the humans in this realm look down upon our kind so.

Should they hear our poetry, what our language is truly capable of, they would not think our tongue one brutish and simple."

"Hah, poetry!" Ganth slapped his musclebound thigh with a grunting laugh. He slung an enormous club fashioned out of ice over his broad shoulder. "You funny. Poetry makes you sit down and think, makes you weak and soft. Maybe that's why you so skinny."

"Well, we already know who is the stronger between us," said Shun with a smirk of confidence.

"Hmph." Ganth grunted in annoyance. "One day, I figure out how you move like that. But you strong for sure. Respect that."

"Martial arts."

"Huh?"

"Martial arts. That is what I use," said Shun. He pointed down to his waist where a lengthy sword of blackened, glossy rock lined with heated cracks hung by string to a skirt-like leg garment fashioned with thick, black cloth.

"Instead of swinging clubs mindlessly, I focus my qi, or mana as you call it, and make every single one of my swings and movements something I grace with the full breadth of my focus and devotion.

Your kind in those cold northern wastes beyond the mountains might have thicker skin and bigger muscles, but without focus, what is the use of all that power?"

"Argh, too many words," said Ganth. "You sound like the thrall now. Always talking about this and that. I only care about being strong."

The hobgoblin flexed his arm muscles, letting them bulge through his thick, icy skin. "And taking with strength. You know, I excited for this war. Lord seems serious. Many of us united now. We can take human lands. Human women."

"I still do not understand your kind's obsession with these human girls. They are so fragile, "said Shun with a shake of his head.

"Hah, easy for you to say!" Ganth pointed a stubby, big finger at Shun's face. "Look at you. Sharp nose. Small face. Big eyes. Look almost as pretty as human girls."

Ganth pointed a thumb back to his own face, at his comparatively wide, blocky head, his shaggy red, greasy and unkempt hair, small eyes, and tusked, bestial mouth. "I am big ugly. And you see women of my tribe in this camp? Some of them uglier than me."

"Fair enough. The few women of your northern tribes I have seen do put quite the icy touch to my passions," Shun put a hand to his chin. "You know, Ganth, perhaps when this war is over, when the lord has united our kind across the five, no, four realms now of life, I can show you to my home.

You mentioned you were bored of the cold wastes, no? Well, there is so much to see where I am from."

"Good food?" questioned Ganth.

Shun nodded.

"Pretty girls?"

"Certainly," said Shun.

"Okay then!" Ganth said, beating his chest with a fist.

"Although first you may have to catch up with some basic cleanliness. And those clothes-," Shun froze, red eyes narrowing as he put a hand to the handle of his sheathed blade.

"Huh?" Ganth picked at his tattered loincloth of icebear skin – the only article of clothing he wore. "I thought this looked good."

"I sense something," said Shun, his voice quiet, serious. His black clawed hand wrapped around his sword handle. "Ready yourself."

"You funny. No human ever come here. Too dark. And humans here weak and scared. Weak black goblins said so already." Ganth turned to Shun with a smile, but the smile faded as he sensed a stern gravity emanating from Shun.

Ganth stood up, holding his oversized club in front of him.

A few seconds later, and the sound of falling and crashing trees echoed through the forest.

"Something big coming," said Ganth. "Very big." The crackle of shattering tree trunks accompanied by the thuds of heavy footsteps became louder. "Very quick."

"Head back to the war tents," said Shun as he kept his hand on the blade but did not unsheathe it. "Tell the champion that we are being attacked. The weight behind these steps do not match any human. Either a monster or a sorcerer's familiar."

"No, I stay here. I fight. I strong." Ganth went up to the edge of the light cast from the lightstone torches, a few meters back from thick growths of darkwood trees. He roared to the vast darkness in front of him. "Face me! I, Ganth of the Frostskulls, am ready!"

The Collector burst out of the trees as a raging pinball of musclebound white carapace, charging right into the hobgoblin that had foolishly shouted out its location.

Having built up to its top, maximal speed, the Collector moved fast enough to appear as a blur to the average human eye, and that velocity compounded with its immense weight meant that when it hit the hobgoblin, it eviscerated the specimen, splitting it apart in a shattered mess of caved in bones and torn flesh.

Or that was what the Collector had calculated based on the hobgoblin's density of muscle mass, height, and approximate sturdiness of bone structure – all details it had parsed mid charge through its sensitive hairs.

The hobgoblin did fly backwards a dozen meters, breaking through the darkwood stake wall entirely and tumbling several times, but it did not die, skidding to a halt in the dirt as an intact, living, breathing specimen, though it did groan in audible pain, clutching at his side where blood began to flower from internal bleeding and shattered ribs.

The Collector clicked its mandibles. Loudly, this time, for never before in its life had it been this disappointed, this wrong with its calculations. It brought shame upon the name of the Collective, it–

Shun slashed at the Collector, unsheathing his blade in a quickdraw arc meant to gut the Collector from the side.

The Collector did not react to the attack. It had assessed the red-skinned hobgoblin variant's physique and estimated its physical capabilities, but this attack was approximately 3.66 times faster than what its musculature could muster, even with considering efficient movements.

The blade clanked into a shower of sparks as it skidded across the Collector's immensely durable carapace.

Shun's eyes widened as he felt impact against a surface harder than any he had felt before ring up his hand, jarring his very bones.

The Collector capitalized on the moment of hesitation and swiveled its head to the hobgoblin, opening its maw and activating its pyrocatalytic glands.

Its tongue retracted and a bulb shaped, muscle powered organ at the back of its throat jutted out in its place, pulsing once in an intense contraction that launched a thin burst of highly pressurized white chemicals.

The chemicals struck against a vibrating, friction inducing piece of faceted bone lined up in front of the glands, the biotrigger, as it was called, and when the chemical jetstream hit the biotrigger, it lit up once more into a beam of brilliant white, blue tinted flame that washed over the hobgoblin's entire body.

The intense light bathed the entire forest once more, and the Collector's compound eyes and sensitive hairs twitched, allowing it to dodge back from another swipe from the red hobgoblin, this time one aimed at its softer, unarmored eyes.

"A fire-breather are you?" said the red hobgoblin variant. He stood with blueish white flames flickering on his skin, staring at the Collector as if utterly unharmed.

The Collector glimpsed at the red variant's surroundings. An acrid, bitter smell of chemical fire and burnt grass rose up through the air from the smoking black patches of devastated earth around it, and yet, at the center of this path of desolation, the hobgoblin remained unharmed.

"Sorry, but I am a bad matchup for you, then," said the red variant. "The tribes of mount Oe have been blessed under its volcanic touch for centuries. Flame alone, lest they hail from the gods themselves, will not harm us."