Four weeks later an army of goblins and bone knights arrived. Kegan couldn’t get an accurate estimate because he was driven off before he could see the tail end of the army.

The goblins were used as scouts and they flooded the valley in groups of five to ten. The small groups only lasted a day. They quickly realized that Kegan could easily kill an entire group of goblins and disappear before any other groups could move in to assist. The goblins had an even bigger problem with all of the traps that littered the valley. Snares, hidden pits, and buried stakes took a heavy toll on the leading groups of goblins.

Hundreds died every day, and nights were almost worse. It was common to find groups of sleeping goblins with all of their throats slit and not a single sign of a struggle.

On the third day the bone knights moved into the valley to speed up the process. They discovered that many of the pit traps were weight based, and the lighter goblins didn’t weigh enough to trigger the traps. They shrugged off the traps at first, just pulling the bone knights out and letting their healing take care of the injuries. But the metal spikes in the pits were made specially for them. The stakes were barbed and it was almost impossible to get them out if they had penetrated too deeply. Their only option in many cases was to cut off the entire foot and let it regrow.

Most of the bone knights were mindless thralls, so the loss of a foot didn’t bother them. However, the bone knight commanders were not mindless, and they worried about how many casualties they were taking. Their success on campaigns was measured by how many goblins they lost. They were far from the front lines of the war, which meant there was a large supply of goblins. But losing so many would still look bad. The bone knight commanders had decided to speed things up by taking a hundred bone knights and heading directly for the cabin they’d seen.

Kegan had fought and attacked the goblin groups that came close to his cabin. So the bone knight commanders had assumed that was his base and resting place. If they could force out their prey they’d be able to chase him into exhaustion and capture him. The sorceress wanted him alive.

Despite the numerous traps that they ran into the bone knights were quickly able to make it to Kegan’s cabin. They were surprised to find Kegan waiting for them and ready to fight.

Twenty feet out from the cabin in a full perimeter, there was a low wall of cuttings and debris from trees. There were wooden stakes sticking out of the wall. It looked like barely enough to impede goblins, but the bone knights wouldn’t have much trouble climbing over or through it.

Kegan was standing at the only break in the short wall holding a set of harpoons and wearing full metal armor from head to toe.

The five bone knight commanders were excited to see their target waiting for them. They sent fifty of the bone knights charging towards Kegan, and the other fifty to surround the wall and capture him if he tried to escape.

Kegan immediately began flinging the harpoons at the charging bone knights. Moving in thick bone armor took way too much energy, and meant they had to eat more goblins. So all of their armor was thin, and each of Kegan’s thrown harpoons were able to pierce through the front and back of the armor.

Eight bone knights went down with harpoons in their chest before the first ones reached Kegan. He held them back for a few moments with a halberd. Cracking open the helms and skulls of the first few over eager bone knights. They were eventually able to force him back through the entrance of the small wall. Only one bone knight could fit through the small entrance in the wall. Each time Kegan incapacitated a bone knight, the other bone knights were forced to pull it back, to prevent Kegan from hacking away until the bone knight expired.

The stalemate only lasted thirty seconds, and by then the other half of the bone knights were finishing their encirclement.

The bone knight commanders were worried if they let this fight continue they might actually lose one of their bone knights. The loss of bone knights was rare, and would have been a huge embarrassment.

They ordered the knights to start climbing over or through the wall to surround Kegan. The wall was topped with a sticky sap that only slightly slowed them down.

Kegan ran from the wall and headed towards the cabin. He was much more nimble than the bone knights in his iron armor. Bone armor had to be thicker to be effective, and the joints were either weak points or a hindrance to movement.

Kegan ran up a small ladder in front of the cabin that brought him to the roof. He brought the ladder up after him and threw it aside on the roof. One of the commanders noticed a poof of sawdust as the ladder landed. He noticed that most of the roof was actually covered in sawdust. He hadn’t thought much of it before because it appeared that the human had done his sawmilling in the yard around the house. But that didn’t explain why there was sawdust on the roof.

Kegan raced up to the middle of the roof. Making sure to keep his footing. At the top of the roof he saw the bone knights congregating around the cabin. He threw harpoons at the ones that had reached the house first, knocking them off in their attempts to climb up. Only seconds later there were too many at the cabin clambering onto the roof.

He quickly looked through the hole he’d made in his roof down into the shallow pool of water in his cabin. ‘I hope that will be enough’ he thought, before lighting a torch with his fire starter perk, throwing the torch into the air and jumping through the hole in his roof.

The bone knight commanders standing back from the fight all saw the torch fly into the air, and Kegan disappear into the cabin. The commander that had observed the sawdust realized what was about to happen, he shouted “No!” right before the torch landed and a slow growing fireball lit up the cabin and the hundred bone knights crawling over it. Fire raced across the lawn that was covered in sawdust and reached the low wall that also caught on fire.

The bone knight commanders rushed in to order the bone knight thralls to roll around on the ground to put out the flames. The ones that were still conscious followed the orders. But the flames weren’t going out easily. The sticky sap from the walls had stuck to them and continued to burn slowly.

The cabin itself had quickly caught fire, and all of the bone knights on it were lost as the massive fire stopped other knights from getting close enough to drag them out.

Just thirty seconds after the explosion the front door of the cabin exploded outward. With steam rolling off the metal armor, Kegan spotted a clear path to the outside of the circle. He launched harpoons at the only two bone knights blocking his way, including a commander. Before anyone could stop him Kegan had made it to the wall and dove over it through the flame. The chasing bone knights stopped short and were forced to just watch as their target ran off into the woods.

As the fires died down the commanders counted the losses. Forty three bone knights were dead. Seventeen had just slivers of bone armor remaining. The fire had taken the most, but they had realized too late just how deadly the harpoons were as well. They were the perfect weapons for countering the regenerative abilities of the bone knights. The commander that was hit with a harpoon barely survived, and they only extracted the harpoon by hacking into his chest and pulling it out the side. He used up all of his own bone armor and the bone armor from two other knights in order to survive. All of the other bone knights hit with harpoons perished.

Meanwhile as the bone knight commanders lamented their losses, Kegan was busy starting a second fire. The wooden staircase he’d build to make it easy to enter and exit the valley was going up in flames. The corpses of the goblins tasked with defending the stairs only fed the fire. Kegan headed up the mountain path. There were a few groups of goblins spaced out along the path, but none of them were close enough to each other. Kegan easily cut them all down.

On the other side of the mountain Kegan found a sprawling camp had been set up. There were hundreds of goblins wandering about running a large scale cooking operation, they were being directed by bone knights. Grains and crops were being hauled in and converted to fresh bread and other rations.

He was spotted quickly, but he was able to outrun the goblin pursuers easily. He made a large circle around the camp to track back along the path they’d come from. An hour of running late and he ran into the first grain train of five wagons being pulled along by large hogs. No bone knights and none of the goblins were prepared to fight. Many of them ran off as soon as Kegan started killing.

He let them go, the more goblins that were alive the better. Because more goblins meant more mouths to feed. The grain went up in flames. He released the hogs and let them run off into the wild.

As the evening carried on, and the sun began to set Kegan had destroyed two other shipments of food. He left the trail and headed back towards the cooking camp. He passed a group of twenty bone knights and a hundred goblins that were following his trail of destruction.

It was dark when he made it back to the cooking camp. There were torches lit and guards around the perimeter of the camp. ‘Perfect, they’ve already started the fires for me’ he thought.

He didn’t bother too much with stealth, instead just running up to the nearest guard station, cutting down the four goblin guards, grabbing the torch out of the ground and hurling it at the nearest pile of food and grain. Some goblins went to attack him while other tried to put out the fire he had started. Kegan ran off into the night, turning his camouflage on as soon as he was shrouded in darkness.

He repeated this five times on different sides of the camp. On the last attack, the camp commanders had ordered the torches away from the edge of the camp, and they had moved all the food stores further into the center of the camp, out of throwing distance.

Kegan left them alone for an hour after that. He removed his iron armor and stashed it away. He added leaves, twigs, and grass to his leather armor until he looked like a walking patch of forest undergrowth. He crawled up to the camp and past the guards using the camouflage perk.

There were two bone knight commanders in the camp, and a group of goblin underlings that were also giving orders.. The rest of the bone knights had left to chase after him, and would probably be back soon.

Kegan had two harpoons and a one handed war axe with him. He got as close as he could to one of the bone knight commanders, while keeping the other one in sight. He quietly got up and threw a harpoon at the furthest bone knight. A second later a goblin spotted him and cried out. Alerting the closer bone knight commander just as the harpoon hit the other commander in the stomach. Kegan quickly threw the second harpoon, but the bone knight commander acted quickly enough to deflect the throw. Kegan began lighting camp items around himself on fire and tossing them in random directions to sow chaos. Torches, crates, sleeping packs, etc.

The group of goblin commanders charged him, but most of them were not carrying any weapons and Kegan quickly cut down all six of them. The bone knight commander used the extra time to begin growing a bone sword in one hand, and a bone shield in the other.

The goblins in the middle of the camp were running in terror from Kegan because they were mostly non combatants, all the guards and fighting goblins had either left the camp to chase him, or were guarding the perimeter of the camp.

As the camp began to burn around them Kegan and the bone knight commander clashed. Kegan immediately knew that the commander was a skilled and practiced fighter. None of Kegan’s cheap tricks or feints were working. The tempo of the fight shifted quickly and Kegan found himself on the defensive. There were moments when he thought he’d gotten lucky that the commander hadn’t taken an opening. But as the number of similar moments increased, Kegan realized the commander was holding back.

Time wasn’t on his side. If he couldn’t finish this fight soon the camp might get organized and surround him. Kegan let himself be backed up towards a grain wagon. He scooped a handful, lit his finger using the firestarter perk and tossed the grain towards the commander. A small fireball lit up, forcing back the commander. Kegan stuck his still burning finger into the pile of grain, covered his face with his other arm, and heaved his hand upwards.

A much larger fireball launched him and the commander away from each other. Kegan rolled on landing and leapt up without waiting, he ran off into the night once more.

The group that had chased him came into the camp half an hour later to find a single pissed off commander, a bunch of burnt food stores, and a severely demoralized group of goblins.

Kegan felt like he’d pushed his luck enough for one day. He snuck back into the valley using the hidden climbing handholds he’d created. Then he made his way to his new hidden home to get some rest, do some surgery to fix his burn wounds, and eat the only food left in the valley.