The first thing we did the day after the discovery of the goblins, we pull our camp back a few miles.

Up until that point we had been traveling through the wilderness with a destination only Wilmette understood. All that suddenly changed. He had us build lean-to’s in an area that was sheltered from the elements, and I was even made a kind of semi-permanent bed in my personal lean-to.

Then we started making netting. Lots and lots of netting. I didn’t like the idea of capturing goblins. What would we do with them? But Wilmette looked at me and said “Yuz, see.”

When we had more net than I ever thought we would need, we started constructing a strange building. It was open all around like a cage, with wooden bars up the walls and across the ceiling. There were entrances at both ends. The interior of the cage was just a great expanse of flat earth, maybe 25-foot square. One of the doors opened up into a dark little 8-foot square box that was far more secure. Both doors into the cage could only be opened from the outside. A significant percentage of the netting was stretched tight across the bars making it so that even smaller; skinnier creatures could not get out.

I kept thinking, was there some far off market for goblins. Would we have to feed and wash the damned things? Since the building Wilmette had me construct resembled nothing to me except a fortified chicken coop, I thought maybe Goblins laid eggs. We would have to collect their offspring like chickens.

When I got up the next morning, Willamette was not around, so I spent the day trying to figure out how to make my soul signature less visible. It was hard since the only thing I had to study was my own and Wilmette’s, neither of which was something I could spend time injecting mana into to see what happened.

I had tried that a few times, at first on myself, and then on plants and then the things we had hunted in the forest.

Injecting mana into your soul could be painful. I’d discovered that the hard way after I’d spent two days curled into a little ball trying not to scream in agony. The only saving grace was that I’d been experimenting in a hidden, sheltered spot I’d found, and no predatory animals had passed by while I was vulnerable, and Wilmette hadn’t come looking for me.

Changing the life source of a plant did weird things to it, even causing wild growth spurts, or even tumors or odd blooms. It was even worse for animals. I’d once made a chipmunk explode.

Had I been a geneticist in my past life this probably would have made more sense. But I was limited to what I remembered from two semesters of college Biology, a semester of Chemistry and a Human anatomy class I’d taken as an elective.

Right now I was working with the least common denominator of living things. There was a fragment of life that shone like a beacon in everything that was alive. If I focused enough, I could see it in algae. If someone invented a magnifying glass, I could probably see that spark in single-celled organisms.

After the experience with the exploding chipmunk… umm… chipmunks… and maybe a rabbit. And a frog. I had kept my experimentation strictly to plants. Mostly wild vegetables that I could find. Chicken-of-the-woods, fiddleheads, morels, and ramps didn’t blow up quite as dramatically as chipmunks, but I didn’t need to feel quite as guilty about it when they exploded.

It occurred to me very quickly that I didn’t want to remove the actual life from the plant, I just wanted to hide it.

Removing life was easy — everything living had an innate ability to resist, but I found that if I used all my strength I could overcome this resistance in small creatures and plants fairly easily (hence the explosions) or I could slowly, over days work against the living thing’s resistance and drain the life out of the being (which was excruciatingly painful, and not a little bit terrifying when I thought about it).

The thing that scared me the most about the second form of magic was that I’d discovered that I didn’t even have to be near the being as I drained them of their life force. All I had to do was create some kind of symbolic link, and as long as I focused on that link, I could wear away their resistance and kill them.

The only real saving graces with this method of killing were that it needed my full concentration to maintain. If I was ever disturbed the link would break and the creature or plant I was killing would slowly heal. The second was that if I looked closely, there was a barely visible connection between myself and my victim. The link was pure life magic, so only someone with a strong life affinity had a chance of seeing it.

My mind likened this connection to a tenth of a pound fishing line; in that, it was held taut while it played away from the victim’s life, was barely visible, could be broken with the barest of forces, and there was a direct easily followed connection between killer and victim.

Honestly once I’d learned the techniques, I grew disgusted with them. They were so easy. Things any reasonably strong life mage could probably do. The fact that they were also so easy to track down must be why they weren’t used more in this culture.

As I was saying, my studies, were less about taking life, and more about hiding life. I wanted to be invisible, and in this, I was not making any headway. Anybody with any mage sight in the life affinity could see me, no matter how well I hid, as if I were standing naked in church on Sunday.

Just as the sun was going down Wilmette appeared again in the campsite. In front of him, he led a ragtag troop of goblins. They were tied together with the rope we had been using to make the nets, and each pair of the creatures had a wooden bar lodged between them, and another wooden bar restricting their feet and yet another restricting the movement of their hands.

After a quick count, I saw that there were around twenty goblins.

Wilmette began to unleash each goblin individually from his chain. He had a practiced way of holding them as he unshackled them. Their feet and hands were still bound, but even so, each goblin tried to bite and scratch at Wilmette as soon as it was free of the press gang it was part of. Then Wilmette would simply grab the creature by the neck and chuck it into the eight by eight section part of the chicken coop building that we’d spent the last few days setting up.

When he was done, he laughed and looked at me. “Use tomorrow. Get up early.”

I said “What for. I no gobble egg omelets. Gobbles no lay eggs?”

Wilmette laughed, “to teach. You useless. Too purddy to fight. Deer no fight back.”

As the sun went down, we spent the rest of the night in quiet. I ate by myself thinking about the next day. Deer don’t fight back. He’d said that with too much bloodlust.

In their cage, the goblins gnashed and wailed. I watched as the biggest of the bunch used its shackles to bash the smallest one repeatedly, as it lay in one of the corners of the cage crying and bleeding, the big goblin mounted it and sodomized it. The other goblins backed away, apparently fearing to be next. I heard laughing and looked over and saw Wilmette watching the goblins and in tears of laughter.

The next morning I got up and strapped on the short sword and dagger that I’d been carrying this whole time. I put on some deerskin boots I’d made months ago, and deerskin pants and a deerskin shirt.

Wilmette took one look at me and shook his head. “No shoe. No shit. No pointy.” And so I took off my shoes, and my shirt and my dagger and sword. In exchange, he handed me a stone dagger just like I’d seen that Goblin using the day before.

Then Wilmette led me to the cage we’d built together. He opened the door and ushered me in, closing it after me. Then he got a long pole with a curve and a sharpened edge at the end.

He flipped used the pole and the pointed edge to separate the smallest goblin who had been raped the night before from the rest. Then guide it out of the hen house part of the cage and into the main 20x20 foot section of what I now understood to be an arena. Using the pole, he closed the door behind the goblin, then used the sharpened part to cut the ropes of the shackles.

Wilmette pulled the pole out of the cage. The goblin still wasn’t doing anything. If it were human I would say that it was suffering some variety shock or PTSD, but I don’t know about goblins, and it just quivered where Wilmette had guided it too.

Wilmette pulled out two more stone daggers and threw them at the goblin's feet. He looked at the goblin and said something in the chittering and screeching language that they used, and suddenly the goblin was charging at me daggers in its hands, slashing and screaming.

Wilmette laughed. I could barely hear him as he said, “bet kill runt. I tell, kill purddy and I free gobble, plus let gobble kill big gobble slowly as much time as it want.” My concentration was entirely on the maddened goblin.

I was so shocked at first that I forgot all the carefully trained maneuvers I had learned in the courtyard of my father’s guards. I had only ever practiced with a training dummy an occasional people my father had hired to train me.

None of that carefully controlled maneuvers were the same as a homicidal goblin entirely out of control slashing with a knife with no care for its safety and its entire focus on trying to kill me.

If I’d had a long sword, this would have been easy. If I’d had enough time to overcome its resistances and explode it, this would have been easy. But standing as I was with a tiny sharpened stone knife, surprised by its ferocity, I barely got out of the way as it slashed a vicious swipe across my stomach. Even, so it still drew blood, and it kept coming.

I backed up and almost tripped, and if I had, I am sure the thing would have killed me. But luck was with me, and I kept standing. The little thing kept coming and coming. There was fury in its eyes. Madness.

But now I had a surer step as I stepped back again. Now I was using the footwork that had been drilled into me, and now on my guard was up as I watched for an opening.

There is a truism in a knife fight. You are going to get cut no matter what you do. I was bigger, stronger, more in control and better trained than the little goblin but balancing that out was the fact that it didn’t seem to care if it lived or died, and it was faster and had killed before.

It lunged at me with the stone knife, and I stepped out the way instead of backing up. My knife followed up and made a slight cut to its knife arm. Careful and controlled. Like a fencing cut.

I cursed. That kind of cut would have ended the fight back home. I would have scored a point. And the instructor who’d been making the demonstration would have backed off and congratulated me. This goblin only wanted my blood.

It swung at me again, and I stepped aside again, thrusting at its chest this time, but the wily thing was expecting that, and I took a cut to my side that began to bleed. But, now I was in close, and I hit it with my fist and then finally connecting with the dagger aimed at its chest and scored a deep belly wound. It dropped clutching at its chest.

I stepped away. It tried to crawl at me. A belly wound took a long time to die. I walked over to the goblin that was still trying to get at me and bent down and cut the poor thing’s throat.

I was bleeding from two cuts. The weren’t horrible, but I fully expected Wilmette to call it a day. Instead, I looked over at him, and he was already guiding another goblin out into the arena.

“Again,” he said and set the goblin free.

On that day I learned that a single goblin, one on one isn’t that hard to kill. Oh, I took numerous cuts, but outside the madness and ferocity of the first goblin, none of the ones that followed were all that difficult. Goblins were weak on their own, so weak that even a half-trained boy could overpower them and rip their weapon out of their tiny hands.

Oh, I took scratches, and bites, and cuts. There were numerous close calls with death. One of the little bastards managed to stab me deep in my left arm and I had to bind the wound with one of the filthy fur loin cloth one of the goblins had been wearing.

But after about 6 hours of fighting and the brief rests between fights, one by one I had killed all of the goblins except the biggest one.

That ugly bastard had growled and paced in its cage. I was looking forward to killing it. Honestly, I felt sorry for all the other goblins that had died today, but that big rapist fucker needed to die.

So I smiled at it when it was the last one left, fully expecting Wilmette to let me kill it like he had been forcing to match up against goblin after goblin all day long. And as I looked the big goblin in the eye and felt the edge of my stone knife, it snarled and looked at me and urinated on the ground in its cage.

But Wilmette said “Big Gobble mine. Purddy boy not so purddy, more.”

He was right. I now had dozens of cuts all over my body. Some deeper than others. And I was tired. But I knew that if I didn’t do something those cuts would scar, so I stumbled out into the woods looking for some plants that I knew had healing properties.

When I came back, neither Wilmette nor the big goblin was nowhere to be seen. I was dead tired on my feet, but something inside me wanted to know what was going on, so I looked around until I found his trail.

He had hidden it well, but I sunk into the shadows. I might be visible to anybody with a sense of life magic affinity, but following him attempting stealth was still something my gut was telling me that I needed to risk.

So I followed him. His trail led about a mile away from our campsite, to a clearing. I heard them before I saw them. The muffled whimpering of a goblin in agony. From a distance, I climbed a tree.

In a clearing up ahead, I saw Wilmette had staked down the big goblin. Wilmette had his knife out. The knife I often saw him fondling as he looked at me when I was pretending to sleep. He was using that knife to slowly peel the skin and remove bits of the goblin while a small delicate strand of life affinity was attached between man and monster keeping the monster alive through its vivisection.

And as I looked closer, I saw Wilmette bend over the prone goblin’s body and then he seem to smell, to breath deeply like a gourmand, and slowly through my mages sight, I saw a vast outflowing of the spirit and soul energies from the Goblin’s corpse flow into my mentor. Even from my distance, I saw him shiver in ecstasy as those energies flowed through his body.

Then there was nothing left except a goblin corpse. A hunk of flesh. And I was about to look away when I saw two things that shocked me.

The first was that Wilmette looked up at the tree where I was hiding and waved.

The second was that for a moment. Just a tiny little moment. The corpse of the goblin took on the same blank waiting essence of the void that seen from my lofty position above the planet before I had been born. It was as if, if I could find a soul, I could stuff it into that still warm but dead goblin.