I looked down on a small child as he left his parent’s house.

No, I’m not a creep. Not that kind of creep anyway. I have standards. Incredibly low standards, but still a hell of a lot higher than that.

I winced as my stomach audibly rumbled. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten anything that deserved the dignity of being called a meal, and unfortunately I couldn’t see myself enjoying the luxury anytime soon.

Still, this child represented my best shot at getting something close. No, I wasn’t going to eat the kid, humans had a drastically over inflated opinion of their deliciousness. Representative of most of their opinions about themselves really. They actually tasted pretty mediocre, and once you factored in their hard on for vengeance only the stupidest of monsters favored them as prey. I certainly didn’t, for all their ample protein.

Luckily for me, humans deserved at least some degree of their inflated sense of pride, and had thought up their own way of getting protein. That was precisely why the kid was here. I licked my lips as I watched him go inside the chicken coop.

Eggs. Delicious, nutritious. Humans had somehow stumbled upon the novel idea of storing chickens and stealing their eggs on demand and, in proud goblin tradition, I’d stumbled upon the idea of stealing theirs.

Soon the human child was retreating with a basket full of dinner, and I was retreating from my vantage point in the barn loft.

I backed off slowly, only moving quickly when I was well out of sight from the crack in the wall. That was the trick to stealth, I’d found: speed. Not moving as fast as possible of course, but to know when to move fast, and when to move slow. Quick movements could attract attention, slow movements could leave you exposed.

I jumped off the edge and hit the ground lightly, crouching to absorb the weight. I stood and scampered to the entrance and put my ear to the door. Nothing. I popped the door open by barely a foot and squeezed out, scurrying low to the ground as quickly as I could. I reached the chicken coop and darted behind it.

I clung to the wall behind the coop and wedged myself into the crook where the wall met the ground to minimize my profile. I lay there, waiting, but I heard nothing. No cries of alarm, no opening doors, no alarmed clucking from the hens.

Excellent. I turned my body to the side, letting the battered rags on my back face outwards. The brown cloak, which I’d fashioned out of an old blanket from a garbage heap, blended into the wall and ground from a distance, letting me root through the coop with the slow and methodical motions I needed.

There were two things that mattered to a scavenger, whether a vulture or a goblin, and those were finding food, and surviving whatever you were stealing it from. For me, someone with neither wings nor claws, that wasn’t an option. Humans could both outrun and outfight me easily, and that made stealth the only option.

Fortunately I had mastered a virtue normally alien to goblins: patience. Panicked hens would draw their human keepers faster than goblins to a rotten carcass, and I had no desire to meet my end at a human’s hands. Or at all really, but that was more of a long term goal.

I buried my arm up to the shoulder in a hole in the coop wall and carefully wriggled my fingers up through the hen’s straw nest before I found my prize. An egg. Wonderful meals, and the chickens were already used to losing them, particularly right after their humans had taken some.

They certainly wouldn’t miss another… one… or two…

Or even three! I carefully withdrew my hand as slowly as I had inserted, letting my hand loosen enough to squeeze back through the hole. I licked my lips as my prize came into view.

“Figured I’d find you here.”

I jerked backwards, shoving the eggs straight down my throat, but I froze as soon as I saw the figure standing atop the chicken coop. When had he gotten there!?

He slouched casually on the edge, arms folded as if to say this was perfectly normal behavior, and my heart began to race in my chest. A dramatic cloak billowed about his shoulders, and I knew without a doubt that I was facing something infinitely more dangerous than a farmer.

I gulped audibly, forcing my stolen dinner down my throat, and my mind began to race as fast as my heart.

The cloaked human smirked. “Disgusting beast. Can’t stop from shoveling food into your mouth even now.”

My eyes darted around the field. No cover. No escape. My reflexes had driven me to jump away from the voice the instant I heard it, but that had actually taken me further away from the barn.

Through, come to think of it, that wouldn’t save me either. Barns were just buildings after all, and buildings were a human creation. I couldn’t escape from him there. I would need to make it all the way to the forest. That was on the other side of town and in order to get there… I’d have to evade him for at least a few minutes.

I sprung off, going from zero to full speed in a second flat. Distant chuckling came from behind me, chilling my blood. Fucker thought he could catch a goblin? I’d show him exactly what kind of squirrely bastards we could be.

My ears swiveled backwards, catching the sound of him leaping from the rooftop only after I was halfway to the barn doors. Heh. Fool wasn’t taking this seriously. Humans were faster than goblins on open ground, but not that much faster.

The human hit the barn wall fifteen feet up and turned to look down on me with a smirk. “Going somewhere?”

How the- I blocked out my shock and pushed my body faster, plunging through the barn doors before the human could drop down, but his mocking laughter made it clear he wasn’t done with me yet.

My ears swiveled around to track the human as he moved up and over the barn, running along the rooftop. His footsteps were light, far lighter than any human should have, but no match for my hearing. I could hear him clearly as he reached the end of the roof in less than a breath and stopped to wait for me to come out the other end.

So I didn’t.

I turned and vaulted over a pen, running along the back of a startled horse and leaping through an open window headfirst. I hit the ground rolling and came up running. By the time I hit my stride I could already hear the his cloak cracking like a whip as he spun around.

How the hell a human had heard the sound of grass crunching beneath my feet from all the way up there was beyond me, but it didn’t make a difference. He was too damn fast, he’d catch me either way.

So I turned as the human soared through the air on his incredible leap and punched myself in the gut. My stomach convulsed and bile spewed forth from my throat. The human’s foot came down on the bile-slicked grass and he sprawled across the ground.

Ha! That had to hurt. Unfortunately the human seemed more concerned with franticly spasming in the grass in some futile attempt to get the vomit off and swearing up a swarm than he was in having broken bones.

Cocky ass could be as stupidly durable as he wanted as long as it wasn’t near me.

But as my feet pounded down the village street he finally got his priorities in order and climbed back to his feet. Shit. In two steps he’d already passed over two houses and was bearing down on me again.

I dodged through the alleys and streets, but this little town just didn’t have the cramped conditions I needed to truly exploit my small size. Humans didn’t have to worry about hiding their settlements, so they could afford to sprawl out, with ample space for gardens and grazing around each house. I could only thank my stars that the human had finally hit the limits of whatever unholy power let him leap so far, and couldn’t leap straight from one rooftop to another.

Annoyingly, as the chase went on I was getting more and more sure that he was just holding back. He wasn’t clearing half the distance in a each leap, but was hopping lightly off rooftops before driving himself vast distances with powerful bursts of motion that threw up clouds of dirt behind him.

He wasn’t anywhere near the limits of his ability, he was just too considerate to collapse someone’s house with the sheer force his legs could generate. For the moment that was keeping me out of his reach, his brief loss of a good vantage point enough that I could stay one step ahead, but that wouldn’t last forever. Already I could hear people rousing at the commotion we were making, and as soon as there was even a single other human to box me in, I was done for.

I had to get the hell out of here, but it was all I could do to keep ahead of him. The second I crossed the open ground between the village and the forest I’d lose the only things blocking his view from ground level, and he wouldn’t need a vantage point to catch me.

Luckily, he had a weakness, one that was already slowing him down. If I could exploit it fully it might buy me the time I needed.

So I entered the lion’s den once more, diving directly through a cottage window left carelessly open to the summer breeze. Fools to value comfort over security, but their pain was my gain. I tumbled through their common room and reached the other side before the man stumbling out of the bedroom with his clothes half on could react.

He did his best to respond to the threat of a goblin in the same house as his wife and his children, but that response seemed to consist largely of sputtering. Certainly not nearly enough to stop me as I plunged both hands into his fireplace and seized the burning coals deep inside. I was back out another window before the humans inside had time to properly process my presence.

I chucked one over my shoulder, leaving it to smoulder in their thatch as I struggled to juggle the others without burning myself too badly. A figure slammed into the dirt in front of me, and I skidded to a halt.

“Games up animal.” The cloaked human said. “You won’t terrorize these people any longer.”

I gave him a toothy grin as I closed my hands around the burning hot coals, heedless of the pain, and held them up in full view with the orange light shining through the cracks between my fingers and the stench of burning flesh wafting off it.

The human squinted. “What?”

He didn’t get it. So I educated him. I hurled the embers out, sending little sparks flying across the village and into the vulnerable straw thatch. My grin widened, and I forced a few words of the human tongue out of my guttural throat. “Have fun with the spreading fires.”

I could see the shock on his face, and more importantly, the hesitation. I didn’t know why he cared about these people, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t exploit it and I wasted no time in turning to flee while he debated his options.

The human hissed out a curse, and the distinctive sound of a boot scraping dirt reached my ears as the human turned around. Heh. My big brain, saving me once agai-

I heard a sharp whistling, almost entirely covered amid everything else going on, an instant before the knife impacted me in the shoulder. Pain burst forth, searing deep into my body as my muscles convulsed around the piercing blade.

I stumbled, every movement inviting excruciating pain. I barely even felt my own body hitting the ground, but I still dragged myself forward. A life brawling with dozens of other goblin runts had accustomed me to fighting through pain. This was worse than anything I’d felt before, but it didn’t take me more than half a minute to push myself back onto my feet with my good arm.

I limped forwards, gradually picking up speed. I needed to go faster, I could already hear the clamor dying down behind me, and my distraction with it. If an offhand strike sent me to the ground like this then I had no illusions about surviving once he actually got his hands on me.

I drove myself forward with little more than will alone, each and every step jolted the blade imbedded in my body, getting worse and worse as I built into a run, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. Had to make it to the safety of the trees. Had to-

A weight slammed into my back, bearing me down to the ground. My face hit dirt, but my hands fumbled behind my back.

“Did you really think you were going to get away with that?”

My hands found the dagger buried in my back and I wrenched it free. I slashed wildly, but a hard kick hit my wrist and sent the weapon spinning out of my hand before I could land a hit.

“You are nothing, you rat.” Strong hands seized me by the throat and hauled me up until the human and I were face to face. I writhed in his grip, but his grasp remained firm.

He glared at me with bloodshot eyes. “You think you can get away with whatever you want you little animal? No.”

He released my neck with one hand and grabbed me by the face. Long fingers wrapped all the way across it, and squeezed with an impossible strength. “I take some satisfaction that you’ll die in just as much pain as any of your victims.”

Victims?! As if what I did was half as bad as what they did to each other.

“Venom Fang.”

Acid, like the very bile of a dragon itself, burned at my eyes. I screeched in agony, my previous wriggling rapidly turning into involuntary convulsions. I battered at his elbows, desperately struggling to get away from the liquid agony that jetted from his palm, but he didn’t truly seem to notice, let alone care.

I blinked the huma- this creature’s venom away from my eyes, but it was already too late. My lungs burned, and my attempts to hold my breath were met with wheezing and coughing, drawing more deadly vapours into my body.

Until my breath hit a final rasp and stopped altogether.