Sentient, self-aware beings are known to give more Essence on death compared to non-sentient beings. - From the treatise, A Study of Essence and the Origin.

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Marc shivered as a cold breeze ruffled his clothes and chilled his skin. He wished he was back in his apartment. The sun had already disappeared behind the horizon and a purple half moon had taken it's place. Marc wasn't an expert in astrology but he could tell that the constellations in the night sky were notably different from Earth's sky.

Nearly three hours had passed since the goblins set up camp and Marc was willing to bet nearly everyone in the camp was asleep. Marc had meditated most of the time, guiding and watching the different energies in his body.

He had been able to create fire with his ether; it was barely candleflame-sized and took minutes to grow from a spark to that size. At that point, he could only focus on transforming his bound ether into fire ether to maintain the flame and trying to increase the size or heat just destabilized it. It also cost a good amount of his miniature ether reserves to create the small flame.

It wasn't anywhere near useful for battle but he still loved it. Being able to create fire at will felt euphoric.

Despite the cold, he had not lit a campfire. Although the area around him was scattered with desert shrubs and plants he could use for kindling, he didn't want to alert the goblins to his presence. Experimenting with making fire had been risky but he needed something to keep him occupied.

Marc briefly closed his eyes to examine his body. His ether felt like it had reached the limit of what he could contain. It didn't feel like much to him but he didn't know how to increase it yet. His body's lifeforce generation had slowed to a trickle and Marc guessed he would have to eat to speed it up. Still, there was a good amount of the misty energy running through his body. His spirit... still looked like a blurry shadow to him.

He had experimented with ice shaping and found out that he didn't expend any of his three forces with the talent. However, each use left him feeling more and more tired and lethargic. Whatever he was expending, it seemed to recharge with rest. He could create about three dozen or so ice daggers before he got too tired to do more. However, maintaining the daggers only had a negligible cost.

Marc stood up and dusted himself off. He didn't have a plan beyond getting into the goblin camp, stealing some food, probably killing some goblins and escaping whilst freeing the captured humans.

Marc started walking towards the camp, circling around it to find a good place to sneak in. He considered creating an ice blade but dismissed the idea. He could create a blade quickly when...if he needed it.

The light of the purple half moon provided some illumination to the landscape and combined with Marc's improved senses, allowed him to see a bit clearly.

The goblin campfire was set up between some rocks and most of them were lying or sitting on boulders encircled around it for warmth. The captives were located further away from the fire, with half a dozen or so goblins guarding them. They were tied to each other and a lone, tall tree with long stretches of rope and huddled lifelessly against each other.

Marc was curious about how they had been captured, being inhabitants of a fantasy world. Unless the System was restricted to a few people, they should also have magic powers of their own. Most of the captives were children and old people so maybe those were weak but he'd also seen some adolescents and adults amongst them. This only made him more wary about the goblins.

At some points even further away from the camp, some goblins stood as lookouts in pairs. The lookouts were spaced quite widely apart and didn't seem to take their jobs seriously, one pair either arguing or playing some kind of game and another sleeping.

The goblins were short but not as much as he had thought. They were about four to five feet on average, with slouching postures that made them seem shorter. They had long arms ending at clawed fingers. They had scales all over their bodies except their faces, with a smattering of scales around their cheeks and eyes. They wore roughly made clothing made of fur and hides.

Due to the how lax the lookouts were, Marc was able to easily sneak past the sleeping goblin pair. Marc was especially careful of where and how he stepped, trying to keep his footsteps from being heard. He needn't have bothered. The ambient night sounds, the chattering of the goblins still awake and the mournful sobs of the captives covered up his few missteps.

He got closer to the main camp of goblins and surveyed the place as he crouched behind a boulder. The light of the campfire made it easier to see in the night. The campfire was still burning brightly courtesy of regularly replaced kindling and he could see skewered pieces of meat placed on hot rocks around it. The sight of meat left him salivating but he ignored it. The area around the campfire was thick with goblins and he knew he couldn't get to the food without disturbing them.

He forcibly turned his sight away from a larger goblin chewing on a mouthful of meat. The recently hunted meat couldn't be all they had for food. They had to have some stored food and water.

Looking through the greenskins one by one, he discovered that nearly all of them seemed to have a bag near them. The bags looked like they were made out of different hides sewn together. They were wide at the bottom with a narrower neck tied with rope. Every goblin was had one near or on them and thinking back, he recalled some lumpy shapes near the goblin lookouts.

Marc let out a quiet, relieved sigh. The goblins had to have their supplies in the bags. If he was correct, he could just go steal the bags with those sleeping lookouts without having to risk anything.

He glanced around to make sure he hadn't been noticed, trying to ignore the captive humans, mostly children with the occasional adult, and started to retrace his path.

"Fuck it," he cursed quietly and turned back. "I hate empathy."

He started creeping over to the tied up humans and a razor blade made of ice formed in his hand. He palmed it to keep it from reflecting light as he moved stealthily past passed out goblins, trying not to jostle or step on them. Thankfully, the conscious goblins were crowded around the fire.

He circled around a goblin rooting through his hide bag and hid behind a bush to peep at the eight goblins guarding the captives. He caught snatches of inane conversation as they chattered to each other but was too far to clearly hear them. One of them laughed at something another had said and poked one of the humans with a spear.

'Can't get past them now,' Marc thought. 'I'll have to come back later.'

As much as he might wish to free the humans, he would have better odds attempting it when he was fed and hydrated. He dismissed the ice razor and felt it dissolve in his hand, before turning away to get to the sleeping lookouts.

Moving away from the camp was easier than getting in. When he reached the lookouts he had snuck past, he quickly found the bags they had. Both were tied tightly to their waists. He tried to form two ice blades at once and was surprised by the difficulty. Deciding not to strain himself, he formed them one after another and with as much force as he could muster, stabbed into the goblins' foreheads at the same time.

The goblins' eyes snapped open, startlingly yellow in the dark but it was only a reflexive action. They were already dead.

[Killed T0 creature, +1307 Essence.]

[Killed T0 creature, +1993 Essence.]

Marc felt bile rising in his throat and forced it down. Despite their seeming intelligence, these were creatures who had captured humans as slaves. Probably killed them.

It didn't matter that they were sapient. They were monsters, looked like monsters. He was doing this for survival.

The last reason helped him settle his mind more than any of the others. He was doing this to survive.

He wiped away the blood that had stained his hands on the sand. After trying to work out the knots that tied the bags with slightly trembling fingers, he used an ice blade to cut them away.

He didn't bother to check for what was in the bag, deciding to get away first. Looking around the dead bodies, he found a smooth, red stone with what looked to be carvings in it lying in the sand. He picked it up and placed it in a bag.

Standing straight, he cast one last glance at the dead bodies before leaving.

Monsters, he told himself. They were monsters.

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Gornak examined his scales in the light of the fire. On his right forearm and chest, the bright emerald scales were disfigured and bent from when an aged human had gotten him with a shovel.

He sat on a rock foremost to the fire. At his level of power, he didn't actually need the heat as much as the other goblins but it was the privilege of the strong to get more benefits.

He had had a good fight, something he hadn't been expecting to get on this raid.

The old human female had been at the zenith of Tier Zero, which was exceedingly out of place for an out of the way village like that.

Still, he disliked any imperfections on his body and scales didn't heal back up as quickly as other parts of the body, being dead skin. He would have to peel them off and wait days or weeks for new ones to grow in.

Grokking humans. They were the cause of everything bad in a goblin's life.

He remembered late night tales from the old ones of when they used to live in the bountiful hills and plains to the south, tribes of goblins ruling and warring over the land, before the grokking humans had taken over their homes and forced them into the desert. They had wandered the desert, barely better than beasts, few in numbers and enfeebled, in constant threat of extinction.

They had been unable to leave, too weak to claim other lands for themselves.

To the north were the Cursed Mountains, with beasts that could easily destroy the most powerful of them. He'd once seen a bloodhawk circle one of the highest peaks from a distance, it's bloody cloud trailing ominously behind it, and had marveled at it's size even separated as they were. He had hungered for the day he would be able to kill a creature of it's power.

To the east was the Great Wall, seemingly endless in both directions and reaching to the skies. It was said to guard a paradisical kingdom. The wall was unbreakable. Nothing they could do could damage it.

To the south and west were human habitations. Those settlements closest to them were weak enough they had almost taken over them a few times when they had increased in numbers and strength but those attempts always invited reprisals from the more powerful humans.

Things were different now.

They had found a stronghold, an almost buried desert city with plenty of underground tunnels and abandoned secrets. Clearly, the city was once home to a powerful country with great knowledge of magic. Exploration of the deeper tunnels was dangerous but also fruitful. They had found artifacts that warded away any powerful creatures, allowing them to increase their population in relative safety. They had found secrets of ascension that were before unknown to them.

Although they would have preferred to bide their time before attacking the humans once more, they needed to attack them to grow stronger. The powerful creatures of the desert had been hunted to extermination by them and the few that remained were too powerful.

They needed opponents powerful enough to challenge them but not powerful enough to destroy them. The Cursed Mountains were out; it was basically confirmed that Tier 3 creatures were abundant there and there were rumors of cursed... things roaming the peaks and valleys.

The humans, however, saw them as cannon fodder, as training wheels for their low-tiered. Attacking the humans would give them a lot of Essence and good eating. They wouldn't send their most powerful after them at first. They would only send them in when all those weaker had failed and by then it would be too late.

The goblins were different now. Now, they were no longer weak and few. They were even stronger than they had been when they'd ruled the southern hillside.

Gornak was getting close to Tier 1 and he wasn't the most powerful of the clan by any means. There were elders whose power dwarfed his.

He would get there though, even if he had to claw and bite his way up. Already, he was imagining what kind of Talents would be available to him at Tier 1.

A commotion in the camp made him look back, his eyes only taking a few seconds to adapt from the bright fire. His nightsight was almost as good as his daysight so he saw clearly as a human swordsman slice through the neck of one of the goblins guarding the captured food and go on to parry a piercing spear with his sword.

Gornak growled and barked out orders to the goblins around him, standing up and tightening the fastening of his keepsack. All around him, goblins woke up and armed themselves or if they fought like him, went unarmed.

He grinned at the prospect of a fight, showcasing pearly white, fanged teeth.

Humans had come to attack them. They should only take their Essence as was right.