A rhythmic rumble vibrated across the forest floor and was accompanied by an endless susurration of countless chittering limbs. A council of eyes had adjourned, all upturned toward a moving mountain of mass. Like cockroaches eager to swarm over a corpse, the Facestealers' minds were heady and animalistic, already sure of their victory, already looking forward to cracking open the goblins tree like an egg to get at the sweet yolk that lay inside. The Facestealers march towards the goblin village was an oncoming tidal wave of destruction that cut a path through any and all that got in their way. None would survive, none could do anything but be devoured. By the break of morning all the goblins would lay snug inside the stomachs of gorged and contented kin. There could be no other outcome except complete and utter-

Naive.

The goblin at Kai’s side must have noticed an expression steal over his face for he asked,

"Is something wrong, outlander Warrior?"

Kai looked out at the Facestealers swarming over one another, disgust welling up inside him. Not disgust directed towards Facestealers, no. It was an inward disgust. There was an urge building there inside of Kai. An urge to jump off the tree and wade through the Facestealers, to become a whirling dervish of black powder and blades. He could see himself much in the same way as they could see him. It was hard not to look down at the Facestealers and see, too, that they were nothing more than sacks of yolk waiting to be cracked open. That was why Kai had made a last minute decision to position himself on the far end of the tree’s branch in a commander’s post. He needed the reminder that lives were at stake.

Kai shook his head. "Nothing. Let's just get this over with."

As the goblins looked down at the Facestealers an invisible line was drawn between the two forces. The Facestealers knew of the traps that lay between them and the tree. It was a veritable no man’s land, a patch of cleared dirt filled with cairns and covered by a grave of leaves. Even the blindest fool could understand that something lay beneath. But what? Neither side was willing to make the first move and thus a thread of tension was sewn between the minds of all combatants, growing larger and larger into a tapestry stretched ever more taut until, finally, the line simply-

Snapped.

The smallest Facestealers were first to cave and give into their instincts. A wave of two story high howling mouths surged forward into the area in front of the tree. They thought little of the goblin’s preparation, for even the smallest of their kin towered far above the little races that scurried beneath their shadows. What could the goblins possibly prepare that could put even a scratch to their armor? Nothing. Only the kin eater was a threat and even he would die this day. The Facestealer’s many legs and limbs stepped over leaf and bramble with careless abandon. With every unaccosted step they grew more certain that the preparations were a bluff, the pathetic squirmings of cornered prey. Halfway there. A little more to the tree and then-

A giant log burst out the ground and flung one of the Facestealers up into the air. Not backwards, but forwards. Into a patch of leaves? No, a line. Like a fisherman’s line the hook was now baited with a dangling worm. Only one of many, many hooks.

But the Facestealer was confused. Did the goblins expect a meager log to deal any kind of damage to a creature of its stature? It got up. It looked up.

The first boulder crashed into its side and out came a gush of its innards. All the pain in the world concentrated itself into a single shuddering spot of rejected mortality.

Then the second boulder hit and with no brain to interpret what happened its world relented to black.

Kai repeated his orders from above, “Do not salvo! Wait for my command!”

Below, having seen their comrade slain, the Facestealers rushed forward with renewed zeal. If the goblins would use ranged weapons, then all they had to do was just reach them before they could use their weapons. The slaughter could begin if they simply charged all at once. They were cornered!

True. They were cornered. Kai looked at a patch of empty space and shouted out his orders, “Hold! Mark 2, mark 6! Hold!”

Sure enough, another log sprouted out of the ground and dragged a snared Facestealer towards the coordinates. Kai let the order fall and a barrage of boulders hammered into it in a spurting fountain of flesh.

The scene repeated itself across the battlefield without fail.

It was a network of motion. Logs blasted upwards to bar their way, spikes whirled and jutted out of the ground and snares dragged them around in circles straight into carousels of rope bound boulders spiraling through the air. Then, when the first layer of traps were sprung, pits made movement circuitous and guided the Facestealers further into yet more layers of traps. All the while the real trap was being constructed. Ropes clung to their limbs, nets entangled them. The Facestealers’ focus was so concentrated on what was in front of them that they couldn’t appreciate what was happening below them. The deeper the Facestealers went, the more they found that they were unable to advance.

After all, the goal was never to injure the Facestealers with the traps. Just impeding and limiting their progress was enough. A moment’s hesitation, a single second of pause was all it took for a barrage to hit. But there was something else there, too, a latent design to the madness that welcomed struggle. One of the Facestealers could see it. With dawning horror it could see the lengths of rope coiled around its legs and body. And where did those ropes lead? To the corpse of another rope lashed Facestealer, with yet more lines being pulled taut outwards like grasping tendrils into the night. They could not advance without dragging the dead behind them.

The design was simple, yet effective. Why bother building walls when you could use corpses as obstacles to grab and drag their breathing compatriots down into the mire and muck? The more the Facestealers struggled the more they became entangled in an ever growing web built out of their battered bodies. Like flies stuck in a spider’s web, by the time they realized that they wanted out it was already too late.

Before long, 25 out of the 35 Facestealers lay dead on the ground.

Hunger.

Hunger wracked Kai’s brain. The plan went too well. Something needed to go wrong! Why were they so stupid?! Even a buffoon would have realized that they needed to retreat once the first layer of traps were triggered. They could have just set off the traps one by one and advanced under the cover of makeshift shields. But dying all at once? Idiotic.

No, the larger ones were smarter. There was still hope yet that they would reach the tree.

Sure enough, out from under their lurking, three story tall armories flashing iron and steel rose to stand before the carnage. Knights clad in scavenged armor the Facestealers were adorned with a patchwork of mismatched designs and implements. Swords, sipars, halberds, sabers, flails, plates, scales, mail and gambeson. All manner of war’s instruments were brought beneath the beckoning of clawed emblems and tattered banners flapping in the night’s wind. Like hunters hanging trophies on a wall, their bodies were temples of conquest, testaments to slaughter.

Nine harbingers of destruction stood before the brink and in their many hands were crude shields hewn from stone. They charged forwards past their fallen kin, slashing away any strands of rope and netting that rose out of the ground to grasp at them. Boulders flung their way were intercepted by the shields and shattered into fragments. The Facestealers crashed through the remainder of the trappings as though they were twigs and before long found themselves at the base of the tree. The time for slaughter was at hand.

They used shields. That was good, they were learning. Yet, would they really learn their lesson? Would they change their strategy and try something different?

No. Of course not. They climbed the damn tree like a bunch of idiots.

The Facestealers expected that once they were able to get to the tree the goblin’s strategic advantage would be diminished. They climbed up the side of the tree without much trouble, all the while lifting their shields to defend from the onslaught of boulders crashing down from above. Their thoughts were predictable from that point on which was precisely why they did not expect the battering rams to come pummeling out of the sides of the tree.

Two of the Facestealers were hit in the dead center of their bodies. While they could ascend the trees safely with their shields, they had to sacrifice the usage of a large portion of their limbs to do so. With only a flimsy grip on the tree it was easy enough for the combined force of forty goblins behind a battering ram to push them off balance and send the Facestealers hurtling back down to the ground. There a coordinated strike from above could finish them off. The two that fell down did not get back up again.

The rest of the Facestealers now understood their predicament. They were, yes, trapped. If they wanted to secure their grip on the tree they would have to release their shields but doing so would leave them vulnerable to strikes from above. The only option was to surge forward in the hopes that they could slip past the range of the battering rams. Of course, that, too, was accounted for. Those that rushed upwards were not met with battering rams. Those were reserved for the Facestealers closer to the middle and bottom of the pack. No, those at the top would become obstacles.

To be honest, it was an oversized mousetrap. Just a few dozen torsion springs connected to an array of logs that would spring forward and lock any Facestealer in place once they snapped the trigger. Kai actually expected nothing to come of them. The image of a Facestealer squirming beneath a house sized mouse trap was so preposterous that he hesitated to have it built. Yet, lo and behold, the image became reality and Kai couldn’t help but try to suppress a wince.

But after what happened next there wasn’t a single combatant that wasn’t wincing.

The goblins inside the tree peered out of their murder holes and started to bash into the Facestealer’s carapaces with sledgehammers. The faintest of cracks eventually bloomed into massive fissures that spurted blood. The goblins then peeled off their armor and looked into the pulsing flesh and organs that lay beneath. Sufficient holes were carved into the flesh as proper receptacles of what was to come. Then a pot was brought over. The black, bubbling, boiling mass of pitch inside was lit aflame and then promptly dumped into the holes dug out of the Facestealer.

Screams.

High pitched wails reverberated through the forest and there was not a single creature that heard them that did not feel a shudder of fear. They were the screams of beings having their organs cooked from the inside out. They were the screams of those that could smell their own burning flesh but could do nothing but squirm in agony. Even the goblins were hesitant to continue once they heard the screams.

There were three of them. Eventually, Kai relented and went up to each of them and sent his black spear hurtling into their brains before taking up his post back at the end of the branch. He meant for it to be a shock and fear tactic once they started swarming the tree, but obviously that wasn’t necessarily anymore. The first part of the battle was over. Just one Facestealer was left lingering in the distance as it watched the events unfold.

34 corpses were splayed across the ground. Yet, it still couldn’t see its death at the hands of those tiny, insignificant insects.

Kai sighed.

“Alright, everyone into the tree. Pack up the ballistas. Slingers, join up with the others on the higher branches. The rest of you wait for my command.”

The goblins did as he commanded and Kai helped them gather their gear back into the tree. Once done they did not shut the doors behind them, but instead left the entrance open which loomed over Kai like a gaping maw ready to swallow him whole. From within its depths something lurked and if one knew where to look there was the slightest gleam of an edge poised to strike. Kai went back to the far end of the tree branch and sat down. After a while Kai called up and in response a lit torch fell down from above. The Facestealer still had not moved.

“Come on, asshole!” Kai shouted. “I want to get this over with by breakfast!”

The hill in the distance began to move. Then it grew closer with the quaking of the earth, the shattering of logs, the crushing of corpses into fine paste. The Facestealer gained ground with tempered ease. Then, without warning, the mountain of limbs became a blur. In an instant it was already up the side of the tree and clambering over to the branch where Kai sat. The branch, barely larger than the apex Facestealer, creaked and groaned under its weight. The Facestealer towered over Kai, a five story building ready to crash over him and turn him into a red splatter across the ground.

But all Kai could see were the cracks and fissures beginning to form along the edges of the branch as he opened up a small hatch at his side. An updraft of escaping gas pelted his face as an acrid smell commingled with rot and faeces Kai’s nostrils. Kai took one last look at the Facestealer, dropped the lit torch into the hatch and closed it.

An explosion rocked the tree branch and sent the whole structure plummeting towards the ground in a shattering of flames and shrapnel. A particularly astute person would have noticed that there were two explosions, the second more destructive than the first. But if anyone asked Kai could have written it off as due to the sudden combustive force of the tar creating a backblast. Not like anyone had to know the truth.

In any case, the subsequent explosions sent Kai and the Facestealer hurtling towards the ground. While Kai could cling to his black spear to somewhat hover past the burning debris and thrashing mountain of limbs, he was still gaining velocity at a disconcerting rate. Maybe not instant death disconcerting but definitely two broken legs and a spine injury kind of disconcerting.

“Any time now would be great,” Kai muttered as he looked down at the Facestealer’s body crashing to the ground with an earth shaking tremor.

At the entrance to the former branch something was moving into place. Instead of a ballista, it looked more like a tool to take down a mammoth. Massive coils of rope were strung around towering columns of wood, enough force latent in the jumble and patchwork of metal and twine to rip several men clean in half. At the end of the ballista were goblins turning winches, putting the final priming touches onto an engineering monstrosity built on dreams and wishful thinking. At the center of that maelstrom there was the glint of a honed edge poking out of a dark, viscous fluid created from all manner of poisons and toxins that the goblins could muster.

The winches were turned and turned. Ropes thrashed against their bonds and vibrated the entire machine. Still, the winches were turned until they could turn no more. Then, when all the goblins were as far away as possible, the trigger was pulled and the beast was unleashed.

It pierced.

In one blink the harpoon went straight through the carapace, straight through the flesh and organs and out the other side. Tied to the end of the harpoon was a rope and the goblins pulled at it so that it rocketed back into the Facestealer and nestled snug inside its shuddering flesh. The Facestealer cut the line but the damage was already done. It could scream and thrash as much as it wanted but its ability to fight was gone with the growing paralysis blooming across its body.

Still floating in the air Kai saw a form approach him from above. It was the Elder flying with his magic glider and before long the Elder had scooped Kai into his arms and deposited him back onto the ground. There Kai and the Elder surveyed the aftermath as the rest of the goblins flung nets, ropes, stones and boulders while pouring boiling pitch and tar over the Facestealer from above. Given the opportunity, even a half dead man could recover enough strength to turn victory into defeat. A battle was never over until the last combatant was truly dead. It was only when the final whimpers of the dying faded away that the Elder turned to Kai.

“It is over? Did we really win?”

But instead of replying Kai simply smiled. He then went up to the Facestealer and sent his spear whirling through its brain. Gouts of red splattered across his body. In the flickering light of burning debris, surrounded by upturned corpses dragged down into the blood soaked mud, Kai was the only one left smiling.