Following the Goblins

Your movement is swift at first. It is easy to track the headlong flight of the pair of goblins through the forest. You feel a fierce martial pride at the fear you can read in trampled mud and small broken branches. The goblins sought to ambush and **** and fuck you and you fought back with steel and shed their foul blood. You feel pleasure too in swiftly moving through the forest; it sings in the elven part of your blood. You have always been graceful but beneath the lush canopy, in the dappled shade of the trees and on the hunt, you feel both more graceful and more deadly. You are Lucretia’s paladin and her justice!

You have not thought about thick green monster cock and the aphrodisiac berries, nor the wanton desire they kindled in your breasts and pussy, for several minutes.

A pair of birds erupt into flight ahead, and you freeze into a crouch as you land from vaulting a tree root half your height without disturbing a single fallen leaf. There is a moment of tension and then ahead a russet red shape comes into view. A fox. It moves on, either not knowing or not caring that you are there.

You let out the breath you have held, and take your hand from Lover’s hilt.

You resume tracking the goblins. But you are more cautious now. You use pieces of cloth to cushion and mute the noisier joints of your partial plate armor. Your tutors have taught you of goblins. The sinful monsters are known to favor ambush. And the two targets of your holy vengeance may be moving towards a camp or village. Your green eyes and pointed ears are half-elven sharp, and you feel somehow attuned with the forest. You are not afraid, but nor are you foolhardy.

The goblin spoor becomes harder to follow. You are more than a mile from where you made camp last night, and the horrid little monsters must have realized by this point you were not in hot pursuit. Their slower pace is harder to track. You are no ranger and fear you will find neither foul monsters nor succulent berries when Phryne, dark goddess of luck (and, some say, whores), smiles upon you.

There is boggy ground here. A small spring and much leaf matter. Your sabatons squelch a little. The damp ground has captured many tracks. You can see the marks of bare goblin feet and crude goblin boots. You cannot tell if there are many goblins, or a few who have been this way many times. But the greater mystery and clue are the runnels in the mud. You pause and study them, running a slender steel-armored finger along a grove in the mud. Perhaps a sledge, heavily laden, pulled by many goblins? It seems plausible but you do not know what it means.

The tracks of the sledge, if that is what it is, could be followed by a blindwoman. The forest here is denser, above the trees fight one another mercilessly for the light and below are strangled with thick ivy. The shadows are thick here even though the sun is now well above the horizon. Your sense of communion with the forest fades. This feels like a place where dark things could live. Silently you draw Lover.

Lover leads your way as you penetrate deeper into the dark woods. But soon your sweet Lover is called to do more.

Foolishly silhouetted against the top of a small rise in a gap in the trees are two goblin sentries. Their crude spears are propped up to one side. One is asleep, sat leaned against a gnarled tree, and the other has its back to you as it takes a piss against the same tree. Its thick cock is in its hands and a sickly greenish-yellow stream spurts from it. Revolting!

You charge.

The goblins never see you coming. You drive Lover with fierce strength into the back of the urinating goblin's head. The greatsword parts its skull as if it were paper. Angled down it erupts from the goblin’s palate and out from between its lips. Its mouth opens unnaturally as its jaw hangs partially off its skull. You drive the blade of Lover on with all your paladin strength and holy fury. It skewers the other goblin through its snoring gob. It dies as swiftly and unaware as the first. Lover’s point finally comes to rest in the bark of the tree against which the sleeper lay.

The horrid little monsters have no chance to cry out or make a sound as they die. You feel no shame in killing them unarmed and surprised. Last night taught you that they would do worse to you.

In the clearing ahead is a small fortified camp of crude mud and earth huts within a crude wooden palisade.