In Kuroinu

"Report came in this morning," Filia said, walking fast enough that I had to stretch my stride to keep up. "A farmer found goblin tracks near a cave system east of the village. More goblins than the scouts we dealt with last time. We clear it before they get organized enough to raid."

The road east from the village curved through open farmland before it hit tree line. Filia took point. Llusse ranged ahead, disappearing into the brush and reappearing on rocks and low branches without breaking stride. Tianne walked beside me, staff in hand, her healing magic a faint glow at her fingertips that she kept ready without being asked.

Mila had stayed at the village. She'd stood at the edge of the road and watched us go, her tail low, her ears flat, and she'd handed me a bundle of wrapped bread and dried meat without saying anything except "Please come back." I'd squeezed her hand. She'd gone red and her tail had started up again and she'd turned and walked back to the inn.

The cave was where the farmer said it would be. A wide opening in a limestone ridge, the ground around it torn up with tracks and littered with bones. Small animal bones, mostly. Some larger. Llusse crouched at the entrance and studied the ground while Filia checked the perimeter and I stood there holding my practice sword.

"Fifteen, twenty goblins inside," Llusse said. "Maybe more. The tracks overlap too much to get an exact count." She ran her fingers along a groove in the dirt. "Recent. Some of these are from this morning."

"Formation?" Filia asked.

"Tight. The cave narrows after the entrance. Corridors. I'll have limited sight lines."

Filia looked at me. "Stay behind Tianne. Watch our flanks. If you see movement I missed, call it."

"Spotter."

"You're good at it."

Tianne touched my arm as we moved toward the entrance. A brief squeeze. Her healing magic pulsed once through the contact, warm, and then she let go.

We went in.

The cave was dark and it smelled like rotting meat and wet stone and something animal and sharp underneath. Filia lit a torch and the shadows jumped and the walls closed in. The ceiling was low enough that I had to duck at the first bend and water was dripping somewhere deeper in, a steady plinking sound that echoed off the stone.

The first group hit us at the first intersection. Five goblins poured out of a side corridor and Filia cut the lead one down before it cleared the opening. Llusse put arrows through two more in the narrow space, the shafts punching through green skin at close range with a wet thud. The sound echoed in the tunnel and the goblin closest to me screamed, high-pitched and wet. Filia took the fourth with a backhand that caught it across the throat. The fifth scrambled past her and came straight at me.

It was small and fast and its eyes caught the torchlight and glowed red and it had a jagged piece of metal in its hand, more broken tool than weapon, and it swung at my head.

I stepped left before I thought about it. The metal went past my ear close enough that I felt the air move. I swung the practice sword Filia had given me. The blade caught the goblin across the face and it staggered and I hit it again, harder, two-handed, and it went down. It didn't get back up.

My first kill. I'd hit it in the temple on the second swing. There was blood on the practice blade and on my hand and the goblin was twitching at my feet and I stood there breathing hard and staring at it. The torchlight made the blood look black. My fingers were cramping around the sword hilt.

Ugly. Scrappy. I'd lived because my reflexes were faster than they'd been a week ago and because the goblin was small and stupid and because I'd been lucky. My hands were shaking. I swallowed hard and kept moving.

"Better," Filia said. She was already moving to the next corridor.

We pushed deeper. The cave branched and the goblins came in twos and threes and Filia and Llusse handled them with the efficiency I'd seen at the farmland fight. The tunnels were tight and the torchlight didn't carry far and every corner was a potential ambush. I stayed behind Tianne and watched the dark and called out a flanking pair from a side tunnel that Llusse couldn't see from her angle and she killed them both before they made it into the corridor.

"Good eyes," she said. Still didn't look at me.

The deeper chambers were empty. Whatever goblins had been nesting here were either dead or had fled deeper into tunnels too narrow for us to follow. Filia checked each room methodically, torch held high, sword ready. Some of the rooms had crude bedding, piles of straw and stolen cloth. One had a stack of bones arranged in a circle around a flat stone, and the stone had a dark stain on it that I didn't want to think about. Llusse kicked the bone circle apart as she passed through it.

The last chamber was larger. A natural cavern where the ceiling opened up and the torchlight didn't reach the walls. Water ran along one side in a shallow stream and the floor was littered with bones and scraps of cloth and the remains of a campfire. The goblins had been living here.

I saw it on the back wall.

A symbol. Carved into the limestone, deep enough that someone had used a tool, and the lines were precise and deliberate and nothing a goblin would have made. I knew those lines. I'd seen them in the source material, in background art that most viewers wouldn't have noticed, on the banners of Maou's army in the northernmost scenes.

A demon lord's mark.

My chest went tight. I kept my face still and my breathing even and I walked toward it and studied it like a person who'd never seen it before.

Maou's forces were this far south. The goblins near the village weren't strays or a separated scout party. They were being directed. Someone or something had marked this cave as a staging point, and that meant the demon army's reach extended past the fortress-cities, past the wall, into Lesdea. Into the safest kingdom on the continent.

They were already here.

"What is that?" Filia was beside me, torch raised, looking at the symbol.

"Carving," I said. "Don't recognize it. Might be worth having someone at the capital take a look."

She studied it. Frowned. "It's too precise for goblins."

"Yeah."

"Someone directed them here."

"Yeah."

She looked at me. Her eyes were sharp.

"We'll report it," she said. "Let's clear the rest and get out."

We cleared the rest. A few stragglers in the tunnel mouths that Llusse picked off, and then the cave was empty and we moved back toward the entrance. Daylight showed through the mouth of the cave and the air got cooler and cleaner and I breathed it in and my hands stopped shaking.

We set up at the cave entrance for a rest before the walk back. Filia sat on a rock and cleaned her blade. Llusse crouched at the tree line, scanning. I sat on the ground with my back against the limestone and closed my eyes for a second.

The bruise on my left ribs was throbbing. The goblin that had swung at my head had also clipped me with its elbow or its body during the scramble and I hadn't registered the hit until now. The adrenaline was fading and the pain was filling in behind it, dull and deep.

"Let me see," Tianne said.

I opened my eyes. She was kneeling in front of me, staff laid aside, her hands already glowing faintly. She was between my legs because that was the angle she needed to reach my left side and her face was close.

"Lift your shirt," she said.

I pulled the linen up to my chest. The bruise was a dark spread across my lower left ribs, already going purple at the edges. Her hands hovered over it and the warm pulse of her healing magic sank into my skin and the pain eased.

Her fingers were cool where they pressed against my ribs. She was leaning forward and her hair was falling past her shoulder and the line of her throat was right there, the pulse beating steady and visible in the soft skin below her jaw. Close enough to smell the lavender in her hair, to feel her breath warm on my stomach.

She glanced up and caught me looking at her throat.

Her hands stopped moving. The glow flickered. Her eyes met mine and they were wide and brown and very close and the pulse in her throat jumped, faster than it had been a second ago.

She pulled back. Stood up. Smoothed her robes.

"You should be more careful," she said. Her voice had a crack in it that she covered by turning away.

"I'll try."

"You should try harder. A rib fracture in the field could be-" She stopped. Picked up her staff. "Just be more careful."

She walked to the other side of the cave entrance and sat down with her back to me.

From somewhere behind me, a quiet snap. I looked over. Llusse was sitting against a tree, working on her arrows. An arrowshaft lay broken in two pieces on the ground beside her. She was staring at the pieces with her jaw tight.

"Arrow break?" I asked.

"Defective shaft." She picked up another one and started sharpening the head, her strokes fast and rough. "Bad materials."

"Right."

She sharpened. I leaned against the rock. Tianne sat with her back to both of us and didn't turn around. A bird was singing in the canopy above us, something with a long trilling call that repeated. I listened to it for a while. It sounded like it was arguing with itself.

Filia finished cleaning her blade and stood. "Let's move. We report the symbol to the village elder and I'll draft a message to the capital. Whatever made that mark, it's above our pay grade."

I stood. My ribs felt better. Tianne's magic had done its work. The skin where her fingers had been was still warm.

"You did well in there," Filia said. She was looking at me. "The kill was rough but you stayed calm. And the flank call saved Tianne a hit."

Llusse, still working on her arrows, didn't look up. "He was adequate."

"Coming from you, that's a medal," I said.

Her jaw tightened. She put the arrowhead down and stood and walked past me toward the road. "Let's go. It's a long walk."

We walked back to the village in a line. Filia up front, Llusse ranging, Tianne behind me. Nobody talked much. The bird was still going when we left the tree line, and then it was just the sound of boots on the road and the sun on our backs and the walk home.

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