Tulkuth woke from the vision to the strange smells of Earth.

It also smelled humid. Like water.

Even the ancestral memories he had awoken with his metamorphosis had never shown him such abundance of life-giving water.

Perhaps it would even fall from the sky as ‘rain’.

It had been hundreds if not thousands of years since it had rained in Heloth.

His other senses had also been sharpened by the metamorphosis.

He could hear roughly how many of his unevolved brethren were in the camp at this moment simply from the bustle of noises.

Disgusting creatures, he sniggered.

Without ancestral memories, they were little better than animals.

Like the natives of this place that they had penned up just a short distance away, Tulkuth thought, as he sniffed the air for the scent of the delicious, soft flesh.

But he put these thoughts aside.

This was the third time that he had been sent a vision, no doubt by the Great Devourer himself.

In it, he had seen a ‘man’ with pitch black hair and eyes.

The insolent animal held the holy artifact that the Great Devourer had blessed him before jumping into the dimensional rifts.

He had only the broken remnants of ancestral memories to refer to, which would need further metamorphosis to unlock, but he knew that having the same vision over and over again was most definitely not a good sign.

The Great Devourer was not known for his patience.

He would have to find this man, and quickly.

One of his trusted scout leaders had run off with his precious dagger a week ago, and Tulkuth had killed five of his unevolved kin in a fit of rage that day.

There had been enough blood essence for the dagger to soon produce yet another Blood Crystal.

Thankfully he’d been on the brink of metamorphosis anyways.

The looks on the faces of his ‘rivals’ when he had woken from his slumber had been priceless.

He’d stabbed them promptly.

He rose from his bedding, made with pelts of the strange animals that seemed native to this place.

A few of them had four eyes and two pairs of wings like the regular animals of Heloth would, but they always seemed to be in pain or mad. Strange.

He raised the flap of the tent and took a deep breath, assessing the layout of the camp.

The human livestock stared at him with empty eyes. As delicious as they looked, the feast would have to wait until he’d recovered the dagger.

No use spilling blood without letting the dragger drink its fill.

He had directed the tribe, his tribe, he realized with elation, to continue to hunt animals, but to bring back any humans alive.

He had hoped that one of the scouting parties would bring back the black haired human, but instead, many of them had gone missing themselves.

Earth was turning more dangerous for their kind, but the damn Duruks would never make a deal with the smaller Turuks.

The muscle bound fools thought themselves the lords of Heloth’s deserts with their largeness and tusks they so admired, Tulkuth snickered.

They would see. It had been many generations since there had been enough food for more than a handful of Turuks to enter metamorphosis.

He had been sipping his favorite soup from one of the skulls that had been lying around when a commotion arose from one of the entrances.

It seemed to be two humans making the racket, and the guards lay at their feet, a barely recognizable bloody mess.

Tulkuth immediately screamed a war-cry and roused the camp, pointing at the offending humans in an unintelligible rage.

Mere livestock would invade this camp? His camp?

His tribe hurried to their feet, picking up the crude spears and knives they had fashioned from some of the rocks and wood especially resilient to their manna.

The human was female, a woman.

The woman was strong, like a Duruk.

She turned into a tornado of metal each time one of his own warriors closed the distance, separating limbs from body or cutting through torsos.

Impressive.

But what excited Tulkuth was the fact that he had seen her before.

In the visions, this woman had always lurked next to the man holding the dagger.

Excitement boiled and spilled over like a steaming pot of stew.

It seemed he wouldn’t have to worry about the visions anymore. They would capture this woman, and torture her until she led them straight to the man.

He gathered his manna, invoking the blood and soul of his ancestors.

Then the human turned tail and ran, and Tulkuth nearly choked on the spell he had been about to utter.

Why would she flee so suddenly after apparently having challenged his tribe at the mouth of their camp?

But he had no time to think, no time to question. The wrath of the Devourer would be too much to handle if he let this chance slip by.

Over and over, he screamed at the tribe, all of the tribe, to chase her and bring her to his feet.

He was lost in his rage when pain blossomed from the back of his knees, sides, and then the neck.

Tulkuth stumbled to his knees, choking on the blood that flooded his mouth.

His last sight was that of the human man he had been searching so desperately for, his golden eyes glowing as fiercely as the Earth’s strange sun.

The human’s eyes glinted with steel as he lifted a dagger, the dagger, to plunge it into his chest.

Tulkuth knew it would be fatal, but he had already sustained critical injuries and his strength was…

Tulkuth slipped away into the embrace of the darkness.

-----

Noel ran through the streets, arms pumping furiously as the entire fucking goblin tribe chased her with an ungodly ruckus..

She’d grown a bit stronger in the last three days, but not nearly as much as Cain had, who’d probably be able to outrun these fuckers in a flash. Or probably beat up half of them.

All pride aside, she’d really have to ask him if he would train her.

He did owe her a ‘favor’, after all.

A white monkey ran in front of her, skipping playfully as though this wasn’t a life or death situation, and suddenly jumped over a large portion of the road ahead.

Noel gritted her teeth and followed suit, just barely sailing over the mark that they had placed this morning.

The horde of goblins ran over each other trying to get to Noel, who had stumbled and slowed, when the ground fell underneath their feet. They fell a distance of ten feet and impaled themselves on sharpened stakes, on which Cain had spent all of his free time making in the last three days.

He had quietly whittled the sticks Noel scavenged for him with an intense focus, even though his eyes didn’t glow like they sometimes did. It was kind of creepy.

Noel was panting like a dog, but she took a deep breath and rose to her full height. She turned back to face the remnants of the goblin tribe, who were milling about with panicked cries as they watched their kin die slow and painful deaths. There weren’t many of them.

Noel grinned viciously. Cain had told her she grinned viciously, and she'd liked hearing that.

It was time for these fucking invaders to get a taste of what that could be like, coming from the other side. She hefted the axe that had saved her life multiple times over the last few days, and felt the energy burn through her body like a torrent of fire.

Besides her, a white monkey hopped about, flitting from the tops of ruined cars to the ground and back again in an excited frenzy. She let out a roar, and jumped. (Noel)

-----

Cain remained with his gaze locked with the hobgoblin's as life slipped away from its eyes.

Having gotten used to the dagger in the last few days, he could feel the dagger swell with the hobgoblin’s blood essence as it greedily drank.

It was more blood essence than he’d gotten from the last three goblin scouts he’d ambushed with Noel combined.

There were a couple of goblin stragglers, either injured, old, or young that had been left behind in the camp, and Cain hunted them all, eyes shining in the shadows. By the time he was done, the dagger had produced another Blood Crystal, the third Blood Crystal he’d produced with the dagger.

He deactivated the Skill, pure exhaustion hitting him with the force of a truck. He had really pushed himself to his limits today, using [True Sight] for the hyper-focus and awareness to dodge the goblin’s attention and find the ideal route for infiltrating the camp.

Noel and Wutang’s distraction had been a lifesaver.

Cain remained standing, despite the weakness entering his limbs. He still had one more show to put on, after all.

He walked over to the center of the camp, where the hobgoblin’s tent had been. He would loot it later.

He passed the tent and approached the reason he had worked so hard for the last three days.

“Hello.” he said.

A dozen gazes looked back at him blankly as rain began to fall, mixing in with the tears that rolled down their faces.