The notice board hung on the wall beside the tavern's front door, positioned at exactly the height where a tall person had to stoop and a short person had to stretch, thereby ensuring that absolutely nobody could read it comfortably.

  This was, Levin had come to understand, a design philosophy that extended to most things in Thornwall. The village did not go out of its way to make life difficult — that would have required initiative — but it had a natural talent for mild inconvenience that bordered on the artistic.

  The board itself was a slab of cork that had been nailed to the wall with the kind of aggressive permanence that suggested someone had once tried to steal it and the village had taken the matter personally. Pinned to its surface were seven notices, four of which were so old that the ink had faded to a ghostly lavender and the paper had begun to curl inward, as though the notices themselves were embarrassed to still be there. One advertised a harvest festival from three years ago. Another sought a lost goat named Percival, and beneath it someone had written, in pencil, "Percival is dead, Margaret. Let go."

  The remaining three notices were current, or at least current-adjacent. The first requested a Level 5 Herbalist to gather moonpetal blossoms from the eastern marshes, which sounded pleasant until you read the fine print and discovered that the marshes were home to something called a Bog Render, which was exactly as welcoming as it sounded. The second was a call for caravan guards — Level 8 minimum, competitive pay, meals included — heading to Greymarch via the mountain pass. This one had been posted by someone whose handwriting radiated the particular optimism of a person who had never actually tried to hire a Level 8 anything in Thornwall.

  The third notice read:

  GOBLIN SCOUTS — NUISANCE CLEARANCE

  3-5 goblin scouts reported in Briarwood, north trail.

  Suspected camp near the old mill ruins.

  Threat Level: Low.

  Reward: 8 silver pieces.

  Requirements: Level 3+, combat class preferred.

  Post by: Thornwall Village Council

  (Contact: Alderman Fitch, Wednesdays only, before noon, weather permitting.)

  Levin read it twice. He read it a third and fourth time to confirm that it did, in fact, say "Level 3+" and that the reward was, in fact, eight silver pieces, which was roughly what Marda paid him for a week of sweeping, dishwashing, water-hauling, and enduring her commentary on the state of modern commerce.

  "Level 3," he said aloud, to nobody.

  The cat on the windowsill yawned.

  Levin unpinned the notice, folded it, and put it in his pocket. He then went upstairs, retrieved his staff from where it leaned against the attic wall, and came back down. The staff was wooden, unadorned, basic, and had been given to him by a traveling peddler who had described it as "a fine walking stick, barely cursed." So far, the curse had manifested only as a tendency for the staff to roll off whatever surface Levin placed it on, which was annoying but hardly supernatural.

  Most sticks, in Levin's experience, did this anyway.

  Sticks were, as a species, fundamentally opposed to staying where you put them.

  Marda was in the kitchen, engaged in a one-sided argument with a bag of flour that had split along its seam. She looked up as Levin passed.

  "Going out," he said.

  "Where?"

  "Briarwood. Goblins."

  Marda stared at him. Then she stared at the staff. Then she stared at him again, performing the kind of rapid visual calculation that mothers, innkeepers, grandmothers, and anyone who had ever supervised a person under thirty performed instinctively — the calculation that weighed the likelihood of the person in question doing something stupid against the effort required to stop them, and almost always concluded that the effort was too great and the stupidity was inevitable.

  "Take a waterskin," she said. "And don't bleed on anything you can't wash."

  Levin took a waterskin.

  The north trail out of Thornwall began as a proper road — packed earth, cart ruts, the occasional ambitious weed — and then, over the course of about half a mile, gradually lost confidence. The ruts faded. The earth softened. The weeds grew bolder, then dominant, then frankly triumphant. By the time the trail entered the treeline of Briarwood, it had become the kind of path that existed only because enough people had walked in roughly the same direction often enough to discourage the grass, which is the most passive and least satisfying method of road construction ever devised.

  Briarwood itself was the sort of forest that looked, from a distance, like a pleasant place for a stroll, and then, once you were inside it, immediately set about correcting that impression. The canopy closed overhead like a lid. The undergrowth thickened. Thorned bushes — the briars from which the wood presumably took its name — lined the path on both sides with the quiet menace of a crowd that hadn't decided yet whether to let you pass.

  Levin walked. His staff tapped the ground in a steady rhythm. Birds sang overhead, or at least made noises that were technically bird-related, though one particular call sounded less like a song and more like a very small creature having a disagreement with the concept of mornings.

  They didn't have tea after all.

  He had been walking for perhaps twenty minutes when he heard the voices.

  They were high-pitched, scratchy, and argumentative, which narrowed the possibilities considerably. They could have belonged to children fighting over a toy, or to a group of elderly scholars debating punctuation, or to goblins. Given the location, the hour, weather, and the general smell — which had shifted, over the last fifty yards, from "forest" to "forest with undertones of wet dog and old cheese" — Levin was fairly confident about which option applied.

  He slowed his pace and moved off the path, stepping between two birch trees and into a thicket that provided a reasonable view of the clearing ahead.

  The clearing contained the ruins of what had once been a mill. The mill wheel lay on its side like a fallen giant's monocle, half-buried in moss. The walls had collapsed to waist height on three sides and shoulder height on the fourth, which was the side the goblins had chosen to lean their stolen goods against, presumably because it offered the best structural support for a pile of junk.

  And it was, by any honest assessment, junk.

  There were three sacks — one of grain, one of what appeared to be turnips, and one that clinked when nudged and probably contained cutlery. There was a wooden crate stamped with a merchant's seal. There was a single boot, left foot, no partner, sitting on top of the crate with the forlorn dignity of a thing that had been stolen by someone who hadn't thought the operation through.

  The goblins numbered five.

  They were, as a group, exactly what Levin had come to expect from goblins, which was to say they were short, green, wart covered, disgusting, loud, and radiating the particular energy of creatures who had been put on this earth to be a nuisance and were absolutely committed to fulfilling that purpose. Each one stood roughly three and a half feet tall. Their skin ranged from the green of an unripe avocado to the green of pond water in August. They wore scraps of leather armour that had been assembled with the craftsmanship of someone who had once seen armour from a great distance and was working from memory, and they carried weapons — two had short swords (rusty), one had a spear (bent), one had a club (just a stick, really, with pretensions), and the fifth had a sling and the nervous expression of someone who had been given the sling because nobody trusted him with anything sharper.

  They were arguing.

  This was, Levin had learned, the default state of goblins.

  Goblins argued the way other creatures breathed — constantly, loudly, involuntarily, and with no apparent benefit to anyone involved. The argument appeared to concern the division of the stolen goods, which was a subject goblins approached with all the nuance and diplomatic sophistication of a brick through a window.

  "Mine!" said the largest goblin, who was larger than the others in the way that a slightly bigger potato is larger than the other potatoes — technically true, but unlikely to impress anyone at a dinner party. He had a dented iron cap on his head and was pointing at the sack of grain with a proprietary finger.

  "You got the boot!" protested a second goblin, the one with the bent spear.

  "Boot is one boot! One! Grain is many grain! Is not fair!"

  "You wanted the boot!"

  "Wanted two boot! Is only one! Is half a want!"

  This exchange continued with minor variations for some time. The goblin with the sling sat apart from the group, picking at something between his toes with a level of concentration that suggested he had found something genuinely interesting down there, or possibly alive.

  Levin watched from the thicket. He counted them again — five, all tagged with the faint shimmer that appeared above creatures' heads when he focused. Level 2. Level 2. Level 1. Level 2. Level 1. The tags hovered like name badges at a conference for the terminally unimpressive.

  He stepped out of the thicket and onto the path.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  The goblins continued arguing. The one with the sling continued his archaeological toe expedition.

  A bird sang its angry little song somewhere in the canopy. The forest held its breath, or would have, if forests had lungs, which they technically did in the form of leaves, but the metaphor was doing its best under the circumstances.

  Then the largest goblin looked up.

  There was a pause — the particular pause that occurs when a small predator, comfortable in its small predatory world, suddenly notices something that doesn't fit the usual categories of "food," "threat," or "rock." Levin, standing at the edge of the clearing with his wooden staff and his unruly hair catching the dappled light, apparently fell into none of these categories and all of them simultaneously, which caused a brief but visible short-circuit behind the goblin's yellow eyes.

  "Oi," said the goblin.

  The other four looked up. The one with the sling looked up last, having apparently resolved whatever situation had been developing between his toes.

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  "Human," observed the spear goblin.

  "Old human," added the club goblin, squinting.

  Levin blinked. He was twenty-three. His hair was white — or green-tinted, depending — but this was a feature of his arrival in this world, and he had assumed it gave him an air of quiet distinction. Apparently it gave him an air of quiet retirement.

  "Got a stick," noted the sling goblin, pointing at the staff. "Old human with a stick."

  "Easy take," said the largest goblin, and grinned. Goblin grins were, as a category of facial expression, profoundly unpleasant. They involved too many teeth, most of them pointing in different directions, and they communicated a kind of gleeful malice that was undercut somewhat by the fact that the creature producing the grin was three feet tall and smelled like a compost heap that had developed opinions about personal space.

  The five goblins fanned out in what they presumably considered a tactical formation. It resembled, in practice, five short green creatures standing in a rough semicircle and trying to look menacing, which was a bit like watching kittens try to look like tigers — the intent was there, the execution was not, and the overall effect was more saddening than threatening, provided you could overlook the rusty swords and general aroma.

  "Give us your things," said the largest goblin. He pointed his short sword at Levin. The sword wobbled. "Give us stick. Give us clothes. Give us—" He looked Levin up and down, searching for anything else worth demanding. Levin owned one shirt, one pair of trousers, boots, and a waterskin. The goblin's face fell slightly. "Give us boots and waterskin."

  "I'd rather not," Levin said.

  "Then we take!"

  "Ah," said Levin.

  He raised his left palm out, fingers slightly spread. The gesture was casual — the kind of motion a person makes when waving hello to a neighbour, or testing the direction of a breeze, or indicating to a waiter that they'd like the bill. It was not, by any visual standard, threatening.

  A point of light appeared at the centre of his palm. It was blue-white, the colour of a gas flame or a star seen through very clean glass, and it was small — perhaps the size of a marble. It sat there, hovering a quarter-inch above his skin, and it hummed. The hum was faint, almost subliminal.

  The goblins stared at it.

  Levin flicked his wrist.

  The firebolt — which was technically an Arcane Bolt, but "firebolt" was what everyone called them because "arcane bolt" sounded like something you'd find in a university syllabus — crossed the clearing in approximately the time it takes to blink, which is to say no time at all from the perspective of anyone trying to dodge it.

  It struck the ground between the two nearest goblins with a sharp, clean crack, like a whip made of light, and the earth where it hit turned instantly to glass. A circle of fused sand, roughly eighteen inches across, smoking gently in the morning air.

  Levin had aimed for the ground deliberately. He was, despite everything, a fundamentally polite person, and it seemed only fair to offer a warning shot before proceeding to the main event. This was a courtesy that goblins, historically, did not extend to their victims, but Levin felt that someone had to maintain standards.

  The goblins' reaction was immediate, unanimous, and — in its own chaotic way — rather impressive.

  The two nearest goblins leapt backward with a synchronised yelp that suggested they had been practising, though they almost certainly hadn't. The spear goblin dropped his spear, which clattered on the stones of the ruined mill with a sound like a drawer of cutlery being emptied onto a tile floor. The club goblin turned and ran directly into the mill's remaining wall, bounced off it, sat down heavily, rubbed his head, and then got up and ran in the correct direction, which was away. The sling goblin fired his sling with the aim of someone who had closed his eyes at the critical moment. The stone sailed approximately forty degrees wide of Levin, struck a tree, ricocheted off a second tree, and hit the largest goblin in the back of the head.

  The largest goblin staggered, clutched his dented iron cap, and turned to scream at the sling goblin, who was already running. This left the largest goblin standing alone in the clearing, facing Levin, holding a rusty sword in one hand and the back of his head with the other, wearing an expression that was transitioning rapidly from "aggressive confidence" through "dawning reassessment" to "profound and urgent regret."

  "Right," said the goblin. He dropped the sword. "Right. Yes. Leaving now. Bye."

  He turned and bolted for the treeline.

  Levin watched him go. He watched all five of them go, actually — five small green shapes crashing through the undergrowth with the grace and stealth of a wardrobe being pushed down a hill. Branches snapped. Bushes rustled violently. One of them — the club goblin, judging by the pitch of the shriek — ran through a patch of nettles and expressed his feelings about this at considerable volume.

  Within thirty seconds, the clearing was empty. The stolen goods sat against the wall, undisturbed. The single boot maintained its lonely vigil atop the crate. The circle of fused glass on the ground smoked and ticked as it cooled.

  Levin stood there for a moment, staff in one hand, the other hand still slightly raised, and felt something that he had been feeling with increasing frequency over the past six weeks.

  It was confusion.

  Specifically, it was the confusion of a person who had prepared himself for a fight and received, instead, a very brief and one-sided demonstration that the word "fight" was doing an enormous amount of charitable work. He had walked here expecting — well, he wasn't sure what he'd been expecting.

  Resistance, perhaps.

  Effort?

  The sense that something had been at stake, that some small quantity of danger had been present in the transaction, that the universe had, for even a moment, considered the possibility that things might not go his way.

  Instead, he had raised his hand, and five creatures had run away.

  He lowered his hand. The faint blue glow that had been tracing along his forearm — visible now in the shade of the canopy, a web of luminous threads just beneath the skin, like veins carrying light instead of blood — faded and went dark.

  The goblins had scattered into the forest, but they hadn't gone far. He could hear them — arguing again, naturally, because goblins processed every experience, including abject terror, through the medium of bickering. They were perhaps three hundred yards north, regrouping in the way that goblins regrouped, which involved a lot of shouting and shoving and very little actual regrouping.

  Levin considered his options.

  He could follow them, finish the job, collect his eight silver.

  He could also stand here in this clearing and wait for them to come back, which they would, because goblins had the long-term memory of bread and the survival instincts to match.

  Or he could simply walk home, report the camp's location to Alderman Fitch (Wednesdays only, before noon, weather permitting), and let someone else handle the rest.

  He was considering this third option — which had the significant advantage of involving tea at its conclusion — when he heard the click.

  It was a small sound. Mechanical. The sound of a latch releasing, or a spring unwinding. A mechanism doing the thing it had been built to do. It came from directly beneath his right foot.

  Levin looked down.

  His boot was resting on a wooden plate, roughly eight inches square, set flush with the forest floor and covered in a thin layer of leaves. The plate had depressed approximately half an inch under his weight. From the edges of the plate, partially concealed by dirt and moss, ran two lengths of twine — one to the left, one to the right — each connected to a bent sapling that had been staked into the ground and loaded with a sharpened stick.

  It was a spike trap. A goblin spike trap, specifically, which meant it had been constructed with the engineering rigour of a birdhouse built by a particularly untalented child. The sharpened sticks were, upon inspection, not especially sharp. The twine was fraying. One of the saplings had partially uprooted itself and was leaning at an angle that suggested it had lost the will to participate.

  The trap triggered.

  Both saplings released.

  Both sharpened sticks swung inward toward the point where a person's legs would be, had that person been standing in the precise centre of the plate, which Levin was, because he had stepped on it with the dead-centre accuracy of someone who had been specifically trying to find the one square foot of forest floor that would cause a problem.

  He stepped to the left.

  One stick whistled past his right knee.

  The other, released from its sapling at a slightly different tension, swung wide, missed him entirely, continued its arc, and embedded itself in the trunk of a birch tree with a dull thunk.

  Levin looked at the stick in the tree. He looked at the other stick, which was now swinging gently back and forth like a pendulum, having exhausted its single purpose in life and found it wanting.

  He looked at the trigger plate under his boot.

  "Hm," he said.

  From somewhere in the forest, approximately three hundred yards north, a goblin voice shouted something triumphant. There was a brief pause, followed by a second goblin voice asking whether the trap had actually worked. A third voice suggested someone go check. A fourth voice suggested that the someone in question should be the third voice. The argument resumed.

  Levin stepped off the trigger plate. He brushed a leaf from his sleeve. He looked at the clearing, the stolen goods, the fused glass circle, the embedded stick, the gently swinging spike, and the single lonely boot, and he experienced a moment of something that, in a more dramatic person, might have been called existential crisis, but in Levin manifested as a very slight furrowing of the brow and a quiet exhalation through the nose.

  Four hundred kills in six weeks.

  His mana pool was five times its original size.

  He could feel it now — a vast, warm pressure behind his sternum, like a second heartbeat, steady and growing.

  Each kill added to it.

  Each goblin, each wolf, each creature that fell before his spells fed that invisible reservoir by one small, precise percentage point.

  The power was real.

  The growth was real.

  The spells that had once cost him effort now cost him nothing more than a thought and a gesture.

  And yet the goblins had set a spike trap made of sticks and twine, and he had stepped on it, and the sticks had missed, and the whole affair had possessed all the mortal danger of a game of croquet played by the deeply uncoordinated.

  He picked up the bent spear that the goblin had dropped. He examined it briefly — iron tip, wooden shaft, a slight curve to the left that suggested it had been stored improperly, or possibly used as a lever for something it was never designed to lever, and a long crack along its center — and set it down again.

  He looked north, toward the sound of arguing goblins.

  He looked south, toward Thornwall, and tea.

  The goblins, he decided, could wait. They would still be there tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. Goblins were, if nothing else, persistent. They would return to this camp, reclaim their stolen turnips, resume their argument about the boot, and continue being a low-grade nuisance to anyone who wandered too close to the old mill ruins.

  They were, in the grand taxonomy of problems, somewhere between "leaky roof" and "that drawer in the kitchen that sticks."

  Unless they gathered into a massive army.

  He turned south and began walking.

  Behind him, in the clearing, the circle of fused glass caught a beam of sunlight through the canopy and glinted once, sharply, like a wink. The single boot sat on its crate and said nothing, because it was a boot, and boots — whatever else might be said about them — knew when to keep quiet.

  The walk back to Thornwall took twenty minutes. Levin spent fourteen of them thinking about tea, four of them thinking about the fused glass circle and whether he had perhaps used slightly more force than the situation required (he had), and two of them thinking about the fact that he had just scattered five goblins with a single bolt that he had aimed at the ground, and that this fact bothered him in a way he couldn't quite articulate, like a word on the tip of his tongue that refused to arrive.

  The problem — and he was increasingly aware that it was a problem, in the slow, creeping way that damp is a problem, or termites, or a political philosophy that sounds reasonable at first and then gradually eats your house — was that nothing was difficult.

  He had arrived in this world six weeks ago with no memory of how or why, a Level 1 status that refused to budge, little on his person other than a few bronze coins, and a mana pool the size of a thimble.

  The thimble had become a bucket.

  The bucket was becoming a well.

  And the things that were supposed to be challenges — the wolves, the goblins, the quests on the notice board with their cheerful little threat assessments and their "Level 3+" requirements — were not challenges.

  They were chores. They were the adventuring equivalent of taking out the bins.

  He emerged from the treeline and walked down the hill toward the village. Thornwall sat in its valley, doing its best impression of a place where things happened.

  Smoke rose from chimneys.

  A cart trundled along the main road.

  A merchant was shouting with a customer.

  The village orphans worked to steal a couple apples from another stall.

  While someone was shouting at a goat, or possibly the goat was shouting at them — at this distance, it was hard to tell, and in Thornwall, either scenario was equally plausible.

  Levin walked through the village gate — which was really just a gap in a fence that someone had optimistically called a gate — and headed for the tavern.

  The Leaky Sovereign waited for him with a resigned patience and was not especially thrilled about it either. Levin pushed open the door, crossed the common room, went behind the bar, and put the kettle on.

  Marda appeared from the kitchen. She looked at him. She looked at the staff. She looked at the absence of blood, injury, wince, limp, or any visible sign that he had recently been in proximity to danger.

  "Goblins?" she asked.

  "Handled," Levin said.

  "You're back in forty minutes."

  "They weren't very good goblins."

  Marda absorbed this information. She picked up a glass, nearly dropped it, inspected it for spots, found none (Levin had polished it that morning), and set it down again.

  "Eight silver," she said. "From Alderman Fitch."

  "Wednesdays only. Before noon."

  "It's Tuesday."

  "Then I'll collect tomorrow."

  The kettle began to hum. Levin measured the leaves. He poured the water. He counted to two hundred, thinking about clouds again — cirrus today, he decided, the high wispy kind that looked like someone had dragged a comb across the sky — and then poured himself a cup.

  He took a sip.

  It was acceptable once more.

  In the back of his mind, the warm pressure pulsed. Five goblins scattered, none killed. No percentage gained. The reservoir sat at exactly where it had been that morning — vast, patient, terrifying, and waiting.

  Levin set down his cup and stared at the far wall of the tavern, which stared back with the blank indifference of plaster.

  Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow he would go back to the clearing, and he would finish the job properly, and five small, invisible increments would be added to the warmth behind his sternum, and the number in the blue box would remain stubbornly and cosmically unchanged.

  He picked up the broom. The broom pulled left like usual. He corrected.