Far above the forest canopy, or perhaps far outside the island’s reality entirely, holographic projections of Max’s last battle played in a slow, looping replay. Blue wireframes mapped his movements frame by frame, while glowing red silhouettes marked the goblins as they fell.

  “That’s three coordinated ambushes in a row,” a younger controller said, leaning back in their chair. “You sure we want to keep the difficulty dialed this high? He’s already ahead of the curve.”

  Gemly, a stocky dwarf with a beard braided in precise rows, didn’t look away from the display. His keen eyes tracked Max’s mana usage, studying how fast he adapted to the mage goblins’ tactics. “The moment that Tricore was confirmed, the rules changed,” he said in a gravelly voice. “If we don’t raise the stakes, his experience curve will end up soft. He needs to be pacing with the top-tier tutorials, not strolling through like it’s a bloody festival.”

  The subordinate frowned. “Maybe. But pushing him this much, this fast… the oversight protocols are going to notice. You really want the System asking why one tutorial’s difficulty is three tiers above baseline?”

  Gemly finally turned his head, meeting their gaze with a sharp, no-nonsense stare. “Let it notice. We’ll call it adaptive balancing.”

  “That excuse won’t hold forever,” they warned quietly. “He’s already in front of the curve. Push too hard, and even he might figure out this isn’t just random chance.”

  “Then,” Gemly said, turning back to the display as Max’s final mana bolt slammed into the last mage goblin, “we make sure he’s too busy surviving to ask the right questions.”

  The projection looped again, replaying the moment Max blinked out of the way of the first mana bolt. Gemly watched it without blinking.

  “Next encounter,” he said, his tone like stone grinding on stone, “increase caster density by twenty percent.”

  Max woke to the faint orange glow of dying embers, the cave quiet except for the occasional pop from the fire. He stretched, the stiffness in his shoulders reminding him of the previous day’s running and fighting.

  As he sat up, something caught his attention. The back wall of the cave… looked different. Smoother somehow, like the natural ridges and cracks had shifted in the night. He stared at it for a few moments, trying to pin down exactly what had changed, but the harder he tried to focus, the more uncertain he became.

  Max rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “I’m just imagining things,” he muttered. “Too tired to think straight.”

  He stood, brushing dust from his clothes. “Maybe I should start taking more breaks during the day… before I start seeing ghosts in the walls.”

  With that, he grabbed his gear, giving the smooth stone one last glance before turning toward the mouth of the cave. He had more important things to worry about—like tracking down where that goblin squad had come from.

  Max retraced his steps, weaving through the underbrush until the trees thinned and the clearing of the ambush came into view. The scene was grim. Blood pooled in the grass where it hadn’t already soaked into the soil, and severed limbs lay at odd angles among the bodies. Flies buzzed in thick clouds, drawn to the carnage, their droning hum underscoring the silence that followed the fight.

  He crouched beside the first corpse, a brute with half its face burned away, and began stripping armor and weapons. The goblin gear was crude—patched leather reinforced with bits of bone or scrap metal—but the System didn’t care about craftsmanship when buying. Still, Max knew better than to hoard junk. Diminishing returns made stockpiling worthless, so he sold each piece to the store the moment it came off a body.

  Out of seven usable armor sets, only one was intact enough to fetch a decent price. The rest were either shredded from his strikes or warped from magical burns. The melee weapons fared better. Heavy axes and spiked clubs, their wooden shafts worn but serviceable, sold for seventy-five credits each. By the time he was done, his credit balance had climbed by several hundred.

  Looting complete, Max grabbed each body by the arm or leg and dragged it toward the center of the clearing. The pile grew steadily—goblins stacked in a grotesque mound, their empty eyes staring at nothing.

  “I need to stop leaving evidence behind,” he muttered. With a flick of his hand, a sphere of swirling flame appeared, heat radiating against his skin. He hurled it into the heap, and fire roared to life, hungrily devouring flesh and fabric alike. Black smoke curled upward into the canopy, the stench sharp and oily. Max shifted upwind and stood watch until the bodies collapsed into a smoldering mound of ash and bone.

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  When the fire died down, he turned to the task he dreaded more—finding where they’d come from.

  “Now to find out where you came from,” he said quietly, scanning the perimeter.

  The clearing offered little at first glance. Whoever had led this group had been careful. There were no obvious trails of snapped branches, no discarded gear, not even the careless scuff marks most goblin patrols left behind. They’d set this ambush to leave as little trace as possible.

  It took him nearly half an hour of slow, methodical searching before he spotted a subtle depression in the soil just beyond the treeline. The faint outline of a wide, heavy footprint pressed into damp earth. He knelt, brushing aside a layer of leaves to confirm it—a goblin track, the tread pattern matched to the brutes he’d just killed.

  “They’re getting smarter as well as stronger,” he murmured.

  Following the trail was frustrating work. Where ordinary goblin squads trampled through the undergrowth, these had gone out of their way to avoid leaving a path, weaving between rocks, sticking to firmer ground, and occasionally doubling back to mask their direction. Max had to rely on the smallest tells: a patch of moss disturbed on a log, a twig bent the wrong way, a faint scuff in the dirt where one of the brutes had slipped.

  If not for their sheer size, he would have lost the trail completely. Their weight left subtle indentations in softer spots of ground that even careful movement couldn’t hide. Still, more than once he found himself circling an area, scanning from multiple angles before he could pick the trail back up.

  Hours passed as he pushed deeper toward the island’s center, every sign reinforcing the same truth—this was no reckless goblin patrol. This had been a deliberate strike team, operating with tactics he’d never seen from their kind before.

  The further Max tracked them, the more his unease grew. These weren’t the sloppy, undisciplined creatures he’d cut down on his first nights here. The spacing of their tracks, the way they avoided brittle branches that would snap underfoot—it all spoke of coordination. Planning.

  More than once, he caught himself stopping mid-step, scanning the surrounding woods with a tightening grip on his staff. It wasn’t just the trail itself. It was how cleanly they’d masked it, like they wanted to make pursuit possible only for someone skilled enough to keep up.

  Were they trying to lure me?

  The thought made his skin crawl. Goblins weren’t supposed to think like that. At least, not the ones he knew. These brutes had moved like trained soldiers, their mages weaving spells in perfect sync. And now their trail wound deliberately toward the center of the island—slowly, carefully, never too obvious.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” Max muttered, crouching beside another shallow print. His eyes followed the faint line of disturbed soil until it vanished beneath a patch of undergrowth.

  Something was different here. Either the goblins were evolving faster than he thought possible… or someone, somewhere, was teaching them how to fight.

  He rose to his feet, the forest around him unnervingly still. For the first time in a long while, he wasn’t sure if he was the hunter—or if he was being drawn into someone else’s game.

  The trail twisted through dense undergrowth until it abruptly split in two. One branch veered left, cutting across a shallow stream where the water would wash away any trace of footprints. The other turned right, heading toward a rocky ridge where loose stone would make tracking nearly impossible.

  Max crouched between the two paths, frowning.

  “Clever,” he muttered. “Make me pick, and I might miss half of you.”

  He studied the ground carefully, scanning for anything out of place. A faint scuff mark on a boulder. A bent sprig of grass near the ridge. Both directions could be real—but the rocky path had fewer opportunities to mask heavier movement. It was the more dangerous route for them to take… unless they didn’t care about being followed.

  Max chose the ridge.

  It wasn’t easy going. The stones shifted underfoot, threatening to slide him off the narrow path with every step. He had to move slow, pausing often to search for the next subtle sign—a misplaced pebble, a dusting of dirt over rock where something heavy had passed.

  An hour later, the ridge flattened out, and Max froze.

  Through the trees ahead, the forest ended abruptly in a wall of shimmering blue light—the same kind of barrier he’d seen guarding other restricted areas. Nestled directly against its base was a sprawling goblin camp.

  It was larger than he expected. Much larger. Dozens of crude huts clustered together, smoke curling from multiple cookfires. Guard towers had been cobbled together from lashed logs, their lookouts scanning the forest with crude but functional spyglasses. The barrier formed an impenetrable wall at the camp’s back, leaving only three possible approaches—each heavily guarded.

  “Smart,” Max murmured, crouching low behind a fallen tree. The barrier meant they didn’t have to defend from all sides. No chance of flanking them from the rear.

  He counted at least forty goblins on patrol, maybe more inside the huts. From this distance, he could pick out several brutes and at least two more mages moving among the ranks. Whoever ran this camp had numbers, defenses, and the advantage of terrain.

  Then he saw it.

  Near the largest hut, a towering figure strode into view, dwarfing even the brutish warriors beside it. The creature’s skin was a mottled mix of dark green and grey, muscles bulging beneath scarred flesh. Jagged bone plates jutted from its shoulders, and its tusks curved up past its eyes in an almost animalistic snarl.

  A quick glance at his HUD confirmed it:

  [Hobgoblin – Level 17]

  “Great,” Max muttered under his breath. “A mutant.”

  The Hobgoblin barked orders in guttural growls, and the goblins around it snapped to attention, adjusting patrol routes and tightening the perimeter. Even from here, Max could see the intelligence in its eyes—a calculating awareness that set it apart from the rest.

  Rushing in now would be suicide.

  Max settled deeper into cover, eyes scanning every inch of the camp. “Same plan as before,” he whispered. “Scout first. Strike later.”

  The hunt was on—he just had to make sure it was his hunt, not theirs.