Chapter 18

  The Unseen Fist

  Ken pulled back from the fern ridge.

  The goblins were in a frenzy now, but adrenaline would keep them wired and alert for hours.

  A frontal attack was still suicide.

  Instead of striking, he would let their own panic, exhaustion, and poor leadership do the job for him.

  He secured a position high in a dense oak, well out of sight, and began the brutal process of waiting.

  The sun tracked slowly across the sky.

  For the next two hours, he watched the camp, munching on berries.

  The leaders—the three brutish goblins—yelled constantly, trying to organize the chaos.

  But the lesser goblins were restless, their movements growing sloppy and frantic.

  Ken noted the flaws: a sentry who kept leaning his spear against the palisade, a pair of guards who kept wandering further and further from the gate, arguing in high-pitched chitters.

  He slipped down from the tree.

  Over the next two hours, Ken returned to his earlier tactic, only now it was colder and more patient.

  He was running a psychological warfare campaign.

  He claimed four more kills.

  Two drawn out by noise.

  Two who simply wandered too far from the palisade to relieve themselves.

  He killed them swiftly, using strikes that instantly disabled them, then dragged the bodies deep into the leaf litter before anyone could notice the white wisp of chi rising from the corpses.

  He quickly absorbed and compressed the chi from each kill, getting slightly better doing so each time.

  My kill/death is 20/0 now, nice.

  When he returned to his perch, the camp was even worse off.

  A taller goblin was yelling.

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  He violently reorganized the surviving twenty-three goblins, forcing them into a tight, miserable formation that kept them inward toward the safety of the light.

  The two bigger brutes stationed themselves at the main gate, determined not to lose another soul to the unseen hunter.

  They stayed hyper-alert as the sun began to dip below the horizon.

  Ken waited deep into the night.

  Already terrified and deprived of sleep for at least twenty-four hours, they were now standing a miserable, tense watch.

  Running on fumes.

  Their movements confirmed it—jerky, over-reactive gestures, followed by long moments of stillness that bordered on micro-sleep.

  Time to collect that sweet chi.

  He slipped down from his oak, moving toward the darkest side of the palisade, opposite the gate where the three brute leaders were huddled.

  He moved with a careful grace, his feet finding the softest earth, his body sinking into the shadows.

  He reached the flimsy palisade.

  The guard posted ten feet away was leaning heavily on his spear, his head nodding forward.

  Ken slipped through the thin posts, widening the gap with a single, controlled push of his shoulder.

  A six footer dude in work boots squeezing into a kids play house.

  He moved through the camp like a lethal ghost.

  He ignored the fire pit and the supplies, focusing only on the soft targets.

  The sleeping sentry was his first victim.

  A brutal, silent twist of the neck.

  No shriek, no sound, just a soft collapse.

  Ken continued his sweep.

  He found a goblin sitting slumped against a support post, its crude helm tipped over its eyes. Another silent snap.

  A third was tending the fire, its back exposed.

  A swift, disabling chop to the back of the neck.

  He was a blur of calculated violence, using only his brute strength to end lives quickly and silently.

  He moved from shadow to shadow.

  Chi didn't just steam off them anymore, it sought him out.

  Every neck snapped, a fresh pulse of white mist slammed into his chest, drawn in by the pull of his growing core.

  Compressing on the move, his 'nugget' was a hungry, dense singularity.

  Seven silent kills in the camp's interior.

  Then, inevitably, came the mistake.

  As he moved toward his eighth target—a goblin curled up beneath a canvas tarp—his heavy work boot caught the edge of a stack of dry firewood.

  The dry oak clattered like a gunshot in the silence.

  Shit.

  The camp erupted.

  Goblins screamed in primal fear.

  The two brutes turned toward the noise, their iron weapons raised.

  Dashing towards the gaping hole, he left the terrified roaring goblins to their impossible task of finding the invader.

  Running, not bothering to look back.