My Colony Became a Living City

Chapter 12 - Goblin Blood

Chapter 12 · 1,381 words

Dawn at the eastern perimeter smelled like wet iron.

Torven found the snare twisted and bloody before he found the body. The wire trap, set three days ago on a game trail that shouldn't have caught anything larger than a hare, had been sprung hard enough to bend the anchor stake. Blood tracked from the wire's bite in a dark line through the undergrowth.

He followed it and found the goblin.

It was caught by the left hind leg, the wire cutting deep enough to expose bone. The body was smaller than he'd expected, barely four feet from the pointed, torn ears to the curled tail. Grey-green skin, matted with forest debris. Elongated hands with fingers that twitched in the mud. Its breathing was shallow, each exhale producing a faint rattling sound from somewhere deep in its chest.

Torven crouched beside it and didn't touch.

Rule literacy. Pattern recognition was what his mind reached for first. A goblin this close to Ashmark was wrong. The nearest Blight-corrupted territory was a two-day march east. Goblins didn't wander. They were territorial, social, and smart enough to avoid human traplines.

Unless something had displaced it.

He leaned closer. The metallic tang on the air was more than blood. Underneath it, faint but present, was the copper-and-rot smell of Blight-taint. The creature's eyes were still clear, its movements still coordinated, but the taint suggested it had been pushed out of territory that was sicker than this.

The Harrowing's influence, reaching further than it should.

The goblin's breathing hitched. Its eyes, dark and too large for its skull, found Torven's face and held it. There was no aggression in the look. No pleading, either. Just the flat attention of something that understood it was dying and was spending its last minutes paying attention to what was around it.

Torven's mind was already calculating.

A goblin body sat between rat and human on the neural complexity scale. Rats produced fragments with curiosity but limited behavioral range, exploration without preference, processing without personality. Humans produced fragments with richer responses, stronger autonomous behavior, the unsettling fascination he'd seen in Bramel's fragment on its first day. A goblin was intermediate. Testing how a goblin body affected fragment behavior would give him a data point between his two existing templates.

More than that: species unlock. Infecting a new species for the first time permanently unlocked that species' body template. Any future fragment could inhabit any goblin body. That was a capability gain that didn't require convincing a reluctant resident, didn't carry the moral weight of human infection, and didn't depend on the town's fractured politics.

The goblin's leg was a ruin. Even if he freed it, the wound was infected. Blight-taint or ordinary sepsis, either way fatal within hours. The body would die. The question was whether he could use it before that happened.

He drew his pelt knife.

The transfer was familiar by now. He cut his palm (both hands were still healing from the previous day's infections, the bandages stiff and uncomfortable) and pressed the bleeding wound against the goblin's open leg injury. Blood contact. The infection vector.

He pressed. Held. Felt the familiar shimmer of connection forming at the edge of his awareness, a new frequency joining the network, tentative at first, then solidifying.

The goblin's body went rigid. Its eyes widened. The rattling breath stopped, restarted, then deepened into something steadier.

And then the unlock hit.

A structural click in the System's architecture, a lock tumbling open in a room he hadn't known existed. Goblin templates became available. He could feel them at the edge of his perception, a body type, a neural architecture, a set of sensory parameters that were now part of his class's permanent toolkit.

The sensory input from the goblin fragment flooded in.

His own eyes saw the forest floor: mud, blood, the twisted snare wire. But the goblin's eyes, his eyes now simultaneously, showed him the same scene in a different register. The goblin's hearing was sharper. Distant sounds that his human ears registered as a single forest hum resolved into distinct sources: water moving over stone somewhere north, a bird calling three trees east, the creak of a branch swaying in wind he couldn't feel on his human skin.

The smell was richer. More layered. The forest broke into scent-profiles he couldn't have separated before: pine resin, wet earth, the specific chemical signature of Blight-taint (sour, almost citrus-like beneath the copper), the goblin's own blood (iron-heavy, different from human blood in a way he could sense but not name).

The proprioception was alien. Longer fingers. A different center of gravity, the goblin's hips wider relative to its torso, its spine curved differently. Standing would feel wrong for a long time.

The fragment moved the goblin's head. Slowly. Turning it left, then right, then tilting it upward toward the canopy where light filtered through new leaves.

This was richer than the mechanical testing he'd seen in rat fragments. Rats explored with simple curiosity, texture, temperature, the basic parameters of a new body. The goblin fragment turned its head the way someone turns their head in a room they've never been in before, taking in the space. Interested.

Torven sat in the mud and watched through two sets of eyes as the goblin fragment flexed its hands. Each finger moved independently, then in pairs, then all at once. The hands opened and closed. The fragment held one hand up and stared at it, the goblin's dark eyes fixed on the grey-green fingers with an attention that felt less like calibration and more like wonder.

He'd seen curiosity in human fragments. He'd seen it in rats. This was neither. It was something between the two, richer than a rat's processing, not yet as complex as what a human body produced. A middle point on a spectrum he was only beginning to map.

The goblin fragment made a sound. Low, in the back of its throat. A vocalization with no one to communicate with. Just a sound. It had no tactical purpose.

Torven built a fire. The goblin body didn't need warmth yet, the temperature was mild enough. But his hands were bleeding through the bandages again, and the cold was seeping into his bones from the mud.

He sat with his back against a tree and watched through the goblin's eyes as it moved toward the fire.

The fragment didn't sit directly in the flames. It sat near them, close enough to feel the heat, far enough that the light played across its hands. It held its palms out toward the fire and watched the way the light moved across its fingers. Turned its hands slowly. Watched the shadows shift.

It wasn't warming itself for operational readiness. It wasn't testing the body's thermal regulation. It was watching the fire because the fire was interesting.

Torven felt the fragment's attention on the flames as a faint echo in his own mind. A quality of focus that felt like preference.

The goblin fragment chose to stay near the fire when no operational reason required it.

He noted that. Filed it. Added it to the growing list of observations that didn't fit the "fragment as sensor" model he'd been working with.

The cognitive load of managing the new body was different from rat, different from human. A new frequency in the network, distinct in character from the others. Like adding an instrument to an ensemble that changed the overall texture without disrupting the harmony.

Fifteen fragments now. Eleven human, three rat, one goblin. The species unlock was permanent. The body was functional. The sensory data was richer than anything he'd collected before.

And the fragment was already behaving in ways he hadn't programmed.

He watched it tilt its head at the sound of a branch cracking somewhere in the undergrowth, the curious tilt of something that found the sound interesting.

Torven pulled his jacket tighter. Through the goblin's eyes, he watched the fragment reach down and drag a stick closer to the fire to watch the shadows it cast when the flames caught its edges. The gesture had no survival function. It was the first thing the fragment had done that looked, unmistakably, like play.

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