A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

He eyed the scene of his battle after watching that last goblin fall to the floor. "It's different," he mused. There was something about the situation that seemed different to what he was used to. He left the corpses where they were and went back to the head of the burrow where he'd stashed his corpses.

Inside, there was a mountain of meat. The stench was… not too bad. Yet. Had it been any warmer, then Beam was sure it would have stunk. But with the ground half frozen from the winter frost, the meat had been rather well preserved. There were nearly thirty corpses inside, and still, there was room to move and room for more corpses to be added.

As a burrow – or at least that was how Beam thought of it – it was a veritable hotel.

With the state of the floor of the burrow, with meat and bones strewn everywhere, he wasn't particularly eager to step inside, but he had to edge closer anyway, just to check that no goblins remained, and similarly that the creatures were dead.

The floor was slippery underfoot as he stepped inside, and the air was stagnant. After a brief inspection, he confirmed that there was nothing yet living. Now he turned his attention to the damage the goblins had done. He looked at the quantity of bones that were strewn around, and in truth, he couldn't find that many.

He noted that it was the more powerful beasts that the goblins had been set on devouring. They'd really done a number on the Konbreaker corpses. They'd somehow managed to tear the front shells off and feast on the hard flesh underneath. That was where the worst of the damage was. Beam estimated that about two and a half Konbreakers had been eaten, and then two Gorebeasts.

"It's not a lot, considering," Beam thought aloud. This was the type of information he'd been looking for, one of the many puzzle pieces that he'd hoped to find. Things that seemed insignificant, but played a role in determining the overall picture. He was pleased to have discovered it so soon, with time being of the essence.

"So monsters eat each other, and apparently, they grow stronger from it," he said to himself. He'd known such things to be true before. That was meant to be the natural origin of a hobgoblin: a goblin that had consumed enough flesh of enough powerful beasts that it had the energy to evolve.

That, or a goblin mother that did the same during its pregnancy, or so Dominus had told him, but Beam had never seen a goblin mother before. He'd never even seen a proper nest. He'd only ever seen the parties of hunters outside.

Such a thought struck him as odd. How could he have gone so long without stumbling on a nest? the-place-MVLeMpYr

It made Dominus' notion that someone was behind this seem much more certain. They certainly weren't appearing naturally.

"What can I do… These monsters are coming out of nowhere. No matter how many times I patrol, there's always more to be had. And now, if I leave the corpses unattended, it's only going to make more powerful enemies to deal with later on," he said, running the situation through in his mind.

"I wonder… Can I make this easier?" He said slowly, hitting upon the beginnings of an idea. "Ah… I suppose that might work?"

He began to drag some of the better-looking corpses out of the hole, throwing them into a pile on the ground. Slowly but surely, that pile built up, into a mound of unsightly-looking monster flesh.

Once that was done, he tried cleaning up the rest of the cave, with the scraps of flesh that had been left behind. He was hesitant to add them to his pile, for the purpose of that pile was to have it be easy to move, but nor was he too fond of the idea of leaving the meat behind for some lesser creature to stumble upon.

Even if it was the weakest of goblins, feasting on that amount of loose flesh would certainly turn it into quite a monster, and though he would be able to deal comfortably with it, the villagers wouldn't stand a chance. It would be as though one of Ingolsol's demons had managed to crawl up from the underworld.

"I suppose I'll burn them at camp," he said to himself. He had a huge pile of monster flesh – a pile that had risen up to well over the height of his head by now – to shift, and then the other bits of scraps that he wasn't really wanting to use. But luckily, his camp wasn't too far away… At least not if he was walking. Having a pile of flesh to shift made it quite a different story.

His plan was simple: to use the monster flesh as bait. He didn't know how effective that would be, but he was willing to take a chance on it, for there were few drawbacks. After all, the goblins had managed to find his hidden hole, despite the rocks that he'd put up to hide it, which likely meant that they had some way of tracking the scent.

He hoped the same would be true for the other monsters as well. He imagined creating such a pile that no creature in the entire forest could ignore it, so that they'd all be drawn into the same place continually, making his job of dealing with them far easier, and, above all that, hopefully allowing him the opportunity to see why they were appearing so frequently in the first place.

A decent plan, by Beam's eyes, but a plan that would have been impossible for anyone else in the village to execute alone, aside from Dominus and Lombard.

Regardless, he put that plan to work all the same.

Beam shifted those monster corpses as he planned to, hefting them all into a big pile a little distance away from camp, and then he began to set up a blazing fire in the fire pit, before dragging all the scraps of meat that were too annoying to move and tossing them on.