Warmth reached them before anything else did—a thin, smoky current bleeding out of the dark mouth of the cave, utterly wrong against the frozen ravine air. Underneath it, faint and guttural, came voices. Not words. Just the clipped, barking rhythm of a language built for snarling.
Arnold crouched at the threshold, one hand flat against the stone, and went very still.
Henry watched his father's eyes move—not scanning the dark the way a man searches for shapes, but tracking something else entirely, the way Arnold had read the tree line all morning, the way he'd read the tracks Henry couldn't count. A long moment passed. Then Arnold's jaw set, some private calculation resolving behind his eyes.
"Ten of them," Arnold said, low. "Plus one that matters."
Howard's grip flexed on his broadsword. "Matters how?"
"It'll throw fire. The rest won't." Arnold didn't elaborate further, and something in the flat certainty of his voice made it clear he wasn't guessing. "That one's mine. You two clear the rest."
Henry didn't ask how his father could already tell ten goblins apart in the dark well enough to sort them by threat before a single one had been seen. He filed it next to everything else he didn't have an answer for yet.
"There's a fork about forty yards in," Arnold went on, "where the tunnel splits and one side drops off into black. Whatever happens, you do not go past it. Understood?"
"Understood," Henry said.
Howard nodded, jaw tight with the kind of focus that hadn't been there yesterday.
Arnold rose. "Then let's get this over with."
They went in low and fast. The tunnel widened after twenty feet into a natural cavern lit by three sputtering fire pits, smoke pooling against a ceiling black with generations of soot. Crude bone totems hung from cords along the walls. And scattered around the fires, hunched over half-butchered carcasses of something Henry didn't bother identifying, were the goblins.
The nearest ones saw them first—five goblins, lean and mangy, weapons crude, scrambling up with panicked shrieks rather than any real battle discipline. Henry was already moving before the first one cleared its feet.
He took the closest one across the throat before it finished standing, then pivoted into the second, catching its clumsy overhead swing on his crossguard and opening its stomach on the return stroke. These weren't the dungeon's Hobgoblin Champion. They weren't even close. Every motion came back to him with the flat, practiced ease of something he'd done a thousand times over inside a grinding, resetting loop, and these goblins fought like nothing had ever pushed them to be better.
Howard didn't charge this time. He held his ground at Henry's flank, broadsword up, eyes tracking motion instead of committing to the first target he saw.
"Two on your left!" Henry called.
Howard pivoted, caught the first goblin's crude spear on his blade, turned the deflection into a brutal downward cut that dropped it, then rammed his shoulder into the second and finished it while it was still staggering. Cruder than Henry's work. Effective all the same.
Behind the fires, five more goblins rose—broader through the shoulder, better armed, moving with a coordination the first five hadn't shown. They came in a loose wedge instead of a panicked rush, testing distance before committing, one of them actually circling to flank. Whatever separated them from the mangy five wasn't visible to the eye. Henry felt it anyway, the same way he'd learned to feel a dungeon corridor shift in difficulty before he ever saw what waited around the bend.
He met the wedge head-on rather than let it form. A feint low, a real cut high, and the lead goblin's skull opened before it registered the trick. The one behind it barely had time to react before Henry's dagger found the gap under its arm.
Off to his right, past the nearest fire pit, a burst of white-hot flame erupted and died in the same breath—swallowed, cut short, gone before it fully took shape. Henry caught only the edge of it: his father's silhouette moving through smoke with the obsidian blade already reversing for a second strike, and a hunched, robed shape stumbling backward, shrieking in a language that had gone from chanting to pure panic.
Arnold didn't call out. He didn't need to. Henry turned back to his own fight and let his father handle his.
Howard took a glancing hit across the forearm from a spear he read half a second too late, hissed through his teeth, and answered by driving his shoulder into the goblin's chest and finishing it against the cave wall. He was breathing hard now, sweat cutting through the cold on his face, but his footwork hadn't broken down the way it had against the scout in the forest. He was still watching angles. Still calling distance.
"Two left on my side!" he shouted.
"Working on mine," Henry answered, already moving.
By the time the wedge fell, goblin bodies littered the packed dirt and old bones scattered around the fire pits, and for one full breath nobody swung a blade. Howard let out something between a laugh and a gasp, sagging back against the cave wall, chest heaving. "That's—" He shook his head, disbelieving. "That's actually how it's supposed to go."
Henry allowed himself half a smile. Nine down. The shaman handled. Whatever his father had read off these goblins before they'd ever set foot inside, the numbers had held clean.
Then the last one broke.
It came up from behind the far fire pit—the one goblin Henry hadn't accounted for, wounded and half-forgotten in the chaos—and bolted for the back of the cavern, vanishing past the flames toward the dark mouth of a side tunnel.
Henry didn't think about it. He just moved.
It wasn't fear driving him—the fight was all but won, the shaman already reduced to a smoking heap somewhere behind him. It was the memory of Garrett's voice at the Garrison gate. Scouts don't wander this deep alone. If this one made it back to whatever was massing beyond the mountains, every goblin they'd just killed here would have died for nothing.
He caught up to it in the mouth of the side tunnel, blade already rising for the kill, and only then registered how far the light from the fire pits had fallen behind him.
The tunnel narrowed. Split. One path curved on into more torchlight ahead. The other dropped away into pure black.
He'd crossed the fork without noticing it.
The goblin was already dead at his feet, throat opened in a single clean stroke, and for half a second the tunnel was silent except for his own breathing.
Then something enormous shifted in the dark beside him.
"HENRY!"
Arnold's voice tore through the cavern behind him, raw and absolute in a way Henry had never once heard from his father.
"WATCH OUT!"