One Inch Tall, One Power a Day - Hunting the Greenskins
She tossed the rag into the slate sink, turned toward the stairs, and pulled up her retinal display.
It was 8:30 AM on Day Nine.
Outside, the world was locked under a sheet of clear, brittle ice that made every grass blade read as a miniature glass bayonet pointing up at the pale sky.
Wren tapped her wrist nexus to cycle her daily reality distortion.
The three-drum mechanical tumbler dropped into her field of view, the heavy brass cylinders spinning with a loud, oily clatter that resonated behind her cheekbones.
Click. Click. Click.
Three silver feathers locked into vertical alignment.
Anomaly confirmed: [Kinetic Slip / Velocity Overload]. Duration: 24 Hours. Operational Parameter: Base physical Agility increased by flat +7.0 points. Total Current Agility: 15.0 (Base 5.0 + 3.0 Gear/Elixirs + 7.0 Trait).
System Commentary: Your current movement velocity exceeds the ground sprint of a startled field mouse. Please try not to run face-first into an oak root and break your neck.
Wren stood in the center of her warm living room, her breath catching in her throat as the trait took hold.
It didn’t hit her with the raw, bone-crushing weight of a Strength buff.
She took one experimental step toward the front door.
Whoosh.
Her boots didn’t drag. Her feet moved so fast the white floor tiles blurred into a single gray streak, her shoulder stopping precisely two inches from the Iron-Burl door panel before her brain even finished sending the command to her ankle tendons.
Fifteen points of Agility.
Her mount, Cinder, topped out at six meters per second. Right now, on her own two legs, Wren could run circles around the chimera ant without breaking a sweat.
“No mount today,” she said low, her voice sounding oddly deep and slow to her own hyperaccelerated ears. “Cinder would just get in the way.”
Her heavy canvas hazard suit and thick wool coat stayed where they lay; the Fire-Feather thermal inner suit stripped off the dead sniper yesterday was paper-thin, feather-light, and held her core at a steady ninety-eight degrees even in a sub-zero draft.
She unlatched the heavy Iron-Burl main door, stepped through the new black picket gate, and locked the iron latch behind her.
The arctic air hit her face shield with a dry, stinging slap.
The world outside was dead silent. The freezing rain from the previous night had coated every stalk of chickweed, every dandelion head, and every fallen spruce needle in a layer of clear, slippery glaze.
Wren didn’t slide. With fifteen points of Agility, her foot placement was instantaneous, her rubber soles biting into the ice-crusted loam with micro-adjustments that compensated for every patch of slick quartz before her weight fully settled on her heels.
She glided the way stone skipped across a pond would.
She headed east toward the boundary slope, cutting straight through a dense thicket of wild fescue grass.
Her passive Inspect display swept the field ahead, projecting small, semi-transparent red text boxes through the frozen weed stems.
The twenty goblins that had fled her pistol fire earlier that morning hadn’t run far. They were scavengers by nature—cowardly when faced with high-caliber kinetic fire, but too stubborn and hungry to abandon a territory that held a warm, timber-framed shelter. They had scattered into small three-man and four-man fireteams, hiding beneath fallen dock leaves or huddled inside the hollows of decayed acorn caps thirty yards from her perimeter fence.
Wren spotted the first group wedged inside a dry depression beneath a yellowing plantain leaf.
Three goblins. They were shivering violently in the sub-zero chill, their green skin mottled with gray frostbite patches, their fingers wrapped around crude bone daggers as they gnawed on the frozen, half-eaten carcass of a field cricket.
[Tier-1 Common Goblin x3] Attack: 4.0 | Defense: 3.0 | Agility: 3.0 Vitality: 12 / 15 Wren didn’t pull her Arcane pistol. No yell came.
She dropped into a low, gliding sprint, her boots crunching through the frozen chickweed at twentyfive feet per second.
To the three goblins under the leaf, she was no human out for a walk in the snow.
She was a dark, charcoal-gray blur that materialized out of the white glare without making a sound.
The lead goblin barely had time to lift its yellow eyes before Wren was standing directly over its head.
Sleight of Hand.
As she glided past the creature’s right shoulder, her left hand shot with the force of invisible piston.
Skill Deployed: [Sleight of Hand]. Extraction Successful! Acquired: Stamped Copper Currency x12.
The goblin felt its belt lighten, its small, turnip-shaped head snapping around in utter confusion.
Before its eyes could lock onto her visor, Wren’s right hand twitched.
Shhhk.
The Skystone Cleaver cut a flat, horizontal arc through the freezing air.
The razor-sharp, mirror-polished steel bit through the goblin’s green cervical membrane like a hot wire bites through cold butter, severing the head cleanly from the neck.
The second goblin shrieked, scrambling backward through the snow, its bone dagger flying from its numb fingers.
Wren didn’t check her momentum. She pivoted on her left heel, her body spinning ninety degrees in a tight, kinetic arc that kicked up a shower of ice dust.
Sleight of Hand.
Her phantom hand reached into the second goblin’s chest pocket as her left fist drove the Skystone Short Blade straight under its chin.
Extraction Successful! Acquired: Refined Iron Ingot x1.
Squelch.
The short blade’s three-inch steel tip punched through the roof of the goblin’s mouth and drove straight into its braincase.
The third goblin dropped its cricket leg, turned on its heels, and tried to scramble up the slippery clay bank of the erosion ditch.
It covered two inches before Wren caught it.
No blade came into it. She glided past its left flank, reached out with her bare right glove, grabbed its long, pointed green ear, and slammed its face straight down into a quartz softball boulder at full running speed.
CRACK.
The goblin’s skull shattered against the frozen stone, its limbs twitching once before going limp in the snow.
Sleight of Hand.
Extraction Successful! Acquired: Stamped Copper Currency x8.
Three goblins neutralized in six seconds flat.
Wren stood over the three green bodies, her lungs expanding in slow, steady rhythms, her visor clear of fog. Her pulse wasn’t even elevated. The fifteen points of Agility turned what should have been a high-stress close-quarters brawl into an effortless, mechanical sweep.
She picked up the twelve copper coins, the iron ingot, and the eight loose copper bits, sweeping them into her haversack utility compartments.
“Twenty-eight copper, one ingot,” she muttered, checking the time on her retina. “8:42 AM.”
She turned her face toward the south, where her Inspect display picked up five more red outlines clustered beneath a fallen pine cone.
She kicked off the dirt and vanished into the white weeds.
For the next three hours, the crabgrass jungle surrounding the hollow oak became a hunting ground where the roles of predator and prey were violently inverted.
The goblins, who had spent the last eight days ambushing lone survivors in the dark and chewing on the wooden shacks of desperate players, found themselves hunted by something they couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, and couldn’t run from.
Wren moved the way silent scythe would.
Gunpowder and aetheric ammo stayed in their pouches. She relied entirely on her 15.0 Agility, her twin Skystone blades, and her [Sleight of Hand] pickpocket skill.
Every encounter followed the exact same brutal, mathematical protocol: glide into range at twentyfive feet per second, trigger Sleight of Hand to strip the target’s belt pouch or pocket items midstride, deliver a single lethal blade strike to the neck or spinal cord, and pivot toward the next outline before the first body hit the snow.
By 11:15 AM, she had swept a four-hundred-yard radius around her fortress.
She had cleared six separate goblin fireteams, neutralizing twenty-two individual warband units without taking a single point of damage to her Softscale armor.
She sat down on a broad, ice-covered quartz rock fifty yards from the boundary slope, pulled a thermos of warm tea from her pack, and popped the cap.
The steam rose into her face shield, smelling of sweet rose hips and boiled rainwater.
She pulled up her morning harvest summary:
[Total Goblins Neutralized: 22] [Stamped Copper Currency Acquired: 312 Bits] [Stamped Silver
Currency Acquired: 4 Coins] [Scrap Iron Ingots: 18] [Cured Salted Cricket Legs (Edible): 6] [LowGrade Flint Igniters: 3] [Stat Siphons via Sleight of Hand: Agility +0.08, Strength +0.04, Defense +0.02]
Her baseline stats had nudged upward again by tiny, fractional decimal points.
“Three hundred copper, four silver, and twenty-two dead greenskins,” she whispered, taking a long sip of the hot tea. “Not a bad morning’s work.”
She swallowed the tea, capped the thermos, and looked toward the thick thistle patch forty yards to her left.
Her passive Inspect display suddenly flared bright red.
A massive, solitary text box—outlined in jagged, dark crimson brackets—unfolded above the thick thistle roots:
[Tier-1 Goblin War-Chieftain (Regional Alpha Leader)] Scale: 200.0 mm (Approx. 8 inches / 2.5x
Standard Player Scale). Attack: 9.5 | Defense: 7.0 | Agility: 5.5 Vitality: 80 / 80 Equipment: Heavy Iron-Spiked Mace, Reinforced Scrap Iron Plate, Cured Leather Breeches. Status: Enraged (Tracking intruder scent trail).
Wren’s eyes narrowed as she watched the high thistle stems part with a heavy, crunching snap.
The big boss had finally come out of its hole.
Wren closed her thermos, tucked it into her pack, and wiped the tea moisture from her visor with her sleeve.
“Two hundred millimeters,” she said softly, her right hand reaching down to grip the walnut handle of her Skystone Cleaver. “Eight inches tall. That’s a big green target.”
She stood up from the quartz rock, adjusted her boots on the ice, and waited for the Chieftain to step into the open.