Ruby forced herself forward, one halting step at a time, her crutch sinking into the mud with every other stride. Her leg had never healed right since the certification camp's last controlled rift exercise, as the healer had told her to rest and she had refused.
Rest was for people who had time, after all. Rest was for people who weren't trying to prove something. She gritted her teeth and pressed on, her white priestess robes splattered with mud and the black ichor of corruption that would never wash out.
The goblins came in waves. Thousands of them. They boiled out of the controlled rift like ants from a disturbed nest, their small, twisted bodies covered in the same sickly black veins that marked all corrupted creatures.
Their eyes were hollow sockets leaking black sludge. Their mouths were too wide, too full of needle-teeth, and they chittered as they charged.
