It looked at Eskar's group.
It moved.
Cort died first.
It wasn't slow or dramatic. The hegoblin's overlong arm came across in a sweeping backhand, and Cort was simply — gone from where he'd been standing, crashing through the undergrowth ten feet to the left, and by the time the sound of the impact finished echoing through the trees, the quality of the silence that followed told everyone in the clearing what they needed to know.
Wyla made it two more seconds before the creature's follow-through caught her across the chest, and she went down hard, not dead, clearly not dead; she was trying to get up, already trying, which was its own particular kind of awful, but down and not getting up quickly enough to matter.
The group contracted.
Without discussion.
The pure animal logic of threat assessment was pulling them together toward Eskar the way water runs toward the lowest point, because Eskar was the heaviest blade standing and the group knew it even if they weren't thinking it consciously.
Brenn was saying something — short, clipped words, the compressed language of fighters in trouble. Ossian had his shield up, moving laterally, trying to draw the creature's attention and finding that the creature was paying attention to all of them simultaneously, rotating that too-large head with the patient deliberateness of something that had never been in a hurry.
Eskar hit it.
A good hit, with his full weight behind it, blade connecting with the thick hide of the creature's left side — and the hegoblin moved. Staggered half a step, turned toward him, and raised its arm.
Eskar had been fighting long enough to know when he was in trouble.
He dived; the arm came down where he'd been. The impact cracked the root system of a nearby tree.
"Scatter," he said, because he was out of other options that made sense.
"Give it angles, don't let it focus—"
Jake had not moved.
That was the precise, clinical observation that would have troubled Eskar if Eskar had been in a position to make observations — that Jake, who had been fighting on the right flank thirty seconds ago, had gone completely still.
Not frozen or panicked.
His eyes were open, tracking the hobgoblin, the group, the spacing and the angles, and the way the creature weighted its steps — favoring the left slightly, the right knee turning inward on its planted foot.
Tracking the way the light fell through the canopy and where the shadows pooled deep and connected along the depression's far edge.
The System was awake.
Not the low simmer of passive operation — awake, in the full sense of the word, the way a fire is awake when you stop letting it coast and actually feed it.
The ledger behind his thoughts was open and lit, showing him things he hadn't pushed far enough to access in casual practice, and the darkness at the edge of the clearing was doing something it didn't do when he was lazy.
It was listening.
He moved.
Jake Altoras charging into battle with a war cry was not what happened, because that wasn't what the situation called for and because he was, whatever else he was, a young man who had come into a second life with enough accumulated sense to know the difference between courage and stupidity.
He moved smartly — angling wide, using the treeline, keeping the creature's attention fractured between himself and Eskar and Brenn, who was doing the right thing and staying loud and visible on the left.
His blade connected with the back of the hegoblin's right knee.
The weak leg - the turning one.
The creature lurched.
Jake followed — pushing the advantage, reaching for the system, feeling the shadows at the depression's edge respond to him like a pulled thread — and for a moment, half a moment, the darkness at the clearing's perimeter leaned, a subtle wrongness in the light that made the hegoblin hesitate, its flat eyes sweeping the treeline for whatever had shifted.
That hesitation was what Eskar needed to get upright.
It was also, as it turned out, all Jake had.
The hegoblin turned back to him with the particular attention of something that had identified the most annoying thing in the room, and its fist came around in a short, compact arc that caught Jake across the left side — ribs, hip, the edge of the shoulder — and lifted him.
He hit the ground six feet away.
The air left him completely. He lay on his back staring up through the canopy at a sky that was doing something complicated and spinning, and he ran a rapid internal inventory.
[Breathing: working on it.
Vision: currently featuring stars that aren't there.
Ribs: screaming.
System: still present.
Good.]
And tried to decide whether getting up immediately was a sign of resilience or a sign of deeply flawed judgment.
He was still deciding when the sound changed.
The arrow came from the southeast.
Not one arrow. Three, in a grouping so tight they arrived as a single sound — a compressed, short-syllable thunk that buried itself in the hegoblin's right shoulder and made the creature turn, finally, away from Eskar, away from Jake, toward the treeline from which the sound had come.
The woman who stepped out of that treeline moved like water finding its level.
No wasted motion. No dramatic entrance. She was simply not there, and then she was, crossing the open ground of the depression with a pace that was unhurried and exact, and the weapons in her hands were the reason the pace was unhurried — a short blade in her right hand and a weapon in her left that wasn't quite a blade and wasn't quite a hook, something custom and specific, the kind of thing you designed for yourself after enough time fighting to know exactly what you needed.
She was dressed for work. Unlike her previous attire.
Dark fitted clothing, layered for movement, with the kind of coverage that balanced protection with mobility — and across her back, the short bow she'd already discharged, not abandoned but slung back with a practiced snap that said she knew exactly how long it would take to retrieve it if she needed it again.
Her face was composed.
Jake, from the ground six feet away, still sorting out his relationship with oxygen, stared.