"Victory means nothing if the ceiling falls on your head five minutes later."
***
The goblin's death rattle echoed off stone walls as Rhys pulled his spear free. The iron point came away with a wet sucking sound that turned his stomach. He'd heard it a hundred times before on the village palisade, but it never got easier. Black blood dripped from the weapon in thick globules, pooling on the tunnel floor between chunks of rubble and scattered goblin weapons.
The metallic tang of blood mixed with the musty scent of underground air. He'd breathed cleaner air during the mass burnings after the plague summer, and that was saying something.
His team stood among the carnage. Chests heaving. Sweat mixing with dust until their faces looked like miners who'd been underground for a week. The eerie glow of the tunnel's phosphorescent moss painted everything in shades of sickly green and pale blue. His teammates looked like corpses that hadn't figured out they were dead yet.
