The Great Downgrade

A window opened in the air above Grolm's head, and it was very large, and it was full of him.

He looked up into it and saw runes he could not read and numbers falling in columns, and a wireframe of his own body turning slowly on an axis that did not exist. To Grolm this was sorcery of a kind the gods had not been given.

To Gesbiek it was a character sheet, and he had seen more alarming documents scratched into the bark of an oak.

[NAME: GROLM]
[TITLE: HIGH CHIEF | CLASS: WARLORD]
[RANK: 2-RED]
[TOTAL KILLS: 4,502]
[SUBORDINATES: 387]
[REIGN: 7 YEARS, 4 MONTHS, 17 DAYS]

Gesbiek read all of it, and stopped on the fourth line for a moment, and then on the last.

Seven years and four months. So it had begun about a month after the raid where somebody had put a knife between the fourth and fifth rib of the goblin who wanted the clan fed.

"You are a very heavy file, uncle," he said.

He expanded the attributes.

[STR 250 | DUR 300 | AGI 180 | VIT 220 | INT 45]

Every number carried a small closed padlock beside it.

Grolm felt the intent before he understood any of it, because something older than understanding was still working in him.

"What are you doing?" His voice came out without any of the resonance it had carried for seven years. It sounded, Gesbiek noted, like an ordinary goblin. "Do not touch my soul."

"Your soul." Gesbiek considered that. "No. These are variables."

He gestured at the column of them.

"You believe they are yours because you killed for them and ate for them and were hurt getting them. I understand why that would feel like ownership."

The padlocks were still closed. He looked at them.

"You were a user. You had an account and a great deal of access, and you never once wondered who granted it."

[UNLOCK EDITING]

The padlocks came apart with a small chime, twelve at once, like glass on stone.

* * * *

He started with the shard count, because that was where the pride lived.

The field read 2.

Gesbiek deleted the 2 and entered a 1.

Grolm screamed, and it was not the roar of a warlord. It was the sound a body makes when something is removed from it that had been part of it.

The second shard, the one grown over two winters out of three eaten Lieutenants, began to vibrate in his chest at a rate that climbed past anything the eye could follow.

It did not fall out. It came apart.

His own tissue rejected it, having just been informed that it did not belong there, and the shard went to red vapour and left him through the pores of his own skin, wisping upward and thinning out into the air of the chamber.

Thump-THUMP became thump.

Just that. On its own. At a rate a normal chest keeps.

Grolm clutched at the place where half of himself had been.

* * * *

Gesbiek moved to the rank slider.

It sat at the far right, glowing deep crimson.

He took hold of the knob.

"You spent fifty years climbing this," he said. "You ate your way up it, one tier at a time, and you told me about it while I was on my back on your floor."

He began to drag it left.

Slowly. There was no technical reason for slowly.

Red went to Orange.

The remaining shard dimmed and shifted spectrum, from crimson into a burning volatile orange, and the roar going out of Grolm broke apart into something confused. The last of the stamina left him and an hour of accumulated exhaustion arrived all at once, and he sat down in it.

Orange to Yellow.

That was where it stopped being about light.

Grolm's body had been held at that mass by mana density for seven years, and when the density went, the mass had nothing keeping it. His muscles began to go down. Not shrinking; deflating, the way something deflates when the pressure inside it is reduced by somebody else.

His chest came in. Ribs appeared under skin that had turned aside an axe an hour ago. The arms went from trunks to branches and then kept going. The iron-hard hide lost its sheen first, then its thickness, and then it was ordinary flesh with blue veins visible underneath.

The whole thing took about thirty seconds.

"My strength." Grolm was clawing at his own arms, trying to hold the muscle where it was, pressing it back in with his hands. "Stop. You are killing me."

"I am not killing you," Gesbiek said. "I am correcting you."

Yellow to Blue.

The bone went next.

Seven feet became six and a half, and the sound it made was grinding, and it went on for several seconds while the skeleton found a configuration appropriate to its new tier.

Six feet. Five and a half.

The breastplate that had been forged to fit him slid down and hung off him. The pauldrons came off his shoulders and hit the floor one after the other. The gauntlets went past his wrists and dropped. The belt fell to his ankles and he stepped out of it without meaning to and tripped over his own greaves and went down onto his hands and knees among the pieces.

A goblin in a giant's armour, which was an image with more in it than either of them had the leisure to appreciate.

He looked up from all fours, and there was nothing left in his face but asking.

"Please. Nephew. I was wrong. Please."

Gesbiek dragged the slider to the last notch and locked it.

[TIER-1: GREEN]
[SAVE CHANGES: CONFIRM]

* * * *

The last of it went out of him.

The shard in his chest guttered down to a muddy green, barely visible under the skin. His spine curved and stayed curved, and the left hip dropped into a roll that fifty years of mana had been holding level, as though the body had kept it somewhere all along and had only been waiting to be allowed. His limbs thinned into sticks.

Five feet. Four.

Three feet tall.

Which was, precisely, the height Gesbiek had been on the morning he carried a bucket across the Sludge Pits.

The tusks receded into nubs. The ears lost their structure and hung. What muscle was left went stringy.

Grolm knelt in a pile of armour he could no longer lift, shivering, in a room he had held for seven years.

[NAME: GROLM]
[TITLE: NONE | CLASS: UNDEFINED]
[RANK: 1-GREEN]
[STR 3 | DUR 5 | AGI 4 | VIT 6 | INT 2]

Gesbiek came down off the dais and stood over him, and found that the perspective was entirely unfamiliar and that he did not feel anything about it at all.

Grolm was looking at his own hands. Turning them over. Spindly things that could not have closed around a dagger.

He put them on his chest and felt for the beat.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

He had known that sound as thunder. He had heard it in his own ears every day for five years while rooms went quiet around him.

"What have you done." It came out as a squeak. His throat had changed with the rest of him and the voice that emerged from it belonged to something small. "This is worse than death."

The horror of it, Gesbiek understood, was not the weakness. It was that Grolm still had every memory intact. Fifty years of tactics, four thousand five hundred kills, the exact feeling of commanding four hundred warriors and being obeyed instantly.

All of it, filed perfectly, inside three feet of prey.

He tried to summon the aura. Gesbiek watched him concentrate, watched him push, watched a thin puff of green mist come off his chest and disperse before it cleared his shoulders.

* * * *

Gesbiek opened a second menu.

[CLAN HIERARCHY]
[RANK 1: CHIEFTAIN, GROLM]

Legacy data. He revoked it.

[ROLE: CHIEF, WARRIOR, ELITE. ALL BANNED]

He crouched down so that his face was level with his uncle's.

"You are not the Chief. You are not a warrior. You are not an elite."

He said it plainly. There was no pleasure available in it, which he found mildly disappointing and did not examine.

"You are a scavenger. That is the word for it. Your class is what you do."

[CLASS ASSIGNMENT: SCAVENGER]

"You will eat what is crawling in the mud, because that is what is there. You will drink from the rot-pools by the pits, because the clean water is where the strong ones drink. You will sleep at the edge of things."

He straightened up.

"And you will manage it for a while. Longer than most would."

He gestured, and the iron grate at the tunnel mouth ground upward and opened onto the dark.

"The forest is out there, uncle. It is full of things that used to run from you."

Grolm tried to crawl backwards away from the opening and his arms would not hold him.

He collapsed onto his side and curled up. Knees to chest, both arms over his head, made as small as a body can be made.

Gesbiek stood and looked down at it.

He had spent five years perfecting that exact posture in the mud, and had given it a name in the privacy of his own skull, and had once been kicked into a disposal trench while holding it.

Cowards curl like worms, Grolm had said, at gatherings, to laughter. Warriors stand.

"You have one advantage," Gesbiek said.

Grolm did not uncurl.

"You know how to make yourself small. You know how to be somewhere without being noticed. That is a real skill and most goblins never learn it, and you have watched it done in front of you perhaps a thousand times."

He paused.

"You were paying attention to the wrong part."

Then he moved one hand.

An invisible thing took hold of Grolm and lifted him off the floor, and carried him toward the tunnel with his legs kicking at nothing.

"No. Please. Mercy. I will serve you." The words came fast, tripping over themselves. "I will obey. I will be your slave. Do not send me out there."

He knew what was in the forest. He had put a great deal of it there himself.

"Please. The woods will kill me. The monsters will find me and they will not know who I am."

"Yes," Gesbiek said. "They will."

The force carried him out through the grate and into the dark, and his voice went with him, echoing off stone and getting further away and thinner.

"PLEASE. GESBIEK. NEPHEW."

Then nothing.

The grate came down with a crash.

* * * *

Gesbiek stood in a pristine throne room that he had put back together himself, next to a heap of armour that no longer fitted anybody in the world.

He waited.

He had expected something. Not joy, exactly, but some kind of arrival. Five years in the Sludge Pits and two years in the Darkwood and an hour on this floor being taken apart, and at the end of it the thing that had done all of it was three feet tall and screaming for its nephew.

There should have been something.

He checked for it the way he would have checked a readout, patiently, running down the list. Satisfaction, nothing. Relief, a little, of the kind a body gives when it puts down something heavy, and nothing past that. He had carried the buckets and the mud and the curl in the trench for five years, and he had always assumed that setting it down would feel like something. It felt like setting it down.

There was task completion. There was a problem that had been open and was now closed. There was a room, and it was quiet, and outside it four hundred and thirty-one goblins were asleep in the mud with amber readouts over their heads, and none of them knew yet that anything had changed.

Gesbiek went back up the dais and sat down on the Throne of Skulls.

He looked at the ash where the Totem had been, and at the empty chamber, and at the closed grate.

"Right," he said, to nobody at all, in three voices.

He had started talking to himself properly in a hole under an oak tree, because after five years of keeping quiet the sound of himself had been worth something.

It still was, apparently.

"Now the difficult part."