Chapter 1

Zack pulled his longsword out of the goblin's corpse – or at least he tried to. The blade was stuck almost all the way into the small monster's chest, after ending its life, but now it refused to come out nice and clean. So he placed one boot over the corpse and pushed as he pulled the sword's hilt with his hand. There! It came out no problem. Covered in goblin blood, but still.

"Forty two," said a quiet voice not far from him. Zack turned towards its sound as he wiped most of the blood out of his sword with forest leaves, facing the other person with him in the forest. It was a man of average height dressed in long blue robes, his head covered by an oversized pointy yellow hat. His face, however, wouldn't have been visible even without the hat, as it was shrouded in darkness, leaving his only facial feature as two yellow spheres, representing his eyes.

"Huh?" Zack asked, not understanding his companion's sudden comment. He strapped his longsword to his back, forming an "x" with the other one already strapped there. "Did you say something, Ozz?"

Ozz was looking absently at the goblin's corpse, and shrugged. "Forty two," he repeated. "That's how many goblins we've killed," he explained.

"Oh," Zack replied, not knowing what else to say to that. "You were counting them?" he asked, a bit perplexed. Ozz nodded, and Zack grinned broadly. "Haha! You're pretty weird! But hey, you're nice, so I can't complain."

Ozz didn't seem affected by the comment, or at least didn't show it – Zack had quickly found out that the robed man's demeanor matched his featureless face quite well, as he had been pretty inexpressive with him thus far.

"So anyway," Zack began to say, looking around the forest, "we should be getting pretty close to where they said they saw the 'mysterious light', yeah?"

The late afternoon's sun bathed the forest in its amber glow, creating longer and longer shadows as it sunk in the horizon. They had been searching since early morning, and their chance to find anything was slipping away with each inch that the sun descended.

Ozz looked around, eying the trees, rocks, and grass. "Hmm, we seem to be in the right direction, yes," he said. "But shouldn't we bury the goblins we killed?"

The question took Zack by surprise, even more than Ozz's body count. "Bury them? Like, give them a proper burial, you mean?" he asked to be sure he understood, and when Ozz nodded, he laughed out loud. "Ha! Oh man, you're funny. Why would you bury monsters? They're not people, and besides, they were trying to attack us, remember?"

"Hmm," Ozz replied, and kept looking around distractedly. "But what if something that likes goblin meat finds them? Wouldn't that bring trouble?" Despite his words, his tone indicated that either answer wouldn't bother him.

Zack laughed again and patted his red breastplate with confidence, which was the same color of his hair. "Hey, if something comes to hurt us, you've got me to stop it, alright? We just need to focus on finding the source of the light before night, and we can be back in Corneria by dawn if we don't rest for the night."

"But wouldn't it be easier to find this light at night, which is when scouts said they saw it, three times on three nights in a row?" Ozz asked.

"But maybe there's more to it," Zack explained, "maybe there's a sign of what's causing it! No one has been there yet because the king has his army busy with the monster attacks, so if we go to the general area perhaps we'll find a clue!" he said excitedly. "So how about it, Ozz? Are we going to find this thing and be famous, or what?!"

Ozz shrugged. "Yes, I suppose," was all he said. Zack hung his head for a moment, defeated. "Man, I'm trying to get you excited, here," he sighed, but then raised his head and grinned broadly, "But no worries! I'll get you jumping for joy one of these days!"

They kept walking at a good pace through the forest, keeping an eye for anything out of place. The shadows kept getting longer as time passed, and still they explored. Zack even began to look inside bushes and beneath rocks he could move, but this yielded no better results.

"We should be thinking of making a camp soon, so we have a nice fire going," Zack said as he finished searching another spot, this time inside a tree's hollow. "Wood won't be a problem, heh." He had lost track of Ozz, who had gone off to search some distance away from him.

"I've been meaning to ask, why did you come all the way to Corneria?"

He looked around but couldn't find the blue-robed man. The sound of his quiet voice pinpointed his location a moment later, behind a group of trees. "My master once told me that I would have to be in the forest south of kingdom of Corneria on a specific day – today – at midnight, and so I came here," Ozz replied, sounding distracted.

"Your... master?" Zack asked as he went around the trees, following Ozz's voice. "You mean the one who taught you to be a Black mage? I always thought that Black mages were self-taught."

"Most mages are taught by someone else," Ozz said, his voice closer now. Zack climbed over a boulder and hopped down on the other side, finally seeing his companion, who stood at the edge of a clearing.

"I see. It's good that you and I met in Corneria, it makes this whole search much more-" Zack was saying, when he finally reached the clearing, coming to a stop right besides Ozz. Zack couldn't believe his eyes: a part of the clearing, almost sixteen feet in diameter, was a perfect circle of dead grass. In fact, any sort of natural life that had been there was withered and lifeless, including flowers and roots.

"What-what is this?" Zack asked slowly, blinking several times, hoping he was seeing things. Why hadn't Ozz said anything before? "What the heck happened here?"

Ozz knelt by the edge and grabbed a handful of dead grass without a word. "H-hey, don't touch that!" Zack exclaimed, "It could be dangerous!"

But Ozz seemed fine. He looked at the grass on his gloved hand, then showed it to Zack, who leaned in a bit to see it better. "This grass is dead," Ozz said simply. Zack nodded slowly. "Yeah, but... how? It's like someone somehow drained the life out of all this in a perfect circle."

Ozz didn't answer, and instead he began walking into the clearing. Zack was about to stop him, but seeing that nothing happened when the mage stepped on the dead area, he decided to let it go. "Hmm, I don't sense active magic, only the remnants of it," Ozz commented as he walked on the dead part of the clearing. Zack had never considered himself superstitious about magic, but he still had a healthy those of respect mixed with fear for what he couldn't understand – and this perfect circle of death certainly qualified as that.

"I'm not sure, but we might be at the spot where the strange light was seen," Ozz was saying.

"It's just dead grass," Zack told himself, not paying attention to the mage, and took a deep breath. He raised his foot and placed it firmly inside the circle. Step.

"Ha! This is noth-"

There was a crashing sound nearby and the entire ground shook without warning, making all the trees shake. Zack gulped, quickly removing his foot from the dead grass. "Damn it, what did I do?!" he asked, looking around. Ozz had nearly lost his footing and was holding his hat to his shadowy head, his yellow eyes scanning the area as well.

"I don't think this is related to the clearing," he said calmly despite the situation. Another great crash resounded, this time closer, making the trees shake more and more. "Then what is this?" Zack asked, drawing his twin longswords, ready for a fight. "Goblins don't make this much noise!"

As if to answer his question, the source of the noise appeared, crashing through the trees surrounding the clearing closest to Zack. It was massive, muscular, brutal, and it had the brain of a bug: the ogre arrived with no subtlety for it needed none, as it was a being of pure strength, shoving trees around as if they were shrubs, uprooting many on its path to the clearing.

"So I was right," Ozz said quietly, tilting his neck up to look at the ogre, which was more than ten feet tall. Zack jumped back, avoiding a falling tree that would've buried him a moment later, and assumed a fighting stance. He had fought ogres before, but none so big. This was going to be painful for both parties, especially his.

"Yeah, he's unrelated to the dead grass," Zack agreed. Ozz shook his head and pointed at the ogre's hand, "No, that," he added, and Zack finally noticed what the ogre had been holding on to.

It was a dead goblin, one of many they had killed that day.

The ogre seemed to forget about Zack and Ozz for a moment and popped the goblin corpse into its mouth, biting and chewing noisily. Three seconds later it gulped and belched loudly.

"So you're not hungry anymore, right, big guy?" Zack asked with a nervous grin.

In response, the ogre roared and charged at him, all five hundred pounds of hulking death.