Gribble's heart thudded like a war drum in his sunken chest, palms slick with sweat as he crept through the underbrush, his newly heightened senses straining. The nest of sleeping field mice lay just ahead, a tangle of leaves and grass woven between the roots of a gnarled oak.

Gribble's nostrils flared, picking up the warm, musky scent of the dozing rodents, their tiny bodies rising and falling with each soft breath. Saliva flooded his mouth at the aroma, a deep primal hunger twisting his guts. He never thought he'd crave mouse meat. But the orb's power had changed everything. His goblin stomach was now a crucible, waiting to extract strength from any scrap of flesh.

He flexed his fingers, feeling the new wiry muscle sliding under his mottled green skin. Even these small gains filled him with a fierce joy - more power than he'd ever dared to dream. Power he desperately needed if he was ever to rise above the muck of his miserable station.

Gribble tensed, then lunged forward with startling speed, his hand darting into the nest. Squeaks of terror erupted as he closed his grip around one squirming, furry body. A deft twist and a tiny snap - then silence.

Gribble stared at the limp mouse dangling from his fist, its black button eyes dull and glassy. A week ago he couldn't have caught a cold, let alone such swift prey. The orb's gift was already remaking him, stitch by stitch, bite by bite.

He sank his yellowed teeth into the mouse, tearing through fur and skin to the bloody meat below. As the rich coppery taste bloomed across his tongue, Gribble felt the strange tingling spread through him once again. It raced down his limbs like spider legs skittering across his bones, dancing and prickling.

The sensation centered in his core, a pulsing ache that sharpened and peaked before bursting through him in a warm flood. Gribble grunted, nearly doubling over as his muscles spasmed and clenched. He could feel them writhing beneath his flesh, swelling, strengthening, the mouse's essence merging with his.

When the feeling ebbed, Gribble straightened slowly, rolling his shoulders, flexing his arms. He caught a glint of light from the small rusted dagger shoved through his rope belt, the blade he'd stolen from the charnel fields, brittle with neglect. Once it had felt like a lead weight pulling at his scrawny frame. Now he drew it with one fluid motion, marvelling at the lightness, the perfect balance. His fingers curled around the cracked leather hilt - a grip that finally felt sure. A grip that felt right.

Gribble slunk deeper into the forest, his bare feet padding silently over the loamy earth. Before the orb, the woods at night had been a wall of shadows, inky black and impenetrable. Now the darkness peeled away like rotting bark scraped off a tree, colors and shapes emerging where only gloom had dwelled.

He could pick out every vein on the underside of a leaf overhead, see the slither of a snake's scales yards away through the clinging briars, it's triangular head weaving. An owl ghost feather soft across his peripheral vision, more sensed than seen. The night had become a feast for his greedy, straining eyes to devour.

A flash of movement snagged his gaze - a streak of blue weaving between the trees ahead. Gribble froze, crouching instinctively, his grip tightening on the dagger's hilt. He'd seen that same electric blue countless times. Watched it arrow past him on his foraging treks, there and gone before his eyes could even focus. The elusive blue rabbit, fastest creature in the Misty Forest.

Hunger rumbled in Gribble's belly, edged now with fierce anticipation. Catching the blue rabbit would be the ultimate test of his new abilities. If he could run down such blinding speed, sink his teeth in such succulent flesh, there would be no prey he could not fell. No heights he could not scale.

His eyes locked on the blue streak as it flashed into a small clearing ahead, winking in and out of the splashes of moonlight. Gribble drew a slow, deep breath, tasting the cool mulchy air, the green tang of the leaves, the barest hint of rabbit musk.

Then he exploded from the undergrowth, legs pumping, chasing the pop of the rabbit's white tail across the clearing. Gribble's heart slammed against his ribs as his bare feet pounded the earth, blood roaring in his ears. He had never known such a feeling. The power, the raw speed suddenly at his command. It was dizzying, intoxicating.

The rabbit jinked left, diving for the safety of a blackberry thicket. But Gribble was already hurtling to intercept it, his reflexes razor sharp, his lean body cutting a path on pure instinct. He felt the prickle of thorns snagging his arms, his cheeks, but there was no pain. Only the thundering thrill of the chase, the heady knowledge that this quarry could not escape him.

Gribble's feet skidded as the rabbit twisted into another desperate turn. His hand flashed down, dagger glinting - a backhand blur burying the blade to the hilt in soft flesh. A thump and tumble of paws as the creature fell at his feet.

Gribble stared down at the rabbit, sides heaving, bead of sweat trickling down his temple. He watched the light fade from its brilliant black eyes, the vivid blue fur slowly staining with threads of scarlet. Something like wonder flooded him - and something darker. A fierce, savage glee at holding such speed in his hands. Speed and strength to grasp from its flesh.

As Gribble squatted and buried his face in the rabbit's downy flank, he felt the surge building behind his eyes even before the meat hit his tongue. A pressure in his temples, pulsing in time with his frantic heartbeat. His vision wavered and blurred as he tore and gulped, barely tasting the coppery richness coating his throat.

When the wave crested and broke, a strangled cry tore from Gribble's lips. Colors suddenly leapt at him from every corner of the clearing - the luminescent green of the moss, the pearlescent bark of the birches, the shimmering black of a beetle's carapace. Each hue felt more vivid, more saturated, as if some veil had been ripped from his eyes. Even in the gloom, the forest seemed lit from within, every shape and shadow limned in impossible detail.

Gribble rose on shaky legs, turning slowly to take in the transformed woods around him. He felt drunk on the sheer deluge of visual information pouring into his brain. The rabbit's gift was a whole new way of seeing, a hunter's sight honed razor sharp. His gut shivered with excitement at how he might hone it further. What marvels he might witness through these new eyes.

As Gribble shuffled through the underbrush, his preternatural gaze roaming, he caught the glimmer of something in a small gully ahead. A flash of deep purple amid the ferns, glinting with an oily sheen. He crept closer, crouching at the gully's lip.

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A patch of berries winked up at him from their tangled nest of vines, each orb swollen with dark juice. Gribble's brow creased as he scented the air, nostrils flaring. Even over the loamy musk of the earth, he caught the bright acrid tang - the sour note that screamed poison to any nose that knew it.

It was an aroma he'd often caught clinging to the twitching corpses behind the goblin alehouse - the fools who gorged on fermented berries in search of fleeting oblivion. Their last croaking breaths whistling out through bloody foam. A wretched way to die.

Gribble's guts gave a sudden hot twist, as if the orb's power were egging him on. A dark whisper shivered up his spine, daring him to test the limits of what his changed body could endure. What secrets it could wrest from even the most lethal of nature's fruits.

He plucked a single gleaming orb and raised it to his lips, rolling it between thumb and forefinger. The skin was taut and glossy in the moonlight, the color of a fresh bruise. Gribble shoved down the chattering fear in his skull and crammed the berry into his mouth, fangs piercing its flesh in a burst of tart juice.

Gribble chewed slowly, waiting for the searing pain, the convulsions. But there was only the berry's strange alkaline flavor spreading across his tongue, and a buzzing warmth kindling in his belly.

He straightened, breath quickening as the warmth bloomed and spread through his veins. It was not the lightning crackle of new strength, or the soaring rush of sharpened senses. It was subtler, but no less profound - a fortifying from within, his organs and blood vessels sheathing themselves against any toxin or blight.

Gribble broke into a crooked grin, swiping the purple stain from his chin with the heel of his hand. His body was transforming into a suit of armor, a sheath of immunity no poison could pierce. That berry could have kill 20 rabbits, but to him it was already fading to a mild glow in his guts.

With this new resistance thrumming through him, Gribble knew he could range wider in his hunting. Sample any fungus, any herb, any fetid meat, and siphon out their strengths while spurning their venoms. His meals need no longer be bound by what a wretched goblin stomach could handle.

Gribble melted back into the shadows of the trees, his tread near silent on the spongy loam. It felt somehow fitting that his nightly hunts were not just feeding his body, but armoring his spirit. Each foray into the forest's black heart burnished his nerves, steadied his hands, honed his cunning.

For so long he had measured his life in pains and humiliations endured. The aching welts from his father's cane. The jeers and kicks from hulking playmates. The gnawing ache of an empty belly as he curled in on himself, willing his sniveling to silence lest it draw fresh torments.

But now, out among the hush and dappled shadows of the Misty Forest, a new reckoning was taking shape. The orb's eldritch fire was forging Gribble into something more than a meek punching bag. Something harder and hungrier, a creature of fang and claw determined to snatch its survival from an uncaring world.

Already, he was returning from his nightly jaunts with fewer bruises, his movements more nimble and assured. He took a sort of pride in it, even as he schooled his face into the familiar beaten expression. Let them think him a worthless wretch, too weak to even raise his eyes from the mud. All the better to conceal the killer he was crafting from their cast-off flesh and marrow.

The wounds were another badge of his changing. Blotchy welts and bloody gouges he once would have whimpered over for days now seemed to fade like morning mist, his skin soothing to a dull ache by first light. His muscles knitted back with uncanny speed, growing ever more limber and tireless beneath their taut green sheath.

The bear was his first true test of this mounting vigor. A shaggy mountain of a beast, its rank musk hanging like a shroud over a small brook. Gribble heard its grunts and snuffles through the screen of ferns moments before he smelled it. His heart leapt into his throat as the true size of the creature became clear - its hulking shoulders swaying ponderously above the scrub, jaws slavering.

Every instinct screamed to flee, to burrow into the loam like a cowering worm. But as Gribble started to edge back, his eyes caught the banded red pattern of a snake coiled in the ferns behind him. A shiny, black, triangular head rose silently, forked tongue darting.

In that frozen instant, Gribble knew there would be no escape on the forest floor. The bear would run him down in a crashing tangle of brush, or the snake would sink its glistening fangs into his flesh. His only hope lay upward.

With a speed and strength that amazed even himself, Gribble leapt for the trunk of a nearby oak. His fingers, now rough with forming calluses, bit deep into the craggy bark. He scrambled up the trunk, knees and elbows pistoning, breath ragged in his bony chest.

He could feel the bear's rancid breath gusting across his ankles as it reared up, forepaws slamming against the tree bole. Claws like rusty scythes flashed, scoring lines of fire across Gribble's shins. But he was already shimmying onto a high branch, out of reach, the iron tang of his own blood sharp in his nostrils.

Gribble perched there for a trembling eternity, watching the bear lumber and snort below. Each time its bulk jostled the tree, a rain of bark and twigs pattered down around its tufted ears. But it could not reach him, could not drag him down into its crushing, reeking embrace.

As the bear's frustrated roars finally faded into the forest gloom, a fierce electric thrill bloomed in Gribble's chest. He had outrun death and outfoxed it, the gifts of the orb surging true in his veins. There were still trials and tortures beyond counting ahead, but now their outcome was no forgone conclusion. Now he held the bright edge of his fate in hands grown steadier and surer with each hunt.

The bear would not be his last close call. But now, as Gribble dropped soundlessly from the branches and loped off through the whispering dark, each escape only stoked his growing hunger. For more flesh, more sinew, more ichor of the wild to infuse his changing bones.

For he could feel the promise of the orb thrumming in his skull - the promise of a power not even Grimrock's cruelty could crush. A power he would wrest from the jaws and talons of every creature that crossed his path. Until he grew so mighty and terrible that no goblin hand would dare rise against him, lest it be torn bloody from its bony wrist.

Gribble hunched over the guttering flames of his cookfire, the squirrel haunch sputtering on its spit. His eyes flicked to the small pie of snake skin and iridescent beetle wings laid carefully on a bed of leaves at his knee. His trophies and talismans, constant reminders of his kills and the waxing power they bestowed.

With each hunt, Gribble could feel his fear ebbing like a tide withdrawing from a stony shore. In its place rose a cold, chitinous resolve, an exoskeleton of grim purpose and simmering rage. The orb's blessing was changing him inside and out, burning away the frightened mewling thing he had been and leaving something hard and adamant in its wake.

For the first time in his benighted life, Gribble dared to dream of more than mere survival. To imagine a day when he would no longer cringe and grovel, forever under the boot heels of his betters. A day when he would make this miserable world answer for every anguish and abasement.

Gribble tore a strip of scorched meat and crammed it into his mouth, eyes never leaving the swaying shadows at the edge of the firelight. He chewed each mouthful to a pulp, wringing every drop of sustenance from the stringy flesh. In his mind he was already racing through the moonlit glades, scenting his next quarry on the breeze. One more creature to stalk and slay and savor. One more step on the long, bloody road to becoming.

Gribble the Feeble died a little more with each hunt, each swallow of gifting meat. In his place, something new was rising like a black moon over cursed bogs. Something ravenous and relentless, a goblin in its cunning, a predator in its patient hunger. A creature that would gnaw and gorge its way up from the depths of abasement, an inch at a time.

Until it burst forth in all its snarling, red-fanged glory, and made a world of weaklings and fools rue the day it was ever birthed.