When Adam peered inside Felsha's mind and entered her mindscape all those weeks ago, he was careful to not dig too deep or too recklessly, or else he risked outright destroying her brain. There was a method to his psychic incursions, a process that was both careful and painful.

Yet as he pressed his palm against the face of the wretched creature known as a goblin, he found himself unable to muster the same concern for its well-being, nor was he able to consider mercy.

Because the creature did not deserve it.

The creature. The thing. It had around its neck the necklace Caben had personally made for his daughter. The rage the father felt when he saw his gift worn by a creature of malice and cruelty drew him to an anger that reminded Adam of himself during a similarly harrowing moment in his life.

It pained Adam to hold Caben back with his telekinesis before he could gut the creature in his rage. Ruk was quick to restrain the man as Adam pulled him aside. Though Adam shared his anger, there was something else they must do first.

The goblin knew where the daughter was, and by extension, the wife and other villagers. Adam did not think that any of them were still alive. Regardless, the whereabouts of their location was of paramount importance. Once they knew where to look, they would immediately seek it out and retrieve them.

Deep inside Adam, however, was hope. It was small. It was pathetic. But it was there. It told the young psychic that there was a chance. A glimmer of light. Maybe the wife and daughter still lived, even if barely.

Adam viewed the goblin with contempt, but his gaze betrayed the emotions he was feeling. To the goblin, he was staring back at a callous human who looked at it with nothing but a blank and empty stare. It made the goblin fear what was to come next. Would it be tortured? Ripped apart? The goblin could not say, and it terrified him.

But Adam was not that cruel. No. He was about to do something much worse. The young psychic pressed down harder on the goblin, feeling its skull. It was more fragile than expected, felt as if he could crush the goblin's head with just his bare hands.

Then he started. Psychic power poured into the goblins mind, concentrated and focused through Adam's palm. The goblin tried to scream, tried to squirm, tried to fight back, but it was all in vain. Psychic energy flowed into the creature, and through the use of telepathy, broke through whatever mental defenses the goblin had. If it even had such a thing.

Adam felt no resistance by the goblin but agony and despair as he brushed aside the borders of its mind and invaded its thoughts and feelings. But he was not doing this to torture the thing. No. He was here to get something. Information. And to do so, he needed to extract the goblins' memories.

In contrast to when he did the same to Felsha, Adam was not content to stay by the periphery of the goblin's memories, glancing at bits and pieces of visions. No. He wanted everything laid out before him. For him to do that, he needed to breach through entirely.

And so he did.

Back in the physical world, the darkness of the night was illuminated by a wave of light as Adam and the goblin glowed after a bright flash. Their eyes poured with light as the world around them churned. Debris flew and swirled. The entire village itself began to buckle under the immense weight of psychic power being used.

Ruk and Caben could only cover their eyes or look away, sometimes braving the bright light and catching glimpses of what was happening. There was nothing they could do against whatever power Adam was using. To them, the young man was doing something profound and painful to the goblin. They saw how the goblin squirmed, how its body shook and trembled.

But they knew no pity. The goblin deserved whatever had befallen it. And if the words of Adam were to be taken as literal and true, then Caben would soon find out the true fate of wife and daughter and where they were taken.

Thus, they waited.

Inside the mind of the goblin, however, Adam was on a rampage. He had torn through much of the goblin's thoughts and feelings, carving a path of mental destruction through the mindscape of the creature.

Upon reaching the memories, he did not slow. Instead, he quickened his pace and barged right through the most recent of memories. Several months had passed since they destroyed the village of Casmont so Adam was expecting to discard several months' worth of memories before he could reach anything useful.

But after only destroying one month of the goblin's memories, he found what he sought for. There was a fragment. A piece of memory. Adam made his way towards it and saw a young girl. A child. She was skinny, pale, and had the black hair and eyes as Caben.

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"The daughter!" Adam couldn't help but exclaim, his voice echoing throughout the mindscape and escaping into the physical world.

But before Adam could reach into the fragment and know where she was, the goblin mindscape began to crumble. As it turned out, he had made a mistake. He thought that, as long as he was inside the goblin's mind, then he could prevent the entire thing from imploding. Unfortunately, Adam had been too reckless in his search.

No longer able to support itself, the mindscape collapsed, crumbling as the goblin's brain began to die. Adam was so close. Close. He wasn't about to give up now and let this opportunity slip away.

Mustering his telepathy, he poured his power into the cracks and crevices that had formed in the mindscape, sealing them shut or holding pieces of it together through sheer force of will.

The goblin will suffer. The goblin will die. But not before Adam had what he needed. He did not care about the creature either way, just that it was the key to finding Caben's daughter and bringing her home. And since it was the only one of its kind alive and not splattered on the floor in a pool of green putrid flood, Adam was not letting it go. Not yet.

Fortunately for Adam, the mindscape stabilized. His intervention managed to keep it from collapsing entirely, saving it from implosion. It was, however, in some areas, irreparably damaged. The goblin’s ability to project emotions had been destroyed, and so too were its ability to muster any sort of coherent thought.

In the end, as Adam decided to pull away from the goblin’s mind to allow it some time to stabilize, the creature had lost itself. Emotions. Thoughts. Feelings. All of it was gone, torn apart from within and impossible to repair, even if Adam wanted to. That said, what mattered the most was the fact that the memories were still intact, relatively unharmed in spite of the destruction of recent memories.

Then Adam left the mindscape, ending the psychic connected he had established between himself and the goblin. He found himself back in the physical world, feeling lighter than expected. He had thought that such an exertion of his power into a foreign mind would have made him use a lot of his power. As it turned out, he barely felt the strain.

Adam’s powers had not drained, nor was he struggling to come to terms with his return from the mindscape. His senses and his mind were clear, unaffected by his use of psychic power. And he was glad.

Adam found himself still holding the goblin on its face but there was no longer a vain attempt of resistance against both his physical and telekinetic grip. Removing his hand, he saw yellow eyes and slit pupils staring into nothing. As he withdrew his telekinesis from the rest of the goblin, it slumped, falling on its belly against the cold ground.

But the goblin was not dead, not entirely. Its ability to form any thoughts, feel any emotions, or in general experience any sort of feelings had been stripped away from it. What was left was a husk, a shadow of its former, disgusting self.

And Adam liked it better this way.

A hand suddenly landed on Adam's shoulder turning him around, revealing the desperate face of Caben.

"My daughter," Caben said quickly. His tone was excited, but there was an underlying layer of horror underneath. "You said you found my daughter. How is she?! Is she well? Is she with her mother!?"

"Mr. Caben, please calm down-"

"Don't you fucking tell me to calm down!" Caben shouted as he pulled Adam close, "Where is she? WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER."

As Ruk was about to separate the two and pull the man aside. Adam did it himself. Caben found himself restrained by telekinesis, but not too much. He was free to struggle with some leeway, but he wasn't about to start grabbing Adam again.

"Mr. Caben, I need you to first calm down," Adam said, "Do so and I'll answer your questions."

A fire had erupted from Caben, drowning the man in a renewed sense of determination. He was filled with hope. A hope he had lost several months when he came upon his ruined village and his family gone. And so he struggled, begging for answers.

It sat wrong for Adam to keep Caben in place with telekinesis, but until he could be sure of where his daughter was and if she was okay, Adam didn't want to give the man too much hope.

It was hypocritical of Asam, to say the least, since he had the same hope, he didn't want to give. That said, he just wanted to be sure.

It took Caben half an hour before he calmed down. In the meantime, Adam and Ruk went to clear the corpses and wash away the blood. The dead goblins had quickly given off a putrid stench, drowning the air with their foul smell. It was as if their bodies had an accelerated pace of rotting, or maybe their blood and organs were already in such a sordid state to begin with. There was no other choice than to burn them.

Adam and Ruk gathered them into a pile just outside of the village, far enough to avoid the foul smell. With a snap of his fingers, Adam lit the pile of corpses aflame, driving the mist further away in an eruption of light and a bursting inferno.

The bodies burned and Adam waited there, staring into the flames as it crackled and grew. The mist withdrew further into the forest, revealing a clear and starry sky above. A cold wind brushed against his skin, causing a shiver to run down his spine.

Adam had killed. Though he knew his actions to be justified, it still felt wrong for the young man. Two months ago, he lived a normal life in a modern society with his parents by his side. Two months later, he was braving the unknown frontiers of a magical world, accompanied by an orc and a mule that he was beginning to suspect was smarter than it let on.

The goblins were more reckless than expected. They came at them with speed and numbers, yes, but there was little, or any, given to their strategy. They expected the Rukdam Duo to simply keel over and submit to gruesome fates.

He was scared. And still was. But there was something especially disheartening when he accelerated several pebbles to supersonic speed and punched a hole through several of the creatures. He had made and shot his own bullets, to devastating effect. It was the first time he had done so, and it proved to him that his power was indeed a tool to be wielded with utmost care.

Adam lacked the imagination for now, but he was beginning to come around, and it terrified him. Regardless, the world required him to adapt, and so he would.