It was perfect weather for treasure hunting, which was exactly what Friedrich was doing that fine day. The sun shone brightly upon the forest, its rays creeping through the canopy of trees and lighting the overgrown path that was strewn with loose stones and unbroken twigs.

The young explorer with his auburn hair, whistled merrily as he strolled down the lesser travelled forest path. His old, but reliable steel sword was slung over his back and his small, rounded shield was strapped to his arm as it always was.

“You can never be too careful,” he told anybody who asked why he always kept his shield at the ready.

“Why not hold your sword too?” they would ask in response and he would always laugh them off.

Friedrich’s eyes grew wide with excitement as he finally spied the tallest tower of the castle creeping out from the treetops ahead. It was going to be a day of great fortune and the plunder would be worth all the trouble he had gone through to find the place.

It had taken plenty of pestering and the exchanging of more than a few kupons—sparkly little gems the size of a fingernail—for uncorroborated rumours that led to semi-truthful information that then finally led to knowledge that was actually useful to him. And now, he was almost there.

Pushing through a hefty thicket, Friedrich finally laid eyes upon the towering structure. The towers jutted out from the side like a claw, and the jutting battlements were falling apart like rotten teeth in the mouth of a giant. The once-pristine stone brickwork was marred after countless years of abandonment. The moss and vines that clung to the walls had claimed the castle as its own and nobody would dare try and take it back.

Friedrich climbed the weathered staircase and paused at the top. The wooden doors had long-rotted away leaving only rusty hinges behind, yet there was no easy way through. The entrance chamber had collapsed long ago, and the piles of heavy bricks left no room to squeeze past.

“What to do?” asked Friedrich, rubbing his chin and looking around. “Surely, there’s a way?”

He leapt from the stairs and landed on the rough grass, jogging around the side of the castle in search of an alternate entrance. The young man was not one to give up easily. His mother had always said his curiosity and adventurousness would get him into trouble, but he never listened.

To Friedrich’s delight, there was an old grating in an alcove by the side of the castle. He knelt down, pulled at a couple of the bent bars and the bolts snapped instantly, so worn were they. He tossed the grate aside and stuck his head through the hole. He was pleased to see that the drop into the room was more than survivable.

The young man took his head out and slid through feet-first and landed awkwardly on the uneven bricks. The air was humid in this small room, with no ventilation other than the small hole at the edge of the ceiling. No matter, for he did not plan on staying long. This would be a quick and profitable job, there was no doubt about it.

Friedrich breathed deeply, letting his lungs pull in as much oxygen as they could, and moved towards the door. The barred iron door. His heart sank, realising that he had plunged into a prison cell. He ran to the door and shook it, incredibly relieved to find out it was not locked.

He began to laugh. What a fool he had been to mindlessly jump down. The people at home would have told his story for generations. “Don’t be like Friedrich, the silly lad rotted away in a locked prison cell due to his own greed,” they would no doubt say. He was just glad that they would not get the chance to tell such an embarrassing tale and resolved to bring a rope next time. Not that they would have, had he died here and was never found.

Friedrich left the cell behind and walked into the corridor. It was even more humid than the cell, but the smell of rat droppings and decay made it almost intolerable. He held his breath as he walked through the damp and dismal corridor that was lined with many more cells.

Occasionally, he would look into them as he passed and thought about who the skeletons may once have been. What did they do to deserve such a fate? All Friedrich knew was that this place was ransacked by a horde of goblins once upon a time and the braindead little vermin didn’t have the knowledge or desire to treat the place well, and that showed.

A sudden clack made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He dared not draw his sword, fearing that the rasp of the metal on his leather sheath would alert whoever lay waiting for him ahead. Then came a rattling grunt which was followed by a shuffling, but it didn't sound as close as he first thought. Friedrich crept forward as silently as he could manage and saw a shadow filter onto the floor. There was something in a cell ahead and to the right.

He snuck up to the cell and peered inside, keeping a distance from the bars. In the rundown room, stood a skeletal figure. It was about a foot shorter than Friedrich, who would insist that he was tall for his age—which was a lie for he was five feet and five inches, something the pompous Rufus Redforth would always joke about when they were in the same company.

The skeleton was hunched with dangly limbs, its eye sockets empty and its teeth blunted by years of having nothing to gnaw on but stone. The ceiling had collapsed, much like half of the rest of the castle, and blocked much of the doorway, leaving the unfortunate creature trapped and everyone who came here that tiny bit safer.

Friedrich let out a small chuckle, and the goblin skeleton leapt onto the pile of rubble, startling the young adventurer. He pressed himself back against the far wall. He sighed and then laughed once more at what a child he was being. Drawing his sword, he baited the undead goblin towards him and thrust forward with all his might, smashing his sword into its yellowed skull. It shattered into five fragmented chunks and fell to the floor, its body slumping down to join it. Perhaps he would take the advice of the strangers and keep his sword ready too.

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He continued along the dark corridor, that only grew darker with each echoing footstep, and ascended a staircase ending in an archway. He leaned around the corner, straining his eyes to see if any other wretched creatures were waiting for him, but there was not a thing to be seen. He listened intently for the sound of a grunt, a shuffle, or the faint rattling of bones, but all was quiet.

It was a silence most welcome, and Friedrich ventured forth. A sudden click and his eyes darted to the ceiling. He raised his shield to cover his head and the tumbling rocks that rained down on him bounced off the shield and onto the floor. His arm ached, brushing aside the bombardment, but he was otherwise unhurt.

“Always carry your shield,” he muttered to himself, looking at the amateurly set up trap.

He walked until light appeared once more and emerged onto a walkway overlooking a courtyard where the sun was shining onto the thick grass. The walkway was walled on one side and empty on the other, and Friedrich strolled forward, pleased to be in the open air again. He took a glance over the edge and into the grassy courtyard below.

There was a lingering skeleton standing aimlessly, perhaps guarding a thick wooden gate that rested inside the far stone wall. Friedrich presumed it led into another part of the yard. The minion was no threat from this distance, but Friedrich would be cautious regardless.

The ruined castle was not so dilapidated on this higher floor, with clear walkways and mostly intact walls. Even the iron gates that separated path from path and staircase from staircase were all wide open, as though whoever had been here last had fled in a hurry. Friedrich didn’t think that the goblins, whether living or dead, would’ve had the brains to be able to find the keys and work out how to use them—so little he thought of them.

The young man followed the path around and walked back into the tighter corridors of the castle, but being comfortably above ground, the light was not so bad here compared to where the cells lay. There were windows aplenty, and it would have been a pleasant bit of sightseeing had the old castle not been so infested by undeath.

A sudden twang and Friedrich raised his shield once again, recognising the all-too-familiar sound. The stone-tipped arrow hit his iron shield with a dull clunk and fell to the ground. Friedrich charged down the corridor with both sword and shield raised as the skeleton fired a second arrow.

The explorer bashed the projectile out of the air and delivered a heavy kick to the ribcage of his foe. The crack was gruesome and the skeleton fell back, but another jumped out from an alcove, knocking Friedrich aside. He regained his composure quickly and his metal blade met the goblin’s wooden club in mid-air. He drew his right arm back and caved in the skeleton’s skull with a mighty swing of his shield.

The archer had climbed to his feet and dropped his bow in favour of an old sword of his own. He lunged at Friedrich, who leaned back, narrowly avoiding a skewering from the rusty weapon. The young man retaliated with a pointed thrust, jamming his sword between the ribcage of the permanently grinning skeleton. If it could have laughed, it would have, but Friedrich smiled at it.

He swung his sword upwards, still within the goblin’s ribcage, and carried it into the air. He stopped suddenly, his sword raised to the sky, and the goblin was flung overhead. It crashed onto the walkway, desperately trying to right itself, but it was no use. It was met with a boot to the jaw and its skull soared down the corridor, smashing against the floor upon landing.

Quietly satisfied with the victory, Friedrich stopped to think. “If I were a treasure horde, where would I be?” he asked himself quietly. “You would think in the lord of the castle’s room, or perhaps even a vault? Yet there were once living goblins here. Could their greedy leader be guarding it somewhere? Yes, that must be it. The remains of the goblin chieftain must be somewhere close. After all, the castle isn’t all that big.”

Friedrich wandered from room to room, scattering the bones of the lurking goblins across the bricks as he searched for the goblin chieftain and the mounds of treasure he may be guarding. It was only after entering nearly every single one of the rooms that he spotted what he had been looking for the entire time. He could now see inside the inner courtyard and sat upon a pile of kupons—from the barely valuable clear kind to the much-sought purple and orange gems—was the goblin chieftain, or more accurately, the goblin king.

He was much bulkier than his minions, almost orc-like in appearance, yet not as bulky as he would have been if he had his former layers of blubber that had long since rotted away. Even still, it was clear that his bony fists packed a hefty punch and the club he held would be even more brutal; it was adorned with human skull fragments that would tear chunks of flesh from his enemies.

What Friedrich found most interesting about him was that he wore a crown of gold that the young man would very much like to take for himself. It would be the cherry on top after he loaded up his sack with the multicoloured assortment of fine gems. This would be a fortune-filled day indeed.

The way that Friedrich saw it, there were two options. The first option was to take on the undead goblin king head-on, with the goblin having both the strength and size advantage over the young lad. The second option involved the element of surprise and a little bit of foolhardiness; something that Friedrich had plenty of.

He climbed out of the window and onto a thin ledge below, suddenly becoming aware of how steep the drop to the courtyard was. All he needed to do was land on top of the wall separating the outer and inner yard. He edged along carefully, making no sudden movements that would alert the oafish skeleton. Upon reaching the wall he slowly lowered himself down.

The goblin king was unaware of the young man crouched twenty feet above him. He was more infatuated with his treasure, a treasure that he had been obsessed with in life and an obsession that had carried on for many decades after his death. Friedrich had to admire the king’s dedication to greed, he himself would have given up on the treasure by now if he couldn’t make any real use of it.

The adventurer shimmied forward inch by inch, not taking an eye off his target. “Perfect,” he muttered under his breath, now in alignment with the goblin king. He stood up, ready to make the leap across the courtyard and crash on top of the king. It wasn’t too long of a jump; he could definitely make it. Hopefully.

As Friedrich drew his sword and bent his knees, ready to plunge from the sky, he was startled by an arrow colliding with the sword in his left hand. He turned to see a goblin archer firing from a nearby window, and he was ready to shoot again. Friedrich leapt into the courtyard, no longer aiming for the king. All he wanted was to avoid an arrow to the heart.

Friedrich landed clumsily on the ground and, as he looked up, his eyes became fixated on a small wooden mask, carved to look like a fox and painted a glistening gold. It sat at the base of the goblin king’s treasure pile and emitted an ethereal aura that drew the young explorer in. He knew he must have it.