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Ego and Technique (August 22, 2026)

I slapped the goblin in the face, and he thudded to the ground. What was I but the single thing that kept things protruding and moving? How could I allow myself to fall so lowly? Compensate, compensate. Those things that kept me growing. I must cross-enable myself until I become something of a person, something that goes far beyond my initial capabilities. I have to see through it that I know exactly the means whereby I am committed to myself as all-in-all. This bouquet of grandiosity, mythologization, and irrationality can only be a cruciality. There are things worth keeping. This is one of them.

Goblin, oh goblin. Do you see now? The person I’ve become. What I must, I do, and by that authority, self-apotheosis! I righteously act! Wherefrom, only good shall follow. I have to acknowledge those little things as well, but just as much, I will lay down these little self-similar authority copies of me, until all is a cast of my spirituality, that sense-o’-I!

I demanded from the goblin a simple expression of itself so that I may inject myself with the concentrated solution drawn from its essence.

A goblin walked before me.

I laughed.

Tore-so-nor! Don’t you know who I am! That might whereby I act, or have you fucking lost my marbles?

I surged to it, grabbed its head, and tried to ripped it off, only to realize my grip strength didn’t also mean traction on its sweaty green scalp, so my mind can’t trying [sic] and only at best grabbed skin, with whatever ripping off action I attempted to do amounting only to damage. The head was far too attached for my goal, among other things.

I traded blows with the goblin like we were brothers. By the time we were done, I was heaving and coughing with an itchy throat. The blood soaked my knuckles, but most of it went on my clothes and along my right sleeve. I couldn’t brush it off. The goblin’s body was still alive and crawling. I kept stomping, but nothing I did actually stopped it from being alive. It seemed something more vicious was required, so I grabbed a stick, but even its sharpest point was like poking someone with the end of a training staff. The goblin was still alive, and I was too tired to do anything, but I couldn’t stay here and leave myself vulnerable to the goblin and everything else that might be in this forest. Fuck! The goblin was still groaning and breathing heavily when I picked myself up and scrambled out of sight.

I saw the tower I passed by earlier before coming across the goblin. Recently, random lone tall structures like that have been popping up in the wilderness surrounding my home village. But I didn’t think too much about it for a while, just letting the whispers carry on about some great new shift in the world. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t.

I stepped noisily, the mud displaced by one leg splatting my other leg. I cursed.

My name’s Hovac Sinuses! And I intend to do… Fuck!

After I returned home, the village chief called for a meeting. The elders gathered in a line beside him, forming one side. The families formed two lines perpendicular to theirs. Then the children occupied the last side, parallel to the elders. The meeting was rectangular, the families having the shorter distance.

“Okay, where is he?” Chief Bruno grumbled.

“He’ll be here any minute,” his strongest subordinate said.

“That unruly son of mine.”

My figure came discreetly out from one of the houses, closing the door as surreptitiously as I could. Even with the slightest thud, it was enough to get the whole village’s heads turning. While under all their stares, I crept, head down, toward my father.

“Hovac! Come here! Fucking hell! Can you at least pretend to be troubled! What have you spent the last week doing!”

“I saw a goblin,” came my low voice.

Everyone gasped.

“Just five minutes from here. It’s only going to get worse. I tried to deal with it, but…” I showed them the blood and dirt on me. Even after I’ve changed clothes, some of it still stuck, especially around my hands and arms.

“Damn the fucking shit!’ went my father.

He didn’t even bother hiding it. He was wearing the mana necklace he had a lackey of his extort from the family with the lowest status, the Hickeys.

“Are we leaving?” someone asked.

Chief Bruno’s expression tensed before he switched to a warm smile. “Well, as long as we stay here, we’ll be in danger, so we really have to start packing, if not abandon this place altogether.” The smile grew more and more obviously ironic as everyone began murmuring.

I sighed inwardly. If I can’t even get rid of one greenie, how can I transcend this hellhole? This is below me, I above it.

If only one goblin just went and attacked, then I’d be able to begin the resolution of all that this village is made of. Misery, muck, and the made-up. I can’t pretend and hide these crucial desires of mine, which will fuel my ascension.

One goblin, one level, one more layer of separation between me and my village’s superstructure. If I could just… One step can very well snowball, so a goblin can never be dismissed. So the next one… I need something sharper.

When the families finally got all their bags out in the flattest, most open part of the village, I stood watch, absorbing the goblin event from earlier, processing and prefiguring in my head what I’d become. If I could just… zoomed through my mind, not like a ghost, but as an apparition of my very next step that could just as rapidly explode into an overarching reality.

While marching through the plains, a short monstrous figure appeared on the horizon, having come from a dense, endless wall of sprawling trees.

“That fucking greenie!” the depths of my voice broke out.

Everyone’s heads snapped to the goblin, and, instead of advancing like I did, began taking steps back.

Shit. Of course, these useless pigs.

If death comes, I’ll be fucking ready! Because it won’t be me whose blood’s spurting!

My chest grew hot. My tongue tasted like venom. I want to snatch and bite through the sharpest version of my own self-concept and hope that’s weapon enough! But a blade, where is it? I clutched the blades of grass below me and tore them out, gripping them in closed fists, right as my thoughts turned to moving feet. I sought out the goblin. The world is my making. It has to be! Domain has to be operable. It has to be conductible. I have to be! Because that’s what, what, what I already am!

I pounced on the goblin and drew it from sight, trying to tear it apart under veil of vegetation, but not a single grass blade pierced its skin. I had begged for life to take me on a journey. It can’t end now! Not now! I punched it with all of my might after kicking the wind out of it and winding for long enough time I could very well have had a whole birth, life, and death in that wait. The goblin splurted; its form burst like an egg’s shell. The first of many. It was only a small puncture, but death was a spell one couldn’t uncast. It was dying. I half-giggled then burst in a breathless guffaw. I couldn’t bear it. The joy of proclamation.

The goblin clung to life. Just as breathlessly as I, it grasped onto me, clawing toward something called mundanity. If it could just be with everyone…

I watched it, my lips only shifting and compressing at first before erupting in small wriggles throughout. I saw a creature of conscious capacity, and my empathy, whatever it is, could only be subserved by a better, stronger force, something that could put into actuality its goals, even if it meant the loss of it altogether.

I pressed down. Wherever there was goblin, I moved to crush. The shake of its throat rushed jaggedly and gradually eased before falling still. I knew what I did. I knew I could never take it back. But the fruits of this act for me. It was never anything personal between me and it. It was always between me and myself. My selfish desires craved, and I relinquished to them, because I didn’t know any other drive and thought. I can only regret, but that will never curdle to indecision. I can only accept that my essence as I’ve long decided it is brutal and unforgiving. While my heart aches and trembles, there is no justice beyond that of my own vision.

A goblin with a life. Isn’t that fun?

The world is not cruel. I am. And many of the people who act and decide in the same vein. There was never a structural fault. It was always accountability at the individual level. So. Or, more precisely, I am.

Managing Goblins (August 23, 2026)

Diary #253

Sometimes, I look at the little things, and from them, every now and then, something forms, but not anything truly real and hand-holdable. But rather than just simply visual phenomena, for some strange reason, when the sun’s at its zenith and I feel particularly comfortable, it penetrates some part of me that I never knew existed. That damning sense. It’s like knowing something before it even existed. Something like being but not one that I can reduce just to existence as experience. It feels like a hand going under you and reaching into your soul, somewhere even you can’t even find. Ontology at the curve of that hand motion.

What are goblins? You see them walk down the road, and you know they’re pending corpses. But no, no, there can’t be just that. Must be something else. Something more tantalizing. An idea worth pursuing to its conclusion. What is it? What was it? The ancient tomes should have them? No, no, wait, is it really something we’ve exhausted since the birth of the world? Or is it just my eyes slightly blurred? Making shit up where there’s nothing but the wind and how it itches them enough to make them blink?

If I brought an ax, would I know myself by it? Would I have gone and done it frenziedly and count it under “self-developing creative projects”? Is that really all it is? Compensation filling up an hole (ego?) that never needed to exist?

The number of goblins this week? Forty-seven.

The number of times I finished my food this week? Fifteen times out of twenty.

My longest walk this week? Just over an hour.

What I got done this week? Two goblins relocated to my makeshift prison at the Crystal Caves. Three goblins punished for trying to escape. My ax sharpened for the raid next week. And what else? I reunited with a friend whose real name I still don’t know, but they did gift me a sack of rice, saying it would help with feeding the goblins.

What I have planned next week? Besides the raid, making new cages for the thirtieth batch of goblins coming that Sunday and re-planting some of the crops that the storm washed away with the goal of moving it toward the northern edge of the cliff because I noticed the runoff went there much less and whatever rain did fall directly from above could easily be addressed with some cover (though I’m still new to this thing).