The beast’s massive hand shot down with lightning speed and closed around her armored torso just as she wrenched her blade free from its stomach.

  The motion splashed hot, dark blood across her gauntlets and breastplate, but she barely registered it before the world became nothing but pain.

  The hobgoblin’s large fingers dug into the plate armor with terrifying strength.

  The armor's steel screamed in protest making a high, tortured shriek as the metal was being forced past its limits.

  The carefully forged armored cuirass began to deform under the crushing grip. Its edges bending inward as if the armor were made of a thin tin rather than tempered steel made by the finest blacksmiths money could buy.

  She felt the first buckle before she heard it as the pressure drove the metal plates into softer padding.

  The padding, while designed for cushioning and nullifying the force of a weapon, could do little for the pressure of the beast’s grip as she began to feel that pressure seep past her padding and into her body.

  Her ribs strained beneath the compressing plates, her breath exploding from her lungs in a sharp, helpless gasp as the air was forced out.

  Yet the hobgoblin’s grip tightened even further.

  The increasing pressure caused the armor to groan again as the welded seams began warping, and rivets along the joints popped loose one by one like rocks from a slingshot.

  The force lifted her slightly off her feet, boots scraping helplessly against slick sewer stone as she tried instinctively and uselessly to brace herself against anything.

  Another surge of the beast’s strength collapsed the breastplate inward another inch.

  This caused white-hot pain to flare through her chest as something inside shifted where it absolutely should not have.

  Her vision began to flicker as the edges of her vision began darkening while Eleonora's lungs struggled to draw breath against the crushing pressure.

  She tried valiantly to stab at the beast again with her sword she somehow still maintained her grip on before trying to twist free.

  In fact, she tried to do anything to end the hell she was in but inside that iron grip, she might as well have been a child's doll.

  The worst had yet to come as Eleonora felt unimaginable pain once more.

  As the sensation sharpened, she felt the splintering of bone into dozens of fragments as multiple ribs cracked one after another beneath the hobgoblin’s grip.

  Each fracture sending more pain lancing through her body.

  Further discomfort came as her organs felt squeezed and displaced, like paste forced through a narrow tube, forcing the air violently from her lungs once more.

  As she tried to breathe again a wet, choking sound came out of her.

  Her breathing slowed against her will as her chest refused to expand properly.

  Every attempt to inhale felt shallow and wrong. Her breaths came wet and raspy, bubbling faintly with her blood as the hobgoblin roared again.

  The roaring vibration passed straight through her as the vibrations from it further inflamed her injuries.

  As if the hobgoblin had grown bored of squeezing her it decided to begin violently shaking her.

  The motion turned the world into a blur.

  Each jolt from shaking sent fresh waves of agony rippling through her body, grinding broken bone edges together, tearing at muscle and bruised organs.

  Her stomach lurched.

  Black dots crept into the edges of her vision once more.

  Meanwhile she began to become overwhelmed by the smell emanating from the beast.

  It was a potent mix of sweat, animal musk, and the coppery tang of its own blood.

  It forced to gag but that only made it worse as she tasted the copper tang of her own blood which trickled into her mouth, warm and slick against her tongue from her internal injuries.

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  She tried to fight once more despite the pain.

  Her right arm felt distant, like it belonged to someone else. She forced it to move, hacking weakly at the creature’s forearm.

  The blade struck, but with no strength behind it the steel blade only scraped the hobgoblins thick hide leaving shallow cuts.

  The creature snarled, annoyed more than hurt, and swung her like a bolo.

  The world began to spin violently before it tossed her upward.

  For a heartbeat she felt weightless as she began to fall back down.

  Then its massive hand closed around her head as her helmet slammed into its meaty palm with a dull, crushing impact.

  The sound was heavy and final like a hammer striking a coffin lid.

  For an instant the world froze in that single point of contact.

  Then the hobgoblins' fingers tightened once more.

  The helmet's metal screamed in protest, a high, tortured shriek as the reinforced plates of her helmet bent inward.

  The pressure forced the padding against her temples and jaw, squeezing her head from all sides. It felt like being caught in a blacksmith’s vise as pain detonated behind her eyes.

  She saw stars explode across her vision in white, blue, and violet bursts that swallowed everything else, pulsing and spreading until they became a storm of light. Shapes dissolved.

  The sewer, the monster, the world itself, all of it vanished behind the blinding flashes.

  For a moment, the sound vanished completely.

  Like someone had ripped her out of the world and dropped her into a vacuum where nothing existed but pressure, the light and her unimaginable pain.

  Then the sound came rushing back all at once but wrong.

  It collapsed into a single, high, screaming ring that seemed to exist only inside her skull.

  It vibrated through her teeth, her spine, her broken ribs. It drowned out the roar of the creature, the shouts of her companions, even the frantic hammering of her own heart.

  Then the world tilted sideways once more as the hobgoblin hurled her with all its might down the sewer tunnel.

  For a heartbeat she was weightless once more. Unable to move her armor, limbs, and weapon were all suspended in a sickening limp silent arc before gravity reclaimed her, pulling her back to the ground.

  She hit the sewer wall hard enough to crack the stone as the impact boomed through the tunnel like an earth mages rock catapult spell.

  The shock traveled through the steel and padding, into flesh and bone, snapping more of her bones as the plates of her armor deformed inward as the force drove her against the unyielding masonry.

  Something in her side gave way with a dull, internal crunch.

  She felt it as her vertebrae shattered under the force.

  A sickening chain reaction traveled up her spine, each fracture blooming like distant thunder rolling through her nervous system.

  For a fraction of a second, there was nothing.

  Then the pain arrived once more.

  It broke through the adrenaline like a tidal wave smashing through a cracked dam.

  Every nerve in her body ignited at once. It was no longer pain in one place or another, it was everywhere, all-consuming, a white-hot roar that erased the boundaries of her own body.

  She couldn’t tell where she ended and the agony began.

  Her breath hitched into a wet, broken gasp that never quite became a scream.

  Her sword slipped from numb, unresponsive fingers and clattered uselessly beside her, the sound strangely distant.

  She slid down the wall slowly, her broken armor scraping stone, leaving a dark smear of blood across the rough masonry.

  Bits of mortar and dust rained down around her as the cracked stone settled.

  By the time she hit the ground, her body barely felt like it belonged to her anymore.

  She tried to move but nothing answered.

  The tunnel blurred into long, wavering streaks, and somewhere far away she thought she heard shouting, but it was fading, pulled farther and farther away as darkness crept in from the edges of her vision.

  As things began to go dark, her thoughts lost their sharp edges, blurring together into heavy, sinking fragments.

  Somewhere far away she could hear still hear the shouting, but it all felt distant, like echoes underwater.

  All she could think was that she was a failure.

  She couldn’t even protect her friends like a knight was supposed to.

  That thought settled deep into her psyche.

  It was heavier than the pain she now felt. Even heavier than the crushing pressure in her chest as her deformed armored squeezed her broken body.

  She had wanted to be a knight for as long as she could remember.

  As a little girl she had sat cross-legged at her father’s feet, listening wide-eyed to his stories commanding a legion on the frontier, his battles with barbarian tribes and monsters.

  Later, when she learned to read, she devoured every story she could find about the knights of old.

  Heroes who stood against monsters.

  Women and men who had chosen duty over comfort.

  People who mattered because of what they did, not because of what family they were born into.

  She desperately wanted that to feel important and valued for more than her name.

  She wanted the adventure, the purpose, and the feeling of doing something that belonged to her.

  Her three older brothers had never understood that. To them she was always something fragile that needed to be protected.

  And worse someone to gently push aside when real decisions were made.

  Her oldest brother had barely even tried to hide the way he looked down on her, always acting like she was a foolish girl who wasn't disciplined enough.

  And then she had finally gotten her chance to become a knight and go on her grand adventure.

  Yet on her first day at the Adventurers’ Guild.

  And what had she done?

  She’d misidentified a dwarf as a gnome, panicked when corrected, and run out of the hall in tears like a little girl.

  The memory burned, sharp and humiliating, even now.

  And no...now when it mattered, she had been thrown aside like she weighed nothing. Lucien had needed her. The others had needed her.

  And she had failed.

  As her world narrowed and the torchlight above her blurred into thin streaks of gold, one thought circled over and over, slow and inescapable.

  "I failed, I'm not a knight, just a worthless silly girl like my brothers and everyone thinks I am" she thought.

  Then her world faded to black.