Three of them came out of the undergrowth in a loose pincer, which was more tactical thinking than the goblins' general reputation in the literature suggested they were capable of. They had crude spears — stone-tipped, coated in something that the ambient mana-reading identified as the Maw's own toxins, which meant the Maw's ecosystem was actively arming its inhabitants rather than simply co-existing with them.
Shiela had read them at forty metres. She was reading four more at the edge of her range, further back, waiting.
"Three immediate," Rosanne confirmed. "Yours, Rosalind. We hold position."
Rosalind watched the lead goblin's approach for two seconds — not frozen, reading. Tracking the specific way its weight was distributing across the soft mulch, noting which direction it favoured, the angle of the spear relative to its forward momentum.
The void bullet she produced was a concentrated point of mana, tightly enough formed to minimise the atmospheric overhead the Maw's toxicity charged for imprecise output. Clean and small, the way he had told her. The training hall had produced this technique through controlled iterations over months. This was the first time the target would be a thing that moved without instruction.
The lead goblin's forward momentum ceased.
She held her breath for a count of two.
Then: the two flanking goblins, their pincer having lost its anchor, adjusting their approach vectors — she tracked the adjustments through the spatial awareness she'd been developing for seven months, the void affinity's inherent sensitivity to the presence of living things in its vicinity extending her effective read further than standard mana-sense.
Two more shots, aimed at the adjustment vectors rather than the goblins' current positions. Less impressive to observe, she imagined. More effective.
Both landed.
The heavy, simultaneous sound of two bodies hitting the mulch was followed by the specific quality of silence that Rifts produced when a threat had resolved and the ecosystem was reassessing.
She heard Rosanne exhale.
"Good," Rosanne said. "You aimed at where they were going, not where they were."
"That's what he trained me for," Rosalind said. Her voice was steady. Not cold — present. There was a difference.
The level-up pulse she felt in her channels was the cultivation system's acknowledgment of the encounter's conclusion, her mana pool refilling with the specific efficiency of a pathway that had been properly prepared for this kind of work.
"Four more at range," Shiela said. "Withdrawing. They registered the sound but they're not committing."
"Let them go," Rosanne said. "We're not hunting. Move forward."
The outpost was Mika's find, twenty minutes deeper into the Maw.
She didn't call it out until she'd been tracking the canopy for ten seconds, following the specific quality of shadow that didn't move with the wind. The platform was woven bark and vines, crude enough that it had taken that long to distinguish from the tree architecture around it.
The goblin on it was eating something and not paying sufficient attention to the ground below, which was a sentry problem regardless of the species doing the sentry work.
Rosalind didn't look at the platform for six seconds after Donna pointed it out.
She looked at the surrounding canopy instead.
"What are you reading," Rosanne asked, quietly.
"The goblin literature says they post in pairs," Rosalind said. "If there's a second platform in the blind spot covering this one—"
"Good," Rosanne said. "Keep looking."
She looked for another four seconds, the void affinity's spatial read extending through the canopy's overlapping branches with the specific patience of someone who had learned to wait for the information rather than assume it was absent.
"He's alone," she said.
"Confirm that."
"There's a heartbeat at the platform. The nearest other heartbeat is forty metres northeast, moving away. He's alone."
"Take him."
The shot was clean.
The figure on the platform pitched forward without any interval between alive and not, and the undergrowth below absorbed the impact.
"Sentry's down," Shiela confirmed. "Nearest signatures are still moving away."
"How long before the rotation misses him," Rosanne asked.
"An hour," Mika said. "Forty minutes if they're disciplined."
"Then we have forty minutes to sweep the perimeter before this whole sector mobilises." Rosanne looked at the team. "Mika, Donna, wide sweep left. Shiela stays with Rosalind. I want every outpost in this arc down before the camp notices. Move."
They took six more outposts in thirty-five minutes.
Rosalind's shot selection improved across the sequence — she was adjusting for the specific overhead cost the Maw's atmosphere charged against imprecise output, tightening her void bullets to the minimum viable size for the engagement distance rather than the larger-format technique the training hall had started her on. By the sixth outpost she was spending approximately seventy percent of her initial mana cost per shot and achieving the same result.
He noted this from the rear and said nothing. Noting was sufficient.
The alarm came from somewhere beyond their sight — a low, guttural horn blast that resonated through the mulch and the wood and the air simultaneously, the sound of a creature whose biology had been shaped for exactly this purpose.
The jungle changed.
Not dramatically. The birds didn't scatter, because there weren't birds in this section of the Maw. The specific change was in the undergrowth's movement pattern — the way things that had been still suddenly had a direction, and the direction was inward, toward the team's position.
"Retreat," Rosanne said, without any pause. "West. Now. We stay ahead of the reorganisation pattern and find a defensible position while the camp figures out what it's lost."
They moved.
The shadows that followed were different from the goblin scouts — heavier, wider in the undergrowth, the specific acoustic signature of something that was clearing vegetation rather than moving around it. The warriors in the camp's main body had been roused, and they had the specific aggression of creatures whose territorial response to alarm was to expand their presence rather than contract it.
The Maw's path network, which had been passable on the way in, was being systematically worked by the warriors' cleavers — the undergrowth that had provided coverage now being reduced to produce sight lines.
"They're changing the terrain," Donna said, between strides.
"Yes," Rosanne said. "Welcome to a real dungeon. Keep moving — they're slower than they look but there are more of them than we expected given the recent cull."
"How far to defensible ground," Mika asked.
Shiela had been running her hemographic read continuously. "There's a clearing fifty metres ahead with a rocky outcrop on the western edge. High ground. Three approach vectors."
"That's our position," Rosanne said. "Go."
He ran with them, maintaining the rear position, the spatial domain extended to its full radius, tracking every signature in the Maw's immediate sector simultaneously.
The outpost sweep had gone correctly. The alarm was an expected variable in the plan — not a failure, the natural consequence of operating in an environment that was capable of noticing them.
What came next was the test he had actually been waiting to see: not whether Rosalind could eliminate isolated targets under controlled conditions, but whether she could maintain tactical coherence under pressure, with the jungle actively reconfiguring against her.
Seven months of work was about to answer a question that the training hall couldn't.
He followed them toward the outcrop and waited to see what the answer was.