He looked down at the dagger, still smeared with poison paste. For a moment, the pungent stench tempted him to wash it clean, but he decided against it; he planned to venture outside, and if he encountered an orc, the residue would surely come in handy, even raw and unmatured, it might still do some damage.
He tucked the blade into its sheath with extreme care, terrified the poison might smear onto his clothing, then slipped through the cascade into the pool. He dove immediately, and the moment he reached the bank, he bolted for the undergrowth around the pool.
Lying flat against the mulch, he called up the mental map. He turned his focus toward his target: the orc settlement. For the next dozens of minutes, he moved through the trees with taut nerves and practiced stealth, until he reached the massive tree he'd been spying on yesterday and climbed into its canopy, gazing down at the bone-walled settlement in the distance.
But today, something was wrong.
The usual, boisterous sounds of orc brawling were absent. Narrowing his eyes, he saw a sight that made his breath hitch: the orcs were mobilizing. They stood in groups of five, thirteen groups in total, clustered before the monolith.
In front of them paced a figure distinct from the rest. It was hunched, draped in heavy, layered furs that seemed too large for its frame, and it carried a long, gnarled staff that swept the dirt as it moved.
It didn't pace like the others around it but drifted between the groups, its movements fluid yet commanding, as if issuing orders. Even from this distance, Aris could tell the others gave it a wide berth.
Aris focused on their gear, studying the weapons they carried. Some stood out even at this distance, glinting sharply in the sunlight—chains. Each group held lengths of metal roughly twenty meters long. What could they possibly need chains that long for?
The answer surfaced darkly, accompanied by the memory of the human captives he'd seen before. But those chains had been a mere five meters. His gaze scanned the settlement, searching for the captives, but his heart sank. The tiny, huddled figures were far fewer than they had been. A lot fewer.
He observed the settlement for minutes, but his vantage point offered no further insight; the orcs remained locked in their ranks before the monolith. As for the missing villagers, he still had no clues. In normal times, he wouldn't have cared, but this mobilization was wrong, and that alone demanded his attention.
He remained in the canopy for another half hour, watching. Finally, the orcs began to howl, prostrating themselves before the Volrag statue behind the monolith, before dispersing toward directions he couldn't immediately make out.
Then his blood ran cold as one of the groups began moving directly toward his position.
He descended immediately and plunged into the undergrowth. Terrified they might track him back to the cave, he ran in the opposite direction; his breathing, though ragged, stayed quiet, for he feared what other unseen enemies might be lurking in the forest.
He moved in wide circles for nearly an hour, ears straining for the heavy, rhythmic thud of orcish footfalls, until he had put enough distance behind him to risk ascending another tree.
At the top of the tree, he scanned the canopy and the forest floor below. Nothing moved near that stretch of woods. Even then, he didn't hurry to descend. Only after a long, tense vigil did he finally climb down and circle back toward his original vantage point.
The settlement, however, offered only an eerie silence, the kind that precedes a storm. Not a single living soul moved through the bone-walled compound.
He climbed down, not daring to dwell on the sight, and turned his focus to the ground. He began tracking the orc footprints, reasoning they were the only lead he had toward understanding their mobilization.
The further he followed the trail, the more the trajectory nagged at him. The moment he mapped their path against his internal mental map, his heart skipped a beat: they were heading directly toward the village.
He stopped cold. The village was under attack, the realization hit him with the force of a physical blow. Part of him immediately began piecing together the clues. Were the chief's words true? Was this punishment for a single missing sacrifice?
He felt a cold detachment, harboring no regret for having escaped with Lilly, nor for whatever role his flight might have played in the village's impending fate. But logic began to gnaw at him. One group of orcs would have been enough to raze his village. Why had the others deployed in thirteen directions?
Could others from neighboring settlements have escaped? Perhaps. But the odds of thirteen villages having someone escape the sacrifice at the exact same time were astronomically low. Unless… they had allowed it. But why?
The closer he crept to the forest's edge, the more questions took root. The sounds from the village grew clearer, not shouts of battle, but muffled, harrowing cries carried on a wind that stank of copper and rot. He reached the tree line and stood frozen at the boundary, listening.
Despair and terror hung thick in the air, threatening to bloom in his own chest.
For a heartbeat, the scene before him made the future look impossibly bleak. He doubted his ability to survive this hellish world, or whether Prime would be enough to guarantee even his own safety, let alone build anything meaningful for humanity.
Deep down, he feared Prime alone wasn't enough. Yet a sliver of hope remained—he hadn't yet unearthed the full scope of Prime's capabilities. But he was terrified of the alternative: that his hope might be nothing more than wishful thinking.
No. I cannot let fear and despair chain me, he thought, jaw tightening. I am still alive. As long as I draw breath, there is an infinite chance.
But the doubt lingered, cold and persistent. How could a mortal, with a hundred years at most, change anything that mattered? In the grand scheme of the cosmos, a human life wasn't even a single letter in a book of billions of pages.
He shoved the thought into the deepest recesses of his mind. The current crisis left no room for a philosophical collapse, not even for a man who lived his life a dozen steps ahead of the reaper.
He watched as figures were dragged before the village gate—familiar silhouettes chained together, one by one. A man broke ranks to fight, and in a flash, he was severed into pieces. From his vantage point, Aris clearly saw what they were doing with the remains, but he watched nonetheless, his gaze unblinking.
Aris estimated nearly a hundred captives were before the gate. In a village of a thousand, the tally was staggering. The scent of blood, thick and cloying even from hundreds of meters away began to overwhelm the forest air. Then came a sight he had half-expected: the village chief and his sons were chaining their fellow villagers themselves.
Aris didn't wait to see more. He felt no surge of righteous anger; he had seen men like them countless times in his past life: those who sold their daughters, those who betrayed their own blood to survive. Aris held no illusions about his own character, either. He claimed no higher moral ground. He wasn't a monster, but he was certainly no saint.
A group of orcs shifted toward his position, and he abandoned his vantage point, melting into the dense brush several meters to the left. His heart hammered against his ribs, but his gaze remained fixed and wide.
Minutes later, the heavy, rhythmic thud of orcish steps, mixed with the rattle of chains and high, thin cries, grew deafening as they entered the forest. Peering through the leaves, Aris saw the culprits. Their chests were smeared with fresh blood and jagged remnants of human meat. The leader, an orc with a thick scar over his left eye, was chewing on a human leg, the size suggesting it belonged to a woman. He clutched the limb in a clawed hand, laughing in guttural, discordant tones.
Behind them trailed the captives. Their clothes were soaked in gore, and many were missing limbs. Every crying, hopeless face was familiar. There was the man Rill had worked with at the farm, now missing a hand; the children he had watched playing with stick-swords only two days ago, their heads bleeding; and the elderly man who sold him bread, lagging at the very end of the line, hope long gone from his eyes.
Aris's fist clenched so hard he crushed the foliage to pulp. A violent storm of emotion surged through him, but he clamped down on it, refusing to let the chaos touch his mind. Yet no matter how calm he appeared on the surface, his hands continued to tremble.
In a small, shadowed corner of his heart, he felt a sickening, guilty relief: he had been wise enough to flee. He had traded certain death for a dangerous unknown, but at least the unknown held the possibility of survival.
He waited until the cacophony faded into the deep woods before he moved, following at a distance; the heavy, metallic stench of blood marked their trail, impossible to lose.
When he finally returned to his vantage point and ascended the canopy, the sight below robbed him of breath. More orc raiding parties were converging on the settlement from every direction, each group dragging fresh chains of human captives, their bodies bathed in the same ruinous red.
He couldn't see the individual stains from this distance, but he knew they were no different from the others. Aris's deepest fears were coming to fruition: this was far more than a simple reprisal for an escaped sacrifice.
The groups gathered before the monolith, beginning a rhythmic, guttural dance around the statue of Volrag. The chained humans stood paralyzed behind them, shivering in a circular formation. Aris's mind raced: If they chain their captives, how did Lilly escape? How did they miss her?
Before the thought could settle, a pillar of golden light erupted from the statue. The stone wheel behind it groaned as it began to rotate, and a second, more violent burst of radiance shrieked outward. The orcs froze instantly. Aris recoiled, nearly losing his grip on the branches as the light swept through the forest.
The statue's head turned, sweeping in a slow arc toward the position he occupied, and for a heartbeat its gaze passed over him, a weight settling and then lifting just as quickly.
But even then, Aris remained frozen, his breath hitching, his mind screaming at him to bolt. But the light continued its sweep, indifferent, moving on toward the next cardinal direction. The orcs mimicked the statue's movement, their bodies jerking in unison until all four directions had been scanned in turn. Then the light died as abruptly as it had appeared. The entire event had lasted barely three seconds.
The orcs then guided the captives toward the base of the statue, positioning them at precise intervals. As Aris watched, the ground rippled like liquid, swallowing the tiny human figures before closing seamlessly over them. There was no tremor, no quake—only a terrifying, unnatural silence.
The orcs prostrated themselves, their frantic, dissonant worship swelling into a deafening roar.
Aris stayed motionless as the sun began to dip, bathing the prostrating orcs and the settlement in an eerie, golden beauty that mocked the carnage below. Perched on the branch, he burned the sight into his mind.
This world isn't just savage, he realized, a cold dread pooling in his stomach. It's fundamentally supernatural. But perhaps that was also the key, the answer to everything he had been searching for, the missing variable in humanity's survival.
He had no counter for the orcs beyond his experimental poisons, and now he was faced with a deity that demanded tribute. His only reprieve was the entity's apparent passivity; if it could manifest such power directly, it wouldn't need to hunt through proxies. Unless I'm misreading the mechanism entirely, he thought. Maybe they aren't feeding it. Maybe they're just delivery agents.
I have to capture one of them, he mused, his mind already weaving the threads of a new, dangerous plan.
The entity was incomprehensible, and the ritual was bizarre, but Aris refused to be a passive victim. He knew that knowledge was as much a weapon as it was a liability. The accelerated decay he'd witnessed in the woods almost certainly traced back to this same source.
I cannot dwell on the 'why' yet, he cautioned himself. Survival is a game of steps. Every move matters, and every move must be accounted for.
He began his descent. At the base of the tree, he risked one last glance toward the statue, a final look at the grave of his neighbors before turning his back on the settlement. He melted into the darkening forest, his path set firmly toward the cave.