Free Web NovelChapter 35: Had enough?
"Now what the hell is going on?" Ren asked, looking down at the chaos in the clearing below.
He had been gone for what felt like a solid chunk of time on his end, even if Vel had assured him only minutes had passed here. Minutes, and somehow his entire settlement had found itself in the middle of a brawl with a small army of orcs. He shook his head slowly.
"I leave for a second and this is what happens."
He stepped off the cliff edge and took to the air.
The moment his wings spread to their full eighteen-foot span, his shadow fell across the clearing like a curtain being drawn, blocking a significant portion of the sky above the battle. The orcs that had been pressing the attack felt it first as a drop in light, then looked up and found the source of it, and the sounds of the fight changed immediately, the aggression draining out of the orc side of things and being replaced by something else entirely.
Ren looked down at all of them, crimson lines burning across his scales, eyes glowing with the new intensity the evolution had put behind them, wings barely needing to work to keep him suspended above the scene.
"Hehe," he said quietly to himself. "Now to show off a bit."
He dove.
The first Rendering Claw came from a distance, the ability extending far beyond the reach of his actual claws, a blade of compressed force slicing through the air and cutting a clean path through the group of orcs who had been pressing Remu. They scattered like startled birds, the ones who caught the edge of it going down hard, the ones who dodged it running without looking back.
He swung again, a wide arc this time, the force of it tearing through the earth where a cluster of them had been standing and sending them sprawling in every direction. A third slash, tighter and faster, aimed at the group that was trying to reorganize near the treeline, and they gave up on reorganizing immediately.
The orcs were running.
All of them were running, scattering into the forest in different directions with the desperate, unceremonious speed of creatures that had made a rapid reassessment of how the next few minutes were going to go if they stayed.
Ren watched them go with mild satisfaction, already beginning to pull up from his dive, when something in his peripheral vision stopped him.
One orc was not running.
It stood in the center of the clearing, facing him, a massive cleaver held in both hands that looked like it had been made for something significantly larger than even the orc holding it. Its feet were planted. Its jaw was set.
"What the hell," Ren said, genuinely surprised.
The orc’s aura ignited.
It came up red, thick and violent, rolling off its body in waves that flattened the grass around its feet and sent a visible distortion through the air above it. The orc drew a breath so deep its whole chest expanded, tightened its grip on the cleaver until its knuckles changed color, and launched itself straight up off the ground with enough force to crack the earth beneath it, the cleaver already swinging in a massive overhead arc aimed directly at Ren.
Ren opened his mouth and fired Primordial Roar point blank.
The wave of compressed sound and force that came out of him hit the orc mid-swing, caught it completely, and drove it back down out of the air like something had physically seized it and thrown it at the ground. It hit hard, bounced once, and came to a stop on its back, a small crater formed under it.
Ren descended slowly, landing a few feet away with a deliberate heaviness, and looked down at it.
The orc looked up at him, breathing hard, something still burning in its eyes that was not quite fear and was not quite sense either.
It got to its feet.
"Yo," Ren said, genuinely baffled. "What is wrong with you?"
"I will destroy you," the orc said, its voice low and grinding, "for my master."
It launched.
Ren moved his tail.
It came around fast and low and caught the orc across the midsection with a thud that sent it tumbling sideways. Before it could recover he brought the tail down again across its back, pinning it to the ground briefly, then lifted it and brought it down once more, not with the intention of killing it but with the very clear intention of making a point.
Down. Up. Down again.
He kept going for a few more seconds, long enough for the fun of it to balance out the mild irritation, then stopped and looked down at the orc, which was currently face-first in the dirt and not moving with any particular enthusiasm.
"Had enough?" he asked.
The orc made a sound into the ground that was either a curse or an affirmation. It was hard to tell.
Ren looked up at the treeline. The other orcs were gone, the last few disappearing between the trees with no indication that they intended to come back in the near future.
He looked back down at the one that had stayed.
"Right," he said. "You’re coming with me."
He wrapped his tail around it carefully but firmly, picked it up off the ground, and turned back toward the cave, the orc dangling at his side at an angle that was not particularly dignified for either of them.
Remu and Silas and the rest of his people watched him come back across the clearing in complete silence, the aftermath of the battle settling around them, and every single one of them had the particular expression of beings who had just seen something they were going to be thinking about for a while.
Ren looked around at all of them.
"Everyone alright?" he asked.
