Free Web NovelChapter 43: Dead Little Piggies
Ren raised his hand, and the purple energy at his fingertips deepened, pulsing outward in slow waves. The ground responded first, cracks spreading in a rough circle around the wrecked clearing, spiderwebbing out from beneath the craters the orcs had already carved into the earth.
Then the boulders came up.
Not small ones. Not the kind you’d trip over. Slabs the size of small houses tore free from the ground in a series of violent eruptions, dirt and root and stone raining off their sides as they rose, each one wrapped in a faint purple aura that hummed with contained weight. Twenty of them. Then more. They hung there in the air above the clearing, drifting slowly, patient, waiting.
Gravity manipulation. Human form only. He’d had the itch to use it properly for a while now, and here, finally, was an excuse.
A smile spread across Ren’s face, easy and sharp at the same time.
"Now," he said, "let’s see how two little piggies hold up."
He closed his fist, and the boulders moved.
The two orcs, who had been standing there processing exactly what was happening above them, snapped out of it fast. Shock gave way to something closer to fear, and fear gave way, as it always did with things like them, to gritted teeth and forward momentum. They charged.
The first boulder came down like a meteor, trailing a thin line of disturbed air, aimed straight at the orc on the left. He didn’t dodge. He met it, sword raised overhead, and swung with everything he had. The impact detonated in a shockwave of dust and rock fragments, the boulder cracking along its surface.
Then a second one hit him from the side.
It caught him mid-recovery, no warning, no telegraph, just weight and speed slamming into his ribs and hurling him sideways through the air. He crashed through three more boulders that had been drifting lazily in his path, each one shattering on impact, before he finally hit the ground and skidded to a stop in a heap of dust and broken stone.
The second orc came in from the flank while his partner was airborne, sprinting low. A boulder dropped toward him, and he read it, sidestepped cleanly, then did something Ren hadn’t expected. He leapt onto the next one as it passed, used it as a springboard, and launched himself off it straight at Ren, blade already coming down in a committed overhead swing.
Ren stepped back.
The strike cut through empty air where his chest had been half a second earlier, and the grin on his face didn’t waver as, right on cue, another boulder slammed into the orc’s exposed side and sent him hurtling backward across the clearing.
Both of them hit the ground hard enough to leave craters of their own. Both of them, infuriatingly, got back up.
Ren looked at them, bruised, bleeding, furious, still standing, and his smile widened another degree. This was fun. He hadn’t had this much fun in a while.
He raised his hand again, and the remaining boulders began to change shape. Their rough, uneven surfaces smoothed and narrowed, splitting and reforming into long, tapered lances of solid stone, dozens of them now, hovering in a loose formation above the clearing, each one catching the light along a wickedly refined point.
The fear that had briefly left the orcs’ eyes came rushing back in full. They looked up at the floating arsenal, then at Ren, and whatever pride had been holding their expressions together cracked at the edges. Rage rushed in to fill the gap, the way it always did for creatures who didn’t know how to process losing.
Ren started walking toward them, unhurried, hands loose at his sides.
"Surrender now," he said. "If you do, I promise you won’t be killed."
Neither of them answered with words. Their grips tightened on their swords instead, red energy flaring back to life along the blades, and that was answer enough.
Ren sighed. "Suit yourselves."
The lances moved.
They came in fast, spinning as they thrust, striking from multiple angles at once, a storm of stone converging on two targets that had nowhere near the room to dodge everything. The orcs fought back the only way they knew how, blocking what they could, twisting away from what they couldn’t, sparks and stone dust filling the air with every deflected strike. Most of it worked.
Some of it didn’t. A handful of lances found their mark, punching into shoulders and thighs and staying there, buried deep, dark blood running down stone that didn’t so much as chip.
Desperate now, and clearly out of better options, both orcs did the only thing left to try. They hurled their swords straight at Ren, red energy trailing off the blades like comet tails.
Ren leapt.
He spun through the air, twin blades passing beneath him close enough to stir his hair, a clean, almost lazy evasion that put him right back on the ground a moment later, feet touching down without so much as a stumble.
And as he landed, the last of the lances answered the call.
They dropped from above in a converging rain, and this time there was no room left to dodge, no sword left to block with. The final strikes drove down and through, pinning both orcs to the ground at the exact same instant, the impact throwing up a final cloud of dust that rolled outward across the ruined clearing before settling.
Silence.
Ren stood in the middle of the wreckage, craters, broken trees, shattered stone scattered everywhere, and looked at the two massive, pinned forms in front of him. Neither one moved. Neither one needed to say anything.
He rolled his shoulder, the last traces of purple light fading from his fingertips, and let out a slow breath.
"Should’ve surrendered," he said.
He walked toward them, and in one breath, he unleashed his chaos flame breath. The massive wave of blood-red flames rushed out and consumed both orcs in an instant, and they died.
[You have killed an Orc General, 200 EXP] ×10
[You have killed an Orc General, 200 EXP] ×10
[Level up, +4 stat points]
He looked at the roasted corpses on the ground, but before he could do anything else, a stream of blood-red light burst from their chests and rushed back toward the mountain as if called back.
