Free Web NovelChapter 46: Marching Army
The standstill lasted a few seconds.
Ren saw the orc soldiers moving in his peripheral vision, pouring away from the cave entrance and back toward his settlement in a coordinated surge, and the math of it landed immediately and completely.
The Calamity Orc had planned this.
Pull the strongest factor away from the settlement, occupy him here, send everything else back to destroy what he’d built while his buff was out of range and his people were managing prisoners and celebrating a victory they thought was over. It was cold and it was calculated and it was exactly the kind of move that you didn’t expect from something that had just eaten one of its own subordinates with the casual detachment of someone snacking between meals.
Ren was simultaneously impressed and furious.
He needed to end this fast.
He raised one hand toward the sky.
The clouds above the clearing responded immediately, darkening, pulling together, and the lightning that came down was not a bolt so much as a pillar, a sustained column of white-blue electricity that screamed through the air and detonated directly on the Calamity Orc with a sound that shook the mountain to its roots.
The Calamity Orc had no time to react. The pillar consumed it entirely, the discharge so concentrated that the ground around it fused into glass, the air within ten meters of the impact point evacuated by pure force, and when the lightning finally ended and the thunder of it finished rolling across the forest, a smoking crater sat where the orc had been standing.
Ren skidded back from the recoil, his feet carving lines in the shattered earth, and looked through the settling smoke.
The Calamity Orc stood in the center of the crater.
Burns covered its entire body, deep and blackened, the kind of damage that should have been fatal several times over. Its head was down, one knee slightly bent, the chains hanging loose from its hands.
Then the burns healed.
Not gradually, not in stages, just healed, the blackened skin pulling back to ashy pink in the space of two seconds, every wound closing, every scar from the lightning simply ceasing to exist, and when the Calamity Orc raised its head, its eyes were burning brighter than before.
"Okay," Ren said. "That’s going to be a problem."
RAWRRRRRRRRRR!
The roar that came out of the Calamity Orc was different from the first one, deeper and more violent, carrying a physical pressure that pushed against Ren’s chest and made the remaining trees at the clearing’s edge shudder. The chains went taut in its hands and both blades began to spin, building momentum, the red runes on them igniting in sequence until they blazed like something lit from inside.
It launched.
The speed was staggering for something that size, each footfall detonating against the ground as it crossed the distance between them, and the first blade came around in a horizontal arc that Ren ducked under by dropping into a roll, coming up inside the chain’s reach and driving a Rendering Claw across the orc’s midsection.
The strike dug in. Three lines of dark blood welled up immediately.
Gone in four seconds.
The second blade came from above while the first was retracting, the chain extending to give it range, and Ren caught it on his gauntlet with both arms raised, the impact driving him two feet into the earth. He used the momentum, pushed off the ground hard, and launched himself upward to get airspace.
The Calamity Orc had already accounted for that.
Its free hand slammed into the earth, and pillars of rock erupted from the ground in a ring around where Ren was rising, closing off the angles above him, forcing him to twist between them rather than climb freely. He banked left, scraped his wing against a pillar, overcorrected, and barely avoided the blade that was already waiting at the adjusted trajectory.
It nicked his shoulder.
He felt it.
"Gravity," he said, and the nearest three pillars simply stopped being relevant to the ground, their weight redirected, and they crumbled sideways away from him, clearing the angle he needed.
He dropped back down and hit the orc in close range with his Primordial Roar, the compressed wave of force catching it at near point-blank range and slamming into its chest like a wall, driving it back ten meters across the ruined clearing, chain blades swinging wide from the sudden lateral movement.
The orc planted its feet and stopped itself.
Ren was already closing the gap.
They met at the center of the crater in a collision that neither of them bothered to make elegant, just force against force, Rendering Claw against chain-blade in a rapid exchange that moved too fast for anything with normal eyes to follow properly. Every impact sent energy crackling outward, the residual force of each clash stripping bark from the nearest surviving trees, adding to the steadily expanding circle of destruction that the clearing had already become.
The Calamity Orc switched tactics without warning, abandoning the blade exchange and dropping low, both hands going to the ground, and the earth around them erupted in every direction at once. Chunks of stone and packed dirt launched upward and inward simultaneously, a cage of debris meant to bury him under sheer volume.
Ren opened his hands and pushed.
The gravity manipulation took everything coming at him and reversed its trajectory, the cascade of stone and earth reversing course and hammering back outward from the center, most of it redirected into the forest around them, and the impact of Ren’s own redirected attack stripped another wide swathe of trees from the earth.
The Calamity Orc rose from the subsiding dust, unmarked again, chains already moving.
Ren tasted blood, realized it was from biting the inside of his cheek during the gravity push, and spat it out.
He raised his head and exhaled a tight controlled stream of Chaos Flame Breath directly at the orc’s face.
The orc raised both chain-blades crossed in front of it, the red runes flaring to absorb the impact, and the flames spread around the makeshift shield in a corona of crimson and red that lit the entire clearing in violent color.
When the flames stopped, the orc lowered its blades.
The runes were smoking. The blades had held, but they’d worked for it.
Ren’s chest rose and fell steadily. His eyes stayed locked on the orc across the thirty meters of ruined earth between them.
The settlement was still being marched on. Time was burning.
He needed to find a way to end this, and he needed to find it fast.
"I might not be able to fight this clean." He gritted his teeth and muttered.
