Free Web NovelChapter 47: Blast through the chest (Bonus Chapter)
The Calamity Orc swung both blades simultaneously, chains fully extended, the arc wide enough to level a tree line. Ren went low, sliding under the left blade, and came up inside the chain’s reach with a Rendering Claw aimed at the orc’s throat.
The orc leaned back just enough to let it miss, grabbed the chain of the right blade mid-retract, and used it to whip the entire weapon back around at a shortened range, the flat of it catching Ren across the ribs.
Ren took three stumbling steps sideways, teeth clenched.
He answered with his Primordial Roar fired at ground level, the compressed wave tearing a trench through the earth between them and hitting the orc’s legs like a physical wall. The orc buckled at the knees, dropped for half a second, and that half second was all Ren needed.
He closed the gap and hit it in the face with a gauntlet claw moving at full speed.
The Calamity Orc’s head snapped sideways. Its whole body rotated with the impact, one foot leaving the ground, and it crashed into the cliff face at the cave’s entrance hard enough to crack the rock behind it.
Ren didn’t stop.
He was already there when the orc bounced off the rock, Rendering Claw working in fast tight strikes, one after another, opening wounds that healed and opening them again before they finished, keeping the damage cycling faster than the regeneration could fully answer, pushing the orc back another step with every exchange.
Then another step.
Then another.
The Calamity Orc was being walked back toward its own cave and it knew it, the fury in its eyes shifting into something adjacent to panic, and it did what desperate things did when they ran out of better options.
It turned on its own.
The nearest group of orcs who had been watching the fight from a distance had no time to react. The chains snapped out faster than Ren had seen them move in the entire fight, blades finding three of them in the same motion, and the red light that poured from their chests was immediate and total, the life drain happening in less than a second per body, three orcs reduced to dry husks before the other survivors had finished registering what was happening.
The ones who understood turned and ran.
The ones who didn’t ran anyway the moment they saw the ones ahead of them running.
The Calamity Orc straightened.
The new strength was visible immediately, not subtle, not gradual, a tangible expansion in the aura rolling off it, the red markings on its skin brightening, the runes on its blades intensifying, its posture going from cornered to something considerably more dangerous in the span of a breath.
Ren looked at the three collapsed husks on the ground.
The fury that moved through him was quiet and cold and considerably more dangerous than the hot kind.
"You just ate your own people," he said. "Right in front of me."
The Calamity Orc gave him nothing but the widening of its eyes, the chains beginning to rotate again, and then it attacked with the new strength behind every motion and the difference was immediate and brutally clear.
The first blade came in and Ren blocked it, the impact driving him back further than any previous exchange had, his feet tearing furrows into the earth. The second came before he’d fully recovered, and he barely got his gauntlet arms up in time, the force of it dropping him to one knee.
The orc pressed the advantage without hesitation, all four points of the chain-blade system working simultaneously now, two blades, two chain lengths, angles that required tracking four independent trajectories at once, the regenerated strength behind each one making every contact feel like the first strike of a hammer rather than the twentieth.
Ren took two clean hits in the space of five seconds and both of them left marks.
He rolled back, created distance, and activated Dragon’s Rage.
The world sharpened.
He went back in before the orc could follow up, moving faster now, the Rage burning through his frame and sharpening every reaction, and the exchange that followed was the most violent thing the clearing had produced yet. Chaos Flame Breath fired in a short controlled burst between two chain swings, catching the orc across the shoulder, the flames in Sovereign Shell carrying the chaos edge that made them burn differently from regular fire, eating through the regeneration a fraction slower than everything else had.
Gravity Manipulation took the next boulder attack and redirected every piece of it back into the orc’s own legs, tripping its footwork and opening a gap.
Rendering Claw found that gap and used it.
The orc answered with a double overhead chain swing that Ren had to retreat hard to avoid, the impact where the blades hit the earth throwing up a cloud of debris that temporarily cut visibility down to nothing.
They separated, both breathing hard, the clearing between them a graveyard of craters and snapped trees and scorched earth that looked nothing like a forest anymore.
The orc’s markings pulsed with the stolen energy still feeding into its strength.
Ren looked at it across the wreckage and made a decision.
He stopped moving.
The orc read the stillness as hesitation and came in immediately, both blades whipping forward in a speed blitz, the fastest thing it had produced all fight, chains fully extended and converging from two directions designed to leave no clean exit.
Ren activated Ironscale.
He didn’t dodge.
He took the hit, the blades slamming into his hardened scales with an impact that shook the ground beneath his feet, and he used every bit of the momentum behind both strikes to step through them, inside the chains, inside the orc’s reach, closer than any previous exchange had put him.
He drove his shoulder into its chest with his full body weight behind it.
The Calamity Orc went back.
Ren exhaled.
The Chaos Flame Breath that came out was not wide. It was not a sweep or an arc or a sustained burst. It was a single, compressed, dense column of crimson fire concentrated into a point no wider than his fist, and it hit the Calamity Orc in the center of its chest at a range so close the heat came back against Ren’s own face.
The sound it made going through was not an explosion.
It was quieter than that. Almost surgical.
When the flame cut off, there was a hole in the Calamity Orc’s chest the size of a fist, edges cauterized, the chaos energy in the flame having burned through the regeneration entirely, and for the first time since the fight began, nothing immediately started closing it.
The Calamity Orc looked down at the hole in its chest.
