Free Web NovelChapter 49: Die you Piggy
Ren stared at the Calamity Orc as the roar finished rolling across the forest and the echo of it faded into something quieter and more dangerous.
Something had changed.
He could feel it before he could see it, a shift in the air around the orc, in the quality of its presence, the way its aura had stopped rolling outward in waves and started pressing inward, concentrating, tightening around it like something gathering itself for a final argument.
"Something is wrong," Ren muttered.
Then the wound in the orc’s chest began to move.
Not the slow, steady pull of normal regeneration but something forced, something violent, the tissue at the wound’s edges compressing inward with a visible strain that looked more like the body refusing the wound than healing from it, fighting the chaos energy still cycling through the damage with sheer accumulated will and stolen life force. The edges drew together. The hole narrowed. Narrowed further.
Closed.
The scar it left behind was ugly and tight and permanent looking in a way none of the others had been, but it was closed, and the Calamity Orc rolled its neck and the sound of it carried across the clearing.
Then the ground shook.
Boulders tore free of the earth in a ring around the orc, massive slabs and chunks of compacted stone ripping loose and launching upward, dozens of them, rising high above the clearing until they blocked out a significant portion of the sky, hanging there, waiting.
Ren looked up at them.
"That’s a lot of rocks," he said.
The orc pulled both chain-blades back in.
The chains moved so fast they blurred into a visual suggestion of themselves rather than actual objects, both blades snapping back to hand in the same instant, and then it launched without any further announcement, crossing the distance between them with a speed that the fight hadn’t produced before roar.
He moved.
He wove sideways from the first blade, ducked under the chain arc of the second, changed direction and went wide to put more distance between them. The boulders in the air shot down at that same time.
They came down not randomly but sequentially, timed to cut off his movement angles, and the first three he slipped between cleanly, reading the trajectories and moving through the gaps. The fourth one he didn’t fully read in time.
It caught his shoulder.
Not a direct hit, a glancing contact, but the mass behind it was enough to kill the momentum he’d been using to stay ahead of the pursuit, stopping him for exactly the half second he could not afford to give.
The orc attacked in that moment, both chain-blades found him simultaneously.
The double combo slammed into his chest with the full rage-amplified force behind them and launched him backward, his feet leaving the ground, and he crossed thirty meters of open air before the ground came back up to meet him and he hit it rolling, coming to rest on one knee at the clearing’s edge with dust settling around him.
He had time to register the pain as significant before the Calamity Orc was already in the air above him.
It had leaped from a standing start, both chains extended, and at the apex of the jump the blades curved downward in two arcs that were going to converge on a single point directly where Ren was kneeling.
"Shit," Ren said. "This piggy actually wants me dead."
He threw his hands out and pushed with the gravity manipulation, not at the orc but at the blades themselves, splitting the force outward in opposite directions and using it to shove each blade off its path at the last possible instant.
Both blades hit the ground on either side of him simultaneously, the impact so forceful each one buried itself deep, the chains going taut, the ground splitting in long jagged gashes in both directions from the impact points.
The orc was still coming down.
It used the embedded blades as anchors, pullin down with all his strength , feet-first drop aimed directly at Ren’s chest, the force of two tons of enraged orc with chains for leverage behind every bit of it.
Ren crossed his arms.
The impact hit him like something dropped from a building, pain shooting through his forearms and into his shoulders simultaneously, his feet driving into the earth beneath him until he was ankle deep in it, the shockwave of the block radiating outward in a circle that flattened the loose debris around them.
He held.
He grabbed the orc’s leg before it could pull back.
His gauntlet claws drove in deep as the grip locked, and he activated Rendering Claw at point blank range against the limb.
The cleave was clean and complete.
The Calamity Orc’s roar was the loudest thing the forest had produced in the entire fight, a sound of genuine pain rather than combat aggression, raw and enormous and carrying the particular quality of something that had not experienced real injury in a very long time and had forgotten what it felt like.
Ren swung the severed leg.
He brought it around in a full arc and drove it into the orc’s body with every bit of strength he had, the impact sending the Calamity Orc flying sideways across the clearing, its massive body tumbling end over end before slamming into the mountain face at the cave’s entrance with a crack that sent fractures running up the rock face in every direction.
Ren let the leg drop.
He transformed.
The Sovereign Shell dissolved and the dragon came back in its full sixteen feet, crimson-edged scales catching the light, wings spreading to their full span, the size of him filling the clearing in a different way than the human form had.
He drew in a breath.
The Chaos Flame Breath that came out was compressed to a single point, the same technique that had punched through the orc’s chest before, and this time he held it sustained, driving the beam into the same location, the chaos energy burning through the freshly closed wound and into the tissue beneath it with a focused intensity that the orc’s regeneration could not keep pace with.
The Calamity Orc screamed.
It was pinned against the mountain face by the force of the beam, one arm bracing against the rock, trying to pull itself sideways, its regeneration throwing everything it had at the entry point and losing to the sustained chaos energy eating through it faster than new tissue could form.
Its free hand stretched outward.
The red drain ability activated, reaching for the nearest orcs in the surrounding area, desperate, pulling at their life force to feed the regeneration it couldn’t sustain on its own.
Ren saw the red streams beginning to form.
He lifted his claw and used rendering claw to attack the hand, slashing it off in one swift motion. The hand hit the ground and the drain was stopped.
"Die already, You big fat piggy."
