Free Web NovelChapter 51: A new age
The orcs retreated.
It happened without a single word being passed between them, no order, no signal, just the understanding spreading through the ones still standing that their master was gone, and with him gone, everything that had structured their lives was gone with him.
They ran.
Back toward the mountain, back into the cave network, back into the dark where at least the uncertainty felt smaller than it did out in the open with the dragon standing over what was left of the battlefield. They ran because the new lord of this territory was right there and none of them knew what he was going to do with them, and not knowing was worse than anything they could imagine him actually doing.
Ren watched them go.
When the last one disappeared into the mountain he turned around and looked at his people.
They were battered. Every one of them was carrying something from the fight, a wound, an exhaustion, the particular weight that settled into a body after it had been pushed past what it thought it could handle and had kept going anyway. But they were standing. All of them. Every wolf, every lizardman, every evolved fighter that had held the settlement while he was occupied with the forest lord.
He walked toward them slowly.
"You held guys, you all did," he said. He did not say it loudly. He did not need to. "Against everything they sent, with me too far to give you the buff, you held. Every single one of you." He looked across the group, at Remu, at Silas, at the young lizardman with the restless energy and the female one who had directed the chaos into something manageable. "The Calamity Orc is dead. What has been pressing down on this forest, on all of you, on everyone that lived under his thumb is finished. From here on, what happens in this territory is ours."
The response that came back from them filled the trees.
He let it.
When it settled he moved through the group and found Ragna at the back of it, standing apart the way large things sometimes stood apart, the black lightning at the edges of his blade fully faded now but the patterns on his skin still carrying the charge of what he had become.
Ren stopped in front of him and looked up at him.
"You made the right choice," he said. Simple. No ceremony behind it.
Ragna looked back at him and said nothing, but his jaw moved slightly in the way it did when something had landed somewhere real.
"You have no idea," Ren continued, "how much that one choice changed what your future looks like. Your family, your people, everyone who was under that thumb. That changes because you dared to be different." He let that sit for a moment. "And when the time comes to bring the orcs in properly, to give them something to look toward instead of something to run from, you’ll be the one leading that. They need someone from their own, not me. That’s you, Ragna."
He reached up and put a hand on Ragna’s shoulder.
Ragna dipped his head once.
Ren turned and walked back toward the cave, and that was when the system finally caught up with him.
[Quest Complete: Destroy the Calamity Orc]
[Reward: Title — Forest Lord, Unique Ability Pending Selection, 1,000 EXP]
[Hidden Quest Complete: Hero For All]
[Reward: 1,000 EXP]
[10x Multiplier Applied]
[Total EXP Gained: 20,000]
[Level Up! You are now Level 5]
[+4 to all stats]
[Level Up! You are now Level 6]
[+4 to all stats]
He pulled up the full screen and read through it.
[Name: Ren Crimson]
[Race: Chaos Devouring Dragon]
[Level: 6]
[EXP: 4,000 / 12,000]
[Strength: 272]
[Speed: 276]
[Stamina: 276]
[Title: Forest Lord — First Territory]
[Skills: Predator’s Glide, Sovereign Vision, Rending Claw, Chaos Flame Breath, Apex Devour, Inherit Lv2, Ironscale, Dragon’s Rage Lv2, Chaos Dragon Form, Primordial Roar, Venom Fang Lv2, Fusion Lv2, Borrowed Might Lv2, Boundless Gluttony, Chaos Devour, Dominion Aura, Lightning Blast, Gravity Manipulation]
He read the title twice.
Forest Lord.
He had come into this forest as a hatchling with single digit stats and no idea where he was going. He had fallen through a hole in the ground, fought a wolf and used a cliff to kill it, gotten lost in a cave, evolved twice, built houses out of vines and timber, named an orc, fought a forest lord hand to hand and won.
He closed the screen.
The unique ability reward was still sitting there waiting on his selection but that could come later, when his head was clearer and the adrenaline had somewhere else to be.
He sat down at the entrance of the cave and looked out at the territory that was now his.
It was not just his though.
Word moved through forests the way it moved through anything, fast and carrying weight. The town at the forest’s edge that had sent adventurers in and gotten them back with stories of a talking dragon was not a town that was going to stay quiet. The guild hall with Leon’s account was not going to stop at one conversation.
The kingdom that the forest sat within had a desk somewhere that reports about unusual dragon activity reached, and that desk was currently occupied by someone reading one.
The other forest lords, the ones whose territories bordered the section that had belonged to the Calamity Orc, were not indifferent to the information that a dragon had walked in, killed their peer, and set up permanent residence.
And somewhere on the mountain above, the cloaked figure that had watched the final moments of the fight was lurking for reasons that were unknown.
At the center of all of it, sitting at the mouth of a cave in a forest that was just beginning to understand what had moved into it, was Ren.
The weakest dragon.
The one thrown from the nest.
The one who devoured them all.
[End of Volume 1, Calamity Orc arc]
