IM AN ORC?

Chapter 6: The First Spark

The next few days fell into a cruel but productive pattern. Ruk became something between a shadow and a ghost, a thin shape that haunted the upper tunnels while the rest of the clan slept. Every morning he was up before the snoring stopped, his small frame slipping from the crack in the rock wall that he called a bed. The cavern was always dark at that hour, always loud with the deep grunts and wet breathing of sleeping orcs, and he moved through it like smoke — low to the ground, quiet, invisible. He was back before the hunting parties returned each evening, tucking himself into the chaos of their loud, blood-smelling returns, blending the small things he had caught into the noise of their larger kills.

Nobody questioned where he had been. Nobody cared enough to.

That was the thing about being the runt. You were so far beneath everyone’s notice that your absence and your presence felt the same. He had spent years cursing that fact. Now he used it like a tool.

The Cave Hoppers, once his greatest frustration, had become something close to a routine.

In the beginning they had driven him half mad. They were fast, unpredictable, and seemed to take some particular joy in slipping through his fingers at the last possible second. He had come home from those early hunts with nothing but bruised knees and a bruised pride, lying in his crevice and staring at the stone ceiling and thinking seriously about giving up.

But he hadn’t given up. That was the difference between him and every other runt who had come before him and quietly disappeared.

He had gone back. Again and again, until his body learned what his mind couldn’t quite explain. His feet started finding the right footing without him looking down. His hands started moving half a second before his eyes even tracked the target. He stopped thinking about catching them and started just... catching them. The agility that was building in his limbs had a strange quality to it, like his body was becoming smarter than his brain. He would corner a Hopper in a narrow passage and his arm would shoot out at an angle he hadn’t consciously chosen, and his fingers would close around the creature’s body in the air, and it would be done.

Each kill sent a small, sharp buzz through him — not just the energy from DEVOUR, but something personal. Something that tasted like proof.

He was not what they said he was.

[Evolutionary Energy: 90/100]

Ten points. Just ten more.

The number sat in the back of his head every waking moment, a low hum that never quite went silent. He caught himself counting while he moved through the tunnels, counting while he chewed, counting while he lay in the dark waiting for sleep. The anticipation was a physical thing, a tightness sitting right in the center of his chest, wedged between his ribs like a stone. It was hunger, but not the kind that food fixed. It was the hunger for *change.* The hunger for the moment when the creature he was becoming would finally overtake the creature he had been born as.

His body was already showing the early signs of it.

He noticed it first in his arms. The skin there had always been loose over thin, ropy muscle — the kind of arms that made older orcs laugh when they saw them. Now when he pressed his thumb into his bicep, there was real resistance there, a hardness that hadn’t existed a week ago. His legs were the same. The long muscles of his thighs and calves had definition to them now, visible ridges even in the dim light of the tunnels.

And the color of his skin was shifting. The sickly, grayish green that had always marked him as weak was darkening, taking on a deeper and richer tone. A healthier tone. When the firelight of the main cavern caught him at a certain angle, he almost looked like a proper orc.

Almost.

He was still small. He knew that. No amount of evolutionary energy was going to double his height or turn him into something like Bor. But small did not have to mean weak, and weak did not have to mean helpless, and helpless did not have to mean dead. He was learning to believe that in a way that went beyond thought — he was learning to believe it in his muscles, in the way he carried himself through the tunnels with his shoulders back and his chin level instead of curled inward like something expecting a kick.

That new way of moving was what gave him away. freēwebnovel.com

He felt her watching him before he ever caught her doing it.

Nym.

She was one of the older females in the clan, not a warrior exactly, but not a servant either. She occupied a strange middle space that nobody seemed able to categorize, which meant nobody bothered to. She was quiet in a way that was different from Ruk’s quiet — his silence was survival, careful and practiced. Hers felt natural, like she had simply never found anyone worth talking to.

She watched him the way you watched something you hadn’t decided about yet.

He would catch it at the edges of his vision — a stillness in the shadows near the far wall, a pair of eyes that weren’t moving with the general noise and movement of the cavern, but were fixed on him specifically. He never let on that he noticed. He had learned early that letting people know you’d spotted them watching you was the same as handing them a weapon. So he kept moving, kept his face flat, kept his pace even, and filed every glimpse of her away in the back of his mind.

She never approached. Never spoke. Never gave him anything he could have pointed to as proof.

Until the knife.

He came back one evening from a run through the upper tunnels, the familiar ache of exertion sitting pleasantly in his legs, and nearly stepped on it. A piece of flint, sitting just inside the entrance to his crevice. He stopped and crouched down slowly, picking it up with two fingers, turning it in the low light.

It was not a random shard. Someone had worked it carefully — knapped it down to a proper shape, thin and tapered, the edges sharpened with obvious patience. It fit in his palm like it had been sized for him specifically, which it probably had. It was a tool. A real one. Not the junk scraps he had been making do with.

He sat with it in his hand for a long moment and turned it over and over.

In the clan, gifts didn’t exist. What you had, you took or you held onto with both hands. Nobody gave anything to a runt. The concept would have struck most of them as not just strange but actually offensive — a waste, a show of weakness, a confusion of the natural order. Handing a weapon to the lowest member of the group was the kind of thing that got you laughed at.

Which meant whoever had left this hadn’t cared about being laughed at. Or hadn’t cared about being seen at all.

He already knew who it was.

He raised his eyes slowly and scanned the main cavern. The fire was burning low, casting long shadows across the stone floor. Orcs moved around it or sat near it in their usual clusters. And across the space, leaning against the far wall with her arms crossed and her face doing absolutely nothing — Nym. Her eyes were already on him. Had been on him since before he looked up, he suspected.

For one fraction of a second, their eyes met.

She did not nod. She did not wave. The corner of her mouth moved — just barely, just enough. A smirk so small it could have been nothing. But it wasn’t nothing.

He closed his fingers around the flint knife and looked away first.

I see you. I’m not your enemy. I’m watching.

That was what the knife said. He didn’t know yet what to do with that, but he filed it away next to everything else and kept moving.