He pulled the sword free and let the body crumple to the floor. He stripped the chains from it, then wrapped a crude bandage around the chest wound, tightening it until the bleeding slowed to a stop.
Before leaving, he inspected the workshop one last time. With Prime's record feature, he retraced every step, every footprint, every scuff mark, every speck of blood, he erased every trace of his presence until the workshop looked as though no outsider had ever entered it.
Satisfied, he heaved the corpse over his shoulder with a grunt. The floorboards groaned beneath the combined weight as he crossed to the northern wall and returned the sword to its mount. With his bow and quiver on his back and the body over his shoulder, stepped into the darkness beyond.
An hour later, at the forest's edge, Aris paused. The corpse weighed heavily on his shoulder, slowing his return. He glanced back at the village, where two yellow lights still flickered atop the watchtowers.
With the chief dead, the village would descend into disorder. That much was certain. His absence would likely go unnoticed for three, perhaps four days; his sons would assume he'd been summoned to the orc settlement, as before.
As for the murder, it was no longer Aris's concern. If they wanted answers, they could seek them from the masters they worshipped so blindly. Would either son dare resent the orcs? Or would ambition blind them as completely as it had their father? Either way, another enforcer would eventually take his place.
He turned back to the forest and disappeared into the darkness between the trees. Without Prime's map, I'd be wandering blind by now, he thought, pushing through the silence.
He concealed the chief's corpse beneath a dense thicket, covering it with rotting leaves and broken branches. Two days, he thought. He would return and study the decay—if the ambush went well. If not, it wouldn't matter. The Gu worm was dead by now. Cutting it out could wait. Tomorrow mattered more, and he needed every hour of rest he could get.
With that, he turned back toward the cave. I gained little more than vengeance for Rill and his wife. The words circled as he moved through the trees, his mental map steering him through the tangled dark.
But even as he thought them, some colder part of him rejected the lie. He didn't care about Rill. Didn't care about the wife whose name he'd already half-forgotten. If the chief had been useful instead of an obstacle, he would have let the man live, would have found some arrangement, some use for him, the way he found use for everything. The revenge story was just that: a story. Something to hang the act on so it meant more than what it actually was.
What actually sat in his chest wasn't grief, but the flat, familiar weight of a plan that hadn't paid out. Five days, and his life risked for it, and he'd gained nothing he could use. No answers and no leverage. Just a corpse to hide, the same enemies waiting; orcs, and whatever unknown thing stood behind them and the fact that he still couldn't escape to the plains with Lilly.
His thoughts drifted to her as the distant roar of the waterfall signaled his approach. Somewhere along the grueling stretch of the past week, the distance he'd always kept between them—a distance he alone had ever seemed to feel—had shifted. She had stopped feeling like a burden, a weight to be carried, and had settled into his life as a pillar instead.
Had she eaten tonight? Was she asleep by now, or listening for his footsteps in the cave? Had she worried while he was gone? What did she do during the long, silent hours of his absence? What occupied her thoughts, and what scraps of hope did she still hold for a future that looked increasingly bleak?
Such questions had become… ordinary.
That, more than anything, unsettled him. Across forty-three years, he had operated under the hard-learned truth that attachments were chains, exploitable weaknesses, leverage to be seized by enemies more cunning and less human than himself.
He had never grown accustomed to thinking about the internal state of another person. After his parents died, he'd trained himself never to depend on anyone again, never to care. Yet here he was, noting Lilly's needs as if they were his own. The change had been so gradual, so insidious, that he hadn't noticed the shift until now. Or perhaps some hidden part of him had quietly facilitated it, starving for something other than the cause and the survival.
A faint smile formed at the corner of his mouth. Perhaps this wasn't unpleasant. Fragile, easily snuffed out, that much he knew. But not unpleasant. Deep down he also knew it was a liability. Every clean victory he'd ever taken had depended on nothing mattering more than the result. And now something did.
If he meant to lift humanity out of slavery, sentiment was exactly the kind of variable that got men killed, got causes buried, got good plans traded for a single foolish, stubborn heartbeat of feeling. He knew this the way he knew the poison's dosage, the way he knew the chief's patrol routes. Cleanly. Unquestionably.
But he wanted it anyway. Because some starved, buried part of him didn't care that it wasn't.
By the time the thought faded, he was standing at the mouth of the cave, his clothes dripping.
Lilly lay asleep on her straw bed, her breathing slow and steady. The three candles he had placed along the walls bathed the space in a warm, amber glow. A faint smile touched his lips as he moved silently, stripping off his wet clothes and pulling on dry ones.
He crossed to the opposite side of the cavern and settled onto his own straw bed. Beside him, the nearest candle flame danced against the damp stone, its fragile light pushing back the oppressive cold for one more night. The glow caught the three iron spikes embedded in the northern wall and the crude wooden cart that sat in the center of the cave, waiting.
Exhaustion finally descended upon him. He looked at the iron spikes, then the poison-tipped arrows, and finally the cart.
"I will win," he mumbled into the darkness, his voice barely a whisper as his eyes drifted shut. "All I have to do is follow the plan." Even as sleep began to pull him under, his mind refused to rest, looping through the variables of his next ambush. If I'm fortunate, he'll prove more useful than the chief ever was.
Prime, set an alarm. Early morning. He issued the command inwardly as the darkness pulled him under—if only for a few hours.
••••
In the silent, waking forest of early morning, Aris leaned against the rough, moss-crusted bark of a massive tree, his body angled eleven meters to the left of the path the orc took every day. His eyes tracked the center of the trail; the disguised pitfall remained undisturbed, the camouflage of leaves, branches, and dirt still flat against the forest floor. The lack of traces eased a fraction of his tension.
His fingers clamped around the riser of his bow, the grip biting into his palm. He eased his head around the trunk, his vision locking onto the trajectory he had mapped these last few days. His nerves were coiled tight as a bowstring, but he forced a deep breath through his mouth, purging the adrenaline from his blood.
Sunlight began to bleed through the canopy, fracturing into golden spears that danced upon the undergrowth. This was the signal, the time the orc usually arrived, give or take a few seconds.
And as expected, he heard it: heavy footsteps, unhurried, hammering against the ground, the strides of a creature that knew no fear.
Aris's grip tightened, and he leaned out just enough to see. The orc came into view, a hulking mass of muscle and scarred brown hide, standing three meters tall like most of the orcs he had seen. It was completely unarmed, massive hands swinging loose at its sides, perhaps due to the lack of natural predators for its kind, perhaps arrogance, perhaps sheer confidence in its own body. None of it mattered.
Aris drew the bowstring tighter. Prime overlaid the trajectory in his vision—distance, drop, the orc's stride length. Each step narrowed the margin. In a few seconds, it would reach the pit.
Step by step, the orc neared the pitfall. When it was four meters from the edge, Aris stepped out from his hiding spot into the open path and stood perfectly still, face-to-face with the orc, an arrow leveled squarely at its chest.
The orc halted, blinking at the unexpected sight.
[Predicted evasion vector: 0.3 seconds. Required release: NOW.]
Aris adjusted, but he released a half-beat too late.
Whoosh!
The orc was already moving, a blurred, fluid shift that defied its massive body, and the arrow whistled past its shoulder by mere inches. Prime had called it correctly. His hands hadn't been fast enough.
Faster. I need to be faster.
He didn't have time to feel the failure. A second arrow was already rising, nocked and drawn in the same motion, Prime tracking the orc's recovering stance. Aris fired before the correction was complete, anticipating, not reacting. The point cut the orc's shoulder, drawing a thin line of blood rather than the clean center-mass hit he'd wanted.
Fuck. It's too fast.
It stared at the blood, then at the arrow buried in the dirt behind it, before turning its gaze back on him.
Thoook!
The orc roared and charged straight into the trap. The ground vanished. A cloud of dirt and pulverized leaves exploded upward, followed by a wet, crunching impact and a pained, animalistic grunt from the depths of the pit.
Aris stepped forward, his face hardening. One. Two. Three.
The seconds stretched. Nine. Eleven. At thirteen, the orc was still grunting, still moving.
Aris's jaw tightened. Damn. Why is it this strong? His hand went to the quiver at his back.
It hauled itself out of the pit, movements jerky and feral. Spear-tips hidden at the bottom had punctured its flanks, blood streaming down its legs and arms, matting its hide. But as it crested the lip of the pit and locked eyes with Aris, the pain seemed to evaporate, replaced by something far more dangerous.
The fury burning in the orc's face made Aris's pulse skip. He had underestimated the sheer, monstrous tenacity of these orcs.