Over by the cascade, Lilly snapped her head around, her eyes widening in terror as she saw the orc stir. Her whole body locked rigid, seized by the sudden revival of old nightmares. But her gaze darted to Aris, standing just feet from the beast, utterly still, unfazed, or so his back claimed. The sight loosened the knot of panic in her chest, though her small hands stayed clenched.
Aris triggered a rapid scan over its body, his eyes tracking the dull, sluggish drift of the orc's pupils. The heavy neurotoxin and the bespoke hallucinogenic cocktail had done their work; its gaze hung glassy, its cognitive faculties trapped behind a thick fog.
The orc let out a low grunt, raising its heavy head an inch off the stone floor. Its eyes drifted sluggishly across the damp walls of the cave before finally settling on the small, human figure standing before it.
"Urusa, Demesi?" the orc rumbled, its voice thick, confused, straining to form the syllables.
Aris's mind raced, seizing the moment to record every word leaving its mouth. Hearing a genuine, unfiltered native speaker would surely push his Orcish past the forty-percent threshold.
"Kilov freti Miki vrati," Aris replied smoothly, lobbing back an evasive query in fluent, guttural Orcish—answering who are you by handing the confusion right back to it.
The words reached the orc's ears as though they'd traveled through water, muffled by the brain-addling poison, yet clear enough to register.
"I… I don't know." The orc's brow furrowed, its expression twisting into a mask of sudden, frantic confusion as its scattered thoughts crashed against the chemical barrier in its mind.
"How could you forget your father?" Aris pressed, his fingers tightening instinctively around the riser of his bow.
"Fa… father? No."
"I killed you, Father. Why are you alive?"
Damn, Aris cursed inwardly, realizing his improvised script had veered slightly into absurdity. But the misstep didn't stop the fractured mind from spinning.
"Why did you kill me?" Aris pressed harder, fishing for raw personal details, family structure, anything to build a profile, anything to weaponize the illusion of familiarity against it later.
"Why? For her." The orc's face twisted into a grotesque snarl. The harder it strained to force its drugged brain through the timeline, the more savage the blowback grew; agony hammered its skull like nails driven straight into bone.
"Who?"
"Your wife. Me want your wife. Mom." The orc grunted, its massive chest heaving against the chains.
Aris froze for a fraction of a second. What a sick bastard. Then, just as quickly, he caught himself. Who was he to stand on a pedestal and judge the moral rot of a barbaric, apex predator species? Imposing human standards on monsters was a fool's errand. Hell, looking back at the history of his own kind, plenty of humans had proven capable of far worse degeneracies than anything born of the orc tribes.
He cut the thought short, burying the disgust, and pivoted straight back to the matter at hand.
"The mighty Volrag has bestowed upon me a divine chance to speak with my descendant, to impart his will." Aris paused as the orc strained against the iron, but the bindings only rattled, holding firm.
"Don't trouble yourself with divine gestures. You are in a dream."
The orc stilled at once, its drugged mind snagging on the contradiction.
"Oh mighty Volrag the Chainless, Lord of the Five-Edge Wheel, harbinger of war and doom, bless my endeavor to reach the limit, to awaken aura, and I shall offer my everything." The prayer spilled out with chilling clarity, spoken with a sudden, eerie lucidity, as if the poison hadn't touched it at all.
Aris narrowed his eyes at the unexpected clarity, but he understood why: this was the ultimate obsession burning in its chest. It was a supplication muttered in the dark for untold years, worn smooth by repetition until the words had become muscle memory.
Aris filed the words away in his growing folder of orc culture. Time was limited, the hallucinogenic poison was beginning to lift and he could always circle back to what awakening aura meant. For the next several minutes, he fired off a relentless barrage of personal questions, carving through the orc's cognitive defenses. Then he zeroed in on the question that had gnawed at the back of his mind since he'd first spotted the orc practicing alone in the forest.
"Why didn't you train with the others? Those thirteen? Why did you train alone?"
"Oh mighty Volrag, forgive my greed. I only wanted power—to be like them. Aura masters. I found no path forward except stealing the sacred body-forging art."
Aris's eyes narrowed. "A body-forging art? What kind?"
Before the orc could answer, he felt the time slipping. The hallucinogen's grip was rapidly eroding, and the orc's lucidity was clawing back. He abandoned the question at once—body-forging secrets were worthless if he didn't live to use them. Survival superseded all.
"About the settlement. How many of my followers are there? Who leads them?"
"Oh mighty Volrag, there are one thousand five hundred of us. The chief, whom you blessed with your divine spells, leads, followed by his thirteen hands. Every one an aura master of the Dawn stage."
Aris froze. The sheer gravity of the numbers struck him. Taking down this single, isolated orc had required every ounce of strategy, traps, and bespoke poison he possessed. And out there, roaming the territory, were fifteen hundred more. Worse still were the thirteen elites this orc revered, alongside the chief and whatever shadowy entity pulled the strings from behind the veil.
Why didn't I just escape? A sudden, cold spike of panic flared in his chest. Why did I think a clear, manageable danger was less lethal than the vast unknown? Am I just leading myself to the slaughterhouse?
He crushed the doubt without mercy, smothering the panic before it could take root. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder. Lilly still stood near the cave mouth, her wide eyes locked on them, the guttural cadence of the alien tongue dragging her mind back to the horrors of the orc settlement.
He forced his attention back to the prisoner. "The sacrifice. Why did one escape?" The question had gnawed at him like a parasite ever since he'd found Lilly. Orcs of their power wouldn't simply misplace or lose sight of a human child during a culling.
"Reason. The chief ordered her and others released, to justify the harvest. The shaman demanded more blood."
Justify the harvest? Why on earth would a race of apex predators need a political or ritualistic excuse to slaughter human cattle? It didn't add up. It felt too civilized, almost as if they answered to a higher authority, or operated under a strict set of rules imposed by someone else.
Volrag, he thought first. It was the only name he had.
He didn't want to believe in its existence as some old, stubborn part of him still recoiled at the idea of a god, plain and literal, ruling over this forest. But he'd met the Dragon Providence. He'd been carried across time by something that vast and powerful. Whatever scorn he still held for the idea of gods, he no longer had the luxury of calling their existence questionable or impossible. Things that powerful and unthinkable existed. He was proof of it.
And yet. A being with that kind of weight behind its name shouldn't need a justification for a culling. Words carried power especially for the powerful in any world—he'd felt as much, watching how the mere invocation of Volrag's name reshaped the orc's stupor into clarity.
A god built from that kind of weight didn't need to stage an "escape," didn't need quotas, didn't need to keep its followers comfortable with the math of who lived and who didn't. It only needed to be, and the rest would fall in line.
So either something was hiding behind the name, wearing a god's authority the way a thief wears a stolen coat. Or Volrag was exactly what it claimed to be, and had reasons of its own for demanding the charade, reasons Aris had no way to reach, no data to even begin guessing at.
My foundational assumptions are wrong, Aris thought, his mind churning through the corrupted variables as the orc began shaking off the final vestiges of the poison, and a grunt escaped its mouth.
Aris recoiled instantly. He gave the thought no room to breathe, loosing an arrow straight into the orc's chest. A violent wave of agony twisted across its face as clarity fought to return. Its bloodshot eyes locked onto Aris, burning with unadulterated fury,hatred, and something deeper, more feral.
The chains rattled frantically. Aris watched, holding his breath, as the iron spikes embedded in the stone wall shifted, grinding outward by a full inch. Then the poison dragged it back down, and it slumped heavily into unconsciousness.
He didn't hesitate, driving two more poison-smeared arrows into its chest just to be sure. Only then did a fragile sense of safety settle back into his body, though his mind raced. The sheer, terrifying strength of it. If the orc hadn't already been weakened and heavily poisoned, it would have shattered the chains, torn the spikes clean from the cavern wall, and ended them both.
The thought made him grit his teeth. Poison alone wasn't enough anymore; its body was adapting, fighting back, perhaps building resistance already. Surely an orc can't be more monstrous than this. Or maybe I just need to raise the dose.
As the storm churned in his mind, his eyes drifted to Lilly by the cascade. She had collapsed against the floor, frozen solid. Her pale, terrified face sent a sharp pang of shame and guilt straight through his chest. The thought of her torn limb from limb, devoured, if the thing had broken free, clawed at his sanity. No. We have to escape. I have to hurry.
He crossed to her, knelt at her side, and helped her to her feet. Her small body shook uncontrollably in his hands.
"Sorry," he muttered.
Lilly said nothing. For a moment her mouth parted, forming the fractured start of a word—escap——before snapping shut. Her eyes glazed, blank for the space of a blink, then cleared, as if nothing had happened at all. Aris caught the flicker instantly. He studied her, turning the strange, fleeting lapse over in his mind.
"How are you?" he asked, though Prime had already scanned her thoroughly moments before.
"I'm fine." She offered him a fragile, forced smile. "It just shocked me. Didn't think it'd be that crazy." Her eyes drifted warily back to the chained orc. "Brother, I think you should have listened to me and cut its legs."
Aris blinked, startled, then let out a wide, genuine laugh. "Ha. You're right. I should have."
His mind was already turning over the shift in thought. Earlier, he'd hesitated, worried the orc might lose its will to speak entirely if mutilated. But with the hallucinogen still warping its perception, that concern had all but vanished.
Under the right cocktail, it might not even register that its limbs were gone. And he had only four poison-smeared arrows left, brewing more required orc blood as a component. Severing its limbs wouldn't just remove the threat of escape. It would solve a very pressing supply problem too.
Aris walked right up to the orc and triggered a scan. The estimated coma time had dropped by two full hours, an unmistakable sign that the orc's body was actively fighting off the toxin and building a tolerance. Still, twenty-five hours of unconsciousness was more than enough time to work with.
Without a second of hesitation, he set to work brewing a fresh batch of the hallucinogenic paste. Armed with prior experience, the process moved significantly faster. Three hours later, a fresh, noxious-smelling batch of grayish-black paste sat sealed inside a bamboo container.
He carried the new container over and set it down near the orc, then stepped directly in front of it, gripping a heavy stolen sword in both hands. His eyes traced the fierce contour of the orc's leg—the sheer density of muscle, tendon, and especially bone. Cutting through would be grueling, punishing labor. Sharpen the axe before chopping the tree.
Realizing he'd need peak physical form and stamina for the task ahead, he decided to prepare the supportive remedies first. He turned his back on the orc and walked off to brew a batch of vitality-nourishing medicine, leaving the sword resting quietly on the stone floor behind him.