Aris dug into his pocket and pulled out two copper coins, halving his meager wealth. He pressed them into the man's calloused palm and claimed the loaf; it was hard, but the crust still held the faint warmth of the oven. He narrowed his eyes as the biochip hummed to life, and a translucent blue panel hovered over the bread.
[Object: Brown Bread: Composition: 46% Coarse Barley, 28% Crushed Millet, 12% Tuber Starch, 4% Husk, 2% Ash.
Quality: Low
Nutritional Value: Moderate | Digestibility: Low]
The interface flickered and vanished. "Ash and husks," he murmured. "It's just filler for the stomach until I find something better."
He shook his head, already feeling its phantom weight. With that low digestibility, the bread would sit in his gut like a lead stone for the next three days.
He turned to leave, the baker's gaze tracking him with a heavy, unreadable expression. Aris tore a piece of the bread with his teeth; it was dense and flavorless, the texture of sawdust held together by grit. Even the most incompetent baker on Old Earth could have produced something superior to this, but Aris swallowed anyway since he wasn't eating for pleasure.
Aris moved with a measured, deliberate stride, his bare feet clicking rhythmically against the dirt. Behind his eyes, his vision flickered with a relentless stream of scrolling data as the biochip performed a passive sweep of every body he passed.
Most were women. The men were scarce—most were at the forest hunting wild beasts. The few who remained, Aris avoided. He wasn't ready to test how hard their fists could be. He didn't want to know what this body would do if he locked eyes with a face that had helped beat Rill to death.
For minutes, he cataloged their stats with clinical detachment. Yet the villagers also watched him in return, their eyes filled with a thick, wary tension.
They were waiting for a crack in the young man—a tremor of grief, a flash of mourning, a flare of suicidal rage directed at the Chief's house. They wanted him to be predictable. They wanted the reassurance of a human reaction.
Aris simply tore another piece of the hard bread, chewing with a slow, mechanical rhythm. His face remained a mask of artificial calm.
After scanning dozens of villagers, the pattern crystallized. The baseline for a healthy adult registered as a flat 1.0. Women, children, and the infirm flickered in the decimals, their vitals dimmed by malnutrition or age. The laborers and heavy-load carriers edged slightly higher, their frames toughened by the sun, but even the most capable men he mapped averaged a 1.4. Aris kept the possibility of higher numbers in his mind.
For a long moment, he moved through the village as if navigating a low-fidelity simulation. Life continued with an insulting, domestic normalcy, as if two girls weren't dead in the depths of the forest.
A strange dissonance settled in his chest.
"How can they live like this?" he murmured, halting in the center of the path. His gaze swept across the rows of thatch and timber, the smoke rising from chimneys like peaceful white flags. "Sleeping. Laughing. While orcs roam just miles away?"
He turned his eyes toward the open gate and the jagged, serrated outline of the treeline beyond. "Why do the orcs allow it at all? Is it arrogance? The kind that comes from knowing the livestock has nowhere to run? Or is it something worse?"
The answer came in a scream that tore the air, followed by the ringing of bells: clanging, frantic, a metallic heartbeat pounding from the gate.
Aris snapped his head toward the village entrance. The two guards were straining against the heavy timber of the gate, muscles bulging under the weight. Above them, archers in the watchtowers loosed their first volleys, the thrum of bowstrings vibrating in the air.
Around him, the village erupted. Women and children scattered like spooked livestock, disappearing into their homes. Stalls sat abandoned. Within moments, dozens of men emerged from doorways gripping crude swords and notched spears, their faces pale with terror.
Aris stood at the junction of the houses, a silent anchor in the mid-current of chaos. He didn't hurry. For several minutes, he simply watched the men scramble, their movements jerky and inefficient. He saw that they were not a people of war; their long, fragile peace had been bought with the blood of sacrificed young girls for generations. Their muscles knew the plow, not the pike.
He walked toward the gate, then veered right, putting deliberate distance between himself and the congestion at the entrance. He aimed for a weathered section of the wall—a place where children usually played—ignoring the screamed orders of the men behind him. From the shuttered houses he passed, the low, trembling murmur of prayer rose like smoke.
Through a gap in the worn palisade, his gaze caught a crude statue carved in the silhouette of an orc. "The irony," he muttered, his voice a dry rasp from a throat still bruised from the beating.
He scaled the wall with great effort, peering over the top to witness the "threat."
Below, a roiling tide of yellow-skinned creatures greeted him. They stood barely a meter tall, armed with nothing more than sharpened sticks and stone daggers. Goblins. He felt a frown tug at his brow. What were these vermin doing in a territory strictly dominated by orcs?
His gaze swept past the chittering horde toward the tree line. Two large orc silhouettes stood far in the rear, arms folded, motionless. They weren't part of the fighting force; they were spectating, patrons at a bloody sport.
"The sacrifice of Rill's sister had already been made. The price for peace for this year was paid. So why this?"
At the gate, the air hissed with the rain of arrows. The thrum of bowstrings and the wet thud of spears finding flesh filled the air. A few goblins reached the four-meter wooden gate, but spearheads punched through their skulls before they could even notch the timber. On their own, the goblins were a negligible threat to the humans.
So why send them at all? Aris wondered. Was this a slaughter of the weak, or was something else being calculated?
An hour later, the earth before the gate was carpeted in a slick, yellow rot. The smell of goblin blood reached Aris even a hundred meters away, thick enough to taste. He climbed down, his bare feet hitting the dirt with a heavy thud, and walked toward the gate. He needed to process the "why" of this slaughter.
He found the village chief standing among hundreds of men. The sight made him halt. A surge of rage, sudden and predatory, lanced through his chest.
He clenched his fists so hard his knuckles turned white, forcing a jagged breath into his lungs to maintain control. He stepped forward, stopping several meters from the gathering.
Some men were lethargically wiping blood from their spearheads; others were outside the gate, treading over the small corpses to clear the path. The chief stood among them, still barking orders for the aftermath, when he felt a searing heat against his wrinkled cheek. He turned, his eyes locking onto Aris.
"The brat is still alive," the chief thought, his brow furrowing. "Even after the beating they gave him."
Looking at that withered face, Aris felt his fury boil over. New memories, jarred loose by the chief's presence, surfaced like corpses rising to the top of a lake.
He remembered the "Sacred Agreement." Generations of it. The chief's forefathers had struck a bargain—or perhaps the orcs had simply dictated terms. Every year, a virgin girl was surrendered as tribute to the orc "god." They called it the Price of Peace. This year, the tribute had been Rill's sister.
In his mind, he could see her clearly now: a tiny frame, ten years old, small for her age, thrashing in the iron grip of four village men. Her voice had been raw, hoarse from screaming his name until her throat dried. The memory wasn't a folder in his mind any longer but a wound. This dead young girl was becoming a sister he had never had, her ghost weaving into his very core.
He remembered them dragging her toward the tree line. They hadn't been conflicted; they had been merciless. When Rill had thrown himself at them, they hadn't hesitated. Fists, boots, the dull thud of wood against ribs. No mercy for the boy, no mercy for the girl.
Tradition, they called it. They wrapped their cowardice in the language of the divine, calling it a holy necessity to avoid defying the gods. They blinded themselves to the pathetic reality: that they were not a village, but a farm, and they were the ones handing over the livestock.
Aris forced his feet to root into the dirt. He fought this body, wrestling the wild, jagged emotions that threatened to drive him to bad decisions. His breath was a ragged hiss; his hands trembled with the phantom weight of a blade he didn't yet hold—a blade he wished could slice the old man's neck.
But the memories were a floodgate that wouldn't close.
He remembered the chief's face, twisted by the threat of Rill's quiet rebellion. Men like Rill were a contagion to a status quo built on sacrifice. To cauterize the wound before it spread, the chief had set his sights on Rill's wife.
"If he cannot provide the village with children," the chief had declared, his voice as thin and cold as winter air, "then others will be tasked to help him."
Aris's stomach lurched. The memory of her death followed, a final, bloody act of defiance. She had opened her own throat before they could touch her, choosing the silence of the grave over the "example" the chief sought to make of her.
In his fury at being denied his prize, the chief had forbidden the rites. No burial. No mourning. Her body had been tossed into the forest like offal, left for the scavengers.
"Even the dead are not beyond my reach."
The words rang in Aris's skull, a mantra of absolute control. He dug his nails into his palms until the skin split, the metallic tang of his own blood grounding him.